Category: Media / Sociology

Does Death Penalty Save Lives?

Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate – New York Times

This is an interesting piece about a number of recent quantitative studies which have found that, controlling for other variables,  the death penalty can save more lives than it ends.

What interests me, that is not addressed in this article, is the question of what is it about the death penalty that is saving lives?  There are so many possibilities (ranging from a number of effects from locking up harmful criminals, to the impact of the law’s expressed condemnation of murder and violent crime), all of which statistical studies might have a hard time separating out all of these variables. Also unexamined is whether there are other punishments that might have similar effects.

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.

More on blog types

Thanks to Doug and Tammy for the stimulating conversation on blog types.  I still haven’t settled on what I think the most useful typology breakdown might be, but I had one more thought on what functionally makes network blogs different from typical news-y or journal-y blogs: the interface.

Interaction with public blogs typically takes place through the blog’s web page, as well as through some of the networking features for reading (like rss) and interacting (like pings). Yet with all of the different blogging platforms, these forms of engaging the content still have sort of a techie feel. My big assumption here is that the average internet user doesn’t care about things like xml or trackback URLs. Social networking site blogs are starting wrap these features into their systems in a very easy, seamless way.

As these functions become more integrated, how does it change perceptions of and interaction with the medium? Perhaps everyone is right and blogs are becoming less and less traditionally “blogs.” What shall we call this new time-based-content-sharing creature?

Blog types and Community

Someone over at MSU (hi Tammy) noticed a comment I posted awhile ago over at CyberSoc on the issue of blog types and asked that I expand a bit on the idea. As luck would have it, I’ve recycled this idea a number of times over the last few years for a number of work presentations… here’s the current iteration of the powerpoint, for those who’d like to follow along.

Here are the proposed 4 blog types along with a brief explanation for each:

  • Individual
    • An individual blog is the typical single author blog– my blog is one example 🙂
  • Collaboration
    • A collaborative blog is one where there are a small number of authors who all have rights to post. Often, this is a small group with similar interests who want to share ideas and information. An example of this would be my colleagues’ blog.
  • Submission
    • A submission blog is an extension of an individual or collaborative blog. Readers submit stories that the authors deem fit to post, often with some commentary. This type interests me, in part, because of the increased level of collaboration in creating the blog and the greater degree of editorial control that the authors hold over the content. My favorite example of this type is Slashdot.
  • Mixed
    • The idea behind mixed is that blogs are such organic entities, that one type of blog might develop into another or change back and forth. One example of this phenomenon might be “guest blogging” (example: Larry Lessig frequently has other internet law thinkers post to his blog while he is away). Another possibility might be sub-categories of the submission type (example: an individual or group blog that periodically accepts submissions or responds to reader questions).

Thinking further, I’d like to add one more: Network.

At one of my presentations on this typology, a hot question was, “how do I blog for just my friends?” The easiest answer I could think of was to use a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace, which have features to “post” or “blog” to only people in your network. This more private, personal, job, research (etc.) or social network type of blogging could be considered a form of the individual blog, but the tight social ties among the audience might give it a much different flavor.

So there appear to be a number of different factors when thinking of blog types: authors, editors, audience, and the degree of personal ties between each. Robin @ CyberSoc’s types are perhaps a similar way to look at the picture. What this model adds is placing individual blogs in the greater context of the blogosphere (ranging from closed blogs discussing a single topic in a “corner” of the Internet, to an engaged blog that critiques or builds on information in the “conversation” between blogs).

The last point I’d add is the central role that technological features play in all of these types. Without features like author and review control, trackback, ping, and closed-network blogging might have made the blogosphere a much more traditional-media-like forum. Who knows what the next features might add to the mix.

Please let me know what you think in the comments!