Turns out Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist and $10,000 co-funder of Jay Rosen’s new venture NewAssignment.Net, has been interested in ‘citizen journalism’ for a while. He was a regular attendee at meetings held by the San Francisco-based citizens media group in April and May, 2005.
At those meetings, he joined such now well known ‘grassroots journalism’ activists as JD Lasica and Dan Gillmore in discussing "citizens media strategy".
Read the transcripts of those sessions here.
So here it is, from a posting by Caroline Roberts on bostonist.com:
Much to the dismay of those hoping to keep up with non-fatal shootings, non-fatal stabbings, and bachelorette parties "gone wrong," BPD News, the Boston police department’s online blotter, has fallen prey to individuals who claim to be Turkish hackers. "hacked by metlak / Ownz here / F*&k papa." originally replaced the site’s content. Metlak, is that meant to be an insult of Big Papi? Metlak and company have left their fingerprints on Massachusetts news websites before – the hacker took down the website for the Greenfield Recorder back in June. Turkish hackers have been blamed for taking down even bigger fish than the BPD blog, including European websites for Sony Music and the Bolivian Foreign Ministry.
According to a Boston Police Department missive on Universal Hub and the Globe, the BPD’s hosting service is working on the problem, and the "F*&k papa" message is gone. They’re making progress as a "test post" is now up and the BPD site seems to be recovering. If you have the urge to read BPD News, you can still access older pages through Internet search engines and cached files. The BPD News site is hosted by an external company and doesn’t’ sit on a city server. Perhaps if they were under the protection of Government Center (or even the Roxbury fortress) rather than out milling about in the open sea of cyberspace they wouldn’t be a Cyprus for the Turks to invade.
And, from boston.com, The Boston Globe’s website, in the New England in Brief section (Sept. 22):
Boston police are investigating the invasion of the department’s online news blog last evening. Someone hacked into BPDNews.com and left a line that read, “hacked by metlak / Ownz here / . . ." along with some profane language. The department took down the site about 9:30 p.m., soon after it was contacted by the media. Elaine Driscoll, the Police Department spokeswoman , said she did not know when the hacking occurred. “This is an unfortunate incident," she said. “We’re going to investigate this matter immediately. It is a very important tool that we use to disseminate timely information."
I was told the other day that somebody (or somebodies) hacked into the Boston Police Department blog.
I haven’t yet been able to find reports on this, but will post an entry about this as soon as I do.
A photojournalist friend of mine just sent me a link to the blog of Josh Wolf, who was arrested last month in the San Francisco Bay Area on a first amendment issue. From an Aug. 7 comment posted on Wolf’s blog:
In case you haven’t heard about it yet, Josh Wolf, a blogger who covered the recent G8 Summit in Scotland where some violence erupted has been jailed for not turning over to the authorities the video he shot of the event.
Wolf was jailed in early August. In early September he was released on bail. For the past month-plus Wolf’s mother and friends, and Wolf himself, under the code name "Insurgent," have been posting updates on Wolf’s blog. On Sept. 20 Wolf was granted a 2-day reprieve, which allowed him to attend a benefit for him held in San Francisco (where Wolf has been based for a while):
In Wolf’s reply brief to the court, he and his lawyers argue:
"… a fair reading of Supreme Court precedent requires a finding that there is a “substantial connection” between the information sought and the criminal conduct under investigation before a witness may be held in contempt for refusing to answer question that implicate First Amendment rights.
"The district court here declined to engage in the required balancing, specifically refusing to view the videotape to determine whether it bears a substantial or merely a ‘remote and tenuous relationship to the subject of the investigation’ and whether its production was required to satisfy a ‘legitimate need of law enforcement.’"
Having lived for a little more than a decade in the SF Bay Area, I know that there is a vigorous freedom of the press/independent media/intellectual property protection movement there, led by Media Alliance. Media Alliance’s executive director, Jeff Perlstein, was scheduled to speak at the Wolf benefit.
The Bay Area chapter of the National Writer’s Union and Truthout.org, an SF Bay area-based organisation "dedicated to establishing a powerful, stable voice for independent journalism," are also fighting on Wolf’s behalf.
What does this fight for a relatively obscure blogger’s rights as a "legitimate journalist" signify?
It seems to be a maybe small but possibly crucial battle in the war for establishment of full journalistic rights — and responsibilities — for bloggers who view themselves as journalists and act accordingly.
(Writer’s note: sorry about the misaligned paragraphs. Cutting and pasting wreaks havoc with my typesetting.)
Maybe the Boston Police Department is approaching the whole blogging thing the wrong way entirely. Maybe instead of regarding it as a means of disseminating dryly packaged information, the BPD could be using its blog as a means of earning serious money.
That’s what some bloggers are doing.
According to a Sept. 8 article in CNN’s Business 2.0 magazine, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Michael Arrington’s blog TechCrunch pulls in $60,000 in ad revenue each month. Arrington didn’t start blogging full-time until earlier this year, when Techcrunch was earning around $6,000 each month from advertisements. That’s when Arrington quit his day job.
And he’s apparently not the only one. According to the Business 2.0 article two other blogs, Boing Boing and Fark, are on pace to gross around $1 million in ad revenue this year. And with extraordinarily low overhead (by comparison with the business model as it has existed for several centuries), the profit potential is 70% – 90% of that gross income.
Like the "dot-com bubble" of the 1990s and the northern California housing market of the past several years, this is bound to even out eventually, but the reality is advertisers — from Coca Cola to Banana Republic to Intel — have become aware of the unique ability of blogs to get their message in front of narrowly definable demographics.
So why doesn’t the BPD try to funnel some of that advertising cash its way?
According to a Sept. 6 article in Boston’s Weekly Dig:
A 1979 city law requires the Boston Police Department to maintain a minimum staffing level of 2500 officers; in June it had around 2,100, over 300 of whom were either injured, in the military or in the academy. Boston’s fiscal year 2007 budget, passed in July, allotted for 140 new police officers (a net gain of 100 after retirements; 45 more officers would be folded into the department under a controversial merger of the BPD and the Municipal Police).
With ad revenue from, for example, the United States Marines, Prozac and a couple of gun manufacturers, the BPD could have an officer on every street corner.
Chicagocrime.org has been renowned in the online world for some time now for its remarkable transparency and usefulness — a comprehensive, open and spectacularly searchable database of Chicago crime statistics.
The Boston Police Department has a blog — which is commendable, but it seems to be confused about what it is. When I read "blog" in the title of a Web site, I expect that what I read will contain some measure of personal opinion. This blog reads like a police report. There are statistics on the site as well as other useful information, such as a regularly updated Missing Persons report and transcripts of q + a exchanges between the BPD and The Boston Globe (for example), but why is the BPD calling this site a blog?
Why not, as with chicagocrime.org (apparently being renamed www.chicagocrime.com), just call it an official BPD database?
How about, below each (or at least some) daily incident report, including a statement from an officer involved with a little of his or her take on the incident? A glimpse inside the action… Like the TV show "Cops" but with time for thoughtful reflection?
(Note: chicagocrime.org is not an official Chicago PD site — Adrian Holovaty, a programmer-journalist for WashingtonPost.com, has written software to extract data availabe on the CPD site and re-post it in ways that are eminently useful and interesting.)
Some thoughts on possible pitfalls of the NewAssignment.Net project (see my post from two days ago, below):
That all being said, I love the idea behind this project and am looking forward to seeing it develop — and what develops from it. Tremendously exciting to think about the possibilities thereof. And with Jay Rosen guiding it and substantial financial backing from people who are savvy to the ways of the web and bringing untrained individuals together to collaborate on something much bigger than any one of them could create alone — I believe this project will succeed, although it might succeed in ways no one can yet forsee.
I’m staying tuned.
New media vs old media seems to be all anybody in the media is talking (or writing) about these days. From an article in The Economist of August 26, headlined "More media, less news":
Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if … they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices.
I’m not so sure about reading my daily Boston Globe or New York Times or Guardian on the 1.5" by 2" screen of my cell phone, but the matter goes deeper than that. "Most [newspapers] have been slow to grasp the changes affecting their industry," the Economist article continued, " — ‘remarkably, unaccountably, complacent,’ as Rupert Murdoch put it in a speech last year — but now they are making a big push to catch up."
So much for old media trying to catch up with new. Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of the widely read, highly regarded and oft pot-stirring blog PressThink, has started something new entirely. With an initial $10,000 gift of seed money from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and now another $10,000 from The Sunlight Foundation, Rosen has launched NewAssignment.net, described as "An experiment in open-source reporting."
The idea is to have a pool of "citizen journalists" throughout the country (and eventually, I would imagine, the world) gathering information about a specified topic and reporting back to "professional" journalists and editors. From the Web site’s introductory page:
New Assignment.Net is a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust.
A truly exciting venture in many ways, but one that also raises a plethora of questions.
Tomorrow, the questions.
Immediately upon completion (give or take a few minutes) of the New England Patriots game at home against the Buffalo Bills last Sunday night (Sept. 10, 2006), the Rhode Island Providence Journal (Projo) published all of its beat writers’ and columnists’ stories about the game plus the attendant sidebars and stats, on their website.
This meant that when the Projo’s loyal readers opened their newspapers the next morning, they were greeted with sentences that had already been available to everyone throughout the world with internet access for around twelve hours.
The import of this action — this business decision on the part of the Providence Journal — reveberated within at least one other newsroom in New England.
"How do you combat that?" asked Karen Guregian, sports columnist for the Boston Herald. "When you post your beat writers’ game reports and your columns and all your sidebars and stats right after the game ends? Do you create something different for the paper and for the website?"
This is a question that most, if not all, major and minor newspapers are struggling with now. Nicholas Lehman, in his article in the August 7 issue of The New Yorker, suggests that the best internet journalism is that which "has a distinctly Internet, rather than repurposed, feeling." Which means that the answer to Karen’s question would be, "Yes."
