Mr. Alexander’s predecessor as ombudsman made the same point in 2008, and it’s easy to understand why: It seems to dismiss an embarrassing failure with an uncontroversial idea. Everyone likes diversity, right? And this way no one is really to blame for botched coverage of any sort, least of all newspaper brass. Their intentions are pure, just poorly executed by their annoyingly conformist info-proles.

The idea seems good when put like that, but it has some serious problems.  First of all, how do you hire for political diversity?  It’s not like race or gender, where the person is easily categorized visually, or even like sexuality.

Years ago, Mr. Alexander wrote, newspapers achieved racial and gender diversity, and “It’s the same with ideology.”

Actually, it isn’t. Unlike race or gender, people choose their ideologies. What’s more, they often change them as they go through life, and they sometimes find that it is to their pecuniary advantage to ditch the embarrassing political enthusiasms of their youth.

Even if you decided that diversifying the ideologies of the newsroom was a good idea, how would you enforce it?  What would you do if someone changed their mind, fire them?

More crucial, the fact is that journalists are supposed to be neutral and bias-free.  Even if they are not so in their private lives, they are held to a professional standard of objectivity when writing.  If you start hiring more conservatives, all that goes out the window.

The answer is better and more objective reporting, not creating a partisan divide like already exists in the general population.

How loudly should a responsible person shout (or whisper) “Possible Fire!” in a crowded theater?

It seems that the media, for once, is a little afraid of its own power to overhype a story.  With health officials urging that we must prepare for possible disaster, responsible news outlets are shouldered with the problem of how to cover a potential risk.  Epidemiology is not something that is easily understood by the general public, especially when even the experts don’t really know what’s going to happen.

The demand from many media consumers seems to be: ‘Tell us exactly what is going to happen and how bad it will be.’

As Mackey says, this kind of accurate prediction is impossible.  Is the virus deserving of the amount of media coverage its getting, considering that it’s only a potential threat?  He makes the argument that yes, it is, and after reading this I’m inclined to agree.  Although the extensive media coverage may be over-the-top, such as in tabloids, or spawn misinformed behavior, such as people refusing to buy pork (or the slaughtering of pigs in Egypt), the fact remains that the risk is there.  If nothing materializes from it, then at least it got the attention of the government and the public, and we were better safe than sorry.  If the media were to ignore the threat, and it turned out to be a killer pandemic with no vaccine, we would be in serious trouble.  He uses the analogy of Katrina — the media may cry wolf more often than it should, but disaster can result when people get too used to ignoring it.

The funds include $20 million for new state and local economic, high technology and Internet crime prevention grants; $8 million for new FBI agents targeting IP crimes; and $2 million for new Department of Justice IP prosecutions.

I think this is a total waste of taxpayer money.  MPAA chairman and CEO Dan Glickman summarized the rationale for the expenditure,

“Copyright industries in the U.S. lose $25.6 billion a year in revenue to piracy, the U.S. economy loses nearly 375,000 jobs either directly or indirectly related to the copyright industry, and American workers lose more than $16 billion in annual earnings.”

This is completely oversimplifying the problem.  Although I agree that law enforcement should take efforts to combat the physical sale of pirated CDs and DVDs, regulating the sale of information is a completely different affair.  For one thing, the figures he cites assume that every single person who has ever pirated an album or a movie would have otherwise paid full price for it.  This is absurd.  As anyone who has ever downloaded anything can attest, it’s often to sample an artist to see if you like them before you purchase, or to see a movie that you would never buy, but would wait to rent or watch on TV, or would otherwise never watch at all.  Glickman is distorting statistics to his advantage here.

The second issue with spending taxpayer money in this way is the methods by which the RIAA has been protecting its copyright holdings.  Essentially employing scare tactics, the organization targets a few individuals out of the hundreds of thousands of culprits and sues them.  This has proven to be fairly ineffective, and to use taxpayer money to do more of this is just wrong.

I think it’s time that we re-examined our notion of ownership of information, since the archaic ideas of property no longer apply, rather than supporting the RIAA and other similar organizations as they frantically try to extract as much money as they can.

With cutbacks, layoffs and weak revenues, the Herald is looking for money from its online content any way it can get it.

Unlike the model of the BBC, government funded media, which I discussed before, this is partially public funded media, similar to PBS and NPR.  The rationale is, if enough people see the news as being as essential to society as other things they are willing to donate their money to, like soup shelters and national parks, then they will be willing to support it when it can no longer support itself.  The Herald’s current model differs from that of other publicly funded news outlets in that it is currently using a mixed revenue system — it is still charging for subscriptions and advertising, in addition to the private donations.  This is actually a fairly good plan, since if one fails the other can pick up the slack.

There are a couple of issues with this, however.  Firstly, once it becomes funded by public donations, many would argue that the Herald now has a duty to cover only stories that are in the public interest.  The most emailed story on the Boston Globe’s home page today was about a library book return that was 99 years old — entertaining but essentially useless.  This type of coverage, though popular and useful for generating readership, may prove unacceptable under the Herald’s new model.  In addition, by accepting donations from private individuals, those individuals now have some influence over what is published in the paper.  The editors may be reluctant to publish a story revealing the wrongdoings of an entrepreneur or government official who has been making generous yearly donations, for fear that they may no longer do so.

It will be very interesting to see if this new business plan will work out.

I hate to use the too-often-repeated mantra “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but this basic storytelling device really shows the power that a few photographs can have.  Today’s images — a volcano eruption in the Philippines, a butcher preparing for increased business in London, shocked witnesses of a car bomb in Baghdad, flamingos displaced by habitat changes, a man pulling a statue of Barack Obama in Java, the first flight of the Boeing 787, and an injured statue depicting the Italian Prime Minister — provide an extremely concise summary of what’s happening in the world.  Some people may be uninterested in the volcano eruption, but they lost little time skipping the picture.  For some, the photo may be enough, and they can move on.  Others may want more details, and because of this little photo section they can now do a search on the site for the story about the eruption.  It’s a more modern version of the headline summaries at the top of the front page of many newspapers.

This is a good example of something simple that can be done with “new media” that wasn’t possible with print.    High definition photographs simply aren’t possible in newspapers, especially a collection of them.  It’s simple, but a very smart idea, and a great way to summarize events around the world in a way that needs only a glance, yet is interesting by itself, while still offering more depth elsewhere on the site.

RCRDLBL is a conglomeration of independent record labels, often very small with only a few artists signed.  Alone, these labels have a lot of trouble supporting themselves, especially as they are competing with media giants.  The site highlights a few releases from these labels every day, always free to sample and usually free to download.  There’s usually a write-up about the track, about the artists, and, if the artist hasn’t been featured before or isn’t very well known, there is usually a list of other musicians with similar sounds.

In an age when most music is controlled by a few media giants, usually to the detriment of the music industry as a whole, it’s really great that these labels, who often allow their artists much more freedom than the bigger corporations would, have found a way to promote themselves without selling out.

Ignoring the business side of things, it’s also a really great way to find new music.  Most of the music I’ve listened to from the site has been really good, leading me to believe that the selections are based on what the editors think is worthy of attention rather than what the labels are most keen on promoting.  It is all brand new indie music, so if you are looking for classics you are out of luck (although there is a weekly “flashback,” usually from 10 or 20 years ago), but the site hosts almost every genre, from folk to punk to electronic.  Highly recommended.

Designing sites for search engine optimization, or SEO, is becoming increasingly common and necessary.  This is a result of a change in the way people get their news.

“A growing number of users come to stories on the BBC site from places other than our own front page – for example search engines, other sites, personal recommendations, Twitter or RSS feeds,” [Steve Hermann, editor of the site] wrote.

People used to pick a news source based on what caught their eye.  A headline looked interesting, something they wanted or needed to read, so they picked it up.  Thus, headlines were designed to attract the attention of people.  Now, in many cases, there is a new intermediary — the search engine.  People aren’t going to a newspaper’s website and looking at the headlines, they are searching for things that interest them in a search engine and picking the topics that catch their eye there.  The search engine acts as filter, and news sources now have to contend with the fact that their headlines must be designed to attract a computer as well as a person.

Personally, I don’t think this is particularly apocalyptic — Google is a far cry away from an android.  It is, however, interesting how much the way we consume the news is changing.

Brown’s analysis of the future of reporting is the first argument for community-based reporting I’ve heard that really made sense. That said, Fry’s criticisms were exactly the same I had while reading the article – with no newspapers, will the public fill the shoes of Woodward and Bernstein, or will deeply buried stories never see the sun?

As the popularity of Twitter and blogging increases with no signs of slowing, it is obvious that the future of news is going to be a world away from the print-dominated landscape of just a few decades ago.  The question is whether the move will be complete, or if some aspects of traditional, professional beat journalism will be able to survive.  Brown argues that the “magic journalism box” is quickly becoming obsolete, to be replaced forever by reporting by the masses, in the style of Wikipedia.  Fry’s question, and my own, is whether or not the masses can take on the big jobs that traditional newspapers are famous for. Fry points out that “not all sources want to speak to the public — some don’t want the public to see them as sources at all. And some sources are too vulnerable or damaged to tell their own stories in ways that will be heard or believed. The public can’t discuss stories it doesn’t know exist.”  The one or two people that may know of a story, be it government corruption or corporate pollution, are frequently unable to talk to the public, and so they turn to professional journalists under conditions of anonymity, doing what they feel is right while protecting themselves from the public eye.  When there is no one to turn to but the public, though, will they find another way to get their story out, or just remain silent?

In a perfect world, I think everyone would agree that we would be better off with the professional journalists, regardless of how many bloggers and Twitter users are backing them up.  The problem is how to pay for them, and if there’s one thing that capitalism has taught us, you can make people pay for just about anything with enough ingenuity.  The internet as we know it has only been around for about twenty years, and people have come up with some brilliantly profitable ideas, such as Ebay and Amazon.  It is only a matter of time before the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the information age find a way to make professional reporting profitable again.

However, I also think that community reporting will also play a big role — just not the only role.

Many new ideas have been thrown around, attempting to overcome this problem.  One frequently mentioned method is community reporting – harness the power of enough citizens and you can do anything.  There are many difficulties with this, the biggest one being that it is extremely difficult to get large amounts of people to do what you want, especially for free.  Another idea is to hand everything over to the bloggers.  This, however, has a different flaw – bloggers tend to be the armchair journalist type.  Bloggers are good aggregators, but you’re rarely going to get original reporting out of them.

So, it is clear that we need professional reporters.  The other ideas are nice, and useful from time to time, but relying on all your news from amateurs is a terrible practice.  Since ad revenue is no longer working, we need a new way to pay for our news.  Some have suggested donations, models such as the one that NPR and PBS run on, but the problem with this is that it is hard to get enough money, and the private interests of donors might take precedence.  The other option for cash is the government.

Personally, I think this is the answer.  Some people argue that this would never work in America, because government funding of the press would give it too much control over our information flow, and the job of the press is to be watchdog of the government.  This is a legitimate concern, but if enough steps are taken to ensure that the press is truly independent, I think this model could work extremely well.  Take, for example, the BBC.  This is one of the most highly regarded news sources in the world, not only for news, but also for music (BBC radio 1 is a fantastic music station), the arts, and television.  The capitalist, laissez faire model worked for American journalism for a long time, but it is time to find a new way to inform the people of our democracy, before Rupert Murdoch or Time Warner controls everything we see and hear.

Elbo.ws is a blog aggregator for music, which means that music blogs, after gaining a certain readership requirement, will have their latest posts show up on the front page.  The site is updated in real time, so each time you refresh the page there will be new articles to look at, and you can go all the way back 50 pages to look at older stuff from the day.  It also highlights mp3s, making it easy if you are looking to download new music (the music is usually legally released from the artists).  You can also search for an artist or song to see what’s been happening lately.

Although many people find itunes, pandora or other much more commerical sites sufficient, I never was able to find the music I was looking for through those.  Although it still covers pop music, it also pools together the underground and independent stuff that no other site, as far as I know, does nearly as well.  Highly recommended to anyone looking for something outside the mainstream.