Media Nation

I finally got around to watching the DVD that comes with the “limited edition” version of Bob Dylan’s “Modern Times.” And the notorious “Soy Bomb” moment that occurred as Dylan performed “Love Sick” at the 1997 Grammy Awards, in February 1998, has somehow been edited out.

What happened? Is it simply a different camera angle? Were more-drastic measures taken? A concert clip isn’t journalism, but is this kind of rewrite ethical or not?

Here is the original, unedited clip, complete with Soy Bomb writhing away as Dylan tries to ignore him:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boGrq8VdDEE]
The editing makes for a smoother viewing experience, I suppose. But it’s not what happened.

Globalvision‘s Danny Schechter and Rory O’Connor have posted a three-minute video commentary on the debut of the English-language Al-Jazeera International channel. It’s worth checking out. Schechter and O’Connor want American cable operators to carry the channel, which they have so far declined to do. But I’m not sure whether that’s all that important.

After all, you can watch a live stream of Al-Jazeera International right here. And if you don’t mind a low-quality stream that has to be refreshed every 15 minutes, you don’t even have to pay. It’s a great example of the increasing irrelevance of big media companies, and it will become more of an option over the next few years, as television and the Internet become one.

Two dissenting voices.

First, the extremely predictable Jeff Jarvis responds with his standard critique: They’re clueless! To wit: “It’s foolish that they try to charge a monthly fee for watching the stream and even more foolish that they based the business on getting cable carriage. If they’d just put the channel up online, they’d be getting a huge audience today.” Hmmm … well, maybe. Somehow, though, I don’t think HBO would be doing as well if it were streaming for free on the Web. (And, as Jarvis acknowledges, Al-Jazeera International is streaming for free — just not the way he’d like.)

Second, a woman with the unlikely name of Cinnamon Stillwell has written a commentary for a Web site called Family Security Matters that begins with this introduction:

It is unthinkable that America would allow avowed enemies to move here, set down roots, flourish and grow, and then manipulate our citizens into thinking that our own government is the enemy rather than they. Yet as FSM Contributing Editor Cinnamon Stillwell points out, this abomination is exactly what has happened with Al Jazeera International as it sets up shop right under our noses in Washington, D.C. Imagine that!

I’m going to confess that I have not slogged all the way through Stillwell’s screed. I just wanted to point out that the notion that Ignorance Is Good is alive and well. I mean, why on earth would we want to know what Al-Jazeera is reporting? Is Stillwell afraid we might learn something?

Personally, I would rather see the regular, Arabic-language Al-Jazeera channel with subtitles than Al-Jazeera International. Though I don’t think Al-Jazeera is quite the spawn of Satan that its critics would have it, I am curious to know whether the message it tells its viewers in the Arab and Muslim world is different from what it streams to the West.

Speaking of Herald blogs, Adam Reilly confirms, via State House News Service, that the paper has lost its best blogger, political reporter Kimberly Atkins, who’s moving to Washington.

Atkins is skilled at negotiating the line between working as a straight-news reporter for print and projecting her own voice online. She mainly did it by making her blog, the Daily Briefing, interactive, with readers contributing ideas not just for the blog but for print as well.

There’s talk that the Herald may find a way to keep her blogging from her new home. That would be good news.

The Boston Herald recently started a media blog, the Messenger, helmed by media reporters Jessica Heslam and Jesse Noyes, pop-culture guy Sean McCarthy and TV critic Mark Perigard. The Messenger is the city’s third blog devoted to all things media, joining Adam Reilly of the Phoenix and yours truly.

The Herald’s media coverage is pretty good, but the Messenger is off to a slow start, mainly in terms of linking: When other content is referenced at all, it tends to be Herald stories. The exception is McCarthy, who’s been blogging on his own for a while and who gets it.

Across town at Boston.com, there are plenty of blogs by Globe reporters, but none on the media per se. The Globe hasn’t had anyone covering the media full-time since Mark Jurkowitz left in mid-2005.

While you’re on the Globe bloggers page, scroll down to “Other Blogs in the Boston area,” and check out “Politics & the media.” You won’t find a single media blog listed there — including the Messenger, Reilly’s Media Log (which has been around in one form or another since 2002) or Media Nation (2005). Curious, no?

By the way: Jesse Noyes reports that Ed Piette, who runs WBZ-TV (Channel 4), has decided to go back to calling the station WBZ rather than CBS4. For the record, Media Nation never stopped referring to the station as WBZ. After all, those are the call letters.

The Boston Globe did something pretty smart yesterday: It blew out about two-thirds of the City & Region front for a feature whose sole purpose was to drive you to the Web. The online presentation, “Ten from 20 to 30,” is a multimedia package on 10 young Bostonians with lots of photos and audio but not much text.

You might wonder why you should pay for the paper when the Globe is saving some of its more provocative content for the Web. But that’s where the audience is going anyway. Far smarter to give people a reason to go to the Globe’s site, Boston.com, than to chase them away altogether.

The trick, as always, is how to make money from this.

In a column about people whose hobby is writing letters to newspapers, the Boston Globe’s Alex Beam takes a poke at one John Zack of Hopkinton, whose blog, ZACKly Right, is devoted to making fun of the Globe. But it only takes a moment for Beam, in the course of criticizing Zack’s grasp of grammar, to run off the grammatical rails himself. Beam writes:

The site touts itself as “a spout-off space for a taxpayer that endures the nutty liberalism of the Boston Globe and the nutty liberalism of all those that need the Globe to know how they think.” Shouldn’t that read “a taxpayer who endures” and “those who need the Globe”? Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

In fact, both examples Beam cites are restrictive phrases, and though it has become customary to precede them with who, it is perfectly acceptable to use that. Here is what the American Heritage Book of English Usage has to say:

Some people say that you can only use who and not that to introduce a restrictive relative clause that identifies a person. But that has been used in this way for centuries. It is a quintessential English usage, going back to the Old English period, and has been used by our best writers. So it is entirely acceptable to write either the man that wanted to talk to you or the man who wanted to talk to you.

In other words, Beam should have resisted.

Drake Bennett, who writes for the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, says this today in his article on the pros and cons of private newspaper ownership:

What also worries many journalists is the issue of what happens when a newspaper owner exercises the prerogatives of ownership. William Randolph Hearst famously used his newspaper empire to drum up support for the Spanish-American War. The Sulzbergers were accused, most recently in a 1999 book by the journalists Alex Jones and Susan Tifft, of playing down the Holocaust in the pages of The New York Times out of concern that the paper would seem too Jewish.

Most recently? In fact, Bennett’s research should have quickly revealed that the definitive work on the Sulzbergers and the Holocaust was written by Northeastern journalism professor Laurel Leff and published in 2005. Her book, “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper,” recently received the American Journalism Historians Association’s 2006 Award for Best Book in Media History. So it’s not exactly obscure.

Here’s what Seth Lipsky wrote about “Buried by the Times” in the Columbia Journalism Review last year:

The importance of Leff’s book is in helping us to understand what happened so that we can be faster on our feet and avoid the same mistakes now that a new war against the Jews is under way and a new generation of newspaper men and women are on the story.

Then again, the Globe never bothered to review Leff’s book.

By the way, the book by Tifft and Jones to which Bennett refers is “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times,” expertly analyzed in this 2003 post by former Globe columnist David Warsh.

The Phoenix held its 40th-anniversary party at Avalon last night, and if this were a party column, I could go on for a few sentences with boldface names. I’ll spare you, but it was great to run into former colleagues and friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen for years.

Publisher Stephen Mindich, retiring president Barry Morris and incoming president Brad Mindich all spoke. The food was good and the bands were loud.

The paper’s 40th-anniversary supplement is online here. Of course, you can also grab one out of a big red box.

Congratulations.

More: Jon Keller, not surprisingly, puts it much better than I did. I endorse everything he says, especially with respect to Stephen and editor Peter Kadzis. Jon and I are certified old farts, but if he could get to know the current staff members, I know he’d agree that they’re every bit as good as, if not better than, we were back in the day.

David, you’ve got to read this: CommonWealth Magazine editor Bob Keough recommends a 2002 essay by former state legislator John McDonough that explains why it’s so hard — and why it should be so hard — to amend the state constitution by citizen petition. “The process for putting matters before the voters is layered with nuance, booby traps, court rulings, and intrigue,” McDonough writes. And that’s the way it should be.

Same-sex-marriage opponents — as well as a few supporters, such as David Kravitz of Blue Mass Group and Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh — are outraged that the Legislature failed to do its supposed constitutional duty last week by holding an up-or-down vote on a gay-marriage ban. Only a quarter of the Legislature, meeting as a constitutional convention, needed to vote “yes” in order to move it on to the next session. If it then received 25 percent again, it would go on the ballot, and would become part of the constitution if it received a simple majority.

The Legislature, of course, avoided taking a vote by approving a motion to recess — something that requires a majority, not just 25 percent. Thus were lawmakers able to kill the amendment through a parliamentary maneuver — something they’ve done on numerous occasions over the years on a wide variety of measures.

Well, here’s what McDonough has to say about that:

By collecting valid signatures equal to 3 percent of voters in the previous gubernatorial election, proponents can submit their proposed amendment to the Constitutional Convention. If at least 25 percent of senators and representatives vote, in two conventions in a row, to allow the amendment to appear on the ballot, the people vote on it in the next general election. But nothing compels the Constitutional Convention to take that vote. If the presiding officer — the Senate president — refuses to bring the matter up for action, no go, which is what happened this year to the marriage proposal. [McDonough is referring to an earlier attempt to ban gay marriage.]

That’s what I was trying to get at in this post last week. McDonough offers much more background and detail than I was able to bring to the table. Bottom line: It’s not “dereliction of duty,” as “Maverick Dem” would have it, for the constitutional convention to follow the normal and customary rules of parliamentary procedure.

The Boston Herald’s Jessica Heslam reports that WRKO Radio (AM 680), fresh off the John DePetro mess, has whacked its entire news department. Apparently the local news will be “outsourced.” (Do they cover Boston in Bangalore?) Heslam also documents the station’s plummeting ratings.

Heslam’s story follows Andrea Estes’ article in Wednesday’s Boston Globe revealing that former Massachusetts House speaker Tom Finneran is being considered for a talk-show slot at WRKO if he can beat the bogus perjury case brought against him over a redistricting lawsuit. Presumably Finneran will talk about the news — but he’ll have to tune in to another station to get it.