The only profession?

The Bangor Daily News has a fascinating tale of the Las Vegas Sun’s Pulitzer-winning research that is worth a read.

Unfortunately, the lede contains a fallacy (as pointed out aptly by Jay Rosen):

Let’s look at the First Amendment for a moment:

There are numerous parts to that amendment. It might help if we broke it down into its constituent pieces:

1. Establishment of religion
2. Free exercise of religion
3. Freedom of Speech
4. Freedom of the Press
5. Right of Assembly
6. Redress of Grievances

Now, the writer of the Bangor piece clearly confuses “press” with “newspaper,” which is a major problem as we shall see later.

But first, I’d rather point out other “professions” that are “enshrined” in the First Amendment.

Probably the first would be “preacher,” as in “religious authority.” Freedom of the Press is only the fourth right granted by the First Amendment, behind freedom from establishment, free exercise, and freedom of speech. So “preacher” or “religious authority” would be the first “profession” enshrined in the First Amendment.

What about freedom of speech? Well, clearly, “community organizers” would seem to be enshrined in the amendment as well. And lobbyists, for all anyone cares to curse them, seem to be protected by this part of the amendment as well. We could also add “comedians” to that list of people protected by the “free speech” clause of the First Amendment.

And even if we turn to the “freedom of the press” part of the amendment, we run into problems related to the current “newspaper journalism” ideal that such journalism is “enshrined” in the FA. The clause clearly points out that it is freedom “of the press” that is protected.

“Press” includes book publishers, authors, magazine publishers, printers, etc. It would actually cover anyone who could get ahold of a printing press to spread their political ideas (e.g. – the Federalist papers). Indeed, the advent of the Internet and weblogs and other publishing platforms shows decidedly that it isn’t just the platform that determines who gets to enjoy First Amendment protections for their “freedom of the press.”

In short, the editorial is hopelessly wrong in its assertion that “newspaper journalism” is the only profession “enshrined” in the First Amendment.

Indeed, one could argue that NO “profession” is enshrined in the First Amendment, per se. Rather, the First Amendment “enshrines” ideals – free speech, free thought, free practice of spiritual exercise, freedom of political thought.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I applaud the reporter whose research won the Pulitzer. I think there is a case to be made for why newspaper journalism is important. But this egotistical blathering about the special place newspaper journalism holds in the First Amendment is the wrong approach.

Simon Owens p0wns HuffPo

Simon Owens does the legwork to show that the majority of Huffington Post front page stories are not “original reporting.” Check it out here.

Very reminiscent of a paper I did with Chris Roberts at South Carolina. Here’s the PDF.

FWIW, I’m less than enthused about HuffPo. Ariana Huffington rode the wave of blogging by gathering a bunch of A- B- and C-list celebrities, paying them NOTHING for their thoughts, and now she shuffles a lot of AP content through there as well. So she’s not unlike the traditional media elites in that respect.

I hope to repeat our study in the future. Oh, to have the time.

Depends on your definition of “cleaning up”

A bit of pop culture this morning. Ross Douthat, the newly appointed token conservative on the New York Times‘ op-ed page, chimes in on the Dan Brown phenomenon (”Da Vinci Code,” “Angels and Demons”). The entire column seems to be a jeremiad against “post-modern” Christianity and religiosity, which is itself quaint and deserving of fuller discussion. But he starts off with an exaggeration (to put it mildly) in his first sentence:

The movie treatment of his novel, “Angels and Demons,” is cleaning up at the box office this week.

See, the problem is, “Angels and Demons” didn’t “clean up” at the box office at all.

A&D made $46,204,168 in its opening weekend as the only major picture opening this weekend. But “Star Trek,” which opened last weekend, made $43,034,547, only $3 million less than A&D. Compared to other summer releases so far, A&D paled in comparison to the opening weekends of “Star Trek” ($75,204,289) and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” ($85,058,003).

A&D also paled in comparison to its predecessor, “The DaVinci Code” which made $77,073,388 in its first weekend of release in 2006. In fact, it couldn’t even beat the opening gross for the second “Chronicles of Narnia” which opened on the same weekend in 2008 with $55,034,805.

What’s more, A&D will likely plummet this weekend as it faces stiff competition from the latest “Terminator” release, and the “Night at the Museum” sequel.

With an estimated budget of $150 million, $48 million on opening weekend is hardly “cleaning up.”

Related articles by Zemanta

• “Angels” U.S. opening may not be so heavenly (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
• Angels & Demons Wins Box Office (shoppingblog.com)
• Weekend Box Office: ‘Demons’ Barely Beats Out ‘Trek’ (cinematical.com)

Random Idea: Newspaper Tycoon

The other day driving to the ACES convention in Minneapolis, I was thinking about journalism and gaming, and the problems of the news industry. So many people are proposing new ideas, or bemoaning the moves made by industry titans. But what do we really know?

I’d love to see how much a major newspaper chain spends on various cost centers (printing, distribution, sales, management, editorial, etc.), and then see how those cost centers could be managed to make a reasonable profit without gutting the editorial division.

Which is when it hit me: Newspaper Tycoon. I’ve seen several versions of the Playstation/PC game “Railroad Tycoon,” and when I was just out of college, I got wrapped up in the SimCity craze when it came to the Macintosh.

So why couldn’t someone create a version of that “real-world” simulation for newspapers (or any media in this crazy environment)?

Imagine being offered the chance to purchase family-owned newspapers, and trying to juggle the debt created by such purchases, and figuring out how to survive the Internet cuts in your classified income. Trying to come up with new ways to boost circulation, dealing with labor strife, advertiser complaints over negative coverage, etc.

What lessons could be learned from such a game that had accurate figures that depicted the real business decisions that have to be made, and the competing “stakeholder” commitments that newspaper execs have to deal with.

I think it’s a good idea. And it would also help with anyone who wanted to teach or take a “business of journalism” class. Maybe this has already been developed, and I’m just not aware of it. If so, please let me know in the comments. Otherwise, it’s an idea that I’m giving away for free.

NYT threatens Boston Globe?

Am I the only person who thought of this classic National Lampoon cover illustration when I heard this news over the weekend: New York Times Co. is Said to Consider Closing The Boston Globe?

As far as bargaining tactics go, this seems like an incredibly high stakes game of “Chicken” from the Times Co.

The Globe last year reported weekday circulation of 324,000, the 14th highest in the country, and Sunday circulation of 504,000, the 11th highest.

Of course, there’s a part of me that wants to say, “Go ahead” and see if the Times is serious about closing the Globe. But that part of me is tempered by the lives that would be impacted by such a move.

The six stages of media twitter coverage hell

Mike Elgan makes a funny. The Six Stages of Media Twitter Coverage Hell.

He misses a stage:

7. Twitterati make fun of coverage to gain traffic.

To quote Mr. Elgan:

The so-called backlash is just the media’s knee-jerk pseudo-contrarianism, right on schedule. Obviously Twitter has been clearly overexposed and overhyped in the media, and now reporters and commentators are both slamming their own hype, and, inevitably, attacking Twitter itself.

My advice: Don’t take any of it too seriously. The media does this with every truly major Internet phenomenon that comes along. It happened with the Internet itself, then e-mail, then the Web, then the tech bubble, then social networking and now Twitter.

heh.

Honestly, I don’t care who’s covering Twitter. It’s the same as Facebook, MySpace, blogging, IM, etc. Play the same record so many times and it gets old. Just enjoy the ride, because it’ll come around again.

Do what you want. Use it. Don’t use it. Talk about it, write the lifestyles feature. Whatever. I’ll keep plugging away.

Am I getting too cynical in my old age?

About that “social” media

The last couple of days, I’ve been thinking a lot about “social media.” I’m not an expert, I grant you. But I do see where the lines are blurring, and that is something that culminated in my responses to Pat Thornton earlier today on Twitter.

What is “social media?”

To hear some people talk, it’s closer to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter than it is to blogs and podcasts and YouTube.

But I’m going to argue that “social media” encompasses all those things. It is FaceBook. It is Twitter. It is MySpace. It is YouTube. It is blogs. It is even – gasp – comments!

Because social media isn’t about the platform, rather it’s the ability of people to interact with the content, to provide feedback, to provide their own views on whatever content is supplied. Some media are more social than others. I’d argue that newspapers – for instance – are gradually moving toward a greater social media presence through the use of blogs and comments. But it’s a slow movement. Some are more attuned than others.

Twitter sounds like a good example of “social media,” since people can respond to one another and follow one another, but, honestly, that’s been happening since the beginning of the blog explosion in 2001. “Social Media” is really just another term for “Web 2.0.”

Now, the real crux of the issue is whether people “respond” to “social media” and change their practices based on the feedback of their userbase (for a great discussion of this, listen to this episode of On the Media).

If I really wanted to dissect “social media,” I’d come up with an operational definition that excluded some of the simplistic means of “socializing” media (like comments) and go through every media outlet and score them on their “social media” ability. It’s a good idea, and one I’m throwing out for free to anyone who might like to apply for a grant. I’ve got a dissertation to finish.

The point being, “social media” is amorphous. You can’t nail jello to the wall. Let’s quantify the phenomenon with better data before talking about who’s doing what. I would welcome the details.

Social Media and history: another frame to consider

It seems a common trait when “new” means of communication arise for there to be a bit of the “tsk tsk” from folks who don’t seem to “get it.” It can happen with a medium, or with a message (think rock ‘n’ roll and blogging).

Lately, it’s happening with Twitter, in particular, and “social media” in general.

The latest examples to fall into this vein of luddism are from Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail, Jenny McCarthy of the Telegraph UK, and Robert G. Picard of The Media Business.

I encourage you to read those three pieces and the points made in them. Then come back.

Now, I’m not going to get into how many times I’ve heard these points raised about every different new platform for expression that comes along (recalling the professor who described blogging as “the mental equivalent of masturbation”). And I’m not going to debate whether telling everyone about your “banal” existence actually achieves any worthwhile ends. There are certainly problems with social media.

But I do want to say that all this “narcissism” is a good thing from a historical perspective.

Bear with me for a little biographical backstory: While attending South Carolina for my Ph.D. courses, I was able to take a course in journalism history that was very informative, and led to a conference paper that I was actually quite pleased with. (see the Academic Resources section of this site for a PDF version).

But one thing I learned from journalism history is that there are an awful lot of “holes” in the historical record. Source documents are remarkably limited. Secondary sources like news reports are remarkably limited. What brought this home to me was listening to Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina talk about protests where he was arrested and not a single word appeared in the local newspaper.

Then there are lives that are lived outside the glare of cameras and media attention. Ordinary people who exist as unemployment statistics, or productivity statistics. If you were to do research on these people, you’d likely find some gov’t documents, maybe, as McCartney noted, “a few photographs,” but precious little else.

The beauty of social media from a historical perspective is that there is a greater chance that the lives of individual real people can be saved for the historical record. A fuller picture of the people who surround us will be available for future historians, for future generations. That doesn’t mean it will all have equal value. But it could be available. I wish more of my great-grandfather’s life was available for me to know about, to learn from.

One thing social media allows that past media platforms don’t is the ability to put more of “yourself” into the medium. TV doesn’t allow that. How many historical nuggets did we lose to people watching “Must See TV” instead of living their lives?

Of people listening to crap top-40 radio instead of creating their own music?

Now let’s turn that around: What if you had access to your great-great-grandparents’ Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, Flickr photos, and YouTube mashups? Not to mention their iTunes playlists? Could you get a better idea of who they were than looking at a few faded posed pictures, maybe an old diary, and some government records?

That can’t be a bad thing.

Failed banks by state visualization

Playing around with IBM’s Many Eyes online data visualization site, inspired by the Planet Money crew at NPR, I came up with this visualization showing the number of failed banks by state:

Illinois has four. California and Georgia lead the nation. The data came from the FDIC’s list of failed banks, which I put in a spreadsheet and then manually counted them by state after sorting the columns. I also removed any bank failures prior to 2007, since there was a gap between 2007 and 2004.

Obama’s 2nd Press Conference – Semantic Network Analysis

As I did with one previous performance by President Barack Obama, I’m uploading a real semantic network analysis of the president’s press conference from tonight. This was done using the transcript and the Leximancer semantic network analysis software. I took out the questions and Obama calling names.

The circles represent themes. The larger the circle and the more centrally located, the more central was the theme. Themes that are closer to each other were more closely associated in the answers than other themes.

Here are the top concepts by mention:

issues 37
think 31
people 30
budget 27
leadership 26
economy 23
simply 18
years 17
health 14
care 14
percent 12
talking 12
growth 12
steps 12
costs 12
American 12

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