Inter­na­tional Her­ald Tri­bune: Media con­sumers will increas­ingly get their news from blogs and seek their enter­tain­ment online, says new media pathfinder John Bat­telle. “Now any indi­vid­ual can become a film stu­dio or a pub­lish­ing company.”

From his perch on the “Left Coast of Amer­ica,” in the out­skirts of Sil­i­con Val­ley, Bat­telle feels the media indus­try is at a “chasm-crossing moment.” The era when big media com­pa­nies deliv­ered news, infor­ma­tion or enter­tain­ment to con­sumers via mass-market tele­vi­sion or printed pub­li­ca­tions, financed by the sale of adver­tis­ing, is rapidly draw­ing to a close, he says.
.
Media con­sumers will increas­ingly seek out the democ­racy of the Inter­net, get­ting their news from blogs instead of print on paper, and seek their enter­tain­ment from a lim­it­less sup­ply of quirky online con­tent, he says.
.
And if they do choose to watch tele­vi­sion, they will skip the ads, using per­sonal video recorders. Bat­telle would ben­e­fit if that pre­dic­tion came true. A found­ing edi­tor of Wired mag­a­zine, which he has since left, Bat­telle wears sev­eral hats. He runs sev­eral Web sites, includ­ing a blog, and he plans to start a busi­ness that will sell adver­tis­ing for other blogs. By pool­ing ad sales, he says, blogs could pro­tect edi­to­r­ial inde­pen­dence but ben­e­fit from the abil­ity to aim spe­cific spots at tar­get audi­ences. “Big media’s rev­enue premise is based on the deliv­ery of adver­tis­ing on a plat­form that’s no longer nec­es­sary,” he said. “Now any indi­vid­ual can become a film stu­dio or a pub­lish­ing company.”

Thanks to IWant­Media for the pointer.

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I Want Media editor/founder Patrick Phillips is teach­ing an under­grad­u­ate course in dig­i­tal jour­nal­ism at New York Uni­ver­sity for the spring semes­ter. The course cov­ers Inter­net cul­ture, online mag­a­zines, blog­ging, and more. Sched­uled guest speak­ers include writer/editor Kurt Ander­sen, Slate edi­tor Jacob Weis­berg, WSJ.com man­ag­ing edi­tor Bill Grue­skin, and sev­eral blog­gers. What top­ics in dig­i­tal jour­nal­ism do you think stu­dents should explore? Patrick wel­comes your suggestions.

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From CyberJournalist.net via Mitch Rat­cliffe today:

Another par­tic­i­pa­tory jour­nal­ism attempt, TakeBackTheNews.com, has launched. (Yes, it’s get­ting hard to keep track of all of them…)

This one so far seems to be mostly a blog sum­ma­riz­ing main­stream media arti­cles. But the site has more ambi­tious goals. Indi­vid­u­als are encour­aged to par­tic­i­pate in the fol­low­ing roles at TakeBackTheNews.com:

• Gen­eral Con­tent Con­trib­u­tors, who sub­mit inter­est­ing news-of-the-day items cov­er­ing var­i­ous top­ics
• Topic-Specific Con­tent Con­trib­u­tors, who focus on a par­tic­u­lar topic or con­tent area and sub­mit news items relat­ing to it
• Op-Ed Con­trib­u­tors, who sub­mit orig­i­nal opin­ion pieces
Con­tribut­ing Blog­gers, who sub­mit takes on the lat­est news and increase blog expo­sure
• Edi­tors, estab­lished con­trib­u­tors who may apply for or be recruited to serve as vol­un­teer editors

Edi­tors will review all edi­to­r­ial sub­mis­sions for pur­poses of appro­pri­ate­ness and clar­ity before pub­lish­ing con­tent online.

From the new site:

TakeBackTheNews.com is a grass­roots effort enabling news con­sumers to deter­mine for them­selves which sto­ries and top­ics are wor­thy of atten­tion, to share that news with oth­ers and to have a say in spe­cific cov­er­age and news in gen­eral. TBTN serves not only as a rich source of news — with round-the-clock updates and live news feeds — but also as a meet­ing place for news junkies of all stripes.

Far too much reliance on main­stream news, but looks to be a site worth keep­ing an eye on.

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In 1988, sci­en­tists pro­nounced the Shroud of Turin a fake because radio­car­bon dat­ing put it at no older than 1290 AD.

Today, Scotsman.com reports, new analy­sis of the shroud — believed by many to be the bur­ial cloth used to wrap Jesus Christ after his cru­ci­fix­ion — sug­gests it is between 1,300 and 3,000 years old.

Ray­mond Rogers, a chemist at the Los Alamos Lab­o­ra­tory in New Mex­ico, who con­ducted the tests, said: “As unlikely as it seems, the sam­ple used to test the age of the Shroud of Turin in 1988 was taken from a rewo­ven area.

“Pyrol­y­sis mass spec­trom­e­try results from the [new] sam­ple area, cou­pled with micro­scopic and micro­chem­i­cal obser­va­tions, prove that the radio­car­bon sam­ple was not part of the orig­i­nal shroud. …

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From the Asso­ci­ated Press today: Top blog­gers debate need for code of conduct.

When Jerome Arm­strong began con­sult­ing for Howard Dean’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, he thought the eth­i­cal thing to do was to sus­pend the Web jour­nal where he opined on politics.

But to sug­gest oth­ers do the same with their jour­nals, oth­er­wise known as blogs? No way.

“If I’m get­ting paid by a client, I don’t blog about it. That’s my per­sonal set of stan­dards,” Arm­strong said. “I’m not going to hold any­body else to my per­sonal stan­dards. I’m not going to make that universal.” …

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New Jersey’s courts, for at least three decades, have been among the most forward-looking in the nation.

Paul Alan Levy of Pub­lic Cit­i­zen Lit­i­ga­tion Group today reports on yet another good deci­sion com­ing from the New Jer­sey court system:

I want to call your atten­tion to today’s excel­lent deci­sion of the New Jer­sey Supe­rior Court, Appel­late Divi­sion in Donato v. Moldow, uphold­ing a citizen’s right to host a forum for dis­cus­sion of local affairs with­out being held liable for offen­sive post­ings made by vis­i­tors to the web site. avail­able online here (PDF).

This is the case involv­ing the “Eye on Emer­son” web site, cre­ated by a res­i­dent of Emer­son, New Jer­sey to dis­cuss local affairs in the Bor­ough of Emer­son. Sev­eral pub­lic offi­cials sued over allegedly defam­a­tory and cer­tainly offen­sive com­ments posted on a bul­letin board that was part of the web site. The offi­cials sued both the anony­mous posters and Moldow, the cre­ator of the web site. After fail­ing to obtain enforce­ment of a sub­poena to iden­tify the posters, because the plain­tiffs refused to sub­mit evi­dence to sup­port their claims, they dis­missed those claims and con­cen­trated their efforts solely on the web site host, whom they held respon­si­ble on the ground that he had facil­i­tated the offen­sive com­ments by cre­at­ing the dis­cus­sion site, and had failed to com­ply with plain­tiffs’ demands that he take down every post to which they objected, or require posters to iden­tify themselves.

In the deci­sion released today, the Appel­late Divi­sion agreed with the vast major­ity of courts that have addressed this ques­tion, hold­ing that the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. sec­tion 230 pro­tects all per­sons who host dis­cus­sion forums, whether or not they are Inter­net Ser­vice Providers like AOL. The court also refused to treat the Good Samar­i­tan pro­vi­sion of sec­tion 230, which pre­cludes lia­bil­ity for good faith efforts to remove offen­sive mate­r­ial, as mod­i­fy­ing the CDA’s basic grant of immu­nity. Thus, alle­ga­tions that Moldow was hos­tile to plain­tiffs, that we was happy that plain­tiffs were attacked on the bul­letin board, or that he made neg­a­tive some post­ings more read­able by ton­ing them down or that he removed praise but not crit­i­cism, all failed to under­mine the claim of immunity.

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This from Andy Carvin, pro­gram direc­tor, Edu­ca­tion Devel­op­ment Center’s Cen­ter for Media & Community:

I just wanted to let you know about a new blog I’ve set up called The Gates @ Cen­tral Park.

The blog cov­ers the upcom­ing Cen­tral Park art project, The Gates, by the artist Christo. For two weeks in Feb­ru­ary, Christo will dec­o­rate Cen­tral Park with more than 7,000 gates sport­ing saf­fron flags.

I’ve set up the site as an open blog and mob­cast. It’s an open blog in the sense that any­one can post to it; I’ve cre­ated an email address that any­one can use to post their thoughts about The Gates. They can also post pho­tos as email attach­ments. It’s also a “mob­cast,” which plays on the ideas of mobile pod­cast­ing and smart mobs. The site allows any­one to call a phone num­ber, input the site’s login and PIN, and post a voice­mail directly to the blog, which is then made avail­able as an pod­cast through its RSS feed.

I tried out my first mob­cast a cou­ple of weeks ago at the Berk­man blog­ging con­fer­ence at Har­vard, and it worked well, so this time I’m open­ing it up to the pub­lic. I’m hop­ing peo­ple who attend The Gates will
want to post their ideas and images to the site, and add to an online dia­logue about the event and pub­lic art in general.

Sounds like a great project. If I were vis­it­ing New York next month, I’d take part. But it will still be fun to peek in from afar.

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The San Jose Mer­cury News has a good pack­age of sto­ries today about pod­cast­ing:

Dawn C. Chmielewski: Pod­cast­ing power. New tech­nol­ogy deliv­ers per­son­al­ized broad­casts to your MP3 player.

Michael Baze­ley: My very own radio sta­tion has trans­formed my lis­ten­ing habits.

How to tune in to a podcast

I’ve got­ten hooked as well. I had sched­uled an inter­view with pod­caster Eric Rice to video­tape him doing a pod­cast, but he came down with a cold and we have to resched­ule. I want to cre­ate a short movie on How to pod­cast, and pub­lish it on Our­me­dia.

Con­tinue reading »

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NY Times: The Duel for the Dirt.

The media gos­sip wars heat up Mon­day between Gawker and Medi­a­bistro, a jour­nal­ist net­work­ing site that is unveil­ing Fish­BowlNY and sev­eral other new blogs, partly due to the efforts of for­mer orig­i­nal Gawker scribe Eliz­a­beth Spiers (I sat next to the charm­ing Ms. Spiers at lunch at a Uni­ver­sity of Florida new media con­fab last year).

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Ed Cone in a col­umn for the Greens­boro, NC, News & Record: “I arrived at a recent con­fer­ence on jour­nal­ism and the Web con­fi­dent I knew a thing or two about the subject.”

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