Dean and the press

Salon article on media pushed by Republicans and anonymous Democrats to paint a bad picture of Dean. (via metafilter) In the mean time, Dean rocks our world on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. Here's the CNN synopsis of the interview. (via Rick Klau)

Electrolite: If we only had a press.

nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/005159.html#005159
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Whats New |The Associated Press

ap.org/pages/about/whatsnew/hayspress.html
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The PC Press War and the Public

Associated Press on RSS and Syndication

Press Clipping

Skolelinux in the press again

press credentials

indcjournal.com/archives/000600.php
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Protection against the press?

"press release"

"Jewish Press (US)"

Apple vs. the press

The legal matter that forces us to contemplate such a graph is Apple Computer's suit against three online journalists in an attempt to get them to reveal the sources they used to publish some advance scoops about forthcoming Apple products.

We're fortunate to be at a moment in history when changes in technology, begun a decade ago by the rise of the Web and accelerated by the introduction of anyone-can-publish software, mean that the spectrum of journalism has been broadened in ways that were previously unimaginable. The danger in the Apple suit lies in the possibility that a bad court decision -- like one a lower court has already delivered in this case -- might careless and foolishly decide that in order to be a journalist one has to receive a salary from some operation that some legal authority has defined as a journalistic entity.

That such a definition would be not only wrongheaded but actively harmful to the vibrant and lively democratic free-for-all on today's Internet is the point of an amicu s curiae brief filed today by Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. I'm proud to be among the signers of this document, which was written by Lauren Gelman of the Stanford center. (Here's a full list of the amici, with links.) The brief argues that, when the courts need to determine who receives the various legal protections available in some circumstances to working journalists, it should decide who is a journalist by looking at what putative journalists actually do, not who pays their salary or what membership cards they carry or what degrees they hold:

Amici come together to urge this court to hold that Internet publishers, including webloggers who are engaged in the reporting and dissemination functions a journalist performs, may invoke the protection of the journalists’ privilege on equal footing with traditional reporters and news organizations.... The applicability of the newsgatherers’ privilege is determined not by the reporter’s formal status as a “professional journalist,” but rather by the reporter’s functional conduct in gathering information with the purpose of disseminating widely to the public.

If you take the time to read the somewhat confused state court decision that is now under appeal, you'll see that the judge's initial ruling, in favor of Apple and against the Web sites, declares that it doesn't really matter whether you consider the Apple news sites to be conducting journalism or not, because, the judge seems to be saying, journalists have no business publishing trade secrets anyway.

I'm not enough of a lawyer to try to predict where that argument is headed; it seems of a piece with a variety of assaults taking place today on the rights of journalists to protect their sources. (The parallel amicus brief presented by the AP, a long list of California newspapers and the Reporters' Committee for the Freedom of the Press tackles this issue.)

What I do know is that, if the New York Times or Time magazine published a scoop from an anonymous source about a forthcoming Apple product, the company wouldn't be suing the press. So it's important here for people who do journalism at all points along the spectrum from "pro" to "citizens" to step forward and say: If you ask questions with intent to publish, and you publish information someone considers news, you're a journalist, and should be treated as one by the courts.

CfA Press Release

cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/pr0407.html
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The Establishment Press gets it

I AM the press pot queen

Press Photos

[sd] Press conference

Red Hat Decides To Do Its Own Press

EFF: Press Room

eff.org/news/archives/2004_08.php#001838
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Bloggers Aren't Press?

Each Nation its Own Press

The Easton Press

Easton Press Online Catalog: I love Easton Press. They make leather reproductions of classic books — I have 35 of them on my bookcase. I collected them one at a time for three years while I was in college. Right next to them, I have a complete reproduction set of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. They're gorgeous.

So I was dismayed to see that Easton Press Web site is perhaps the worst site I've ever laid eyes on. Take a tour through this baby sometime, and learn how NOT to do e-commerce. Hint one: don't just scan all your catalog pages and put them online as big images. To top it off, they have a search engine so worthless as to make it worse than nothing at all (as near as I can tell, it always links to the front page of the catalog).

Missing the boat big time here, which is very sad. Don't let that turn you off the books themselves, through — they're amazing. Order a catalog and check out their "Masterpieces of Science Fiction," "Signed First Editions of Science Fiction," or "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame." Or how about a leather-bound, gilt-edge copy of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy? There's a signed Asimov over on eBay.

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Press launches often just hot air

"Outside the Beltway: The Press
Conference"

Other News: Pepsi Press

Bugzilla meets the press

Software development teams have used bug tracking software for ages now -- why not journalists? But keeping it in-house, as the papers the Bee cites seem to do, limits the value of the approach.

I'm spending a lot of time these days around open-source software developers, and they take the logic of this approach one step further: Major open source projects maintain public bug databases. Anyone can come along and post a bug report. It's like opening a trouble ticket: developers will have a look, see if your complaint is new or duplicates an existing problem; over time the database provide a permanent record of the resolution (or non-resolution) of the issue.

The model doesn't map perfectly onto journalism, but it's not too far off: Let people file "bug reports" if they believe your publication has published something in need of correcting. The publication can respond however it seems appropriate: If the complaint is frivolous, you point that out; if it's a minor error of spelling or detail, you fix it; if it's a major error, you deal with it however you traditionally deal with major errors -- but you've left a trail that shows what happened. However you respond, you've opened a channel of communication, so that people who feel you've goofed don't just go off to their corners (or their blogs!) feeling that you're unresponsive and irresponsible.

I know this idea will horrify a lot of editors and reporters, but I think an adventurous newsroom could benefit from the transparency and the accountability. Maybe someone's already doing this out there -- if so, it would be great to see what we can learn.
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