Jay Rosen on NewAssignment.Net

Jay Rosen expects his latest idea, New Assignment.Net, to fail. Launched several months ago with the idea of promoting open-source journalism (that is, collaborative efforts between professional journalists and unpaid citizen activists), the project will most likely fizzle out after two or three years, Rosen said yesterday at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

“I see this as a temporary burst of energy and innovation designed to be imitated,” Rosen said. “Our idea is to steal this book — steal this project.” And: “It’s not going to be the next startup sold for $1.5 billion.”

Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, is one of the leading thinkers in how the Internet will change — and is changing — the way journalism is practiced, and the way it’s perceived by the public. His Press Think blog is a must-read, and NewAssignment.Net has attracted funding from Reuters and Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist. I brought my Journalism of the Web students to Berkman so that they could see and hear the latest about where online journalism may be headed.

Rosen said NewAssignment.Net has three missions:

  • To “spark innovation in open-source reporting.”
  • To determine whether the “pro-am” model — that is, having professional journalists and citizen volunteers collaborate on projects — can actually work.
  • To “figure out whether there can be a ‘gift economy’ for news.” There is a whole philosophy behind the idea of the gift economy, and I don’t want to oversimplify it. But if you’re thinking it means that people don’t get paid, well, that’s certainly part of it.

Open-source journalism is already working in a limited way. The Sunlight Foundation, for instance, has tapped the power of volunteers to expose such things as pork-laden earmarks that have been tucked into the federal budget.

What I find most interesting about Rosen’s idea is that he wants to figure out how to add professional journalists to the mix. Given the current economic decline of the news business, getting this right strikes me as essential both for preserving journalism’s public-service mission and, frankly, for helping the next generation of journalists find jobs. Indeed, Rosen welcomes help from journalism students.

Rosen said yesterday that NewAssignment.Net is already working on projects with Wired.com and the BBC. In 2008, he hopes to put together a collaboration with WashingtonPost.com to do an in-depth project on polling places.

The idea with all of these is that large numbers of volunteers would be asked to gather certain types of specific information to create a database that’s bigger and more comprehensive than a news organization could afford to assemble on its own. Then professional journalists would try to make sense of what the volunteers found.

Is this nebulous? Yes. I asked Rosen whether he thought such projects might lead to the creation of new types of jobs for professional journalists, rather than simply having journalists swoop in near the end to write and broadcast stories based on the data collected by volunteers.

His answer: Maybe. One of the lessons that may come out of NewAssignment.Net, he said, is that it may help journalists figure out how to make use of online “smart mobs” so that they can be better beat reporters. For example, a reporter whose beat is a particular company could assemble an online community of employees, former employees, spouses, suppliers and the like, and then make use of that community’s collective knowledge. But, as an attendee sitting next to me noted, developing sources is what we already do. (Although surely the Net makes it easier to build the kind of community Rosen envisions.)

I also asked about a news organization’s obvious need for exclusivity, as with the proposed WashingtonPost.com project. What, I asked, would prevent another news organization from making use of the data before the Post got around to reporting on it? Rosen had two answers: It wouldn’t happen; but certain things might be “kept secret for the sake of the project” when necessary.

“I think people who have a lot of ideas don’t worry about their ideas being stolen,” he said.

It’s hardly a surprise that Rosen’s answers to my questions weren’t entirely satisfying. The whole point of NewAssignment.Net is to find answers. This is a project that will be well worth following closely.

Update: The Berkman Center has posted video of Rosen’s presentation here.

Credit: Photo of Jay Rosen taken by Laughing Squid on June 24, 2006, and licensed under the Creative Commons (cc) system. Some rights reserved. Full details here.

Dylan on fire

I just got home from the Bob Dylan show at the Agganis Arena. I wouldn’t want to be a music reviewer, because the superlatives just get lame after a while. But Dylan was incredible, amazing, astounding, whatever you want to call it. He was absolutely on top of the moment, dancing and swaying at his keyboard, singing as well as his blown-out voice allows, even telling a joke near the end of his two-hour set. Media Nation Jr. and two of his friends came along, and they saw and heard something I hope they’ll remember for a long time.

This was the third time I’d seen Dylan. The first was in 1986, when he was playing with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers at Great Woods. The second was in 1989 at the Opera House [Note: This is a correction, as I’d originally said the Orpheum], with a small band fronted by G.E. Smith. He wasn’t bad on either of those occasions, and in ’89 he at least had a decent new album (“Oh Mercy”) to promote. But he seemed like a faded legend trying to push his career past the expiration date. Tonight he was a legend reborn.

OK, enough. Here’s the set list from tonight’s show:

  1. Maggie’s Farm
  2. She Belongs to Me
  3. Lonesome Day Blues
  4. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
  5. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
  6. Workingman’s Blues #2
  7. Tangled Up in Blue
  8. Blind Willie McTell
  9. Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine
  10. The Ballad of Hollis Brown
  11. Highway 61 Revisited
  12. Spirit on the Water
  13. Summer Days

The encores:

  1. Thunder on the Mountain
  2. Like a Rolling Stone
  3. All Along the Watchtower

The obscure favorite, for me anyway, was “Blind Willie McTell.” The most radical rearrangement was of “It’s Alright Ma,” redone as hard rock; I couldn’t place it until Bob got to the line about the president standing naked, always a crowd-pleaser.

I also didn’t understand why he included “Spirit on the Water,” one of the wimpier efforts from his new album, “Modern Times,” until he got to this: “You think I’m over the hill/ You think I’m past my prime.” (Cries of “No! No!”) “Let me see what you got/ We can have a whoppin’ good time.” (Cheers.)

Oh, yeah. His joke. After he introduced his band, which includes three guitarists, he leaned over his cheesy organ and said, “I’d like to play guitar, but then I’d have to find someone who can play one of these.”

The Raconteurs opened. They were loud and good. The weird highlight: a Led Zeppelin-esque remake of Cher’s “Bang Bang.”

A whoppin’ good time was had by all.

More: The Herald gets a review up on its Web site. Not bad, though reviewer Jed Gottlieb seems more surprised than he should be by Dylan’s late-career eccentricities. Nothing in the Globe, not even here.

Still more: The Globe finally checks in, with this Sarah Rodman review.

Thanks — now get out

Message to all free-agent pitchers: Come to Boston and get hurt, and this is how you’ll be treated, no matter how much you’ve contributed in the past. “HERO TO ZERO” is the screamer on the front of today’s Herald, accompanied by a photo of a shell-shocked Keith Foulke.

Foulke doesn’t strike me as the most pleasant fellow in the world. But the real story of his collapse, as everyone knows, is that he was perpetually injured following his phenomenal 2004 World Series — both knees and his pitching arm. Not that I’m keeping count, but I believe he went under the knife twice before coming back in 2006 and, between stints on the disabled list, proving himself to be a useful middle reliever.

The usually sensible Tony Massarotti acknowledges all that in today’s Herald, yet still piles on with this:

Now Foulke is gone and here is the truly amazing thing: No one is shedding a tear. Not Foulke, not Epstein, not anyone who has watched the Red Sox over the past two seasons. That might all be considered sad were it not for the simple fact that Foulke brought so much of this upon himself.

Because he mouthed off a few times? Please. If, last year, Foulke had been anything like the closer he was in 2004, Jonathan Papelbon probably would have won 18 to 20 games as a starter, and the Red Sox’ season might have turned out quite differently, despite all the injuries. And no one would care about Foulke’s attitude.

Blogrolling

The new Phoenix media critic, Adam Reilly, takes the helm of the Boston Phoenix’s Media Log, a blog I started in 2002 and that was capably handled by my successor (and predecessor!), Mark Jurkowitz, from mid-2005 until earlier this year.

I’ve fixed the link in the right-hand rail so that clicking on Adam’s name will take you to Media Log rather than the Talking Politics blog. Also, at long last, I’ve heeded Donna Halper and fixed the link to Altercation, by Eric Alterman, who moved his blog from MSNBC.com to Media Matters quite some time ago.

Gay marriage and the state constitution

Now that the latest attempt to outlaw same-sex marriage has ended, I thought I’d share some thoughts about the procedures used by gay-marriage supporters.

Some of this is repetition, and virtually none of it is original with me. But I’d like to pull together a few strands in order to address the question of whether the Legislature acted illegally or unconstitutionally (almost but not quite the same thing) by refusing to take up a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Those who believe that legislators acted improperly have a serious argument to make. I think they’re wrong, but it’s a close call.

Let’s begin with the whole notion of what a constitutional amendment is. In theory, it can be anything — it is the most radical step the government can take. At the federal level, you could bring back slavery and deport anyone whose last name begins with “Q,” and there’s nothing that anyone — not even the Supreme Court — could do about it. By definition, a constitutional amendment cannot be unconstitutional, because it’s part of the constitution. (You couldn’t take such radical steps at the state level, because state constitutions may not grant fewer rights than the U.S. Constitution.)

Given these facts, it ought to be extraordinarily difficult to amend a constitution. At the federal level, it is: you need two-thirds of each branch of Congress and three-fourths of the state legislatures. In Massachusetts, though, amending the state constitution by citizen petition is ridiculously easy. Once a petition comes before it, the Legislature, meeting in joint session as a constitutional convention, need only muster one-fourth of its members to keep the amendment alive. The amendment must garner a one-fourth vote again during the next session of the Legislature, and then it goes on the ballot. If it passes by a simple majority vote, it becomes part of the state constitution. Thus, 50 percent of the voters plus one would be enough to deny gay and lesbian couples the right to marry.

The anti-gay-marriage crowd’s cry of “let the people decide” is, on its face, ludicrous. By requiring that 25 percent of the Legislature approve an amendment in two consecutive sessions before sending it to the voters, the state constitution acts as a check on the most dangerous measures. You can get 25 percent for almost anything; but you can’t get it for everything. For a legislator to vote “yes” merely for the sake of putting the question on the ballot would be irresponsible.

The proposed gay-marriage ban, though, is another matter. Although I think it’s a terrible idea, there is nothing inherently dangerous about it. Plenty of states have amended their constitutions in order to prevent gay marriage from being legalized, and all of them have survived. The gay-marriage ban also clearly enjoys the support of more than 25 percent of Massachusetts legislators, though less than a majority. Which is what brings us to our current dilemma.

There is a school of thought — more reasonable than “let the people decide” — that argues that the Legislature has a constitutional obligation to hold an up-or-down vote on constitutional amendments. Here is the language from the Massachusetts Constitution:

Section 3. Amendment of Proposed Amendments. A proposal for an amendment to the constitution introduced by initiative petition shall be voted upon in the form in which it was introduced, unless such amendment is amended by vote of three-fourths of the members voting thereon in joint session, which vote shall be taken by call of the yeas and nays if called for by any member.

Section 4. Legislative Action. Final legislative action in the joint session upon any amendment shall be taken only by call of the yeas and nays, which shall be entered upon the journals of the two houses; and an unfavorable vote at any stage preceding final action shall be verified by call of the yeas and nays, to be entered in like manner. At such joint session a legislative amendment receiving the affirmative votes of a majority of all the members elected, or an initiative amendment receiving the affirmative votes of not less than one-fourth of all the members elected, shall be referred to the next general court.

This would seem to argue that, indeed, the Legislature must vote on the amendment itself, and not on a procedural question such as yesterday’s motion to recess, which only required a majority. David Kravitz of Blue Mass. Group made an interesting case for this last summer, writing:

There’s a right way to defeat the anti-marriage amendment in the legislature: convince 151 legislators to vote “no.” If that happens, then the backers of the amendment have lost fair and square, and it’s game over. But if the amendment isn’t allowed to come up for a vote, it’s a good day for Kerry Healey, and a bad day for the democratic process.

That’s the heart of the argument, and Kravitz puts it well. Thus it seems to me that those of us who defend the right to kill the anti-gay-marriage amendment by any means necessary need to explain why the Legislature is not obligated to vote on the measure. And to that, I would offer the following:

1. The Legislature, meeting as a constitutional convention, is a parliamentary body with its own rules and procedures. If the moderator — the Senate president — recognizes a member who then moves for a recess, is he supposed to rule that motion out of order? The customary procedures of the Legislature allow for members to call for a recess, and such a motion need only pass by a simple majority. Anyone who’s familiar with Robert’s Rules of Order should understand that. Proponents of a constitutional amendment need to get 25 percent by following the rules, not by having some outside authority put its thumb on the scale by suspending the rules.

2. The state’s Supreme Judicial Court is the arbiter of whether such parliamentary maneuvers are unconstitutional, and it has never issued a clear ruling saying that they aren’t. Which brings me to —

3. The anti-gay-marriage amendment is far from the only proposed amendment that has been killed through parliamentary maneuvers such as yesterday’s. On July 21, 2002, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby noted that, 10 years earlier, then-Senate president William Bulger had used the very same tactics to kill an amendment that would have imposed term limits. And to return to #2, the SJC subsequently ruled that it did not have the authority to force the Legislature to vote. Jacoby wrote:

The sleazy maneuver succeeded. The amendment never made it to the ballot. Its proponents asked the SJC to order the Legislature to perform its duty, but the justices said they didn’t have that power. Still, they made it clear that Bulger and his minions had violated the Constitution: “Efforts to obtain term limits by a constitutional amendment foundered,” they wrote, “because of the refusal of the Legislature in joint session to take final action on such a proposal as the Constitution of the Commonwealth directed.”

As Jacoby properly observed, the SJC declined to present Bulger with a good-government award. But it didn’t say he couldn’t do what he’d done. Courts do have ways of enforcing their orders, which leads me to believe that the decision fell short of finding that Bulger had violated the constitution, Jacoby’s interpretation notwithstanding. After all, a few years ago, the SJC started selling off state property in order to fund the voter-approved clean-elections law after the Legislature refused to appropriate any money. (The law was subsequently repealed.)

And that’s just one example. As Steve Bailey reports in today’s Globe, the Legislature this week also declined to act on a health-care amendment, and no one is holding up signs saying, “Let the people decide!” And writing in Bay Windows recently, Susan Ryan-Vollmar pointed out that the Legislature has ignored proposed amendments more often than it votes on them:

In the race to appease the good government pundits huffing and puffing about process and giving voters their due, many seem to have forgotten the history of initiative petitions in this state. In the last 100 years, lawmakers have considered nine amendments to the constitution initiated by citizens’ petitions. Only four were voted on by lawmakers. Three advanced to the ballot: a 1938 measure calling for biennial budgets and legislative sessions (which voters approved); a 1974 measure allowing highway taxes to be used for mass transit projects (which voters approved); and a 1994 measure calling for graduated income tax rates (which voters defeated). The fourth, a 1934 measure on biennial budgets and legislative sessions, was defeated by lawmakers.

The other five citizens’ petitions were never voted on. In 1982, a measure that would have changed the way the state budget is handled died when lawmakers adjourned the ConCon without taking action on the amendment. In 1990 two proposals — one dealing with reproductive rights and another with education — died when lawmakers failed to make a quorum for the ConCon. In 1992 a measure on term limits for elected officials died when lawmakers adjourned the ConCon. And in 2002, a measure seeking to amend the state constitution to prevent same-sex couples from marrying died when lawmakers adjourned the ConCon.

You may not like the way the Legislature does business when taking up constitutional amendments. But if you want to argue that legislators have a unique responsibility to vote on an amendment that would take away rights from your gay and lesbian neighbors, you’ve got to ignore a lot: the Legislature’s right to follow its own rules and procedures; the lack of any clear guidance from the state’s highest court; and a century’s worth of history and precedent.

And, yes, the Legislature this week did the right thing.

Not moving on (yet)

Despite his best efforts, John DePetro is not going to get his job back. But it may slowly be dawning on the brainiacs at Entercom that they should have said they were removing DePetro from his slot at WRKO Radio (AM 680) because of his lousy ratings — period. To claim that they couldn’t tolerate DePetro’s “fat lesbian” crack at a station that could market itself as the Hub’s Home of Homophobia is laughable.

DePetro may get a decent settlement out of this before returning to Rhode Island, where he was a radio talk-show host in the Providence market before coming to Boston, and where he still lives.