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COPA plaintiffs win, yet again

March 22, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Alberto Gonzales has bigger problems these days, but his Justice Department just lost the latest round in a longstanding Internet censorship conflict.

The Child Online Protection Act went on trial again in recent months, and today, again, a federal court has struck down the law — which would require commercial online publishers like Salon to make sure that their readers are over 18 or face criminal prosecution for publishing material that might be “harmful to minors.” Publishers are supposed to be able to protect themselves from prosecution by requiring site visitors to register with their credit cards, thus ostensibly demonstrating their adult status.

The law is supposedly only aimed at commercial pornographers, but the law is absurdly vague. Somehow, publishers are supposed to trust the Justice Department to make the right call and understand who is a “bad” publisher and who isn’t. Placing such trust was problematic when the law was passed, under the Clinton administration; in the era of Bush justice, doing so would be utterly foolish.

Here’s the decision, which concludes that:

COPA facially violates the First and Fifth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs because: (1) COPA is not narrowly tailored to the compelling interest of Congress; (2) defendant has failed to meet his burden of showing that COPA is the least restrictive and most effective alternative in achieving the compelling interest;
and (3) COPA is impermissibly vague and overbroad.

I am proud that Salon has been a plaintiff in this suit since 1998, when the ACLU first launched it. (Here’s my account of the 1994 oral arguments before the Supreme Court in an earlier phase of the COPA fight.) I have no idea whether, defeated at every turn, the Justice Department will drag this proceeding into another decade by appealing it. In the meantime, we can take another deep breath and be glad for the victory.

Here’s the AP story. And here’s a post by Salon editor Joan Walsh, who testified in this most recent round of the case. And here’s the ACLU’s page. And here’s CNET’s story.

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Post departures spark sinking-ship suspicions

November 21, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

This week two well-known Washington Post journalists upped and quit their newsroom to start a new venture on the Net. That got tongues wagging across the blogosphere — and across the print business as well. In some quarters the action was granted watershed-like status. Brave souls striking forth from a crumbling old world into the wilderness? Or, er, rodents fleeing a listing mothership?

The hubbub simply sounds quaint to this grizzled veteran of the flight-from-print-to-Web meme. This isn’t the start of something big; it’s the latest in a long, long line of defections that have been piling up for many years. Chris Nolan notes some recent examples, including her own, in a letter to Romenesko; I flashed back somewhat further in time.

When a half-dozen of us left the S.F. Examiner newsroom en masse in 1995 to start Salon our colleagues looked at us like we were nuts. Give up good union jobs? Nobody wanted to read on the Web, anyway! John Markoff wrote in the New York Times that our departure was a harbinger of a new world in which newly independent “tribes” of journalists would break free from their corporate overlords and light out for the new territories.

I never felt very tribal, myself. I just know I’d rather help build something new and exciting than work for something old and valuable where all I could do was watch helplessly while its owners gutted and dismantled it. At Web 2.0 Roger McNamee repeated a point I’ve heard before: The newspaper industry is not doomed, it’s committing suicide. Its managers and owners have decided to “harvest” its value with 24 percent profit margins rather than invest the money to move its assets into a new era and onto a new platform.

In other words, you might say, journalists aren’t abandoning newspapers for the Web; rather, newspapers are abandoning journalism to the Web. Not all newspapers at the same pace, of course, and not all at once, and not without lots of fights. But the process is real, it has been underway for over a decade, and though it will take decades more to unfold it shows no sign of being reversible. The only thing notable about this week’s Post story is that the newsroom exodus is beginning to reach those places — like the Post, or the Times, or the Journal — where print journalism is likely to last longest.

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Steven Johnson interview — plus: where I’ve been

October 29, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Tonight on Salon’s cover — in our brand-spanking new home page design, which we’re quite proud of — you’ll find my interview with Steven Johnson. It’s about his fine new book, The Ghost Map, as well as sundry other topics, including his new tool for organizing the local Web, Outside.in; why cities aren’t environmental disasters; why nuclear terrorism is more of a long-term danger to city dwellers than bioterrorism or epidemic; how innovators change a scientific consensus; and more.

Johnson has been one of my favorite authors ever since his Interface Culture, which I wrote about back in 1997, so I relished the opportunity to talk with him once more.

Apologies for light blogging here. My spare time has been devoted to hunkering down on a big freelance project. It’s almost done, so normal programming here — including a return to Code Reads after an unplanned one-week break — will resume shortly. I have a couple of posts I wanted to make from OOPSLA, and a few other interesting things lined up.

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COPA trial begins

October 25, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

As longtime readers of this blog know, Salon and I have both been deeply involved in the ACLU’s challenge to the 1998 Child Online Protection Act from the start, which means this epic has been going on for something like eight years.

Under normal circumstances, the fact that multiple courts have already preliminarily ruled against the law — an Internet censorship bill masquerading as a “protect our kids from porn” measure — should have sounded its death knell a long time ago. But the Bush Justice Department loves its social issues, and instead of folding up its tent based on the preliminary proceedings, Justice has taken the issue to a full trial.

The trial started this week in Philadelphia. Joan Walsh, Salon’s editor, testified Monday. There’s a full transcript of the day’s proceedings available from the ACLU. (Back in 2004 I wrote about the Supreme Court hearing on COPA.) As there’s news on this I’ll keep posting it.

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Newassignment.net: new-model journalism

July 25, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

Jay Rosen has posted a detailed sketch of a new, non-profit venture in the “citizens’ media” (or “networked media”) realm that he is calling NewAssignment.Net. The idea is to create an institution online where people can contribute dollars to fund reporting projects they’re interested in. These projects will in turn be pursued by paid reporters and editors working creatively with information and contributions flowing back to them from the Net. Foundation seed money gets the thing off the ground; money from the crowd keeps it going. Old-fashioned editorial processes mesh with newfangled feedback loops and reputation systems to produce something new and unique.

Jay is one of the bright lights in this area, and I’m looking forward to what he comes up with — especially since some of the issues and problems he’s exploring are similar to the ones I’m working on at Salon these days.

Rosen’s description makes it clear that he’s seeking to create an institution where many traditional journalistic values persist and shape the work being done in a novel mode. In particular, there’s the idea that the reporters are going to go out and ask questions and consider all the information flooding back to them from the Net and determine the truth as best as they can — even if that truth is not what the people ponying up the cash wanted to hear.

This, to me, is likely to be a major friction point for NewAssignment — which will doubtless be avowedly nonpartisan but which will not be able to insulate itself from the fierce political divisions that shape so much online discourse today.

At Salon, we don’t make any claims to nonpartisanship but do maintain our own tradition of journalistic pride, and a commitment to fairness and giving the “other side” a say, and a belief in telling the story as you find it, not as your political preferences might dictate it. This has regularly placed us at odds with at least some of the readers who are funding our stories with their subscription dollars. (The relationship is not quite the direct quid pro quo that Rosen envisions, where individual site visitors put their chips on specific stories, but emotionally it seems similar.)

So, for instance, in the wake of stolen-election charges in Ohio in 2004 we had Farhad Manjoo — one of the most talented, hardest-working and open-minded reporters I’ve ever worked with — devote a lot of time to exploring the story. He’d done significant reporting on the topic in the past. His conclusion — as our headline put it, “The system is clearly broken. But there is no evidence that Bush won because of voter fraud” — was well-documented and carefully delineated. But it wasn’t what many of our readers wanted to hear.

Ever since, Salon has had a steady trickle of disgruntled subscribers cancel on us, citing these stories as a factor. It’s never been enough to make any difference to our business, and it certainly won’t stop us from doing further reporting on the subject, and presenting our findings accurately. But it’s disheartening. And I think that NewAssignment may face some similar tensions if it ends up reporting on topics that people have strong feelings about, which it must if it is to matter.

The sample story Rosen walks us through to explain his new idea is one about wild variations in drug prices from one place to another. The assumption is that some people who are upset by what they perceive as unfair, rigged drug pricing might be willing to help fund such an investigation. But what happens if the reporters come back and say, gee, it turns out that the drug companies are innocent here, the fluctuations are actually the result of [some other factor]? (I’m not saying I love drug companies. This is just an example.) Will these citizen-journalism sponsors want their cash back?

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis’s post about NewAssignment provides some tidbits of interest about the new media venture he’s been dropping hints about for a while, named Daylife. But I wonder about his comment: “We must explore new business models to support coverage of news and this is one of them.” It strikes me that the not-for-profit, institutionally-supported model Rosen has picked — perfectly reasonably — is good for many things, but maybe not so good for exploring new business models. Yes, there are sustainable nonprofit models, and maybe NewAssignment will turn out to be one of them; but it seems to me that Rosen’s plan is more about delivering a proof-of-concept for important new ideas about networked journalism than it is about building a business. If I’m wrong, I’m sure he’ll let me know!

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Reluctance to give credit

May 12, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

In the early days of the Web, when we were just getting Salon off the ground, we noted with amused snorts how big media outlets were unwilling to credit anyone doing original work online — they’d prefer, when they bothered to acknowledge a source at all, to use vague attributions like “a Web site” or “on the Web.”

These days Salon gets somewhat more respect. Hey, it’s only been ten years we’ve been doing our independent journalism thing — not long enough to belong to any clubs, assuming we’d even want that, but enough to warrant a named-attribution tip of the hat, some of the time.

The rise of blogs has occasioned another turn of this same wheel. Josh Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo (and new TPMMuckraker spinoff) regularly breaks news on those stories it focused on, notes with amusement today that the New York Times won’t actually credit his site for a scoop about documents relating to bribery in the Dusty Foggo/CIA/Cunningham/Wilkes imbroglio.

The documents simply “appeared on the Internet Tuesday,” the Times story says. Apparently they simply materialized.

This is like writing about the Times’ scoop on NSA spying by writing, “News of the program appeared on paper last month.”

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Stephen Colbert and the Beltway disconnect

May 2, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Sunday and Monday the Net was abuzz with word of Stephen Colbert’s bracing, revelatory acts of lese majeste at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Videos were posted. Emails were exchanged. Word spread. This was, or at least felt like, a watershed event, an emperor’s-new-clothes sort of moment.

That, apparently, is not how it seemed from inside the Beltway bubble. Colbert’s highwire irony apparently left the D.C. press corps cold. It didn’t even merit a mention in the New York Times coverage of the event. Colbert “fell flat because he ignored the cardinal rule of Washington humor: Make fun of yourself, not the other guy,” the Washington Post told us. It seemed that a silly routine that President Bush concocted with a Bush impersonator went over better with this crowd.

At Salon we’re well accustomed to this disconnection between the D.C. consensus and the view from beyond the Beltway. We felt it keenly during the mad Monica days, when capital insiders and mainstream media boffins puffed themselves up with outrage at an inconsequential presidential transgression while a significant portion of the rest of the nation sat there thinking, “Get over it — move on, and get back to work on the real problems we face.” Today, this dynamic is inverted: the outrage lies beyond the Beltway, where it’s almost impossible to believe how badly the nation has been run into the ground by the current administration and its allies.

In Washington, it seems, the emperor’s nudity remains a verboten topic, and our leader is to be feted with business-as-usual niceties. Meanwhile, beyond the corridors of power, the clothes vanished a long time ago, the folly is transparent, and we can’t believe the ugliness of the resulting spectacle. Our young people are dying in a war based on a lie, our national leadership reeks of corruption, our economic well-being has been sold out for a mess of tax-break pottage, the global environment is being wrecked for our children, the absence of a smart energy policy has left us powerless in the face of an oil shortage — and we are supposed to be nice?

Maybe the editors and reporters in that banquet room didn’t find Colbert funny. Watching his performance at home, I couldn’t stop laughing.

[Watch Colbert here (Videodog, Youtube 1, 2, 3); read Michael Scherer's Salon piece; there's a full transcript over at Kos.]

LATE ADD: Dave Johnson calls the absence of mainstream Colbert coverage an “intentional blackout.” Me, I don’t think it’s coordinated in quite that way; newsrooms independently reach the same (wrong) conclusion about what’s newsworthy — then see their choices reinforced by those of their colleagues at other outlets. Mostly I think they resented Colbert’s jabs at them — and cheered themselves up by telling themselves that he wasn’t really funny.

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