The Nation goes open-source

The Nation, the leading left-liberal opinion journal, has launched a slick new website using Drupal, an open-source content-management system that’s free and can be tweaked by anyone. “If he understood open source, Glenn Beck might well denounce it as a socialist practice,” writes Peter Rothberg.

A bit of an exaggeration, given that Drupal is used by such diverse organizations as GateHouse Media and the White House. (Oh, wait …)

The best news for media junkies is that Greg Mitchell’s blog, Media Fix, has finally made its long-awaited debut. Mitchell, the former editor of Editor & Publisher, is a double-barreled master of the tweet, posting what seems like 18 hours a day at @GregMitch and @MediaFixBlog. His blog goes straight into my Google Reader list.

Like its more moderate counterpart, The New Republic, The Nation will reserve some of its premium content for paying customers, writes editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. A shame, since opinion journals are trafficking in influence, not revenue.

Nevertheless, I suspect TheNation.com will quickly prove to be more widely read (if it isn’t already) than the rather hidebound print edition.

John Odgren is hospitalized; Paul Levy apologizes

Two late-breaking developments:

  • John Odgren, convicted last week of killing a fellow student, James Alenson, at Lincoln Sudbury Regional High School, has been committed to Bridgewater State Hospital, reports Northeastern criminologist James Alan Fox. Someone, at least, is approaching this case with some compassion.
  • Paul Levy, president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, has issued a statement from the board and a personal apology for the behavior that led to a kerfuffle last week. What exactly happened remains murky, but perhaps this is all we’re entitled to know. It seems to me that he’s handled this as straightforwardly as can be expected. He remains as respected a public citizen as we have in Boston, and I hope this is the end of it.

From talking about it to just doing it

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When I first started teaching a course called Reinventing the News a few years ago, I envisioned it mainly as a seminar. The idea was that we would look at some case studies of where the news business might be headed and blog about it.

I quickly realized that wasn’t good enough. The spark for me was a student who had just come back from her co-op job at the Patriot Ledger of Quincy. She had assumed the most complicated tool she’d have to use would be a notebook. Instead, she was tossed a point-and-shoot digital camera and told to teach herself how to capture and edit video. She liked it so much she ended up changing her career goals from print to video.

It was with some trepidation that I began adding three weeks of Web video to Reinventing a year and a half ago. First, I had to teach myself how to do it. And it required exposing some vulnerabilities. I knew some students would be starting from zero, but I also knew that others were already better at video journalism than I’d ever be. Nevertheless, it proved to be well worth it.

Last week we finished the most complex version of Reinventing I’ve offered, and my students had to pull together a variety of skills for their final project. The assignment was to use free online tools to create a multimedia story. The elements:

  • An 800- to 1,000-word story about a digital media project that had caught their eye, written up as a blog post with relevant links.
  • A slide show of six to 10 still photos, posted to Flickr and embedded in their blog.
  • A two- to five-minute video they shot and edited, posted to YouTube and also embedded in their blog.
  • An explanation of how they used social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to find sources and report their story.

At the end of it all, they were asked to note the location of their story on a Google map and link to their blog post. The result is the map I’ve embedded above. I invite you to explore. These young journalists did a terrific job, and I am very proud of them.

If you click on “View Reinventing the News: Final Projects in a larger map,” directly under the embedded map, you’ll find the list of students on the left-hand side. Click on a name to find his or her spot on the map, each one of which is linked directly to their project. Hmmm … Google could make this a little bit simpler, eh?

I’ll be teaching Reinventing again this fall, and I will continue to refine. My first thought is that I ought to dump the brief wiki exercise I offer and instead delve more deeply into how to handle comments. Any thoughts you have would be welcome.

A heartbreaking miscarriage of justice

In a humane world, John Odgren would have been institutionalized in a long-term psychiatric facility three years ago. The focus could then have turned toward how best to help the family of James Alenson, whom Odgren killed in a bathroom at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School.

Instead, Odgren, who was 16 at the time (Alenson was 15), is headed off to prison after having been convicted of first-degree murder. By most accounts, Odgren was a bullying victim who has Asperger’s syndrome and a variety of mental illnesses. Alenson was not among Odgren’s tormenters, which only compounds the tragedy.

Earlier this month, Odgren’s father, Paul, testified about the bullying to which his son had been subjected for years. The Boston Globe published a heartbreaking account [link now fixed], with the elder Odgren claiming that John had talked about committing suicide when he was only 9 years old.

My Northeastern colleague James Alan Fox, the noted criminologist, has a must-read commentary today in his Crime & Punishment blog for Boston.com. Fox writes:

Frankly, the thought of John Odgren, a boy who was bullied and ostracized repeatedly in high school, spending the remainder of his years in a prison setting is absolutely chilling. His well-documented fears and paranoid view of his world will undoubtedly become acute once he lives amongst a population of hardened criminals….

Life without parole makes sense for 25-year-old cold-blooded killers, but not for someone as immature and emotionally disturbed as John Odgren.

Finally, if folks at the Boston Herald have one shred of decency, they will delete the comments on their Odgren story as soon as someone inside the building reads this post. You can find the link on your own.

Insurer profits by denying needed care

My friend Clif Garboden, with whom I worked for many years at the Boston Phoenix, has written a compelling op-ed piece for the Boston Globe about his battles with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, which refuses to cover a chronic condition caused by his successful treatment for cancer. Clif writes:

I have the right to appeal this rejection …, but frankly, I have better things to do with my remaining time on earth than play against a stacked deck with a bunch of bandits.

Garboden’s tale may provide some insight into how former chief executive Charlie Baker, now the Republican candidate for governor, engineered Harvard Pilgrim’s turnaround. As Clif observes, maybe we can move something better now that we have near-universal health care.

The Globe’s all-out effort in Haiti

American rescue workers pull woman from debris following Haitian earthquake.

In an era of downsized newsrooms and an increased emphasis on local coverage, newspapers like the Boston Globe must pick their spots in covering stories beyond their home base. Thus the Globe’s extensive, ongoing coverage of the Haitian earthquake and its aftermath makes eminent good sense.

As health and science editor Gideon Gil said last night at a presentation by Globe journalists at Northeastern University, the Haiti story is rooted in Boston in two ways: more than 55,000 Haitian-Americans live in the Boston area, making this one of the largest Haitian communities in the country; and Boston’s world-renowned hospitals were (and are) major players in the relief effort.

Speaking and presenting their work were reporter Maria Sacchetti and photographer Bill Greene, who were among the first wave of journalists to arrive in Haiti, and who have focused on the victims; and reporter Stephen Smith and photographer Dina Rudick, who have covered the response by Boston’s medical community.

Both Rudick and Greene shot video as well as still photos. As part of last night’s presentation, they showed two “Haiti Journal” videos (here and here), which serve as a good overview of the Globe’s coverage.

“A story like this in many ways is why you become a journalist,” said Sacchetti.

Greene spoke of the disorientation he experienced after coming back from Haiti and being assigned to cover the pending sale of a $12 million townhouse on Beacon Hill. When one of the people involved in the renovation asked Greene what he thought, he replied, “You don’t want to know what I think. I just came back from Haiti.”

Both Rudick and Smith spoke of the frustration that medical workers experienced when they first arrived in Haiti, as they were forced to camp out on the lawn of the U.S. embassy in Port au Prince, doing nothing, while they waited for supplies and security to be moved into place.

Their reporting, Smith said, reached “the highest levels” of the State and Defense departments, and helped move the relief effort forward.

Rudick called it “one of the most impactful stories I’ve been able to participate in as a journalist.”

Photo by U.S. Navy Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Justin Stumberg via Wikimedia Commons.

Haitian copyright case turns on Twitter’s TOS

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in New York, Agence France Presse (AFP) claims that it did not violate photojournalist Daniel Morel’s copyright by distributing his images from the scene of the Haitian earthquake because Morel had posted his photos to Twitter, via TwitPic. AFP argues that by posting to Twitter, Morel was bound by Twitter’s terms of service (TOS), and that he therefore granted “a nonexclusive license to use his photographs.” The relevant section in the TOS would appear to be this:

You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

As I reported on Saturday, AFP has sued Morel, charging him with “antagonistic assertion of rights.” I have since received copies of AFP’s complaint (pdf) and Morel’s answer (pdf). It’s a fascinating case, involving the question of how a journalist can transmit his work under difficult conditions without giving up his rights. (Last month I took down one of Morel’s photos from Media Nation after hearing from his lawyer, Barbara Hoffman of New York.)

The AFP suit, filed by attorneys Joshua Kaufman of Washington and Brendan LeMoult of New York, also charges Morel with “commercial defamation.” According to their complaint, Morel, through Hoffman, undermined AFP’s reputation even though the agency took steps to cease distribution of Morel’s work once Hoffman informed it that Morel’s copyright had been infringed. According to AFP’s suit:

Even though it believes it acted under an appropriate license, when AFP was contacted by Mr. Morel’s attorney indicating that he believed the publication of the photographs was a copyright infringement, AFP again acted in good faith to cease publication and distribution of the photographs and notified its subscribers that the photographs should not be published or distributed.

In response to AFP’s eight-page complaint, Hoffman submitted a 66-page rebuttal. I have not had an opportunity to read it in detail. But clearly the heart of AFP’s complaint revolves around Twitter’s TOS. Hoffman writes that Morel found himself working under difficult conditions after the earthquake and trying to find a way to transmit his photos. The manager of the hotel where he was staying helped him set up a Twitter account. She continues: “Mr. Morel had no prior experience
with Twitter, the social networking site and did not read the Terms of Service.”

Nor has any of us, I suspect. So I’m sympathetic to Morel on those grounds. On the other hand, if AFP really did act “in good faith” to halt distribution of Morel’s photos once it had been notified, it is difficult to understand why Morel kept pushing his claim.

Thus Hoffman also includes a long section aimed at proving AFP did not, in fact, act in good faith, taking 13 images from the TwitPic page of a Dominican named Lisandro Suero. Suero, she writes, had “pirated” the pictures, and AFP acted “willfully or with reckless disregard of Mr. Morel’s rights, in its rush to receive credit for the news-breaking photographs to the world” by failing to verify Suero’s bona fides.

Ironically, Morel’s photos are included in Hoffman’s filing, which is a public court document. So if you want to have a look at them, all you have to do is follow the link to her rebuttal, above.

All in all, a pretty interesting case.

At the Globe, higher prices, lower circulation

If you take a look at the new list of the top 25 daily newspapers in the United States, you might notice something odd: the Boston Globe, a longtime fixture, has disappeared. In fact, the Globe’s weekday circulation has plunged so much that it now sells fewer papers than the Oregonian, the San Diego Union-Tribune and Newark’s Star-Ledger.

In a memo to Globe staff members that was obtained by Media Nation, publisher Chris Mayer says the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations show the Globe’s weekday paid print circulation is now 232,432, down 23 percent from a year ago. On Sundays, a category in which the Globe is still a top-25 paper, circulation is 378,949, a decline of 19 percent.

Circulation continues to drop almost everywhere. But the Globe’s particularly steep decline was the calculated result of a 30 percent to 50 percent (depending on the geographic area) hike in home-delivery rates, Mayer writes. The move is credited with helping to stabilize the Globe’s shaky finances. And it drove even longtime print subscribers like the Media Nation household to switch to home delivery on Sundays only; the other six days we subscribe to GlobeReader, a paid electronic edition of the paper.

Mayer also reports that the local audience for Boston.com, the Globe’s website, is up 16 percent over the past year.

I don’t have any hard figures for the Boston Herald, but Jon Chesto of the Patriot Ledger reports that the Herald’s weekday circulation fell by 12 percent over the past year. That would put the Herald’s Monday-to-Friday current circulation at about 140,000. Sunday circulation at the Herald was about 95,000 a year ago.

The full text of Mayer’s memo follows.

Dear Colleagues,

As you may know the ABC March Fas-Fax six-month circulation numbers were released today, and as we anticipated, the Globe has shown significant year-over-year declines, as a result of our pricing strategy instituted last summer.

The Globe’s circulation, now at 378,949 on Sunday and 232,432 daily, still leaves us the most dominant newspaper in New England. The year-to-year decreases of about 19% on Sunday and 23% daily were just about what we budgeted. We raised prices last summer in most areas by 30% to 50% to grow circulation revenue and stabilize the business.

To stress the point, these decreases were forecast and taken into account before launching our strategy. We set out in this direction not only to cope with the effects of the recession on advertising, but to compensate for the structural shift of advertising to the Web.

In terms of readership, also included in the ABC Fas-Fax report, we reach 32% of all adults in the metro market on Sunday and 20% each weekday. In contrast to our print circulation declines, Boston.com’s local audience grew by 16%. When you factor in Boston.com, our readership is even more impressive. Currently, during an average week, the Sunday Globe, the daily Globe and Boston.com together will reach more than half of all adults in the metro Boston area.

We are also developing additional news platforms to attract audiences. For instance, our mobile product usage is growing considerably, as is our recently launched app for the iPhone. We launched GlobeReader, and are working full-speed on other initiatives. Our goal is to be available wherever and whenever the consumer wants – on whatever device they prefer.

No local media can point to such a large audience or dynamic media portfolio. It’s heartening to know that hundreds of thousands of adults choose to rely on the Globe’s quality news each and every day, and that the newspaper has a core loyal audience who is willing to pay a premium for our product.

Thank you for your continued commitment to our mission.

— Chris