Actually, Chris’ characterization of copyright law isn’t quite accurate. Unless he’s planning to charge his daughter’s friends to attend the birthday party, he can read a book (or perform music, show a movie, etc) to his heart’s content. Here’s the relevant quote from US Copyright Law, title 17, section 110 “Limitations on exclusive rights: Exemption of certain performances and displays”:

“Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:
…
(4) performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work otherwise than in a transmission to the public, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage and without payment of any fee or other compensation for the performance to any of its performers, promoters, or organizers…”

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#110

Also, as I said in my comment on Mary Hodder’s post, of course news shouldn’t have DRM. But there’s plenty of other content that should have protection against theft. If we can’t protect the right of the creator of content to make money on it, give it away, and to keep other people who steal it from making money off it illegally.

Rebecca MacKinnon is talking about “young reporters that are just there for a few years while they work their way up the rungs”. Vacancies in Vacaville, from the American Journalism Review, talks more about that:

Barney wants this symbiotic relationship to last two years, about the average stay for young reporters and copy editors who come to Vacaville. “The first year is an investment,” she says. “The second year we reap the benefit of that investment.”

Mannes’ career plans fit that timeline. “Ideally, I will work here for between a year and a half and two years and get some great clips…. Then I’ll move to a more reputable paper, a more well-known paper. Part of it is that it’s very hard to live on this income.”

A person just replied, “it’s an episodic issue.”

On screen now:

“Insure content security with baked in Digital Rights Management.”

Chris: What’s the point?

Michael Silberman: I think DRM could be used to keep people from stealing, and get them to pay for content. And it could be used to facilitate the making of content.

No. Not.

DRM for news? Okay, your content has high value for maybe, 24 hours? You want to lock it up? There is no DRM that has never been cracked.

What IS the point? This is about being an authority in your field, being a voice for good trustworthy content and linking out to others talking about the same stuff. Why would you try to stop people from getting that value? Why would you want to keep people from seeing your stuff. Your value comes from the network effect of lots of people looking and talking about you. Take a page from the Wall Street Journal to which noone can link. Take a page from the RIAA, who has been so incredibly successful with DRM. People are mad at the media. Care to make it worse?

Let’s move on to something constructive. Design content so it can be reused and accessed.

Tim Porter’s got comments on on First Draft:

“No one needs an editor. Reporters don’t. Bloggers don’t. Even other editors don’t. But last night I realized why I want an editor.

I was too busy yesterday to keep up with all the intellectual activity at Mediamorphosis, an API Media Center conference underway in San Diego with a lot of smart people talking about, well, media, so last night I went to the conference blog to catch up and in moments was overwhelmed by all the posts, comments and back channel chatter.

I scanned the page, scrolled, scanned again – looking for some kind of summary of the conference and the many conversations taking place. There wasn’t one. It was late and I moved on, thinking I’d get to it this morning.

Then it occurred to me: I wanted a story. I wanted someone to take all the day’s events, filter them, order them and compile them in a format I could scan quickly and then go deeper into if something grabbed my interest.

Isn’t that someone an editor?

More of this post here. Well worth checking out,.

I’d like to revisit my comments from yesterday about the impact of rich media on news sites. Let’s not forget about the opportunity that multimedia gives us to reach, inspire and persuade our readers. Persuade them, that is, to be interested.

Thought I’d share two new reader emails that arrived this morning.

———————-

Subject: (Webmedia) about the interactive media

This addition to your webpage is delicious,and if i could pour milk on it, it would be the best way to start every day.

———————-

Subject: (Webmedia) thank you

Dear Webmedia people,

I love your narrated art reviews!! Fantastic and well worth the effort.

Thanks,
John Steins

——————————–

One last thing. As Gary Kebbel pointed out to me, with all respect and appreciation to the hard-working organizers of this event, it’s a little ironic that I had to verbally apply for a login and password to be allowed to post a new topic to this blog.

Stuff we’re not talking about, things I value in a newspaper, views from a young member of your target audience.

What about newspaper editorials & opinion pieces? They’re an important part of the paper, something that no other media really does. There’s tons of editorial and opinion online, but it doesn’t have as much thought and effort put into it as the things I read in the LA Times.

A newspaper tries to be comprehensive…a lot of small but important things are in a newspaper, things that might be ignored otherwise. The point of view is coherent (ideally), usually some slant off of neutral. I expect different things when I pick up a USA Today and a Christian Science Monitor. Blogs have a certain point of view too, but the views are more specific, they aren’t comprehensive and rarely attempt to be neutral. Maybe “neutral” news is a myth…do people complain about encyclopedias trying to be neutral?

People still listen to radio news, especially in the car. Maybe young people don’t listen to it as much anymore, but have they ever? I’d be interested in some statistics on the demographics of radio news, but I haven’t seen any. Some news radio stations are supported by advertisements – is radio news dying, is advertising a dying business model? Does radio news not really matter?

News magazines, too. How are they doing? What makes people buy news magazines, how might newspapers learn something from that? News magazines seem to be more obviously slanted – is that their appeal? The glossy pictures?

Computer screens are small, hard on the eyes, relatively low-resolution. I enjoy reading on paper more. There aren’t as many distractions (animated ads, instant messaging, etc), so I read more deeply and remember more. Print is better for those big photos, elaborate illustrations, and complex layouts that would take a year to load online and wouldn’t look so good on a screen. It costs more to print those colorful images, yeah, but maybe raising the cost of the newspaper would be ok. I wouldn’t mind paying $1 for a richly illustrated, good-looking paper.

Also, not everyone has Internet access, not everyone wants Internet access. My high school journalism teacher hates the Internet and only uses it when he absolutely has to. I didn’t even tell him why I’m missing school today…

Newspaper writing is generally good quality – so they dumb down the LA Times to an 8th-grade reading level, but it’s pretty good, clear, correctly spelled (yay for copyeditors). One of the things that makes blogs so remarkable is the lack of anyone editing them. That’s great for personal expression blah blah blah, but the writing ends up not being as good as I’d like it to be (mine included). I don’t think good writing is appreciated enough.

Some folks at the conference asked about how they can post on this group blog:
1. Get an account–email smernit at aol dot com or come talk to me and we will set you up.
2. Post in the comments section under a post you want to talk about.

80 people in the room, laptops open.
Dale and Andrew ask: So how do you like the conversation so far?
There isn’t much holding back.
Some comments:
William Weiss: We need to remember that the technology is strictly an incident…It’s the knowledge of new consumers that matter in building these businesses.
Leah Gentry: I am so tired of people talking to this audience like we are a bunch of three year olds! We have to stop having a conversation that is ten years old.
Brian Monroe: Let’s get over the blogs good/blogs bad thing. We are REALLY good at hooking up customers to one another–we need to work from that.
Gary Kebbel: I want to support what Leah is saying..If we can only talk about blogs good/blogs bad, we have wasted a lot of time,. We did not talk about community, participatory journalism, involving the user when we met yesterday. Instead, we talked about a freaking tool. Yesterday was a missed opportunity.
Dale Peskin: Look, we don’t want to tell anyone what to do. We wanted to get people together to decide what to do…We don’t have all the answers–we’re asking you for help. Where do we start?
Neil Chase: It’s easy to take shots at Dale and Andrew, but this discussion is all shadowing what happens at work– the real challenge is to figure out how to resteer the conversations to improve the talk in our shops…We need to focus.
Len Witt: I have been in civic journalism for ten years. Blogs keep coming up because of the change in control–Kos has an audience of 100,000 people a month.
Chris Waddle: As this conversation continues it needs to morph into the community markets.
MJ Bear: Blogs took over because they have a loud voice at the moment. Are we afraid to push the envelope?
Michael Silberman: Blogs took over because of the way the conference framed the conversation yesterday.
Allison Macondray: My perspective is from what we do at WIRED. I’ve actually been surprised at how much its been a cerebral, generalized discussion, At WIRED we were born on the Internet and we don’t have anyone to convince. Looking back now, I would have liked more direct lectures from the futurists in the group and more concentrated workshops.
After a deep breath, the group moves on.

API President and Executive Director Andrew Davis gave this presentation yesterday afternoon.

He doesn’t get it, though he is a great speaker in a way, polished, professional, at home in front of all these people. But he showed us slides that were so boring none of us at the blogging table watched, though I did look up to see the slide of hierarchy:

And he doesn’t see that it’s obsolete, hierarchy. The internet is horizontal. Ditch the hierarchy. What if the metaphor is chaos, the chaos of all your users in the future, breathing the internet for dear life, it’s air, experiencing media as wearable, livable, be-able, recombinable. What if my eyeglasses are my newsaggregator, designed by Armani as Dan Gillmor heard from a conference recently. How do you sell that news? It’s one possible path, and it’s an extreme metaphor to contemplate, but the point is, the metaphor he’s working from is old media. And it’s stagnant. Get one that reflects what is happening, and one that is not just a reaction to one that no longer works, cause reactionary metaphors don’t cut it.

I’m sure he’s a lovely person, but this is not about an incremental upgrade. This isn’t the addition of sound to what was formerly the silent picture biz. What is happening now is comparable to 40 years earlier, where the second industrial revolution was hitting hand made crafts people and manufactures with interchangeable parts. This is a paradigm shift. This is everything you know, changing, upside down.

This presentation missed the point. I’m sorry to say it, because API invited me here to blog this, paid for me to come, but I cannot in good conscience not say anything about this. I know journalism is a religion, and the practitioners are hardcore, but your friend is openness and a willingness to go to the next step, reframe your metaphor. Right now old media is working with homemade hammers and were talking air compressor hammer guns.

Frankly, yesterday, we could have stuffed the whole day into the first two hours to get everyone up to speed, and then gotten on to the real deal which is, your current metaphors only work in analog media, and you aren’t in the analog biz anymore, so let’s brainstorm what the new metaphors are, which lead to the new questions, which lead to new answers. Instead, we sat in the binary morass (as Howard Rheingold stated doesn’t work) they still think it is: either traditional media or new, either edited or blog, either paper or online, either either either, argue argue argue, blah blah blogs. They’re a crude tool anyway. Who cares. Let’s get down to chaotic, horizontal, citizen, not organized, not controllable media. That’s what we should be forging ahead on.

Does it matter that I say this? No. Does it matter that old media doesn’t have a clue? No. Because the reality is, this paradigm is here. Whether we like it or not. It’s what is, and we can talk or not, get a clue or not. But this new paradign will keep rolling along. With or without us.

Dale Peskin is reflecting on the conference-so-far. Some quotes:

“Yesterday, we compiled a lot of ideas – they came into us, came out of us. This morning, we’re going to try to make sense of these ideas. That’s the first step to doing something with these ideas.”

“I loved the Fred Friendly conversation – entertaining, interesting, addressed all the great things. Here’s my problem: I’ve been having that conversation for ten years and I can’t seem to get past it. i don’t know why. We tried. The conversation isn’t just a few years old, it’s a hundred years old. It’s circular, it gets in the way of things. We should be having the conversation about doing things, not agonizing over them.”

I think that thought is shared by a lot of people in this room.

“Here’s what I’d be doing…writing a memo to my boss. A very careful, somewhat risky memo…less buzzwordy. A two-page memo, a risks and benefits brief, the implications…Then, my own advocacy document – what does it means for me, in context of what it means for the company.”

Somebody said, “A lot of us have written this memo – in 1990, I wrote it to ABC news. Maybe it’s the battering ram against the wall.”

Peskin replied, “The memo’s probably better now because fear is a powerful motivator.”

Later, Leah Gentry: “I am so tired of having the audience treated like we’re three-year-olds…You know better than that. Stop having a conversation that is ten years old.”

update 9:24 am: corrected Peskin’s name

This conversation, I believe, is talking a few levels above those it’s talking about. It’s not this complicated. This is an age of interactivity. Everything must allow for a staggering amount of user control. Computers come in different colors, telephones plan your schedule, palm pilots play your music and so forth. The critical part of all this is that none of these technologies give the user something, instead, the user gives them something. The user gives them style, schedules, music, and so forth. Traditional media is stuck in a rut that simply gives the user something; you broadcast the news. You give them a paper, they get to read it. All these new technologies, be they news blogs or news aggregators on your Treo stem from the user’s wish to control, filter and affect their news. Our society is now predicated on being the change, on having influence over every aspect of our lives. The media problem is a value problem, you still tell them what should be important while they want to be telling you; even if that participation is simply tokenism.

The question isn’t how do you adapt to these technologies, it’s how do you adapt to these users. They want a voice and, when they read a newspaper, they don’t get one. How do you change that?

A relaxed dinner at an unexpectedly fancy restaurant with fellow conference participants. Then hanging out in the bar with waves of other attendees coming back from their dinners.
A collection of comments on the day:
–I’m tired of talking about media vs. blogs–that derailed other points at the conference.
–Are we stuck on this topic because no one has any new ideas?
–How about community journalism, reader participation, RSS, newsreaders, FOAF–hasn’t anyone here heard of any of them?
–There’s a great brain trust in the room–they’re not having enough time to share their ideas.
–I am having a great time. The people are so interesting here–the energy in the hallways is wonderful–I hope we can leave here with some follow-up steps.
–I’m really enjoying this…the people are great.
–The morning conversation was good, but then the moderators were too generous–they let people talk too long,
–Ban the words “I remember”, 1996, and “This is just like…”

(the following post was given to me by Chris Waddle, VP/News of The Anniston Star and President of The Ayers Family Institute for Community Journalism. He can be reached at chris_36207 at hotmail.com

Good as this conference is, Mediamorphosis neglects the beauty of community journalism. Heartland media – print and broadcast – present a ready digital market for participatory journalism. When the reader or viewer can walk into a county seat newsroom and tell off the editor or manager, goes one definition, that’s community journalism. Blogging is just the electrification of personal feedback already going on. The courthouse café is unwired at present but is a vigorous chat room on issues from the election to Friday night combat by the local high school football team. Beauty parlors seethe with local commentary, waiting for a virtual microphone. Subscribers already know the news from all the town’s many listening posts. They just buy the paper to see if the local clarion gets it right. So draft all those citizen-journalists into a digital reporting and picture-taking system! Why, do you know they even have cell phones on Main Street? Romanesko reported more Americans now use the Internet than cable TV. That digital shift moves sluggishly in rural America. Still, opportunity beckons information companies where the grass grows green. Nimble, small media outfits know how to work on the cheap and don’t bother with all the bureaucratic barriers bothering huge communication corporations. Phone companies ought to partner with small papers and stations to develop virtual audiences and to promote their broadband services. Scaled-down markets add up. The smalls tap energy of young staff who want to take on an electronic project in exchange for the experience and autonomy. And mainly they are already doing conversational journalism. At my 30k-circ paper, The Anniston Star, community writers get a star printed by their best letters-to-the-editor. The publisher then invites them to an annual banquet for vigorous reinforcement of relational journalism. Best practices like that abound in every quarter. Such fertile ground begs for online networking. And it wouldn’t come as mere threat response, creating so much anguish in metro markets. We Media thinking in the countryside reinforces the local franchise, consolidates community feeling that’s already thriving and adds value rather than merely rescuing a media company from future shock. Citizen-journalists call and send in their local news tidbits now. The social architecture of customer-driven media merely waits for editors and producers to digitalize and tantalize their participatory audiences. Rejoice, rejoice you knowledge managers! Community journalism has a handy tool.

It’s eeearly. There aren’t many people in the conference salon yet. They’re playing silly neutral music, people are checking email, munching/drinking a little breakfast, setting up.

Speculating more about Media Minds Meld yesterday afternoon (my earlier post)…

Maybe the WebIQ brainstorming sessions aren’t such a new media thing – brainstorming is a part of old media too, an accepted place for decentralized spontaneity (or so I’m guessing). There isn’t a lot individual-ness in the brainstorming – ideas are anonymous and meant to benefit the group first. The added hierarchy (leaders for each section) reminds me of traditional stuff. Also, they’re going to refine the generated ideas into something coherent – that’s more like producing a newspaper than a blog/wiki/etc.

A new-media-type thing wouldn’t work too well for these purposes, though. They want the end product to be a coherent thing, to make sense and be concise and useful. In my experience, new things don’t usually end up that way – they end up with somewhat uneven quality (ideally, lots of good, some medium), sprawling, but really useful over a long period of time.

Some kind of mix, I guess. New-media ways aren’t best by default, but neither are those old ones.

This in from Lars Jespersen, NORDJYSKE Media

Well, trust is the big chance for media. There is so much information out there, so many sources and people hasn’t got a chance trying to sort out, which is to be trusted. Media can help them navigate, provide them with the tools and information to cope with this overinformed world. Only problem is – the media has to be good. We have to make quality content, and listen to the users, and what they want, when they want it, as they want it. So the challenge now is to deserve the trust of the audience – which hasn’t allways been necessary because media ruled as gatekeepers.