Basically it’s a series of well-chosen infographics, which make their points well.

At the end, there’s this call to action:

Time For You To Take A Stance.

Do you want an internet with more openess and less censorship?

47,347 People

Have Said YES.

…I clicked on the “say yes” button. And…

Nothing happened.

Huh?

Perhaps the creators — whoever they are, they don’t say — are trying to make an ironic meta-point: “You can’t actually do anything about net censorship, so your opposition is futile.”

Or maybe they got so enamored with creating a perfect design experience that they forgot about the action part? Which would be a damn shame.

Or maybe something about the “Say Yes” button is broken?

Either way, it’s a great windup and pitch. But the connection is missing.

Last week, GigaOm reported that Nokia is now suing Apple, claiming technology patent infringement. And on Oct. 15 CNET reported on Nokia’s dire slide in the US smartphone market.

According to GigaOm:

“Nokia is looking to collect patent royalties of 1 or 2 percent for each iPhone sold, according to a note from Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, which — given the roughly 34 million iPhone units already in the hands of users — would amount to $200 million-$400 million. That’s not a lot of money to either company, of course. But Nokia is clearly hoping it can be more successful in the courtroom than it’s been in the marketplace.”

Nokia: Really? Is this what you’ve sunk to?

There are far better ways. Here are some options…

Nokia: How about finding ways to get the price of your smartphones phones down to compete with the iPhone?

How about offering smartphone service to your US users on reasonable terms? If my ultra-expensive Nokia phone breaks, don’t make me mail it back to you at my own expense and wait up to a month to get it back. Don’t tell me to drop by one of your flagship stores — because you’ve only got two (count ‘em: two!) US stores.

How about achieving both of those first two goals by finally cutting some deals with some US carriers? I know you don’t like the way they play. No one does. They all suck. But they do rule this market. If you want in on this market, you’ve got to play with them.

If you want to be accessible to most US smartphone consumers, they need to be able to buy, service, and replace their Nokia phones locally. Plus getting a subsidized price break for handsets would help a lot.

Yes, unlocked phones are nice…  IF they’re not outrageously expensive to buy, or exceedingly onerous or risky to repair or replace.

Also, how about releasing Android phones? Symbian and Maemo are OK, but just too geeky for most folks. I really don’t understand why you’re still fighting Android when you’re already losing in this market.

Nokia, if you care about the US smartphone market, then please start acting like you really want to be here. Work with us. Stop digging your heels in and telling us what you think we should want. Rather than snapping at Apple’s heels, why don’t you invest in building a real business here?

You make pretty good smartphones, Nokia. I like them. It’s just the recalcitrant way you do business that turns me — and a lot of other would be Nokia users — off cold.

If you don’t want to be here, then just bow out. You’ve got a strong market presence in the rest of the world. You may not really need to be a player in the US smartphone market.

The biggest challenge in business is deciding which business you’re really in. That’s partly about deciding which business you want to be in, and also not kidding yourself (and others) about what business you’re really in. Nokia, I suspect you need to ask yourself some frank, basic questions about the nature of your US smartphone business

I just finished reading a killer classic fiction mashup (literally), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It’s a parody of the Jane Austen novel (which I tried to read in college and found unbearably tedious).

I must admit, though: The addition of a Night of the Living Dead-style zombie plague made all the endless fretting and plotting over how to present  oneself as appropriately marriageable in polite society surprisingly entertaining and understandable.

Because the thing is: The strictures of British aristocratic society — particularly how women were held in chattel status, and the ceaseless power plays of verbal indirection — were indeed nightmarish, soul-destroying, and cannibalistic.

Therefore, I don’t think it’s a stretch to consider this book a seminal feminist treatise. (God knows we need more entertaining seminal works of feminism!)

If you read this book (and I recommend it) don’t miss the reader’s discussion guide at the end. It contains 10 questions. Here are a couple of my favorites…

2. “Is Mr. Collins merely too fat and stupid to notice his wife’s gradual transformation into a zombie, or could there be another explanation for his failure to acknowledge the problem? If so, what might that explanation be? How might his occupation (as a pastor) relate to his denial of the obvious, or his decision to hang himself?”

6. “Some critics have suggested that the zombies represent the authors’ views toward marriage — an endless curse that sucks the life out of you and just won’t die. Do you agree?”

So: Discuss….

Unfortunately I won’t be able to participate in the chat since I’ll be heading to the airport at that time. However, I have had a great deal to say about this topic earlier on Contentious. Here are my posts from last year:

• April 9, 2008: Journalism remains a smart career, despite shrinking newsrooms. This theme in my posts began in response to Elana Centor, who asked me: “Is journalism still a smart career path?” My answer began: “Personally, I think that developing journalism skills and experience is valuable for many career paths — but I think that betting that you’ll spend your career working for mainstream news orgs is a losing proposition in most cases. I think most j-schools are setting bright students up to fail, and that bugs me. A lot….”
• April 10, 2008: New J-Skills: What to Measure? This followup post is a reply to Mindy McAdams’ thoughtful response to my earlier post. She challenged me to translate my original quick list of what j-schools should be teaching into a something more testable and measurable that could be translated into a curriculum.
• April 16, 2008: Overhauling J-School Completely. This begins: “I’ve heard from some journalism educators that the kind of preparation I’ve proposed is far beyond what most existing j-schools could offer. I understand that. Really, I think what may be needed is to completely re-envision and rebuild j-school with today’s realities and tomorrow’s likelihoods in mind…” (This post also includes links to many other posts sparked by my previous posts on this topic.)

Again, I wish I could sit in on the Poynter chat. But hopefully this material might help inform the discussion. I look forward to reading the live blog and chat transcript after I land.

Here’s his line of reasoning. I think he makes a very going point….

First, Zuckerman quoted this comment left by Joshua Jeffryes on a 2007 Publishing 2.0 post. Jeffryes wrote:

“When I worked in advertising the ineffectiveness of advertising was hardly a secret. But customers couldn’t measure the effectiveness of ads. So they paid and continue to pay ridiculous prices for them. Online ads, on the other hand, are measurable. They work just as well, if not better, than print, television, etc., the difference is that for the first time ad customers know exactly how ineffective they are.”

From that, Zuckerman observed: “Basically, there are two ways to explain the disparity in online and offline ad cost. One is to argue that paper ads are, for some combination of reasons, ten to a hundred times more effective than online ads. The other is to argue that advertisers are better at pricing online ads than offline ads.”

Zuckerman continued: “Let’s posit for a moment that the price of newspaper ads may have more to do with how much money a newspaper needs to earn to keep the presses running, rather than how effective they are at producing new business for advertisers. …Why are advertisers willing to pay these prices without strong evidence that they give an effective yield? They may not have much choice — other options in a community where many customers are offline are also pay per impression and may be similarly expensive. …Without good methods to track the effectiveness of the print ads, [a paper's] ability to sell ads may have more to do with comparable ad rates in other local newspapers or radio stations.

“So what happens if the market rationalizes, if pay per performance advertising becomes a viable way to reach the majority of consumers who consume a particular publication? …If print advertising costs are fundamentally irrational, then it’s possible that the way we’ve built media in the U.S. can’t survive a transition to a more rational market.”

What do you think of Zuckerman’s line of reasoning? If he’s right, what — if anything — can ad-supported news organizations do to update their strategy and work with advertisers on a more rational basis? And if it’s too late for most legacy news organizations to make this shift, could their prospective successors find a more rational, fair way to make money from ads? Please comment below.

(Note: I originally posted this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

For example, see Inquisitr.com: Indian Government trying to block Twitter as Terrorists may be reading it.

Rumors — even fairly innocuous ones — really bug me. Mainly because they’re so easy to prevent!

I’m trying to track this particular rumor down, but haven’t been able to confirm anything yet. At this point I’m skeptical of this claim. Here’s what I’ve found so far…

Newstrack India reports:

“[Yesterday] evening, there were suddenly a lot of ‘tweets’ reporting that the Indian government had asked that there should not be online updates of military operations against the holed-up terrorists, citing a BBC news source. But, the BBC actually quoted ‘tweets’, which in fact had no independent confirmation.”

BBC’s timeline of the Mumbai attacks (which is an excellent resource, by the way!) reported at 11:08 GMT:

“Indian government asks for live Twitter updates from Mumbai to cease immediately. ‘ALL LIVE UPDATES – PLEASE STOP TWEETING about #Mumbai police and military operations,’ a tweet says.”

The BBC included no link to that alleged tweet from the Indian government. A simple Twitter search for “please stop tweeting” showed the earliest occurrence of this phrase in connection to the Mumbai attacks came from the MumbaiUpdates account, which appears to be run by a Twitter user named Mark Bao — a high school junior based in Boston, who apparently is not in Mumbai at the moment.

Several hours ago, MumbaiUpdates tweeted: “ALL LIVE UPDATERS – PLEASE STOP TWEETING about #Mumbai police and military operations.”

Prior to that, he tweeted (in chronological order):

1. “Due to military action happening very soon, @mumbaiupdates may have little information to report to protect the rescue operations”
2. “I am not updating on any details about #mumbai operations until futher notice to protect the operatoin”
3. “Indian government is asking that the twitter search page #mumbai be shut down.”
4. “or possible clarification: to just stop live updating about the situation pertaining to #mumbai”

UPDATE: Bao just e-mailed me to let me know that his tweet was not the original report on this event. Here’s what he said:

“The rumour started on via another twitter post that retweeted from another person that was a trusted source IN mumbai. Later, it was confirmed on video that the police wanted live updates of the operations to be stopped, though they did not mention the hashtag #Mumbai, though they asked media outlets to stop reporting live.

“The purpose of [the MumbaiUpdates] stream was to disseminate info from the CNN-IBN, NDTV and those twittering from Mumbai. With any news reporting and re-reporting it’s possible errors got in the way. I’m sorry if it caused any confusion.

“If anything, even if NDTV and CNN-IBN were still reporting, it is best practice, and I think justified, to stop tweeting and disseminate more information on the operation that could be spread and could be useful to those that we don’t want to let know the info.”

Also, on Twitter he wrote:

“It was confirmed by Mumbai police on video that they don’t want live updates. Don’t think they mentioned Twitter but it is possible that they did. If not, then that is the rumour that evolved, yet still good practice.”

I’m really glad that Bao elaborated on this, and I’d like to say that I think he did a good job with quickly starting the MumbaiUpdates account to aggregate information on the attacks in India.

Parsing out Bao’s response, it looks like we still don’t know the exact source of this rumor’s first report, but apparently it might have come from a Twitter user in Mumbai. He also said it was “confirmed by video” — but we don’t know where that video was, whether that confirmation was an on-camera statement by police, whether someone was relaying on video information they’d gotten first-hand from the police, or whether someone was simply repeating an unsourced rumor on video.

If you have any further information on this (especially specific links, cites, video clips, etc.), please leave that information in a comment to this post.

TAKEAWAY LESSONS

Media is increasingly unmediated. People are communicating directly, on a global level. We don’t all have to be journalists — but we’d all be better off by adopting stronger media-literacy skills.

Specifically, when you hear something that sounds surprising or important, CHECK OR ASK FOR THE PRIMARY SOURCE before you share the news. It’s not hard to do, and it’s a crucial step.

If something just sounds like common sense (like, “Hey, tweeting details of police movements here might endanger police and hostages, so don’t do that!”), there’s no need to appeal to authority (i.e., saying the police said so) to make people listen. A true common-sense message stands on its own — and in social media like Twitter, it could  carry more credibility as a peer recommendation than if positioned vaguely as an order from “above.”

In this case, many, many well-meaning Twitter users simply repeated the alleged government/police request as if it were established fact. This could cause ripple effects in future interactions between the Indian police and the public (in person and online). There’s a power dynamic in play here that deserves attention and care.

Of course, if an important primary source (like a government official) does offer crucial or interesting information, attribute it clearly. Just a like when professional journalists rely on source documents or press releases, transparency counts! It doesn’t take much time to include a link in your tweet, or just say you heard it firsthand.

Rumors and misinformation, even if well-meant, don’t help. In this case, what if the Indian government made no such request regarding Twitter? What if this call for social media restraint actually arose from concerned Twitter users? Actually, that might be far more interesting than a governmental request.

Imagine the precedent that a true government or police request regarding live tweeting might set for possible future police policy or requests during other events, such as political demonstrations, natural disasters, or a food riot.

Finally, if there was a police or government request, it may have had nothing to do with social media. It’s possible that any official move to get people to stop tweeting details of police/military location and actions, or victims’ locations and circumstances may have actually been a side effect of incautious TV coverage. Many people in India and around the world were watching network TV coverage (especially NDTV and IBN) and tweeting what they saw.

I think in this case it would be useful to know whether the police were mainly requesting cooperation from TV news organizations, or from individuals with cell phones. If the latter, that might mark an interesting turning point in the intersection of government, public safety, and free speech.

——————

NOTE: The original version of this post included the following information about my initial assessment of the situation and attempt to get clarification:

So far I can tell, the source for this alleged request by the Indian government is someone based in the U.S. who is monitoring the situation by remote online. He did not cite or link to a primary source for his allegation. It’s unknown whether he got this news firsthand, is repeating what he heard secondhand, or simply made it up. (I’m not saying he would fabricate that info; I’m just saying it’s possible that he could have done so — and that possibility needs to be ruled out before making this news worthy of repeating as fact.) On that basis, I personally would not repeat this rumor as fact.

That’s why, just now I asked Bao about his source: “@mumbaiupdates: What’s the source of your info that Indian government was seeking to curtail tweeting about #mumbai? Link or cite, please?”

UPDATE: I just received this response from Bao:

MumbaiUpdates: “@agahran ~14 hours ago police were asking that the live updates (incl from media) stop. not sure if it is still in effect.”

…Which really doesn’t answer my question. So I just asked for clarification:

@mumbaiupdates My question is, did you get that info 1st-hand? If not, what’s yr source? Also, did the police specifically mention Twitter?

…Soon after Bao transmitted his “PLEASE STOP TWEETING” request, he noted via MumbaiUpdates:

• “Requesting that if live updates are stopped, that when operations are happening, that NDTV and CNN/IBN stop broadcast also. #Mumbai”
• “This is exactly what #Mumbai doesn’t need: a certain tv station following the configuration of the police. That’s what I’m getting at.”
• “SUCCESS – the NDTV website is no longer broadcasting live video from the #Mumbai front. Thank you NDTV.”
• “TV MEDIA, BE RESPONSIBLE. RT @MumbaiAttacks CNN-IBN just gave out a room number from a guest that called them. What are they thinking?”
• “If in #Mumbai pls call +91-120-4341818, or if anywhere email editor@ibnlive.com to tell to stop broadcstng operations info.”

“Journalism requires that stories been constructed, facts be tied together, narratives presented, and context created. In short, journalism is the big picture.

“No one would argue that you can get the pig picture in 140 characters. But what about aggregate tweets? One person over a long time, or many people over a large subject?

“Is Twitter a viable, standalone medium for journalism?”

I think this quesion misses the mark regarding the nature of journalism. It confuses the package with the process. That’s understandable, because in the history of mainstream news, journalists and news organizations have often taken a “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” approach to revealing their own processes. When all the public sees is the product, it’s easy to assume that’s all there is to journalism.

Here’s the comment I left on his post:

Hmmmm…. I do journalism, and I know a lot of journalists, and I’ve seen what Twitter can do. It seems to me that any medium — from Twitter to broadcast news to smoke signals — has potential journalistic uses.

Journalism is a process, not just a product. For many professional journalists and other people who commit acts of journalism, Twitter is already an important part of their journalistic process (i.e., connecting with communities and sources, and gathering information). And it can also be part of the product (i.e., live coverage of events or breaking news, or updates to ongoing stories or issues)

So yes, Twitter CAN be a real news platform. As well as lots of other things. Just like a newspaper can be the Washington Post, the National Enquirer, or a free shopper’s guide. It all depends on what you choose to make of it.

And also: These days, almost no news medium is “standalone.” Every news org has a web presence, and many have a presence in social media, and also in embeddable media.

…That’s my take. What’s yours? Please comment below — or send a Twitter reply to @agahran

That’s what David Cohn is trying to do with Spot.us, which launched yesterday. This project, funded by the Knight News Challenge, is attempting to support local investigative journalism through crowdfunding. Poynter’s Ellyn Angellotti described this project her recent centerpiece feature. Here’s Cohn’s short explanation of how Spot.us will work:

Yes, crowdfunding is a very different approach to journalism. And the unfamiliar always seems potentially dangerous. That’s why most mainstream media articles so far about Spot.us, like this one from the New York Times, include some variation of this caution: “Critics say the idea of using crowdfunding to finance journalism raises some troubling questions. For example, if a neighborhood with an agenda pays for an article, how is that different from a tobacco company backing an article about smoking?”

That’s a valid concern, but I think it must be considered in context…

1. Journalism has always had funding strings attached — often implicit, sometimes explicit. Great journalism has always been subsidized by people, organizations, or sectors with various agendas. And, more often than most journalists would care to admit, this has skewed coverage. This explains why so many newspapers have long offered meaty real estate, auto, travel, and lifestyle sections. It also explains why many news orgs take extra care (including, sometimes, outright avoidance) when covering news that might hurt the economic interests of big advertisers. To navigate this morass, most news orgs have devised processes (including the advertising/editorial firewall) that address internal conflicts of interest — not perfectly, but generally well enough.

2. Could crowdfunding actually work? We don’t know yet — hence, the experiment. And Spot.us is just one experiment; typically several experiments are required to fairly test a hypothesis. Leonard Witt analyzed the prospects of Spot.us according to Clay Shirky’s “three rules of crowdsourcing” test. (See Ch. 11 of Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody.) Witt thinks that so far, Spot.us succeeds on two of Shirky’s criteria: “Is there a plausible promise?” and “Are the tools effective?” Witt says the open question remains on the third: “Is there an acceptable bargain with the users?” I agree: This needs to be a good deal all the way around. That’s why the first few Spot.us projects should offer blatantly obvious value and impact to the Bay Area. Without great content, the model might be unfairly judged.

3. The traditional approach is broken, perhaps beyond repair. It has become glaringly obvious that ad-supported, mass-media news orgs — the key support infrastructure for most investigative and enterprise reporting — are in dire trouble. Alarming numbers of them are shedding staff and cutting costs fast, yet still remain in danger of folding entirely, sooner rather than later. While national-level investigative journalism will probably continue at the major news orgs left standing after this shakeout, local projects are very much in jeopardy. For this reason, more than any other, I think we need experiments like Spot.us. We cannot dismiss a community’s willingness to pay directly for investigative journalism without giving it a serious try.

(NOTE: I originally posted this on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

Earlier this week I wrote about the internal and external obstacles journalism schools face when trying to achieve collaboration with other academic departments (such as computer science). That spurred a pretty interesting discussion in the comments.

This discussion got me thinking: Right now, it’s becoming obvious to many journalists that our field sorely needs lots of top-notch, creative technologists. Developers for whom software is a medium, and an art form. Developers with a deep passion for information, credibility, fairness, usefulness, and free speech.

However, my impression is that, so far, it’s not nearly so obvious to most “geeks” (and I use that term with the utmost affection and respect, as do many geeks themselves) how they might benefit from collaborating with journalists, j-schools, and news organizations.

So if journalists need geeks, but right now they don’t need (or even necessarily want) us as much, the question becomes: What’s in this for the geeks? Why might they want to work with us? Where’s their incentive?…

There is a bright spot of opportunity: Many hardcore geeks (especially those who create free software, where the mantra is “free as in speech, not free as in beer“) share core goals with journalists — especially regarding public service and free speech. That’s a solid launching point.

One of the people whose views on bridging the journo/geek culture gap I respect most is my Tidbits colleague Rich Gordon, from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. He runs a pioneering program that offers scholarships to Medill’s graduate journalism program to people with education and/or expertise in computer programming. (This effort is funded by a Knight News Challenge grant — and they’re seeking a followup grant.)

In his comment to my earlier post on J-schools, Gordon wrote, in part:

“Journalism and computer science partnerships will work only if the two academic departments see these collaborations as equally valuable. In my experience, there are cultural and communication gaps that need to be closed.”

And in this MediaLab post, Gordon elaborated:

“Journalists and technology professionals do have two things in common. First, the best people in both fields really do want to change the world and make it a better place. Second, both believe that people want and deserve access to the best possible information. But there also is a substantial gap between journalism and computer science.

“Too many journalists don’t respect technology development as a creative activity — they think developers should just build stuff they want. Too many technologists don’t respect journalism as an intellectual activity — they think journalists just pump out content for their algorithms to process.

“Too many journalists really don’t like technology change; they blame it for hurting media businesses, threatening their livelihoods and diminishing the quality of news available in local communities. Too many technologists think it’s not their job to worry about the negative impact of technology innovation on media companies and journalism — and when they do think about the consequences, think only about information at the national and global level (which is broader, deeper and more accessible than ever) and not at the local level (where online news ventures rarely do the kind of original reporting that newspapers do).”

…I think that pretty much nails the key mindset differences that define this culture gap. But there’s also the organizational angle. I was discussing this recently with Brian Boyer (a programmer currently in Gordon’s graduate journalism program, and part of Medill’s Crunchberry Project team). He observed that generally news organizations don’t see themselves as tech companies. Yet, he said, geeks “want to work at a place where tech is at the core of the ideas. News orgs need to realize that they’re tech organizations now — they live and die by the Web.”

Given that context, I ask again: What’s in this for the geeks? How can we foster more mutual understanding and respect? What compelling reasons can journalists offer that honor geek values, culture, and goals? How can journalists demonstrate that we can and will respect talented, passionate geeks as full partners (or even potential leaders) in collaborative efforts — not pigeonhole them as IT lackeys?

I’m asking journalists to start from this point: “Journalism: So what?” I’m also asking geeks to speak up about how they view journalists: our efforts, our culture, our goals, and what might make us more appealing as collaborators.

Any ideas? Please comment below.

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