Media Ethics and Rhetoric Journal

Mark Lieberman at Language Log beat me to this one (drat!). Here, from The Onion, is some bullshit happening somewhere:

Ouch.

Technorati Tags: Culture, Journalism, Rhetoric

In the early days of newspaper comment features I was a big fan of open systems that allowed anyone to comment and to comment anonymously. I believed at the time, and still believe, that running an open system is the best way to jump-start discussion and build an online community. But I also believe that newspapers must exercise control.

Exercising control means having an employee read the comments and filter as necessary for such things as obscenity and threats of violence.

Further, I think the time has come to offer different levels of service based on different levels of anonymity. For example, offer a continuum with these poles: total anonymity would come with length and posting restrictions and total openness would come with no restrictions and perhaps even some cool perks.

Story Lab today runs a nice bit of meta-reporting about comment blowback: What if open comment features scare away sources? Here’s the conclusion:

I’m not here to say whether the comment board is a good thing or a bad thing, or what The Post should do about them. That’s the ombudsman’s domain. But like any reporter, I try to protect my sources from any outfall that might result from agreeing to go on the record, even though that’s not always possible. These days, opening up to a reporter sometimes means getting beat up on the web site’s comment boards. Will sources become more reluctant to talk to reporters because they fear what the posters will say about them?

I wrote Sutherland another email asking him about the comments and how they affected him. Did he think we should get rid of them, or better police them?

I didn’t hear back.

It’s time to change the rules of the game. It’s time for newspapers to engage in live moderation. It’s time to offer differing levels of service based upon differing levels of anonymity.

Technorati Tags: Journalism, Rhetoric

No, this isn’t a post about shoe-leather reporting. It’s about numbers of reporters.

Doing good journalism is difficult if a news organization doesn’t have enough reporters to cover the news. We can quibble about “enough” I suppose, but I don’t think I’m making an outrageous claim. I think we’ve seen plenty of examples of what happens when the corporate owners of news organizations cut back in newsrooms in order to bolster the bottom line. I consider it a colossally stupid thing to do given the reason that people buy newspapers in the first place.

We’ve seen the results of this thinking right here in Springfield. The Gannett-owned News-Leader was bleeding reporters like crazy and then trying to publish a useful product with too few feet on the ground. The results were predictably sad.

Now I’m making no claims about the quality of the surviving reporters. Some of them are very good. My beef about the (lack of) quality of the News-Leader has always been with local management and Gannett.

The News-Leader is hiring again. And the good results have been almost instantaneous. If this keeps up, I’ll gladly re-subscribe.

The opinion section is still a huge problem for reasons I’ve discussed before. Very little has changed there. It remains toxic and best avoided by reasonable, civic-minded people of goodwill.

But, let’s not end this on a sour note. I’m very happy with the results (so far) now that there are more reporters covering Springfield.

Technorati Tags: Journalism

Rhetorica has always had an open-comments policy. No matter what happens in the blogging world, I will always try to ensure that anyone who wishes to comment here can do so with minimum effort.

I require, however, that comenters be civil and on topic. I’ve rarely had any problems along these lines.

Someone recently has been leaving numerous comments that I have decided are intended to be disruptive and annoying. Basically, s/he leaves numerous comments in a row (without waiting for a reply). The comments are, to the best of my ability to determine, utter freaking nonsense. I have marked them as spam as they come in. I have banned the IP addresses. And I’m looking into other minimally invasive measures to thwart this person.

Technorati Tags: Blogging

I’ve never had a tip jar nor asked for money to write this blog. My blogging policy states one reason for this. Another reason: No one would pay me to do this.

But there may be some things worth paying for. Mashable reports on a Nielsen survey that showed the following results:

Newspapers and magazines look respectable on this chart until you realize where it ends — at 60 percent. And not even movies and music make it that far.

Students have asked me what the next business model will be for journalism and how journalism can pay for itself online. I have no answer for them, except this: It’s your revolution. You tell me. Go figure it out.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Culture, Journalism

Anyone want to start a subversive organization with me? I’ll take anyone — you don’t even have to agree with me on anything — but I’m especially interested in recruiting people from South Carolina.

I don’t have a name for the organization yet, but I’m on the lookout for a “good” acronym, i.e. something using words such as STUPID, DUMB, TOOFUNNY, TOTALLYFREAKINGYHILARIOUS, or ROFLMAO.

Once I get a couple of members, I’ll fill out the paperwork and send it in with the $5 fee.

The form asks:

Do you or your organization directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina or any political division thereof? [ ] YES [ ] NO

Now I’m not into revolution or anything (ewwww… the messiness, the noise), but I’ve often thought we’d be better off with a parliamentary form of government that preserves the Bill of Rights. The Constitution itself is really just a procedural document. I think what most people actually (and properly) revere are the ideas in the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. We’ve amended the Constitution over and over. I think we love the idea of it — the political struggle to create it and what that means to human freedom — more than the actual procedures it outlines.

A position such as the one I’ve just taken would fall under “controlling” on the Subversive Agent Form. So we’re good to go!

Again, you don’t have to agree with me. I suspect you don’t All I need is a coalition of the willing — two people, at least one from South Carolina.

Editors Note: I did a quick check on Google News to see if this is a joke. My source is the Huffington Post. At the time I hit my “publish” button, I could not find any coverage by actual reporters working for MSM news organizations. I have a College Council meeting in 20 minutes, so it’s more important for me to prepare for that than spend any more time on this exceedingly amusing topic. But know that I go to my meeting with a smile on my face

Technorati Tags: Politics, Rhetoric

Jay Rosen talks with The Economist about what the iPad may mean for journalism. He makes a point that I think could spell doom for this device: It’s about the rhetoric of lecture.

Can a generation that has been taught by the internet to be content producers be satisfied with a device that encourages them to be content consumers?

I’m also fascinated with his list of what a 21st century journalist should be. More on that later…

Technorati Tags: Journalism, Rhetoric

I don’t know. Wait and see.

But a few journalism types speculated yesterday about what the iPad may mean. I found this interesting:

But isn’t it interesting that Apple Senior Vice President Scott Forstall touted the tactile strengths of the device over its technology? “IPad is the best way to browse the Web for the same reasons that it just feels right to hold a book or a magazine or a newspaper as you read them,” he insisted in a video shown as part of the product launch. “It just feels right — to hold the Internet in your hands as you surf it.”

Does this contraption have the charms necessary to drag an ol’ paper hound such as me away from the feel of print? I gotta tell ya, this thing looks seriously cool.

UPDATE: Here’s another guy who thinks he knows what it means before anyone has actually bought the thing.

Technorati Tags: Culture, Journalism, Social Media

I have never read Charles Johnson’s blog Little Green Footballs. I can recall visiting it perhaps two or three times over the past 8+ years I’ve been writing Rhetorica. I’ve merely been aware of it as a prominent blog. I have formed no opinion about Johnson or his blog because it would require my time and attention.

That remains true after having read Right-Wing Flame War! in The New York Times Sunday Magazine yesterday. Part of the reason that remains true is that I just don’t much care about the flame war the article chronicles, nor do I care much about the the early war-blog years. It’s all so 2003.

I’m introducing what I have to say with the above caveat because I think there’s something important in Jonathan Dee’s article that you should think about. That something I’m highlighting isn’t about Johnson or L.G.F. or the specifics mentioned in the paragraph I’m about the quote. I quote the entire paragraph merely to preserve a bit of context and not as a comment on anyone named. Here it is:

Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it (or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was delivered in 2007 or 1997. The speaker will never put it behind him. (Just as Johnson, despite his very reasonable contention that he later changed his mind, will never be allowed to consign to the past a blog post he wrote in 2004 criticizing that judicial condemnation of Vlaams Belang as “a victory for European Islamic supremacist groups.”) It may be difficult to travel to Belgium and build the case that Filip Dewinter is not just a hateful character but an actual Nazi (and thus that those who can be linked to him are Nazi sympathizers), but sitting at your keyboard, there is no trick to it at all. Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind.

(One possible) Translation: The internet can make us stupid if we fail to think about context.

I never intended any symbolism by choosing gray as the dominant color for Rhetorica. But allow me to claim it retroactively. I’m liking the gray a lot more this morning. I’m thinking we need more shades of it out there in cyberspace. (I know: Good luck with that.)

The idea of ideas co-existing in time predates the internet. That’s the standard ontology of much of academia in which we discuss past thinkers as if they are still addressing us today in present tense, e.g. Protagoras claims X, but Corbett claims Y. The hope is, however, that academics discussing ideas this way think about thinkers in at least two contexts: 1) in relation to their times, and 2) in relation to their body of work. That second context allows that some thinkers may change their minds — something all good academics are quite comfortable with. Show me I’m right, and that’s cool. Show me I’m wrong and I learn something, which is better (or cooler).

In this sense, good academics make bad political partisans because it ain’t about winning; it’s about understanding. (Note: I use the qualifier “good” for a reason… oh, and “in the sense”).

I think Dee is correct that the hallmark of modern political discourse is “inflexibility.” I wouldn’t, however, call it “intellectual.” Perhaps “anti-intellectual inflexibility” is a better term. Then again, I also like “stupid.”

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Culture, Rhetoric

This just seems really dumb to me:

Five journalists will lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites.

Twitter and Facebook’s use as news-breaking tools has been highlighted over the past year, particularly during opposition protests in Iran that many media described as a “twitterised revolution”.

This month, Twitter played a key communications role in quake-hit Haiti, with users sending harrowing personal accounts, heart-rending pictures and cries for help.

But how will the world look if viewed only through the prism of these sites, whose phenomenal growth has been fuelled by smartphones and, for Twitter, online bursts of 140 characters?

Are these social media – which between them have nearly 400 million users – really the serious threat to established media they are often said to be?

OK, this sounds interesting until you get to this part:

They will be relieved of their smartphones and be given mobiles that cannot connect to the internet, and be reminded television, radio and newspapers are banned.

“We will give them five computers with blank hard drives,” said Francoise Dost of the RFP French-language public broadcasters association, which organised the event.

“They have agreed to be linked to the outside world only through Twitter and Facebook. No web surfing is allowed,” Mr Dost said.

I’ll pause while you ROFLMAO.

This “experiment” fundamentally (willfully?) misunderstands how these social media sites work. Let’s agree that, yes, both Facebook and Twitter can and are used by many people for the most trivial nonsense. And that’s OK. But there are people out there (example) publishing interesting and useful information.

But…

None of it means squat without the lowly link. Remember that? It’s the product of something you might have heard of called HTML.

Surely one can report firsthand using both platforms, i.e. “I’m here right now watching this tornado tear apart my town.” But the real value of Twitter is the link that you comment on and share. Facebook allows even more: pictures, sound, and video.

To restrict these journalists to nothing more than Facebook and Twitter — no ability to link out — is to rig the game.

I’ll wait and see, but I’m initially skeptical that much of value will come from this.

Technorati Tags: Journalism, Social Media