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It’s been more than a week since New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from his captors in Pakistan, so maybe now is a good time to try and look dispassionately at the massive coverup that prevented news of his kidnapping from being reported for more than six months — a coverup that included not just 40 or so mainstream media outlets but Wikipedia as well, with the personal help of founder Jimmy Wales. Raising such ethical issues seemed somewhat crass in the days following his miraculous escape (although that didn’t stop some observers, including Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute, from being early critics of the coverup). But those issues deserve to be talked about in more detail.

For the record, I don’t know David Rohde. From all accounts, he is a wonderful friend and colleague, not to mention an excellent reporter who has a great deal of experience working in troubled areas. All of which is — I would argue — completely irrelevant to the issue at hand, namely whether the New York Times and its senior management were right to conceal evidence of his kidnapping, and whether the editors at dozens of other outlets were right to go along with this plan.

I would argue that they were not, and that if anything the coverup has made things harder not just for future kidnapping victims such as Rohde, but for newspapers and other mainstream media outlets as a whole.

(Please read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab blog)

What would happen if the federal government ordered all computer makers to implement technology that filtered certain websites and tracked the online behaviour of all users? That’s effectively what happened in China a few weeks ago, when the government announced its “Green Dam” policy — a mandatory process by which computer manufacturers and retailers were to be required to include filtering software, software that would be directed primarily at pornography and adult content, but that would also allow the government to block content critical of Chinese authorities or policies.

The Green Dam project was to go into effect July 1, but with just hours to go before the deadline, the government decided to postpone the launch, although it isn’t clear whether the proposal is being cancelled, or whether it has just been delayed. A statement from the offical news wire Xinhua said that computer makers complained they needed more time to implement the software behind the Green Dam policy.

There were other concerns, however, that might have convinced the Chinese authorities to postpone or possible even cancel the requirement. One was an outcry from computer makers and distributors at being forced to become an extension of the government’s censorship policy, something that until now has been accomplished primarily through controls on Internet service providers and websites directly. An international group of business organizations — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the European-American Business Council and the Information Technology Industry Council — sent a strongly-worded letter to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, and the U.S. government sent letters arguing that such a policy might breach China’s obligations as part of the World Trade Organization.

There were also claims by one U.S. company that the filtering software PC makers were required to install was a copy of its own technology and therefore a breach of trademark laws. And a Chinese technology consultant said that its investigation of the software showed that it contained security holes that would make users’ PCs vulnerable to hackers.

As some observers have pointed out, the Green Dam project threatened to extend the range of companies affected by — and implicated in — China’s repression of its citizens, from just the Big Three search companies (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) to every computer maker and distributor inside or outside the country. And China isn’t the only repressive government to stir up these kinds of issues by turning to technology as a way of extending its reach: Iran has also been in the news recently because of its Internet-filtering technology.

According to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal, the Iranian government has developed highly sophisticated censorship technology that is based on software and equipment from several European companies, including Nokia. The Finland-based company’s involvement has sparked outrage from a number of quarters, including an Internet petition aimed at forcing Nokia to stop selling its technology to Iran. The company, meanwhile, has said that it only sold Iran standard voice-monitoring software, not anything that provides deep-packet inspection capabilities or Internet monitoring.

If nothing else, the postponing and potential cancellation of China’s Green Dam project shows — as Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices notes — shows that if companies and organizations and foreign governments stand together, it is possible to get even the most intractable of governments to bend.

I got an iPhone recently (no, not one of the fancy new ones) and so I asked people on Twitter and at work to tell me their absolute must-have favourite apps (I got an iPhone in part because the paper I work for has its own shiny new iPhone app, which was kind of my idea). So I thought I would pull together a list of the most suggested apps:

Social Media: Tweetie, Twitterfon, Tumblr, Facebook, Reportage

Food: Urbanspoon, Epicurious, TimmyMe (Canadian)

Radio: NPR Public Radio Tuner, Wunderradio, Last.fm

Tools: Google Earth, WeatherEye, Shazam. Red Rocket (Canadian)

Saving: Evernote, Instapaper

Reading: Stanza, Shortcovers, Kindle

RSS: NetNewsWire, Byline

Productivity: eWallet, Things, Simplify, iPassword

Pictures: QuadCamera, CameraBag, DarkSlide

Games: FlightControl, Labyrinth, Super Monkey Ball, Tetris, Scrabble, Wolfenstein, Tap Tap Revenge

Feel free to leave your favourites or any other thoughts in a comment.

This is a just a quick note to congratulate my friend Om Malik and his team at GigaOm for launching a new service called GigaOm Pro — a for-pay research site that pulls together analysis on industry trends across a number of verticals, including mobile, green technology and so on. I think this is a very smart move (like most of the things Om has done), and there is more about the rationale behind the subscription service in this post. In the interests of full disclosure, I have written for GigaOm in the past, and hope to be able to do so again at some point in the future.

Chris Brogan isn’t — and as far as I know has never been — a journalist. He’s a new-media marketing consultant and the founder of Podcamp (his bio is here). When I saw that he had written a blog post about what a “new media” company of the future might look like, I confess that I was expecting something with a focus primarily on marketing (perhaps that was unfair, but there it is). What Chris came up with, however, is very similar to what I see when I think about the future of the online media business — a business that takes advantage of what the online world allows, rather than treating it as an afterthought. Among other things, Chris says such an entity would realize that:

• Stories are points in time [and] don’t end at publication.
• Curators and editors rule, and creators aren’t necessarily on staff.
• Media cannot stick to one form. Text, photos, video, music, audio, animation, etc.
• Everything must be portable and mobile-ready.
• Everything must have collaborative opportunities.
• Advertising cannot be the primary method of revenue.

Be sure to read the whole thing. A good debate is already emerging in the comments.

Computer-assisted reporting or CAR has been around, well — ever since there were computers. Even when I was in journalism school (which was longer ago than I care to remember), we learned about databases we could search, etc. But the explosion of Web-based tools and ways of sifting through and sharing data has created something approaching a revolution, and the potential benefits for journalism are only just beginning to reveal themselves. If this movement has a patron saint, it is probably Adrian Holovaty, who gained renown while working on data-driven features at the Washington Post, then created the amazing Chicagocrime.org as one of the first Google Maps mashups, followed by his fellowship-financed Everyblock, which aggregates local data about an area.

Another recent example of how data can drive reporting, and how Web-based tools can extend and enhance that reporting, comes from several British newspapers — primarily The Guardian — and their coverage of an emerging expense scandal involving British politicians. One of the really interesting things that The Guardian has done is to publish all of the expense info they have through a laboriously detailed and publicly accessible Google spreadsheet. As Paul Bradshaw points out at the Online Journalism Blog, this structure actually allows reporters (or in fact anyone who is interested in the info) to extract useful data simply by changing the URL. Someone has even created a page where you can run queries on the database with a simple click.

(please read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab)

Bonus link:

See Adrian Holovaty’s definitive, two-part answer to the question “is data journalism?”

This is an update to a recent post about the Wall Street Journal and its policies on Twitter use by its staff. In that post, I essentially agreed with a post by Jeff Jarvis in which he argued that the WSJ policy “missed the point” of social media in general by trying to lock down the behaviour of reporters too much — by restricting them from discussing their stories, being too personal, etc. Both Steve Buttry of Gazette Communications, in a post at his personal blog and Gina Chen at Save The Media agreed with Jarvis as well, saying the rules were too restrictive and that the newspaper was in danger of missing out on much of the value of social media. Similar thoughts were posted by Pat Thornton at BeatBlogging.org.

Pat, who also writes at Journalism Iconoclast, quotes a Twitter post from John Robinson (editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, North Carolina) that also caught my eye, in which he said:

Twitter rules: I trust the staff to report the news. Shouldn’t I trust them enough to tweet? Is twitter that much harder than reporting?

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times (who recently joined Twitter himself) put it very similarly in a quote he gave to Editor & Publisher magazine:

“I have asked people to use common sense and respect the workplace and assume whatever they tweet will be tied to the paper. Even when they are tweeting personal information to their followers, they are still representing the New York Times.”

As both the Editor & Publisher piece and this piece in the New York Observer make clear, there has been a bit of controversy within the NYT about tweets that staffers (including @jenny8lee and @michaelluo) were making during a strategy briefing at the paper. I wondered at the time whether what they were broadcasting was an internal meeting or not, but assumed it was not. As it turns out, some editors were of the opinion that posting such things to Twitter should always be out of the question, and that even posting positive things from the newsroom shouldn’t be done by Times reporters.

(please read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab blog)

Note: Fred Wilson has some worthwhile thoughts on this topic as well, although he isn’t a journalist. And be sure to check the comments, which feature a response from Peter Kafka of All Things Digital (which is owned by the Wall Street Journal) and — as usual — some excellent responses from Fred himself.

Staffers at the Wall Street Journal recently received an updated corporate conduct policy, including sections on how to behave when using social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. The response to the new rules of engagement, however, has been far from positive so far, with Jeff Jarvis saying the Journal was guilty of “missing the point.” Jarvis says the new rules don’t allow reporters to “make their reporting collaborative,” and that one of the benefits of such social networks is that they “provide the opportunity for reporters and editors to come out from behind the institutional voice of the paper … and to become human.”

The need to have a conduct policy is a reality for major newspapers, and it makes sense to deal with new areas such as Twitter and Facebook — the paper I work for is developing a similar policy. But I have to agree with Jeff about the Journal’s restrictions on reporter behaviour. Obviously, a newspaper doesn’t want to give away the store and tell everyone what stories it is working on, or tip its hand in a variety of other ways, and probably doesn’t want to go into detail about how certain stories emerged (especially if it was a fortuitous accident). But Jarvis is right that talking about stories that are under way can also have tremendous benefits.

The biggest point, however, is that Twitter is inherently personal — that’s why people use it, and why they enjoy it and become loyal to those they follow. The idea that you can maintain a strict division between the personal and professional just doesn’t jibe with the way social networks (or human beings) operate. Naturally, a newspaper like the Journal doesn’t want its reporters discussing every detail of their personal lives on Twitter, and no one would argue with that. A little taste of the personal can have a tremendous impact, however, and can build loyalty with readers. Media outlets like the Journal ignore that at their peril. Steve Buttry of Gazette Communications in Iowa has a good take on the new rules as well, and so does Gina Chen.

Alan Rusbridger is the editor-in-chief of The Guardian, easily one of the most prestigious newspapers in the English-speaking world, and is widely admired as a journalist’s journalist. At the same time, he has also been one of the driving forces behind making his newspaper a leader online, which has involved embracing community — including ground-breaking experiments such as Comment Is Free — as well as social-media tools such as Twitter. The video embedded here (click through if you’re reading this via RSS) is a great summary of some of his views about the future of newspapers, the wisdom of the crowd, the blurring of the line between journalists and non-journalists, the need for community and the appeal of Twitter. Highly recommended. Hat tip to Adam Tinworth for the link to the video.

Like a lot of newspapers and media outlets, the paper I work for in Toronto — the Globe and Mail — has been experimenting a lot with a great live-blogging and live-discussion tool called Cover It Live. The software comes from a company located in Toronto, but is being used by everyone from Newsweek and Yahoo to Vanity Fair and the Austin Statesman-Review. We’ve hosted live discussion/news stories involving the Obama inauguration, the NHL hockey trade deadline, federal communication hearings and even a shooting in a Toronto subway station.

One of the big benefits of the software is that it allows you to do so much within the app itself, which is embedded in a story page as a widget via javascript. You can post photos right in the stream, embed video clips and do instant polls — and integrated into all that are comments from readers. You can also pull comments from Twitter, either by approving individual users or by pulling in tweets that use a specific hashtag or keyword related to the topic. The editor or “producer” can see all the comments and moderate them, and the live blog can be archived and replayed.

For large public events such as the Obama inauguration (or the Oscars), there is a very powerful desire to interact with other people who are watching the same event, and Cover It Live makes that very easy and appealing. News updates are interspersed with user comments in a very natural way, and reporters and editors can respond easily. For events such as the NHL trade deadline, several readers asked specific questions of the reporters and columnists who took part, and got answers within minutes — something that simply doesn’t happen with traditional newspaper stories, even online.

(please read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab)

Earlier this year, my friend and former Globe colleague Keith McArthur came up with the idea of celebrating the 10th anniversary of The Cluetrain Manifesto by having 95 people blog about the 95 theses that formed the core of the book. So he set up the Cluetrainplus10 wiki and asked people to sign up, and after looking at the available choices, I settled on number 38: Human communities are based on discourse — on human speech about human concerns. Why? I guess in part because I’ve been thinking a lot about those kinds of issues in my still relatively new role as Communities Editor at the Globe and Mail, where my job consists of trying to find new and better ways to connect readers with our writers and our content.

In many ways, the Globe isn’t really all that different from any other company. We have a product — namely, our content — and we have customers, except that we call them readers. Of course, unlike many companies, we also play a kind of public-service role, but that’s a service to readers and to the community as a whole as well. And just like other companies, we are trying to find our place in this new, more connected world, where our customers are not just looking to interact and engage with us, but are also interacting with each other, carrying on conversations that we theoretically helped to start. How can we become a part of those conversations? I think the Cluetrain message is a simple one: by being human, and by speaking the way that human beings do.

Continue reading “Cluetrain: Human speech, human concerns”

In the aftermath of a horrible murder by someone who is now routinely referred to as “the Craigslist killer,” the online classified site has been coming under increasing pressure from both the government — which has been waging a prostitution-related crusade for some time now — and others who see the service as somehow complicit in these kinds of crimes. Venture capitalist and blogger Jeff Nolan, for example, says in a recent post that Craigslist “has a problem” and should find some way to deal with it, and suggests that both founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster don’t seem to care much, or want to do anything about it.

“Instead of waiting for a community solution to a problem that will only get worse, Newmark and Buckmaster should be taking a leadership position and driving effective change to combat crime taking place on Craigslist.”

Jeff seems like a smart guy, but I couldn’t disagree more with his post. As far as I can tell, Craigslist has been doing everything it can to remove posts that are linked to criminal behaviour, whether prostitution or anything else, and they appear to have bent over backwards to co-operate with the attorneys-general from a number of states when it comes to imposing fines on wrong-doers and other strategies for limiting that kind of behaviour. What more could they possibly do — turn over their server log files to the authorities? Let Craigslist become an arm of the government?

Continue reading “Is Craigslist the victim of a witch-hunt?”

Curation has become a popular term in media circles, in the sense of a human editor who filters and selects content, and then packages it and delivers it to readers in some way. Many people (including me) believe that, in an era when information sources are exploding online, aggregation and curation of some kind is about the only service left that people might be willing to pay for. That’s why it’s been interesting to watch one prominent website — All Things Digital, the online blog property that is owned by the Wall Street Journal, but run as a separate entity by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — wrestling with how to handle that kind of aggregation, amid criticism from some prominent bloggers that it has been doing it wrong.

As described by Andy “Waxy” Baio in an excellently reported roundup of the brouhaha, the fuss seemed to start with comments from Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thompson about how Google and other aggregators of news are “parasites” in the intestines of the Internet, because they republish the content of others and then make money from it. Pretty soon, some bloggers were pointing out that All Things Digital did exactly the same thing in a section called Voices — namely, published long excerpts from a variety of prominent bloggers, displayed in exactly the same way as the rest of the site’s content, and surrounded by ads.

Josh Schachter, founder of Delicious, noted this behaviour in a Twitter message, and Metafilter founder Matt Haughey said that “apparently The Wall Street Journal’s All Things D does a reblogging thing. I sure wish they asked me first though. That’s a hell of a lot of ads on my ‘excerpt’.” Merlin Mann, who blogs at 43folders, said on Twitter that “republishing online work without consent and wrapping it in ads is often called ‘feed scraping.’ At AllThingsD, it’s called ‘a compliment.”

(please read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab)

As many people probably know by now, Google came out with another of its Google Labs features on Monday: a Google News timeline view, which gives users the ability to see and scroll through headlines, photos and news excerpts by day/week/month/year. The sources of this data can also be customized to include not just traditional news sources but also Wikipedia, sports scores, blogs, etc. It’s a fascinating way of interpreting the news — not something that is likely going to replace a regular old Google News headline view, but an additional way of looking at things.

One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this? Why not a newspaper, or even a collective like Associated Press (which seems to prefer threats to creativity)? Isn’t delivering the news in creative and interesting ways that appeal to readers what we are supposed to be doing? Apparently not. Even the most progressive of newspaper sites still looks very much like a traditional newspaper — not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. But is it too much to ask for a little variety? Why not have some alternative display possibilities available? Who knows, it might even con some people into reading more.

(please read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab blog)

As the newspaper industry has grown weaker and weaker, there has been a steady stream of articles and blog posts blaming Google for some or all of this decline. I’m not going to link to them all, because there are simply too many, and they are easy enough to find. The standard allegation is that the search engine, and other similar engines such as Yahoo and MSN, hijack readers by aggregating content, and then monetize those eyeballs by posting ads near the content. Newspapers get traffic, but Google critics argue that this traffic is essentially worthless — or at least can’t make up for the value that Google has siphoned off.

One of the most recent articles to take this tack appeared in the Guardian and quoted Sly Bailey, the chief executive office of newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror. Among other things, Ms. Bailey said that:

“By creating gargantuan national newspaper websites designed to harness users by the tens of millions, by performing well on search engines like Google, we have eroded the value of news. News has become ubiquitous. Completely commoditised. Without value to anyone.”

This argument is almost too absurd to be taken seriously. In a nutshell, Ms. Bailey is claiming that by expanding their readership and making it easier for people to find their content, newspapers have shot themselves in the foot, and should do their best to avoid being found by new readers. It’s particularly ironic that the Mirror CEO is making these comments in a story in The Guardian, which has built up an impressive readership outside the UK thanks to its excellent content.

(read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab)