Experiments in Cyberspace

I am not adding anything. Joice and rejoice to better understand the financial crisis we are in, as seen by Mark Mitchell in his book The Story of Deep Capture : The Columbia School of Journalism is our nation's finest. They grant the Pulitzer Prize, and their journal, The Columbia Journalism Review, is the profession’s gold standard. CJR reporters are high priests of a decaying temple, tending a flame in a land going dark. In 2006 a CJR editor (a seasoned journalist formerly with Time magazine in Asia, The Wall Street Journal Europe, and The Far Eastern Economic Review) called me to discuss suspicions he was forming about the US financial media. I gave him leads but warned, "Chasing this will take you down a rabbit hole with no bottom." For months he pursued his story against pressure and threats he once described as, "something out of a Hollywood B movie, but unlike the movies, the evil corporations fighting the journalist are not thugs burying toxic waste, the...

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim will invest $250 million in the New York Times. "Slim's money will be used in critical pay-backs that are due late Spring this year," Janet Robinson of Times has said. So far, so good. I am glad for the newspaper but who on earth is Carlos Slim? Reportedly, he is the owner of Banco Inbursa and Inmobiliaria Carso among other companies. And he suddenly felt the need to invest in a troubled industry, media; not in a TV, a dot com or an initially shining technology co. Call me a skeptic but I attribute the erosion of trust in journalism to mostly such deals. A newspaper is only as good as it is critical, the more the better, and my experience with such financing methods in this part of the world is not very pleasant. Such money is poured into media to provide leverage for creditors against competition, their competition, not the newspaper's. Let us hope this one does not turn sour.

Analyzing the crisis of journalism and whether blogging or independent on-line journalism can take the place of media reporting as we know it or not, are not easy issues to tackle. The difficulty stems from the fact that, public's right to access to information, ensuring public's safety, personal and privacy rights, safeguarding the bloggers and anonymity, upholding copyright and patent laws  are all intertwined in a beautiful mixture of a soup we call Internet. Since the topics are huge and will provide enough material to write for many years, I am going to start at a random point. Unlike many though, I do have a proposition to solve most of the problems of today, but to present it gracefully requires time; so it will have to wait. Today, I would like to give three seemingly unrelated news and want you to focus on not who is right or wrong but on the mechanics of them, i.e. how things operate or unfold. First, we have the report of Committee to Protect Journalists, ...

According to Los Angeles Times, Six Apart, the company behind major commercial blogging platforms TypePad and Movable Type, is offering free blogs to laid-off journalists via their Journalist Bailout Program : Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We're Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you. We're a company founded by bloggers, and we've supported on-line journalism from the beginning. During a time when so many great journalists are worried about losing their jobs, we want to do what we can to help. So we've put together a program to put you on your first steps towards independence. But I did not read the story from LAT first. While Times focused on how generous was Anil Dash's (from Six Apart) offer and the difficulties of making money on-line, it was Graham of Entrecard who truly got to the bottom of the real...