Goodman is certainly a journalist in the same way the big network anchors are. For people from the progressive left, handcuffing and arresting Goodman has the same impact that it would if network news audiences saw cops put NBC’s Katie Couric in handcuffs.

Here is a quote from Goodman, in the Post:

“They seriously manhandled me and handcuffed my hands behind my back. The top ID [at the convention] is to get on the floor and the Secret Service ripped that off me. I had my Democracy Now! ID too. I was clearly a reporter.”

The police also raided a house with folks from I-Witness Video, which films police abuse around the country. Several other journalists, both mainstream and citizen, have been arrested or pepper sprayed.

In this era of citizen journalism, we should all be very concerned for everyone’s First Amendment rights.

Here is Goodman getting arrested:

Here is a member of Democracy Now!, who describes an earlier police raid at an I-Witness house.

Here is the essense of the bill SB 59 (georgia-kid-law.pdf ) with Arne’s insert in brackets:

It shall be illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking website [myspace, facebook, linkedin, probably blogger] to allow a minor [under 18] using a protected computer [i.e., one in Georgia] to create or maintain a profile web page on a social networking website without the permission of the minor’s parent or guardian and without providing such parent or guardian access to such profile web page at all times.

First offense is a misdemeanor, second is a felony with imprisonment up to five years.

Of course, as someone who just started a social networking site for SoCon08 to help Georgia businesses, nonprofits and entrepreneurs, it worries the hell out of me.

Here is Arne’s response to what he, at least according to the subject line of this email thinks is a fairly dumb piece of legislation, but his remarks below are more temperate:

I am sending this email to my Senator (Senator Henson) and all the sponsors of SB 59.

I am a concerned parent. I have 4 children, aged 9, 14, 18, and 20. I am deeply concerned about the potential risks to children associated with social media generally.

I am also a partner at the law firm of Morris, Manning and Martin. I started my firm’s “Web 2.0″ practice group. As a part of my job, I study the business models associated with social networking, I have my own MySpace and FaceBook accounts, and I represent clients who are in this business space. (I am not being paid by any of them; this email is sent as a concerned citizen only.) I also speak and write in this area.

Given my parental and professional background, I consider myself one of the more knowledgeable people, over 50 years of age, about social networking.

A few months ago, there was press coverage of sexual predators and MySpace. At that time, it was reported that MySpace had 29,000 sexual predators who had accessed MySpace. Comparing this to the total number of users of MySpace at the time (about 58 million), that means that there was approximately one sexual predator for every 2,000 persons on MySpace. I can understand that this is a serious concern to legislators, parents, and NewsCorp (who owns MySpace).

Also at that time, I checked to see how many sexual predators were in my own county. At the time, I counted 596 sexual predators listed in DeKalb County. DeKalb County’s population is approximately 723,602. This means that in DeKalb County, there is one sexual predator for every 1,214 people.

As you can see, the ratio of the number of sexual predators to the population in DeKalb County is 61% GREATER than the number of sexual predators on MySpace. My kids may be more at risk of sexual predators at school or at the mall than they are on MySpace. While the larger absolute numbers make for sensational headlines, those numbers merely reflect a problem that we have in society.

Businesses are not interested in having sexual predators on their sites, and at least the larger social networking sites are spending massive amounts of money both to prevent sexual predators from using their systems and to catch and prosecute them. I believe that the owners of social networking sites, such as NewsCorp, Disney, Google, and other large, well-funded companies, are a part of the cure.

Second point. I teach my kids how to deal with social networking. I view this as my role as a parent. I don’t need the government telling me or my kids what to do.

I oppose SB 59. This legislation paints with way too broad a brush, and it is very likely to have severe unintended consequences. I don’t think that it is in our State’s best interest to legislate something that has the potential of excluding the State of Georgia from participating equally with other states in the development of social networking generally, which I believe has the potential to be as important as the rise of the Internet itself.

While we have a clear societal problem with sexual predators, social networking is the only area I know where the resources of businesses have been marshaled to help solve this societal problem. The risks of social networking simply aren’t sufficiently different from this problem in our society at large to justify passing an overly simplistic,potentially damaging (to businesses and the cause of reducing sexual predation), and, in my opinion, poorly thought through legislation.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Paul Arne

He thinks anyone interested in social networking should be contacting their legislators too.

“That rotten, traiterous [sic] piece of filth should be hung by the ankles from a lamp post and beaten by the mob rather than gaining a pulpit at ANY self-respecting news organization,” said one message. “You should be ashamed. Apparently you are only out for money and therefore an equally traiterous [sic] whore deserving the same treatment.”

Then Holt as if to brush off the citizen critics writes:

Kristol would not have been my choice to join David Brooks as a second conservative voice in the mix of Times columnists, but the reaction is beyond reason. Hiring Kristol the worst idea ever? I can think of many worse. Hanging someone from a lamppost to be beaten by a mob because of his ideas? And that is from a liberal, defined by Webster as “one who is open-minded.” What have we come to?

Then he gets down right patronizing when he adds:

This is a decision I would not have made. But it is not the end of the world. Everyone should take a deep breath and calm down.

Sitting in your position of power, Clark, you might not know it or feel it, but in this era of waterboarding etc. it is pretty damn tough to take a deep breath and calm down.

Here is what I would have done, insteading of retrieving probably one of the nuttiest letters to prove a point, I would have run all the letters they received. All 700 right here on the web, what does it cost? Almost nothing.

Instead Hoyt decides to treat 700 of The New York Times readers, dedicated enough to take a stand, as if they are little children, or worse nut cases, and worse still, apparently in his mind, liberal nut cases. 

 The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.

Being a resident of Georgia and the owner of citizenjournalism.org,  I felt obligated to provide the opposite view, which is in today’s AJC Op-Ed section.

 I was civil, but others on the Internet were less forgiving. Here is Dan Gillmor’s blog title: Needed: Regulation to Prevent Journalists-Turned-Professors from Embarrassing Themselves.  Rhetorica’s response emphasized free press and is also worth a read. TigerHawk takes the best nasty shot. But first, of course, read the unedited copy that I sent to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which has the headline, at least online of “Citizen journalists: They don’t need to be regulated.” Here is the unedited copy:

As the owner of the URL CitizenJournalism.org, I feel obligated to respond to David Hazinski’s opinion piece yesterday about citizen journalism, in which he wrote: “The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.”   He doesn’t think the formerly passive news media audience members, who are now content producers, are very trustworthy. He adds: “Journalism schools such as mine at the University of Georgia should add courses to certify citizen journalists in proper ethics and procedures, much as volunteer teachers, paramedics and sheriff’s auxiliaries are trained and certified.” 

 I agree with him that journalism schools should offer training for citizens interested in the news media.. In fact, the Department of Communication at Kennesaw State University, in which I teach, is about to introduce a new concentration entitled: Journalism and Citizen Media. Although we might offer a Citizen Media certificate, I am far most interested in helping future journalists understand the power of citizen media involvement and totally opposed to “monitoring and regulating this new trend.”

 For example, mainstream media have been guilty of what Dr. Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte of the
University of Texas calls “censorship by omission.” The voices of the poor, the disenfranchised and minority groups often go unheard. Now citizen participation in the news media is an opportunity to get the disenfranchised heard in ways impossible in the past. Who is going to certify which of those voices is most trustworthy? Will it be the members of the journalism profession, who are 86 percent white and almost 100 percent middle class? I hope not.

Furthermore, you can be a great journalist without formal training. In 1996 former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger did a national study of journalism education, entitled Winds of Change: Challenges Confronting Journalism Education. In her survey of relatively new journalists, those with less than 11 years experience, 27 percent said they had never studied journalism.

It gets better. Taking a 10-year slice of the major journalism awards and fellowships winners she found “the majority, sometimes an overwhelming majority” never studied journalism.” Here are her findings:
·  59 percent of print journalists who won Pulitzer Prizes never studied journalism;
·  75 percent of broadcast journalists who won DuPont Awards never studied journalism;
·  58 percent of journalists awarded Nieman Fellowships never studied journalism, and;
·  51 percent of journalists awarded Knight Fellowships at Stanford University never studied journalism.

Citizen journalism, which goes by many names including networked journalism, We Media, distributed journalism, and open-source journalism, is a direct outgrowth of the open-source software movement, about which Eric Raymond wrote in his book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” The cathedral being the old top-down model and the bazaar being the almost out-of-control street market model. Much to his surprise and almost everyone else’s the chaotic bazaar model produced better and more rigorous software than the rigid top-down model. In the end, this open bazaar form of citizen created journalism will produce a better informed public and a more rigorous public square.

Models will be formed, just as they were in the open-source software movement, which will filter out the crackpots, vandals and incompetents, and it will happen without a certification board. It will not be professional journalism pitted against citizen journalism, it will be a combination of both and that’s what I will be teaching my students. In other words, I will be teaching them about inclusion rather than exclusion and about freedom of speech and the power of the free press even if that press is a blog owned by a solitary individual publishing to the world.

Let’s start first with my Op-Ed piece today that was published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Congress can’t muzzle free speech: Condemning Petraeus critics, lawmakers ignore Constitution

The second is my letter to Romenesko with the headline: Witt blasts NYT public editor’s column on MoveOn.org ad .

 My premise in the first is that the U.S. Senate has injured the First Amendment of the United States Constitution by voting to: “strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.” If we have to worry about one of the highest legal branches of the Federal government “condemning” our use of free speech, then how free is that speech.

In my open letter to Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, I say he is too worried about decorum at the expense of free speech.  As you might notice from the tone of my letter, I am more worried about free speech than I am about decorum.

It is time that all of us to speak out now, and help to put the brakes on the trend to attack free speech via condemning its speakers when we don’t like what we hear.