Category: Journalism

Free speech a personal burden?

JuicyCampus champions free speech, AGs claim it’s a fraud

I have heard of JuicyCampus, but this is the first time I’ve really checked it out.

For those who have not yet had the pleasure of coming across JuicyCampus, the site serves as a public forum for college students to anonymously gossip about others. As you might imagine, this has bred an explosion in malicious, accusatory, and otherwise not-nice postings—often naming gossip victims by full name and school.

The Attorney General of New Jersey is investigating the site, but it might be a tough case.  The site’s use policy (which nobody reads) states that personal information and libelous statements cannot be posted, and that all subpoenas will be answered.  This, combined with some protection from the CDA, might give them legal protection–but the question here is extra-legal.  Would the average person go to the trouble of getting a lawyer to file a libel suit?  No.

This leaves us with a system where we rightly need to protect free speech, but because of technological change, push more people to be concerned about the law. Then again, a site that entices the user to “C’mon. Give us the juice” sounds a little like entrapment.

Martin’s Daily Show

The Daily Show – New York Times

Kevin Martin’s op ed piece in today’s Times portrays the proposed relaxation of cross-ownership rules as good for journalism:

Without newspapers, we would be less informed about our communities and have fewer outlets for the expression of independent thinking and a diversity of viewpoints. The challenge is to restore the viability of newspapers while preserving the core values of a diversity of voices and a commitment to localism in the media marketplace.

Martin argues that the solution is that:

A company that owns a newspaper in one of the 20 largest cities in the country should be permitted to purchase a broadcast TV or radio station in the same market. … Beyond giving newspapers in large markets the chance to buy one local TV or radio station, no other ownership rule would be altered. Other companies would not be allowed to own any more radio or television stations, either in a single market or nationally, than they already do.

A newspaper purchasing a television station sounds fine because it would bring in more revenue and could possibly bring deeper journalistic values to the television newsroom. This sounds good until you step back and think about which direction the purchases would be more likely to go.

TV station owners have deeper pockets, and my guess is that they would be more likely to covet their local newspaper.

This scenario would most certainly not be a good thing for newspapers or the craft of journalism.  While newspapers are already under financial pressure that has caused cuts in the newsroom, television news values could cut papers even more (why send two news crews to an incident when you can just send one).  Television values also tend to sacrifice time consuming stories for “what sells.”  Fewer stories about what’s happening in government, or what’s going on at the community level, would not be good for “their role as watchdog and informer of the citizenry, newspapers are crucial to our democracy.” Further, television newsrooms are less likely to be staffed with graduates of journalism schools who are trained to do hard journalism–the kind that television reporters often rely on, but don’t do themselves.

Chairman Martin: the press is not on your side for very good reasons.

Necessary information

It has been far too long since I’ve blogged…

Online social networking and blogs have emerged as one of the heroes from the Virginia Tech shootings. The degree to which individuals and journalists turned to the Internet for up-to-the-minute personal information might be unprecedented. Otherwise, these articles speak for themselves.