The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.
The Washington Post as a remix page, encouraging developers to make creative use of the paper’s RSS feeds (not unlike some of what the BBC is doing). Perfect attitude. Great first step.
Next, they should put up their interviews and other raw material and let people remix that into better stories. And they should let the people create their own front page.
One step at a time and this is a good step.
Well Pajamas Media, nee OSM, nee Open Source Media, nee Pajamas Media is trying to do some navel-gazing on Thanksgiving and one thing becomes painfully, loudly, self-apparently apparent:
They have no idea what they want to be or why they exist.
Which is what I’ve said from the start.
Really: Just read the closed-loop discussion among only the PM people — no outsiders allowed, no comments allowed (though Roger is thinking about requiring a donation to God-knows-what charity to be allowed the privilege of allowing comments), no different perspectives welcome. And boy, do they need some.
Here’s the challenge, folks: Stand back and see whether you can agree on just one thing. Finish this sentence in no more than 10 words: Pajamas Media is _________________.
Until you can do that, there is no sense in arguing over logos, names, functionality, linking, comments, anything. What are you? Why do you exist? Until you can answer that, you shouldn’t exist. You don’t exist. You are just, everyone there seems to agree, a corporate-looking page that does too little.
But it sure is amusing to watch.
Well, this sucks. Hossein Derakhshan, one of the great pioneers of international blogging and freedom of speech online — a friend of democracy and, one should assume, America — has been barred from re-entering the country for six months. He tells the tale on his blog. The long and short of it is that on a quick trip between the U.S. and Canada, the border officials — being Homeland Security, after all — Googled his name, found his blog, and tried to find incriminating evidence that he was living and working in the U.S. without proper paperwork. A copy of Newsweek with his name and a New York address finally did him in.
How do we help him? Global Voices, which Hossein helped create, is at the Harvard Law School. I hope they know some experts in immigration law.
I will write a testimonial for Hossein telling how he is advancing the causes of freedom and democracy in Iran and elsewhere on earth.
I will write to my senators.
And isn’t it sadly ironic that Iran — whose dictatorial regeime he challenged starting the weblog revolution there — also questioned him and let him in and out. But America will not let him in.
That is our loss. And we need to fix it.
: Also see today’s NY Times story about the bloggers of China exercising their freedom where they can in spite of companies, including American companies, helping to censor them by building their firewalls and handing dissidents over to authorities.
We have to get our authorities to see that these bloggers are the peaceful freeådom fighters of our age, using the internet and free speech as the best weapons possible against tyranny. Isn’t that our fight as well? Shouldn’t we be helping them however we can?
: Here‘s the Committee to Protect Blogger’s post and here is Journalism.co.uk‘s.
Vaughn Ververs writes an odd and emotional and ultimately simplistic analysis of journalistic objectivity and transparency over at CBS’ Public Eye, using me and reaction to Rep. John Murtha’s call to pull out of Iraq as his jumping-off points.
First, Vaughn misses the point on the objectivity debate. It isn’t that with the death of the objectivity ideal — or the admission that it was a false idol — you must now slant every newscast. That’s what he says and that’s what is simplistic, in my view. Instead, I say that the ethic of transparency requires you reveal the biases you do have because your audience deserves to know them, so they can judge your judgments. Having done that, then, of course, you should still try to be accurate, truthful, fair, balanced, and all that. But to refuse to reveal a bias — or rather, call it a perspective — and to, indeed, hide it is a lie of omission. There’s no agenda worse than a hidden agenda.
When Murtha made his call to pull out of Iraq, it was given major coverage — “All three nightly newscasts led with them, as did the New York Times, Washington Post, and other newspapers,” Public Eye reported at the time. But conservatives said this shouldn’t have been given such coverage since Murtha, though once in favor of the war, had long been critical of it. Public Eye linked to Glenn Reynolds saying just that. I didn’t weigh in on that and still won’t, not having studied the quotes.
So now Vaughn mashes this up with an argument over what is newsworthy and who can say what is newsworthy and whether making that call can be seen in this case as evidence of bias:
Now here’s where I have problems with attacks on the idea that the media can achieve a perspective that is unbiased, if not totally objective: If we can agree that there is something called “newsworthy,” then Murtha’s speech qualified.
But, Vaughn, it is a matter of degree, wouldn’t you agree? Was it news, big news, or the top news story in the nation? Couldn’t reasonable people disagree about that?
But, no, Vaughn seems to say it is an absolute — in fact, he attacks me as a relativist, even though I hadn’t even weighed in on the matter.
Jarvis isn’t alone in making the argument for the death of “objectivity” as an idea but since he’s a friend, we’ll pick on him. In Jarvis-world, with no objective criteria for judging events, how does one argue with the conservative advocate who says Murtha’s speech was not news? You can’t, because there’s no common meaning to the word, “news.” It’s total relativism, it trivializes everything and ignores the real world, commonly understood.
That is why we call it news judgment, Vaughn: because people judge it. And we’ve both worked in enough newsrooms to know that there are plenty of disagreements about that judgement, even among the supposed pros at making those decisions. And behind every one of those decisions comes — let’s not call it bias — perspective. That could be the perspective of experience in journalism. It could be the perspective of politics. But it’s not as if you can just feed the news into an algorithm and get universally accepted news judgment. That’s naive.
Vaughn doesn’t stop there. Oh, no, he keeps driving without brakes:
Advocacy that tries to convince you that the Murtha speech wasn’t news is Orwellian, it’s dishonest. An advocate who will argue that Murtha is wrong, misguided or even a pant-load is honest. But in Jarvis-world, you can’t make distinctions like that because, well, everything is relative. Mostly, the Murtha-isn’t-news drumbeat comes from ideologues who, in days of yore, would have been printing pamphlets, distributing fliers or attending demonstrations. It’s nothing new and nothing reserved for one viewpoint or another.
Whoa, fella. When did I become Big Brother? I had nothing to do with this argument and you’re roping me into this without saying that. I wouldn’t call that fair and balanced. And, again, I think you’re misrepresenting what I say about objectivity and transparency in journalism.
In any case, something sure got in Vaughn’s craw. I don’t really know what it is or why. So I wish I knew more about that perspective. Case in point.
But at least he is acting like a blogger, which is what I suggested he do in advice Vaughn quotes. I said when Public Eye started, vowing to be objective:
Try this on for size: I think there’s no such thing as an objective blogger. Or you’re probably not blogging. You’re probably not talking with people, eye to eye. We’re about to kill the myth that journalists can be thoroughly objective; let’s not start trying to accrete that artificial ethic to blogs.
Oh, yes, Vaughn is plenty opinionated. And that’s a good thing.
: LATER: Jay Rosen reacts to Vaughn in the comments:
You have fallen for your own deceptions, Vaughn, casting yourself as the defender of order and others as the bringers of chaos, instead of trying to describe two different ways of ordering the world, both of which have their chaotic contradictions.
Bill Burnham has a good post about Google Base, insisting that it will change the world, or at least part of it. He says it’s all about RSS feeds into a gigantic XML data base that will extrude all kinds of neat new sausages. I await Part II.
Meanwhile, Olivier Travers says that surely Google will open up Base:
…it’s very early to make a call about Google’s intent. I’d say they want to give themselves a headstart in terms of surfacing Google Base content across their services (e.g. Local) but they’ll probably expose it to the outside world sooner or later. Not doing it seems not only at odds with their roots but more importantly it would leave them vulnerable to a more open joint effort by Microsoft and Yahoo, not to speak of countless smaller competitors.
My issue is: Why not open it up now? Why not publish the data format and API? Why not let us in on their intention? Instead, by playing the mysterious hard-to-get game, Google is mimicking Microsoft, the borg: You’ll do what we say because we say so. Once again, Google has succeeded thanks to the very openness of the internet. It should be open, in turn.