JasonMorrison.net

I saw this on Reddit and had to comment. Follow this link. From now on if you want to quote an AP story in your blog, link to an AP headline, or email an article to your grandmother, this is the page they want you to see – including a price list that I’ll quote here:

No, I am not making this up. The AP is really asking people to pay them $12.50 if they quote more than four words of any story. A nice long sentence with 26 words will cost you $17.50. Presumably this includes headlines, meaning the AP could come looking for cash if you even link to one of their stories with the relevant text.

Let’s put aside the fundamental misunderstanding of how the web works for a moment, and put it in terms that most journalists should understand: This pricing scheme amounts to prior constraint on any substantive criticism of the AP. One of the most important reasons we have fair use rights is to excerpt material for commentary or criticism. The AP says that this effort is directed against copyright infringement and sites that scrape and monetize their stories, but quoting 5, 25, even 50 words from an article is in most cases not copyright infringement–it’s attribution.

The AP runs stories on medical topics all the time. If a doctor wants to point out an error in an AP story on their blog, we had better hope they have the cash. Could you imagine being misidentified as the suspect in a crime, only to have the AP bill you when you point out the correction? It’s not like the AP never makes mistakes.

Heaven forbid someone working for a competing news agency wants to criticize the AP’s coverage for bias or political slant. That would require quoting sentences from many articles – perhaps thousands of dollars.

The AP even has the gall to quote prices for educational use. I’m sure the numerous Supreme Courts deciding Fair Use cases over the years would be pleased – it goes against all precedent, but hey, a coupon!

Outside of criticism, the AP’s own guidelines tell you why this is so important:

We should give the full name of a source and as much information as needed to identify the source and explain why he or she is credible. Where appropriate, include a source’s age; title; name of company, organization or government department; and hometown.

If we quote someone from a written document – a report, e-mail or news release — we should say so.

It’s just as important for writers in other media to use proper attribution. Writers should use direct quotes when it’s the fairest way to represent what someone else has said or written. How would the AP operate if every source they quoted demanded payment up front?

But, of course, they would never:

It means we don’t pay newsmakers for interviews, to take their photographs or to film or record them.

This makes me sad. I’m a big proponent of professional journalism and I hate to see newspapers in such dire straits. But if this is representative of what the industry plans to do, I’m not sure they have much of a chance.

Ann and I ended up in the news again today, this time in a New York Post article about Twitter. I used Twitter to send out updates on what was going on during labor. I’m probably not the first to do it, but it’s an interesting use case for an article like this, aimed at introducing some new tech that’s been popping up more and more in popular culture.

But when I noticed the accompanying photoillustration I had to post this screenshot. Notice anything a little off?

Click here to see the full-sized screenshot. The caption text seems to imply that it’s a photo of Ann. For those of you who don’t know us personally, Ann’s not actually a white person like miss stock photo here.

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We’ve hit well over 2000 votes on our baby name survey, and so far my blog has held up well (thank you, WP Super Cache). The traffic has been enough at times to slow the Google Docs form and graphs. To get slightly back on track for this blog, here’s a quick usability lesson – as a form becomes less responsive to users, double- and triple-submissions will increase.

Votes have been coming from all sorts of interesting places:

• Many, many Googlers contributed votes. Obviously I can’t link to any internal company discussion, but I can assure you it was equal parts amusing, helpful, and nerdly. I had a fun time explaining all the programming jokes to Ann, particularly why we won’t be naming the baby after little Bobby Tables. Wysz supplied the very first votes, for Erin and Isaac.

• The MOMformation blog at ParentCenter wrote (somewhat disapprovingly) about our search for baby name assistance.

• Someone posted the link in a thread on Salon.com’s Tabletalk forum. Tabletalk is bizarrely non-searchable, which they could fix with a quick update to their robots.txt file.

• Neatorama picked up the story, which resulted in a flood of votes.

• For some international perspective, The Telegraph wrote about the survey in their “How About That?” column. If anyone has a copy of today’s print edition, I’d love to see if the story made it’s way on to dead trees, given my former journalistic predilections. I really got a kick of the headline, “Google man asks Internet to name his baby” – now that I’ve been publicly outed as Google Man, I’ll need to start wearing my cape to work.

If I’ve missed any, please add them in the comments below. And if you’re having trouble voting or seeing the charts and graphs, try again a little later – I think I my use of Docs and Spreadsheets is somewhere between “statistical outlier” and “abusive” at this point.

I happened across NewsTrust.net, a new social news aggregation site.  I’m a big fan of other sites in the category like Reddit, despite their flaws, and NewsTrust includes a tagging system so I feel obligated to investigate it like any other folksonomy.

So I created an account to give it a try.  The big difference between this site and others is the emphasis on quality journalism.  NewsTrust asks for your real name, and in addition to giving weight to users who write good reviews and get votes from other users, it adds factors like experience as a journalist to the mix.  It makes specific disticntions between mainstream media sources and altenrative media sources.

It’s an interesting idea, and it’s good to see journalists working together with programmers and web developers to make use of some of the social software techniques that newspaper websites so often catch on the trailing edge.  The site’s features seem geared toward providing users with the best that professional journalism has to offer with a dash of brilliant amateur writing thrown in – even the page layout looks more like a newspaper site than a Digg or Del.icio.us clone.

But I’m not sure it will work, at least not without some tweaking.  I don’t know if they put a lot of weight into the “experience” of users, but it didn’t require any verification of my 5-9 years of journalism experience (for the record, that’s four years in college plus more than a year of stringing here and there).  Here’s the problem of trust again, though hopefully mitigated by fellow users’ reviews.

The other issue is interaction design.  The widgets and buttons all work just fine, but when you rate a story you’re asked to score on six dimensions: Recommendation, Trust, Information, Fairness, Sources, and Context.  Only the first is required, but give users options and they are bound to feel obligated to exercise them.  Give them too many tasks and they will tend to give up.  So the simple interaction model of Reddit, where users don’t even have to click through to rate a story, might be information-poor but participation-rich in comparison.

Still, I will play with the site more and I wish them luck, I think they have some promising ideas.  For example, in their blog they talk about gathering sources from other countries based on big world news events, specifically the Russian invasion of Georgia.  Reddit is only fleetingly so reflective and few sites use temporary peaks in interest to get long-term data on source credibility.

Back when I was in college I did an interview with a journalism student at Kent State about online publishing.  I ran across it sort of randomly on my hard drive and thought I would share how I described my relationship with the Internet:

I’m an old-timer when it comes to the Internet.  I began playing around online some time in middle school, back when everything was text and the Internet was more or less just a way to pass messages between local bulletin board systems and universities.  I made my first web site back in high school, and it was a pretty pathetic homepage.

Wow, eight years ago (!) I already described myself as an old-timer.  It’s strange how so much of my life has revolved around the web and kind of fitting that I’m now on a team that helps safegaurd it.

I’m a bit of a map geek and a big fan of using maps to convey information geographic and otherwise, so I’m starting a new series of posts – Map App of the Day.  I’ll highlight either a mapping web application or an application of mapping in information design that’s interesting, innovative, or just plain strange.

The New York Times had a brief article about a new study of genetic relationships between peoples in Europe.  The paper, by Lao et al., looked at genotype data from more than 2000 individuals spread throughout Europe.  The map on the right shows the normal geographic map of Europe, while the one on the left maps the genetic relationships between countries.

Here’s a link to a larger version on Current Biology’s web site.

The genetic map is a great example of why you should always consider mapping to illustrate data with a geographic component, and why you should always consider breaking the rules a bit  to get a good representation (most maps don’t show countries overlapping, for example).

This is also a great illustration of how permeable and impermanent national borders really are.  It would be interesting to see the same analysis done with distinctive populations like the Basque in Spain and the Sami in Finland added.

This also brings up with two non-mapping issues about journalism and research.  First off, the NYT article didn’t bother to actually link to the journal article, the researcher’s websites at their respective institutions, or any of the other places that readers would need to go to follow up on this paper or get more detailed information.  Why not?

Second, when I searched for Current Biology I was delighted to see that the journal publishes everything online, available via regular Google search, rather than hiding behind some expensive and proprietary publication database.  Open access is very cool.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

One of the topics that comes up a lot here is blogging versus journalism.  Someone brought up an interesting project where a reporter was doing live coverage of a trial with in a blog-like way.  A big part of this is how so many relatively inexpensive portable computers, PDAs, etc. are around.  A number of posters noted that it seems like the bloggers are not the ones starting the debate, and that they seem to be a pretty inclusive group.  Others pointed out that blogging is a buzzword and not yet proven; news on the internet is only about 10 years old so its hardly a mature medium.

This thesis paper was originally written for a journalism course at Ohio Wesleyan University in 2001.

Introduction

Discussions about the Internet are dominated by colorful and often ill-defined metaphors.  One is expected to surf the information superhighway over to the infobahn, on the way to the digital town hall in the global village to peruse the marketplace of ideas.  This last metaphor, the market where ideas are offered, considered and either accepted or rejected like so much fruit, is more than just a colorful image.  Media and cultural studies often examine the marketplace of ideas theory and the public sphere when examining how mass media work in a democracy.  The Internet seems a natural place to look for both.

Often discussions about the marketplace of ideas and the public sphere are confined the question to whether or not they are worthwhile goals- many critics see them as impossible or rife with flaws.  The marketplace of ideas notion of traditional mass media seems out of sync with reality.  High entry costs into the mass media, central ownership by large corporations, the popular media’s tendency to marginalize radical and little-known ideas, etc., all act as barriers to a free flow of ideas.

The Internet, however, could theoretically create or function as a public forum.  Every media consumer can become a media producer on the Internet, and in some ways (newsgroups and mailing lists, for example) the line between consumers and producers of media are blurred.  Unlike other media, the cost of making a web site viewed by millions is not necessarily larger than a web site viewed by only a handful.  Communication is instantaneous and choice is not limited to what is provided by a few large companies.  Radical groups in every subject from terrorism to literary theory are able to publish as easily as mainstream political parties.

But is the Internet the true public forum, or even a real marketplace of ideas?  A quick look at Internet usage statistics shows relatively few large producers dominating traffic.  According to Nielsen/Netratings, for example, AOL Time Warner recorded 65,954,683 unique visitors in March, out of an estimated 101,965,365

active Internet users that month.¹ With well over one billion web sites on the web to visit and the average user only visiting 10 unique sites a month, most of the traffic is going to a limited number of places-just as most readership goes to a limited number of magazines, newspapers, television stations, etc.

But why are web sites with less money and fewer corporate ties having a harder time getting viewers?  What barriers have arisen to make it hard to get a large audience, and why has the Internet followed the lead of central corporate ownership like the rest of the mass media?  How is the Internet like a public forum and how is it not?

Thesis

The Internet does not function as a de facto public sphere or marketplace of ideas but it does have enormous potential.  Barriers such as the Digital Divide and website funding problems keep the Internet from being a completely free forum while most users most of the time seem to have no interest in entering the public sphere at all.  A few notable examples, however, prove that the Internet has the power to allow public communication, debate, and opinion formation to flourish when users take advantage of it.

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A response to Mass Media and Society (James Curran and Michael Gurevitch), Chapter 13

In “Dead Trees to Live Wires,” Colin Sparks argues that the rise of online media poses commercial challenges to traditional print media.  Sparks does not say that print is dead or dying, or that publishing print material online is some kind of bonanza.  Instead he says there are four ways in which the internet has changed business for the news.

The first change is in terms of competition.  Newspapers historically do not have to compete with broadcast and magazine news because other media do not balance timeliness with depth the way daily papers do.  Online, however, everyone is publishing 24 hours a day, so the local paper now has to directly compete with the local ABC affiliate and whoever else.  Also, the net gets rid of geographical boundaries to competition and lowers the price of entry into publishing.  Second, it allows advertisers to potentially bypass newspapers and talk directly to consumers and allows people looking for in depth news to go straight to the sources.  Third, this will lead to division between large national/international news sites and small locally-concentrated news sites, with the local sites becoming much more involved in their communities.  Finally, newspapers may respond to these pressures by breaking down the barriers between news/editorial and advertising in order to compete.

Sparks is right on, although he fails to consider a few key facets in how online news is going to develop.  One is the cooperation of different media in online ventures.  Few newspaper sites now compete with all the local network sites-most have one or two networks affiliated with them and many run joint news sites.  This may have something to do with the concentration of ownership of different media even within the same city or it may just provide a competitive edge to both parties in a partnership.  Another conflict he doesn’t touch on enough is the struggle between journalists and business people within online departments.  Some papers have given it over to the business people, some have kept them separate, and others have let them duke it out.  At Naples, we barely had contact with the business side of our department except to talk about new technologies coming in.  All our people were journalists and the content and editorial decisions reflected that.  Still, I’ve talked to people at other publications who feel controlled either by advertising interests or crap handed down from the corporate office.  It seems, though, that individual editors and reporters can often make a big difference in how online news is produced and the corporate centralizing, advertising-based trend seems to be balanced by readers being more interested in real local news.

A response to Taking Sides – Clashing Views in Mass Media and Society – Issue 5

In his memo to NBC news staff, Michael Gartner gives his rational for printing the name of the alleged rape victim in the William Kennedy Smith case and argues such names should be printed in most cases.  Katha Pollitt, on the other hand, says there are no good reasons to print a victim’s name.

Gartner has four main points to make.  First, the job of the news media is to disseminate news, not to cover it up or leave out facts that are important to the story.  Second, giving the victim the decision takes it out of the editors’ hands and rape is the only case in which this is even considered.  Third, not naming rape victims plays in to the stereotype that there is something shameful about being raped, where the rapist is the only one who should feel any shame.  And fourth, that news media consistently report the names of rape suspects, even if they haven’t been formally charged, and fairness dictates the same be done with the accuser.

Pollitt disagrees.  She says that the media often cover up things and leave out salient for other reasons, that anonymity for accusers is standard practice in America and not unfair, and that the press is uneven with its use of anonymity-demanding it for sources but denying it to rape victims.  Pollitt says that printing the name along with information about the accuser does not treat rape like other crimes because it call into question if the accuser was asking for it and that naming does nothing to dispel the stigma of being raped.

Personally I’m perfectly willing to keep a rape victim’s name anonymous.  As a rule I’m wary of anonymous sources and leaving names out of a story, but I think there are good reasons to, and the emotional pain that would come from publicity of rape is one of them.  Related to all of this is how the news media cover rape in general.  Working on the Transcript, we’ve come under fire for reporting on rape at all.  There are plenty of women (and probably some men) who don’t think the news media should even report a rape occurred on a campus this small, because people might be able to figure out who it was.  Pollitt made a point I think is telling when she asked where the media is at the thousands of Take Back the Night demonstrations-most likely, they’ve been specifically excluded.  Every year, dozens of date rapes and worse happen on this campus, yet no one ever hears about it.  Going to Take Back the Night amazes people-so many women have been violated, but no one ever brings the issue up.  That’s exactly the problem-because of the emotional distress and shame surrounding rape, many victims never even report it to the school, let along the police or the Transcript, who would happily plead their case and leave their name out of it.  The over-arching silence is not helping anybody and leads people to believe it’s not a problem.  It is a problem, but the media cannot expose it if no one is talking.