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September 29, 2006

links for 2006-09-29

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September 28, 2006

links for 2006-09-28

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The JZ challenge to news companies: Start fighting censorship!

Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center where I'm a fellow, and currently a professor at Oxford, has written an article titled Dodging the Internet Censor. He argues that Western news organizations should build peer-to-peer networks that help people access their stories from countries where the Internet is subject to heavy government censorship. News organizations have been covering lots of stories about censorship in authoritarian countries, and reporting how various internet geeks have found "hacks" to get around censorship. But JZ (as we call him in Berkmania) points out that news org's have not actively tried to use any of those clever circumvention technologies to fight online censorship of their own news reporting by authoritarian governments.  An excerpt:

Western media outlets have covered this story with great interest. Yet they apparently fail to realise that these peer-to-peer technologies have the potential to "decensor" the news for more people in countries like China. Peer-to-peer technologies make filtering more difficult, because they make nearly any consumer of information part of the process of transmitting it. For example, news organisations could conclude deals with other companies to ensure that uncensored reports are echoed from one free server to the next. That would defy Beijing to filter the entire internet if it wants to eliminate content. But news organisations operate as businesses, and defying powerful governments can be a bad business strategy.

That is why there has been so little rebellion among media companies when authoritarian governments threaten journalists, editors and publishers. It also explains why journalists in those countries have so often bent over backwards to apologise for individual transgressions, rather than stand in defiance.

But news organisations could reach many more people if they worked to circumvent internet filtering instead of passively relying on those inside the firewall to figure out how to reach beyond blocked sites on their own. Doing so might even make good business sense. Building a creative digital distribution system that eludes the censors would help news organisations establish and enlarge their markets.

That would be wonderful. But will any news organizations do this? Because doing so would require them to free their content from behind paid firewalls and to let it be accessed and passed on via websites they don't own or control. I e-mailed JZ with the following thoughts:

...you know, the thing is, most Western journalists don't even really consider the fact - certainly aren't thinking about the implications of, or pushing to change the fact - that their journalistic works aren't even freely accessible to their own countrymen for very long.  As you know, after two weeks or so most news companies (with a few enlightened exceptions) still put their stories behind a paid firewall. Thus it becomes very difficult for these journalistic works to remain part of the public discourse online unless they are heavily excerpted (pushing the boundaries of "fair use") or reproduced in full (in technical copyright violation) on various blogs and nonprofit websites.  Journalists tend to hand in their stories and think shockingly little what happens next or whether there's a more socially useful or effective way for their journalism to be delivered to the public. (..or whether their company's business model is capable of supporting a more socially responsible mode of sharing their journalism with the public.)

If news organizations were to participate in such p2p journalism-sharing systems as you propose (and I agree it would be a great boon to freedom of speech if they did), they would first have to free their content in perpetuity and forget trying to charge for it. There's also the question of whether they would lose ad revenue by doing this - seems they probably would.  Do we now have a situation in which a for-profit news business model is no longer capable of maximizing free speech - and may perhaps be helping to limit free speech? 

Had I participated in such a p2p scheme while working for CNN so that more Chinese people could have seen my stories I would most definitely have been ordered to stop or have been fired. It would have been considered a violation of CNN's IPR, violation of agreements with advertisers and cable distributors, and various other commercial commitments, let alone whatever probs it might have caused with the Chinese govt. Sadly, don't see too sign that my former employer's thinking on such issues or the thinking of most other news companies has changed so significantly in the past three years that they would be willing to entertain your idea. Though I would love to be proven wrong.

JZ replied (with permission to blog his response):

It's tough for individual journalists to make the call to circulate their own work and not upset their employers, just as it'd likely be copyright infringement for members of the public to copy news articles they see and put them wholesale into p2p circulation.  But of course the news organizations could themselves do it, and I think it needn't further harm the already-ailing business models that put the content behind pay-per-view firewalls after a few days.  That's because it's still modestly inconvenient to find and download material from p2p networks.  Since news articles are text they're conveniently small -- no long download times -- but search is trickier, since most p2p engines still go on file titles rather than on file contents.  And, drawing from some music industry counter-tactics, one could even see some authoritarian governments swamping p2p networks with decoy files -- perhaps going further to be among the p2p sources of them, to track down those who download the files with provocative filenames.

That's why I see the current p2p technologies as a start but not a finish.  They evolved either as focused ways of addressing the demand for music and movies (where searching only by title can work), and as ways of moving big files without causing congestion (e.g. bittorrent).  With a little effort, major newspapers could band together, perhaps including some foundation support and participation from the likes of the Open Society Institute, and create a p2p distribution method more honed to this particular problem, and more sensitive to protecting IP addresses as people search and download.  We've seen networks like Tor now packaged into easy-to-use browsers-on-a-USB-stick like Torpark; this is a natural evolutionary step.  The biggest barrier here is not technology or copyright or even the economics of the news business, but the philosophical step to believe that strategies for collectively disseminating news against official resistance is as central to twenty-first century journalism as collecting and creating it under hostile circumstances.

That would indeed be a huge step. Are news organizations prepared to stand up and fight for free speech? I replied:

I totally agree with your last sentence. I agree that if one defines the purpose of journalism as serving the public discourse with information, it is essential that news organizations do something like that.

However if one is an organization whose priorities are driven by the need to boost circulation, ratings and share price, I could see how the heads of most news organizations - especially those run by multinationals whose primary purpose is not news - would find it too risky a prospect with no return-on-investment upside.  Call me cynical. I am very cynical about the news biz. I would love if some news organizations would prove me wrong, though. Maybe the BBC and some others with a less bottom-line and more public-service mission could lead the way.

In the event that some news organizations might be willing to try something like this, I asked JZ if he'd help them do it. He said "sure!"

Any takers out there??

Posted at 01:56 AM in Censorship, China, Corporate Responsibility, Cyber-activism, Freedom of Speech, Future of journalism, Human Rights, Journalism | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

September 27, 2006

links for 2006-09-27

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Yahoo!'s guilt money, Google's hypocrisy...

With the help of a Hong Kong legislator Albert Ho, Chinese journalist Shi Tao is suing Yahoo! for its role in his conviction and 10-year jail sentence for "divulging state secrets." In 2004, Yahoo!'s China office (managed at the time by Yahoo!'s Hong Kong subsidiary) handed over the contents and identifying account information of an e-mail that Shi Tao sent to a  U.S. based Chinese dissident website, reporting on the Chinese government's plans for a media crackdown. Shi Tao's e-mail account was on yahoo.com.cn, whose servers are housed in China. (More about Shi Tao's case from Human Rights Watch here.)  Since Shi's conviction, Yahoo!'s role in the conviction of three other Chinese dissidents has come to light. More on their cases here, here, and here.  Yahoo! claims that in order to do business in China it had no choice but to hand over his information in response to an order by Chinese law enforcement. They have done nothing that I know of to assist the families of these victims, nor have Yahoo! executives apologized, shown remorse, or acknowledged that assisting in the jailing of political dissidents is something an American company (or any company that values free speech and human rights) should not do. For more about Yahoo!'s complicity in Chinese censorship and surveillance, read this section of a recent Human Rights Watch report which I helped to write. Also read this open letter by Chinese dissident intellectual Liu Xiaobo to Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang. Liu concludes: "The case of Shi Tao is a warning: those who put profit before all else may not have the luck of gaining a profit. Most likely they will lose both profit and credibility."

Now as Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineWatch points out, Yahoo! has given money for a fellowship at Stanford "aimed at journalists from countries where there are restrictions on freedom of the press, either by governmental agencies or other forces."  Clearly they're trying to repair their very sullied moral reputation. Why don't they just do the right thing, publicly apologize to the families of Shi Tao and the others, give financial assistance to their families and set up a fund to pay their medical bills after they come out of jail with their health broken? And set forth very clear, public and global guidelines for how they will find ways to do business around the world without helping to stifle free speech and human rights? They would if they had the backbone.

So far the lesson is: If you are a human rights activist or muckraking journalist who makes your government uncomfortable, and perhaps questions the legitimacy or competence of your current leaders through peaceful speech, can you count on Yahoo! to have the backbone to stand up for YOUR rights, if it came down to that? Based on the Shi Tao precedent, I would not count on them.  But rest assured that if they do f*** you over, they'll pay penance money so that some other admirable person can spend a year at an Ivy League University. Then their executives can give speeches about how they really aim to do good in the world... etc... and be applauded by the heads of America's esteemed institutions who will praise them for their wisdom and their goodness...

Danny also very rightly points out Google's recent hypocrisy: while censoring search results in China, it helps to campaign against banned books in the U.S.  More details on Google's complicity in Chinese Internet censorship in this section of the Human Rights Watch report.  Here is the full report: Race to the Bottom: Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship.

Posted at 01:01 AM in Censorship, China, Corporate Responsibility, Cyber-activism, Freedom of Speech, Human Rights, Yahoo | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

September 25, 2006

links for 2006-09-25

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September 24, 2006

links for 2006-09-24

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September 22, 2006

Ethan Z's Zim-blogging

My colleague Ethan Zuckerman, with whom I co-founded Global Voices, is a technologist and an Africa specialist, among many other things. He just returned from Zimbabwe and has written a series of excellent posts. His third post looks at the media situation. The Mugabe regime employes a variety of mechanisms to control journalists and censor media. But the most effective information control is economic: most people can't afford to access international news media anyway. And even if they could, few foreign reporters are able to report from Zimbabwe for the most part, due to government restrictions. So most international coverage of Zimbabwe is second-hand. As a result, he concludes:

What’s really going on in Zimbabwe? I don’t know. Neither do you. And neither do most Zimbabweans, whether they live at home or abroad. Reading the BBC or CNN won’t help - they’re not on the ground here either. And like every other situation in Zimbabwe, it’s both better and worse than you’ve heard.

This post about Zimbabwe's Internet examines the facts and fictions about Internet access in Zimbabwe. Ethan ran some tests and discovered that the Zimbabwean government does not actually filter sensitive websites, as the Chinese do, despite some rumors that they do. But government talk about plans to filter and monitor people's internet communications in the future, Ethan says, has already changed people's behavior. He writes: "While I wouldn’t be surprised to see Internet filtering take root in Zimbabwe, the odd thing is that the government may not need to filter the ‘net - threatening to may be sufficient."

Ethan also reports that Internet access in Zim is painfully slow because the ISP's have trouble coming up with the hard currency to pay their bills to Intelsat, which provides them with their Internet access. "So Intelsat is radically throttling Zimbabwe’s access to their satellites."

It's ironic that in third-world dictatorships where people have a great need for independent information available on the Internet, the economics of global telecoms not only help to keep the dictators in power but also help keep those countries poor because communications are so business-unfriendly - a vicious cycle of nasty proportions.

As many of us celebrate OneWeb Day today... perhaps we should consider that we don't really have one global web at all. It would be really nice if the web was dissolving borders between Zimbabweans and those of us in the Western developed world... but the offline economic, political, and geographical realities are making that rather difficult.

Ethan has two other posts: his personal experiences with Zimbabwe's currency crisis and some lovely photos.

Posted at 07:48 PM in Censorship, Cyber-activism, Freedom of Speech, Human Rights | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

September 21, 2006

links for 2006-09-21

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September 20, 2006

Reuters supports NewAssignment.net

Over the summer NYU's future-of-journalism guru Jay Rosen announced a new participatory news venture. NewAssignment.Net would organize a new form of what he calls "pro-am" journalism: bringing together journalists, bloggers and other members of the "amateur" public who aren't professional journalists to work on investigative reporting projects.

Today, Jay announced on his blog PressThink and on the Guardian's Comment is Free that Reuters will be supporting NewAssigment.Net, to the tune of $100,000, so that Jay can hire a full-time editor to make the whole thing work. An excerpt of Jay's post:

NewAssignment.Net is a not a plan for a company; in fact, it’s closer to a charity, an editorial engine anchored in civil society itself, rather than the media industry or journalism profession. As today’s announcement shows, New Assignment can be on friendly terms with Big Media, which it is is not trying to destroy or supplant.

One of outstanding facts of the Net era is that the costs for like-minded people to find each other and work together are falling rapidly. Someone has to figure out what the consequences of that fact are for original reportage. This is what NewAssignment plans to experiment with if it can find a few more supporters like Reuters and a lot more participants...

Jay writes extensively on NewAssignment.Net's operating philosophy and how it is likely to work. You should read his whole post. But here is another excerpt:

NewAssignment.Net will use the Web as both a “collaboration medium,” the way Berners-Lee intended, and a publishing tool, which he also intended. The site will begin as a niche producer that tries to do one kind of work only: open source reporting projects in the pro-am style. It will follow a middle path between good old fashioned we-bring-you-the-world journalism and the new forms that have exploded on the World Wide Web: blogging, citizen journalism, and what the Neterati call social media. (Social because they connect people horizontally to one another, not vertically to The Media.)

Reuters' Chris Ahearn, who also made the decision last year to fund Global Voices Online, the project I co-founded and which has just won the Knight-Batten Innovations In Journalism Grand Prize, wrote about his support for both of our projects in today's Huffington Post. The news industry is in a crisis, he admits up front. "Without corrective action, we are in danger of the public losing faith in the fourth estate," he says. "As professionals, we need to support good journalistic ideas, encourage broader public participation in the reporting process, and explore different newsgathering business models."

I imagine a lot of Reuters journalists and bureau chiefs wish the money had gone to their operations instead, given that Reuters operations are all run on fairly tight budgets. But Chris makes a rather good case for the need to support innovation outside traditional newsroom and news bureau structures:

While encouraging good journalistic ideas is a worthy goal in itself, Reuters believes that supporting new and varied networks of creators with different perspectives is good for both journalism and business.

Ultimately, journalism is about the story and the pursuit of truth; it is not about the news industry, a j-school or a traditional newsroom structure. By building bridges and finding new ways to augment and accelerate the creation of quality journalism, we believe that ultimately the public will benefit and perhaps change their minds about the noble profession of journalism.

Jay asked me in an email what I thought about Reuters' motivations. I wrote back:

Reuters top management clearly understands that news organizations need to re-think themselves. On one hand, the principles of good journalism are timeless: good journalism should provide the information - accurate, timely, and with the necessary context and background - that we as individuals require in order to conduct our lives in our own best interest. But while the point of journalism remains the same, the accepted methods of achieving these aims are now broken or badly discredited.

The challenge is: How do you do good journalism while at the same time participating in a give-and-take, a conversation about events, which in turn helps to inform your journalistic work? Reuters realizes the answer is not as simple as getting some of their journalists to blog. In fact that may not be the answer at all. What’s more important is to help journalists figure out how to interact with the blogosphere— that big global, interactive, viral conversation about the things that matter to people. How do you interact with these conversations in a way that makes your journalism more relevant, more useful - and more true to the point of journalism in the first place?

Unfortunately, news organizations today are so stripped-down and budgets are so tight, journalists barely have time to cover their beats properly, let alone learn new things about the internet, figure out ways to innovate, or learn about RSS readers and trackback pings. There is very little R & D happening in news organizations today - and usually it’s being done by the tech people, not the reporters, photographers, writers, and editors. Ironically, information media innovation is not being driven by professional journalists who are actually paid full-time salaries to create media. The innovation is coming from citizen media creators: the people who blog, who podcast, who use YouTube, who edit Wikipedia, and who write open source code in their spare time.

...and in other related news, Mark Glaser at MediaShift has a piece about the new human rights video partnership between Global Voices and Witness.

Posted at 10:33 PM in Future of journalism, Future of media, Global Voices | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

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