Today I came across this quote she made that is worth noting:

“This is one the major problems of old media. The illusion of presenting two sides of a story instead of just ferreting out the truth.”

The Tow Foundation will give $3 million to the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism and $5 million to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism are expected to announce Monday that they have received multi-million grants from the Tow Foundation to establish new centers for digital media innovation.

CUNY will receive $3 million to establish the Tow Center for Journalistic Innovation, an incubator for new journalistic products and services using Internet technology. CUNY will be required to match those funds via its own fund-raising efforts. …

The foundation will also give $5 million to Columbia, which will be required to match that grant on a two-for-one basis. These funds will be used to establish a center dedicated to the research and teaching of professional journalism in new and emerging media. While the new center’s main mission will be to educate the next generation of journalists and help them develop the skills necessary for online journalism, it will also explore new methods of interactive journalism.

As you probably know, Murdoch’s News Corporation owns Fox News and apparently owns O’Reilly too.  Murdoch can bully people in goverment, but apparently is a bit afraid of the power of the people. So he allows a lap dog like O’Reilly to call me a lunatic. Just beware, these are powerful people who will use any means they can to intimidate the rest of us, in an effort to have their way in consolidating the media and controlling what is heard, read and seen.

It is important that all of us take a stand as Bill Moyers does in this video — where he puts the loud mouth to shame.

In 2007, combined print and online ad revenue fell about 7 percent. In the last six decades, only one other year — 2001, when there was a recession — had a steeper decline, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Adjusted for inflation, 2007 ad revenue was more than 20 percent below its peak in 2000.

Circulation revenue has declined steadily since 2003, and the number of copies sold has been slipping about 2 percent a year. Some of the largest papers — including The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times — have lost 30 to 40 percent of their circulation in just a few years.

The long-term shift of advertising to the Internet — especially classified ads for things like jobs, cars and houses — accelerated last year…

Newspaper executives and analysts say that it could take five to 10 years for the industry’s finances to stabilize and that many of the papers that survive will be smaller and will practice less ambitious journalism.

Evening selling the business might not be an option because:

…since last spring, the supply of buyers seems to have dried up. 

None of which bodes well for employees because:

At many papers, the usual way to reduce — the buyout — has been supplemented or even replaced by layoffs.

Here is the only bit of good news, and would be much better if there were a financial model to match it, then even that good news is whipped back into reality by newspaper consultant Ken Doctor:

The paradox is that more people than ever read newspapers, now that some major papers have several times as many readers online as in print. And papers sell more ads than ever, when online ads are included.

But for every dollar advertisers pay to reach a print reader, they pay about 5 cents, on average, to reach an Internet reader. Newspapers need to narrow that gap, but the rise in Internet revenue slowed sharply last year.

“That’s another thing that made 2007 a watershed, the dawning realization that you can’t expect 25 percent annual growth in digital revenue,” Mr. Doctor said. “Nobody knows just when this thing bottoms out, or how far down.”

1. Simple enough: just sign up for a Twitter account, go to my Twitter page, and click Follow. (For instant updates, you’ll want to make sure you set up your IM client and/or cellphone with Twitter. If you’ve done either of those, then after Twitter acknowledges that you’re Following someone, you then have to toggle the Notifications ON — otherwise you’ll only see their tweets on your web feed, not via IM or SMS.)
2. Of course, the downside to following someone solely for the purpose of knowing when they’re live streaming or doing something else interesting is that you’re potentially subject to a ton of really boring stuff, like me complaining about the papers I’m grading, or to TMI, like a couple new media friends of ours who sometimes alert us to impending whoopie. One workaround that’s emerging for that is the use of hashtags: keywords like Technorati tags prefaced with a pound sign, e.g., #livestream. Personally, I’m trying to decide whether to sacrifice 13 of my precious 140 Twitter characters to #streetteam08 to tag my news-relevant tweets, or hope that the shorter #st08 is clear enough. The # symbol is only necessary for these tweets to be aggregated and archived at Twitter-related sites like tweetchannel.com or hashtags.org. But in order to get real-time updates about my livestreaming without following the rest of my life, you could send Twitter the command, “track streetteam08;” then, so long as I remember to include that tag in every streaming announcement tweet, you will receive that message when I send it out.
3. Sorry for the mini-lecture. Hope it was all relevant.
4. Sadly, following that #streetteam08 tag will only alert any interested parties to my particular live stream on Tuesday or subsequent video updates, as I appear to be the only one of us 51 that actually uses Twitter, and I haven’t inspired any interest in joining, yet, either.

A note from Witt: Please don’t engage me in an discussion of whether the Street Team folks are real journalists, at least not here. This is just a nice Twitter lesson that Highsmith was kind enough to provide.

Los Angeles Times editor Jim O’Shea announced his departure this week, saying he was fired for refusing to cut newsroom jobs. A few days later, San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein said he would be stepping down. We look at the state of the newspaper industry in light of these developments.

Host:Dave Iverson
 Guests:

• Louis Freedburg, director of the California Media Collaborative, devising strategies for improved coverage of key issues in California
• Phil Bronstein, executive vice president and editor of the San Francisco Chronicle
• Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism

“public journalism” -youtube KQED\’s Forum - The Future of Newspapers

That’s excellent point number one, excellent point number two for me is that the media’s so called experts are not really experts at all. Here is one example:

The current generation of political reporters has based its bid for election-year authority on its horse race and handicapping skills. But reporters actually have no such skills. Think: what does a Howard Fineman (Newsweek, MSNBC) know about politics in America? I mean, what would you logically turn to him for? It’s got to be: Who’s ahead, what’s the strategy, and how are the insiders sizing up the contest? That’s supposedly his expertise, if he has any expertise; and if he doesn’t have any expertise, then what is he doing on my television screen, night after night, talking about politics?

Even if Fineman and company had it, the ability to handicap the race is a pretty bogus skill set. Who cares if you are good at anticipating events that will unroll in clear fashion without you? Why do we need people who know how this is going to play out in South Carolina when we can just wait for the voters to play it out themselves?

Then Rosen adds:

 Among the “bogus narratives” the campaign press has developed so far, the Politico editors chose three to illustrate their humiliation. John McCain’s “collapse” in the summer of 2007, which meant we could write him off; Mike Huckabee’s win in Iowa, where the candidate without an organization took a state where electoral success, we were assured, was all about organization; and Obama’s “change the tone in politics” campaign which, according to the Gang, was not going to be in tune with the voters’ rawer, more partisan feelings in ‘08. All three were a bust, suggesting political journalists have no special insight into: How is this going to play out? What they have are cheap, portable routines in which you ask that kind of question, and try to get ahead of the race. This, too, is what I mean by mindlessness.

Rosen also picks up on this Nation piece by Christopher Hayes:

WHY CAMPAIGN COVERAGE SO OFTEN SUCKS.” He starts with something that is known to everyone in the pack: Campaign reporting is an essay in fear.

“Reporting at events like this is exciting and invigorating, but it’s also terrifying. I’ve done it now a number of times at conventions and such, and in the past I was pretty much alone the entire time. I didn’t know any other reporters, so I kept to myself and tried to navigate the tangle of schedules and parking lots and hotels and event venues. It’s daunting and the whole time you think: ‘Am I missing something? What’s going? Oh man, I should go interview that guy in the parka with the fifteen buttons on his hat.’ You fear getting lost, or missing some important piece of news, or making an ass out of yourself when you have to muster up that little burst of confidence it takes to walk up to a stranger and start asking them questions.”

Whereas he had once thought of it as a rookie’s experience, this year he learned that the fear never goes away. “Veteran reporters are just as panicked about getting lost or missing something, just as confused about who to talk to. This why reporters move in packs. It’s like the first week of freshman orientation, when you hopped around to parties in groups of three dozen, because no one wanted to miss something or knew where anything was.”

 I looked Hayes’ short piece and here is the key to what he says is needed:

You need to deal with the structural issues that reinforce these tendencies.

Rosen nails it when he writes the central problem is that the politcal journalists’ primary question is “Who is going to win?” The whole premise, as the New Hampshire debacle proves, is flawed; it is a horse-race question to which none of them have an accurate answer.

Instead Rosen writes:

… the job of the campaign press is not to preempt the voters’ decision by asking endlessly, and predicting constantly, who’s going to win. The job is to make certain that what needs to be discussed will be discussed in time to make a difference – and then report on that.

However, if you are one of the many serious thinkers who believe citizen journalism has merit,  you would be left with the impression that Weinstein himself is so wedded to old-school journalism that he is either a ”crackpot” or if not that, then one of its “sly marketers.”

Here is the tip off. He writes: 

If you could convince me that crowdsourcing and mojos and information centers weren’t about cost cutting or lazy journalism, I’d be all for them.

In the old-school journalism world, there would be no way for the passive audience to show how cracked his argument is, but in this new citizen journalism world there are plenty of people who can counter and expose Weinstein’s own lazy journalism and sly marketing for the past.

 However, you can see for yourself. First read Weinstein and then read this counter article in the Publishing 2.0 blog by Scott Karp. Were you better off just reading Weinstein’s professionally edited piece or did you need both to really get a sense of what citizen journalism is and where its potential lies?

There’s the Canon SD1000 for stills (the same model I already carry everywhere); a nice Panasonic 3-chip camcorder (consumer, not pro-sumer…we need to remain portable, you know); shotgun mic; an external hard drive the size of a Bible for footage; and a laptop the size of a boogie board (Dell, not MBP, but hey), all jammed into a spiffy and very comfortable backpack with our Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 logos embroidered thereupon.

As they were filling his backpack, they were also filling his head with legal advice:

Yes, to appear in my videos — even if it’s because you stepped up to a microphone to ask John Edwards a question, in front of all those people and cameras — you need to sign my Guest Release. Otherwise, it’s the cutting room floor for you. I’m also going to need someone who is authorized to represent the Atlanta IBEW to sign my Location Agreement, saying I have permission to film there. Oh and I have to slap up Cablecast signs at the door, warning the rest of you that you’re wandering into the line of fire. Meanwhile, my MSM rivals will be pointing and laughing at me, who is now neither as credentialed as a “real” journalist, nor as free from restriction as a “citizen” journalist.

And who are those MTV citizen journalists:

The rest of the Street Team seems pretty cool — even the small handful of Republicans! Well, what do you want, it isMTV after all, so our conservative caucus definitely has the look of a token minority; but I’m sure Vermont, Rhode Island, Indiana, and I believe even Alaska (she’s hard to call) will do you right-wingers proud. The group is split right down the middle in gender, and, as an ever-so-slightly snarky article about our orientation in the Boston Globe says, we even have enough diversity to appeal to “Hispanics, African-Americans, and lesbians.”

She neglected to mention that we are also really, really, incredibly good looking, and do other stuff good, too.

By the way, Shelby will be at our SoCon08 conference on Feb. 8-9, 2008 at Kennesaw State University. We just broke the 146 registrant mark, so are on our way to 200 people at the conference. Having Shelby there will be like having your very own American Idol star sharing dinner with you. Who will you be dining with Friday night Feb. 8? Sign up now.

Yo, Shelby bring your gear. We want our MTV. I’m looking forward to meeting you.

Update: Marietta Daily Journal reports that Trooper Grant Rowe didn’t stop in time and caused this six car rear end crash chain reaction. He was just on general patrol.