Category: Uncategorized

HuffPo finesses the revenuers

Poynter’s Bill Mitchell has an interesting piece on potential tax problems for the Huffington Post with regard to the new $1.75 million investigative-reporting project it announced last week.

The conundrum is that HuffPo is a for-profit, while the Huffington Post Investigative Fund is a non-profit. If it looks like the non-profit entity exists mainly to serve the for-profit, there could be a problem. That’s one of the reasons why the people who are in charge of the investigative project, Nick Penniman and Jay Rosen, say their work will be available to everyone, not just HuffPo.

Rosen and proto-blogger Dave Winer talk about the project in their weekly podcast. (Excuse my self-promotional indulgence; I come up, but only for a minute or two.)

Simply in terms of image, this is a great move for the Huffington Post, whose aggressive aggregation of other content, in my view, brings it right to the edge of copyright violation. “Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post,” the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Joshua Benton recently said.

By giving back and producing original content that everyone can use, HuffPo may be able to quiet the critics. Just as long as it can keep the IRS happy at the same time.

John Yemma on open-source news

Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma has some sharp observations about the demise of Encarta, the struggles of Encyclopedia Britannica and the dominance of Wikipedia. And he argues that there’s a cautionary tale for the news media therein:

If all the big newspapers at once adopted a pay model, some upstart would come along and use a small group of journalists and a larger group of Wikipedia-like amateurs to build a multimedia newspaper. Like Wikipedia, it would be the butt of countless jokes about unreliability.

Maybe it would even report on its own unreliability. But it would grow stronger because it would be organically constituted on the World Wide Web. That’s the power of open-source knowledge.

And that’s the challenge the news media face as they dive into the Internet.

This, of course, is week one of the Monitor’s Web-mostly existence, as the daily print edition has given way to a 24/7 Web site and a weekly magazine. (Via Jeff Jarvis.)

Hard times for the Times

In my latest for The Guardian, I take a look at Mark Bowden’s exceedingly tough Vanity Fair profile of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Bowden may be right in arguing that Sulzberger is not up to the job. But given the implosion of the newspaper business, would better leadership have made all that much difference?

What’s wrong with CNN

CNN has fallen to third place in prime time. It’s an easy way out to argue that it’s because CNN is doing news while Fox and MSNBC are doing talk. But it seems to me that CNN has three problems of its own making:

  • It’s given up on the 8 p.m. slot, where Campbell Brown is caught between Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann. Has anyone ever watched Brown’s show? She certainly isn’t compelling enough as part of “The Best Political Team on Television” (or at least the largest) to make me want to check her out.
  • Larry King at 9 p.m. — you can’t live with him, you can’t live without him. CNN’s fortunes have been tied up with King for so many years that no one dares to mess with his show. But it’s not what it used to be. I’d move it to 8 and try to come up with something else at 9. An intelligent political talk show, perhaps? If that’s not too oxymoronic?
  • At 10 p.m., CNN ought to clean up. Its best anchor, Anderson Cooper, is up against Greta Van Susteren and the Olbermann rerun. Trouble is, Cooper’s newscast lacks a distinct identity. And because it’s two hours long, he spends way too much time flogging stuff that will be coming up after 11, when people are either in bed or watching Jon Stewart. I’d cut it to an hour and make it a consistent, signature newscast. Then again, that’s what Aaron Brown was doing in that time slot, and I would have kept him and deployed Cooper elsewhere.

Problem solved. Next?

Marty Baron is not tweeting

So what did I find in my inbox this morning? A message from someone named Marty Baron, letting me know that he was following me on Twitter. Well, I started following him and sent him a private note to make sure it was really him.

As it turns out, it’s not Boston Globe editor Marty Baron, but someone pretending to be him. “It’s not me,” Baron told me by e-mail. Such gamesmanship is far from unusual on Twitter, though it looks like the normally savvy Adam Gaffin was taken in.

Why can’t everyone be as honest as Fake Rahm Emanuel?

Shorter Freeman Dyson

He doesn’t deny global warming. He likes global warming. From Nicholas Dawidoff’s profile in the New York Times Magazine:

Dyson agrees with the prevailing view that there are rapidly rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere caused by human activity. To the planet, he suggests, the rising carbon may well be a MacGuffin, a striking yet ultimately benign occurrence in what Dyson says is still “a relatively cool period in the earth’s history.” The warming, he says, is not global but local, “making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter.” Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious — a sign that “the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse,” because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields. “Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now,” he contends, “and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.” Dyson calls ocean acidification, which many scientists say is destroying the saltwater food chain, a genuine but probably exaggerated problem. Sea levels, he says, are rising steadily, but why this is and what dangers it might portend “cannot be predicted until we know much more about its causes.”

Given that Dyson accepts the basic science of global warming, how — despite all his brilliance — is his opinion on the effects of warming worth any more than anyone else’s?

The Weather Underground again (II)

As it turned out, it really didn’t take me that long to skim the 1976 FBI history of the Weather Underground.

At 420 pages, it is a comprehensive overview of whom the FBI considered to be associated with the Weather Underground and what activities they engaged in. And there is not one solitary mention of Katherine Ann Power, Susan Saxe or the 1970 murder of Boston police officer Walter Schroeder.

As I wrote earlier, the section in the index where Power’s name might have appeared has been blacked out (or, to be more accurate, whited out). But from actually scanning through the document, it is clear that she’s nowhere to be found. Whoever’s name has been whited out, it’s safe to say, isn’t Power’s.

In another part of the document (PDF) is a section titled “WUO [Weather Underground Organization] Communiques and Bombings 1970-1976.” The section comprises a long list of terrorist acts for which the Weather Underground took credit — everything from bombing New York City police headquarters and the U.S. Capitol to helping Timothy Leary escape to Algeria. Again, there is no mention of the bank robbery in which Officer Schroeder was killed.

The only FBI reference to Power’s alleged membership in the Weather Underground is a photo caption on a Web page that links to the 1976 report. Based on what I’ve found so far, I think someone in the FBI communications department made a mistake.

Moving right along: Over at Google Books, I was able to search “The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground,” by Ron Jacobs (1997). There are no references whatsoever to Power, Saxe or the Schroeder case.

Using Amazon.com’s “Search Inside” feature, I also peeked at William Ayers’ memoir, “Fugitive Days.” Again, no reference to Power, Saxe or Schroeder.

I also consulted stories from the New York Times and the Associated Press published at the time of Schroeder’s murder. Both reported the FBI’s belief that the suspects were involved in “revolutionary” activities. Neither story made any mention of the Weather Underground.

I see no reason to back down from asserting that Katherine Ann Power had no connection to the Weather Underground.