Media Nation

Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Phoenix and I will lead a discussion about race, ethics and the media following this Sunday’s showing of “The Story,” being presented by the Zeitgeist Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts. The play gets under way at 7 p.m., and the discussion should start at around 8:30. The Boston Globe’s Ed Siegel reviewed “The Story” yesterday.

Here is the complete statement from Reporters Without Borders on the matter of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist whose political imprisonment was reportedly helped along by Yahoo. The heart of it is this:

REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS: Yahoo! obviously complied with requests from the Chinese authorities to furnish information regarding an IP address that linked Shi Tao to materials posted online, and the company will yet again simply state that they just conform to the laws of the countries in which they operate. But does the fact that this corporation operates under Chinese law free it from all ethical considerations? How far will it go to please Beijing?

Pretty far, apparently. The New York Times reports on the story today, in a piece buried inside the business section. Among other things, we learn that Reporters Without Borders’ predictive powers are outstanding, as the Times quotes from this Yahoo corporate statement: “Just like any other global company, Yahoo must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based.”

InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds points to this post on the Berkman Center’s Global Voices blog. The fact that Reynolds is on the case guarantees that this is going to spread across blogland – as it should.

Earlier this year I wrote an article on how big Internet companies could violate your privacy with the supposedly non-personal information they collect as you go about your business online. The example I used was Google, simply because it’s bigger than everyone else. But, as Shi Tao has learned to his sorrow, it’s something any Internet company can do. Shame on Yahoo.

David Brooks of the New York Times begins his column today with this: “As a colleague of mine says, every crisis is an opportunity.” A colleague of his? If you Google the phrase “every crisis is an opportunity,” you’ll get 466 hits. Not exactly something he needed to attribute, never mind to an unnamed source. Then again, he didn’t have to tell us he’d never met Judge Michael McConnell, as he did a couple of months ago. Think, David, think.

WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) is respected and admired, but it isn’t loved. Long defined by the prickly personality of former general manager Jane Christo, who transformed it into the essential news service that it is today, the public station’s image has suffered since 2001, when its signature personality, Christopher Lydon, was fired in the midst of an ugly contract dispute.
It only got worse recently, when interim general manager Peter Fiedler canceled Lydon’s former show, “The Connection,” and laid off its workman-like host, Dick Gordon, as well as “Inside Out” documentarian Michael Goldfarb. Given the financial straits in which Christo left the station, those moves were probably necessary. But they contributed to a sense that WBUR’s best days were behind it. And it didn’t help that Lydon has been back on the air since early summer, broadcasting his intriguing new show, “Open Source,” from the studios of rival WGBH Radio (89.7 FM).

So it makes sense that Boston University, which holds ‘BUR’s license, would name Paul La Camera as the new permanent general manager. (Phoenix coverage here; Herald coverage here; Globe coverage here. You can listen to WBUR’s own report, which includes an interview with La Camera, here.) As the longtime general manager of WCVB-TV (Channel 5), La Camera built a reputation as someone who was extraordinarily well-liked. Channel 5’s local news operation was regarded as among the best in the country before corporate-ordered budget cuts began taking their toll. Part of La Camera’s legacy is “Chronicle,” a half-hour magazine show that could be a model for the kind of local coverage that hasn’t exactly been ‘BUR’s forte. (That said, “Chronicle” is too soft for my taste.)

The coverage of La Camera’s hiring has focused on his ties to community leaders, which may translate into fundraising prowess. There’s no question that that’s WBUR’s greatest need. Despite complaints about La Camera’s lack of experience in radio and public broadcasting, the reality is that his most important job will be writing checks to National Public Radio, which supplies the station with “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and other programs. At this point in its history, WBUR needs a businessperson. La Camera happens to be a nice businessperson, which is a bonus.

Among the folks whose e-mail got stuck in my Northeastern inbox were Bug and Ms. Priss, also known as Bryan and Bethany Love, the Appalachian Trail thru-hikers whom I wrote about on Aug. 19. They answered a few questions about their online trail journal, to which they post observations and photos.

Bryan, 32, is a hospital pharmacist. Bethany, 26, is an interior designer and home-furnishings specialist. They e-mailed me on Sept. 1 from a hostel in Andover, Maine. Without any further ado:

Q: Why did you decide to record your thoughts and photos on the Internet during your thru-hike?

A: We wanted a lasting journal for ourselves, and we also wanted our families & friends to share in our experiences. Most people don’t understand what the AT experience is like, so we’re also trying to educate & encourage our audience to get out and hike.

Q: How do you do it – that is, hardware, software, Net connection and the like?

A: We use a Pocketmail (www.pocketmail.com) device to send our journals to my best friend who then uploads them to our TJ website. The device sends the emails via built-in modem after dialing a 1-800 number. The device weighs ~8 oz, which is an important factor for most AT hikers. Photos are more difficult to get onto the site. We usually wait until we are in a large town and have CD’s made which we then mail back and are uploaded by the same friend.

Q: In what ways do you think doing this enhances your experience?

A: It forces us to think about our daily experience, so I think our memories will be more vivid. The pocketmail device has definitely been a conversation starter.

Q: Can you think of any ways in which it detracts from your hike?

A: Time … it definitely takes more time than we thought it would. After a long day of hiking, it is hard to be disciplined and journal.

Q: How many readers do you have?

A: We have had almost 36,000 hits on our website. I would guess we have had 100-200 readers.

Q: When do you plan to reach Katahdin? Are you planning anything special for
your online audience when that happens?

A: We estimate summiting on/around 9/20. We’d love to post our final journal the day we summit. We’re also planning to submit a few post-hike journals detailing our reacclimation back into society.

Eileen Kennedy (no relation) of the Nashua Telegraph has a nice feature on the 70th anniversary of a venerable New England media institution – Yankee Magazine – and how it is trying to reinvent itself through such un-Yankee-like tech advances as blogging and podcasts. Disclosure: She quotes me.

After a week of trying, I was finally able to reconnect to my Northeastern e-mail account yesterday. Unfortunately, the first thing I discovered was that a number of people had been trying to reach me since early July: there were dozens of messages in my inbox that I hadn’t been able to access. So, if you’re one of them, my apologies – and please try again. I’m going to change the contact e-mail for Media Nation back to my Northeastern account, since it seems to be working fine now. But I’ll try to keep a closer eye on it.

The latest issue of The Masthead, published by the National Conference of Editorial Writers, has a diverse roundup of commentary on Michael Kinsley’s controversial stewardship of the Los Angeles Times’ editorial and opinion pages. But you can’t read it without jumping through some technological hoops. (The website LA Observed has a meaty summary online here.) Given that the whole point of Kinsley’s reign has been the melding of newspaper editorials with the Web, that’s more than a little ironic. I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, a brief recap.

Kinsley – who has said he’ll likely be leaving his post this fall – has raised hackles with such dubious innovations as publishing freelance pieces as unsigned editorials and, most disastrously, posting a “wikitorial” on the Times’ website that readers could revise as they saw fit. Not surprisingly, the piece became a magnet for X-rated contributions. There’s no doubt that the editorial and op-ed pages of daily newspapers could use some serious rethinking. But Kinsley, despite a long, successful career editing publications such as The New Republic and Slate, as well as co-hosting CNN’s “Crossfire” back when even Jon Stewart would have liked it, seemed to lose his way.

The Masthead contributions range from pro-wiki commentators such as Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, to the more traditionalist Stephen Burgard, director of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. Both Niles and Burgard have worked for the Times, Burgard as an editorial writer.

Yet unless you’re a member of the editorial-writers group or a subscriber to The Masthead, you are almost certainly not going to put in the effort needed to read these pieces. Because The Masthead, oddly enough, is not on the Web. You can find it online through some specialized databases; I was able to access the articles via EBSCO, available for free with my public-library card. But the path I had to take was nonintuitive bordering on counterintuitive.

By not making its contents freely available, The Masthead is withholding itself from what could be a broader conversation. Romenesko loves this stuff, and a posting on his site would have guaranteed national distribution to an audience of both professionals and lay people – which is what this package deserves. Bloggers would have at it, too. I can’t imagine the editorial-writers group would suffer much of a financial hit by giving away The Masthead. If anything, the organization would achieve a higher profile, and perhaps more people would join.

Jay Rosen, among others, is a staunch advocate of free, permanent links, explaining:

ROSEN: If you linked to the Los Angeles Times, your link would be dead in a week or two, as the content moved, in some grindingly mechanical fashion, off the “free” site, into an closed and gated archive, with tolls, thereby removing the journalism part from circulation on the Read/Write web, which means removing it from Google, from active cultural memory, and interrupting the very patterns by which value is added to a piece of journalism – post-publication, online, because of how the web works.

The danger, of course, is that news organizations, already hard-pressed for revenue because they’re giving away their current content on the Web, will lose yet another revenue stream by giving away their archives. Yet surely there is reputational value in taking part in the national conversation. When was the last time you heard anyone talk about The New Republic? It’s not because it’s not just as good as it ever was; it’s because it now hides most of its content behind a subscriber-only wall. Now the New York Times is ready to places its columnists off-limits to non-subscribers. Many observers are predicting that people who don’t subscribe already will simply find new columnists to read – and I think those predictions are right.

What’s obvious is that if you’re not on the Web, you’re not part of the conversation. The Masthead’s LA Times package could help foster a wide-ranging discussion about the future of the editorial page. But not if only a select few can read it.

The first order of business for the media today should be to check out the shocking claims of Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish. Broussard became the face of the disaster on Sunday. In an emotional appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said the mother of a local emergency-management official drowned at her nursing home despite repeated assurances that help was on the way.

But if you only saw the clips, you might have missed something even more important. Broussard told host Tim Russert:

BROUSSARD: We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. FEMA – we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, “Come get the fuel right away.” When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. “FEMA says don’t give you the fuel.” Yesterday – yesterday – FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, “No one is getting near these lines.” Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America – American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.

These claims are so mind-boggling that I find them hard to believe, even after a week of grotesque incompetence on the part of FEMA and other federal agencies. But Broussard’s charges shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, either. Let’s find out if they’re true or not. Certainly the Bush administration has forfeited any benefit of the doubt. (Speaking of which, Josh Marshall is following how an apparent White House attempt to smear Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has unraveled.)

And by the way, add Russert to the list of journalists who’ve been laudably aggressive in their questioning of government officials – a development I took note of last Friday in the case of NPR’s Robert Siegel, and that Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post and Alessandra Stanley and David Carr of the New York Times write about today.

“Now a Band That It Once Would Parody” – The New York Times, reviewing Green Day’s Sept. 1 concert at Giants Stadium

“Punk and Proud of It; Green Day Remains True to Its Roots” – The Boston Globe, reviewing Green Day’s Sept. 4 show in Foxborough