(iverson's) currentbuzz

I am sitting in my pajamas, working on getting my syllabii together, and being connected. This would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. We live in an age of information. There is so much information, we not only can share it, but we can make money from analyzing it, creating organizational bundles of information for others who don’t have time or expertise to sort through the over-abundance of information. We can report on that information, whether we’re in pajamas or not. Oh, we get paid to this, too. And just to add a bit more snark, we need no stinkin badges or authorizations to do so.

That’s why this week’s AP policy statement on attribution was so interesting. “In the age of the Web, the sourcing and reliability of information has become ever more crucial. So it is more important than ever that we be consistent and transparent in our handling of information that originated elsewhere than our own reporting,” it began. “We should provide attribution whether the other organization is a newspaper, website, broadcaster or blog; whether or not it’s US based; and whether or not it’s an AP member or subscriber.”

Blogs! “Those who work in their pajamas” will be recognized when one of their stories bubbles up into the national media—something that happens with amazing frequency, and that often goes uncredited.

via AP: Yeah, we’d better cite pajama-wearing bloggers, too.

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The Tyranny Of Government And Our Duty Of Confidentiality As Bloggers. TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington discusses two bloggers who were recently served with subpoenas from the TSA, a government agency. One blogger refused to reveal his sources. The other, who was served as he was babysitting for his children, gave his computer over to the TSA. Arrington asserts that:

“As bloggers, we have a duty of confidentiality to our sources. And that means keeping information confidential even if threatened with the tyranny of government. And even if the legislatures and courts haven’t decided that as bloggers we have real rights protecting us from that tyranny.”

I agree with Arrington. The First Amendment (see it below) protects freedom of the press without any caveat about bloggers. The founders wisely did not define “press” so that it meant employees of corporate media companies, for example. However, I’ve sat across the table from a reporter who was facing jail, and thinking hard about what a jail term means when you have a 3 year old at home and a spouse to support. The theoretic collides on such occasions with the practical and that is how people are tested. It isn’t easy.

That said, bloggers who aren’t writing fiction, and are exercising their right to free speech and serving as the press, need to buck up and consider the risks that go with any expression of ideas. Liberty isn’t license, and blogging isn’t just blathering unless that is how you treat it.

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The entire organization was seized by their collective panic at lowering revenues, plummeting readership (I quite literally never met a Tribune subscriber socially during my five years in Chicago), and frequently aborted frantic attempts to do something—hastily convened committees to launch new sections produced prototypes that languished for months and months in sad little piles around the newsroom as reminders of the paper’s institutional paralysis. Meanwhile, there were days when the front page consisted almost entirely of wire copy, when editors picked up two-week-old Los Angeles Times stories to fill out sections, and when Lipinski reacted to the appearance of a bad word—actually, a cheeky, punny reference to a bad word in a headline—by dragging editors to the printing plant after hours and forcing them to physically remove the offending section from the next day’s bundled editions.

via New York Times Hires Gang Who Killed Chicago Tribune to Kill Tribune – New York Times – Gawker.

The entire organization was seized by their collective panic at lowering revenues, plummeting readership (I quite literally never met a Tribune subscriber socially during my five years in Chicago), and frequently aborted frantic attempts to do something—hastily convened committees to launch new sections produced prototypes that languished for months and months in sad little piles around the newsroom as reminders of the paper’s institutional paralysis. Meanwhile, there were days when the front page consisted almost entirely of wire copy, when editors picked up two-week-old Los Angeles Times stories to fill out sections, and when Lipinski reacted to the appearance of a bad word—actually, a cheeky, punny reference to a bad word in a headline—by dragging editors to the printing plant after hours and forcing them to physically remove the offending section from the next day’s bundled editions.

via New York Times Hires Gang Who Killed Chicago Tribune to Kill Tribune – New York Times – Gawker.