PressThink
Sat Jan 20 11:26:37 EST 2007
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Grave and Deteriorating for the Children of Agnew - "The choices resemble what the go-getters from Enron faced: confront the bad accounting or adopt even more desperate measures to conceal losses. But if the AP had fabricated a source and relied on that source 60 times, maybe the tables could be turned again and the day of reckoning put off."

Check out Placeblogger.com. It's About All Those Hyperlocal News Sites Springing Up... - Lisa Wiliams--the ace local news blogger from Watertown, MA, an occasional PressThink contributor and one of the sharpest people I know about all things Net--has launched a new site, Placeblogger.com, which lets you "discover, browse, and subscribe to local blogs," over 700 of them.

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop - "Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that--fuzzing things up--because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004."

Newspaper Chain Goes Creative Commons: GateHouse Media Rolls CC Over 96 Newspaper Sites - Over the weekend, the Watertown TAB of Watertown, Massachusetts, revamped its website. The result is, for now, strikingly bloglike: a wide center column with items in reverse chronological order. And at the very bottom, a small silver badge with a line of text that reads: "Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license."

"A Collection of Journalists Who Have Distinctive Signatures." That's What John Harris Has in Mind. - He and Jim VandeHei will soon open their new franchise in political news. (No name yet.) "The people having the most satisfying careers, it seems to me, are those who create a distinct signature for their work, who add value to the public conversation through their individual talents." Our Q and A...

This Just In: John Harris and Jim VandeHei to Pull Back the Curtain on Official Washington - "What VandeHei and Harris are saying is: game is up, guys. Those deals are news; we know how it works. And we don't have the 'institutional bias' that permits the Post and the Times and the Journal to tolerate the gentleman's agreements, which after all are agreements to bury the story..."

Pro Thinks Pro-Am Reporting Could Work: John McQuaid Interview, Part Two - "With connectivity anywhere and everywhere, journalists tapping into networks can have eyes on the ground in a lot of places simultaneously. That has all kinds of potential for assembling a broad picture of what's going on." Plus: Has investigative reporting been innovative enough?

Top Pro Thinks Pro-Am Reporting Has Promise - "Reluctantly, I gave up on the newspaper industry as a possible employer." Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter John McQuaid, who recently left the Times-Picayune for parts unknown, explains why he's become a contributing editor for NewAssignment.Net. First of two-part Q & A.

Political Ergonomics: Open Source Photo Essay Launches - Anyone can play. Without violating the law, you take pictures when you go to vote and upload them at the site. There's a Creative Commons license (type by-nd). What you are supposed to take pictures of is Americans exercising their sovereignty. The facts on the ground when they do...

Stephen Harper's Press Gallery Put Down : A Report from Canada by Ira Basen - "Harper wanted to see if he could fundamentally change the relationship between his government and the people who cover it. Declaring that the Ottawa gallery was biased against him, he announced that he would speak primarily to local media and other journalists of his own choosing."

Spouse on Campaign Payroll? Sunlight's New Tool - "It takes less than five minutes to investigate whether a given member of Congress has a wife or husband on the payroll. This is because the relevant data bases have been combined and adapted to make it extremely simple to check for spouses as payees in campaign expenditures."

My Interview with Readers of Slashdot - They did the Q's, I did the A's. "What's open to the wisdom of the crowd is vulnerable to the actions of the mob. Wanting to be helpful, the volunteer may slant reports without realizing it. Through the portals marked 'citizen' the paid operative can easily go. How do you prevent all of that?"

Editing Horizontally: Thanks to Reuters, NewAssignment.Net Can Hire Someone - They're giving us $100,000. That will underwrite the costs of hiring our first editor, which is going to be a fun job.

Sunlight Gives $10K to NewAssignment.Net - I'm announcing today that NewAssignment.Net has received $10,000 in underwriting support from the Sunlight Foundation, matching the gift by Craig Newmark that got us started. Like Newmark, Sunlight is underwriting the test project we plan to undertake in 2006.

Exploding By-Lines: Update on NewAssignment.Net - There's now a placeholder site. Design Observer joins in. The Economist weighs in. "Creating capacity does not create activity." I have an assignment for someone who wants to help out. And I need ideas for a test run.