Great new IP & Fair Use comic by Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain:
Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic’s heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean ‘Rights Monster’ – all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.
– Brandt Goldstein, The Wall Street Journal online
There’s not much to laugh about in European op-ed sections just now. The decision by newspapers in Denmark, Norway, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary and Spain to publish cartoons considered blasphemous by Muslims has the potential to turn into the first skirmishes of a renewed culture war, to morph into the clash of civilisations hoped for by extremists – but, insert hope contingent on the beneficence of any transrational belief system you fancy here, the mayhem seen yesterday and today may resolve into a relatively civilised spat over free speech.
What happens next largely depends on what the newspapers do next.
Germany’s right-leaning Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calls for “Europe-wide solidarity”:
Religious fundamentalists who do not respect the difference between satire and blasphemy have a problem not only with Denmark but with the entire western world.
– via the Guardian
However, rather than pushing the limits of freedom of speech, British newspapers urge a policy of restraint.
The right-leaning Daily Telegraph refuses to publish the cartoons “in keeping with British values of tolerance and respect for the feelings of others”. It doesn’t want to “cause gratuitous offence”.
However, it accepts that the “right to offend within the law” remains crucial to the free speech enjoyed in the UK. It notes:
Those Muslims who cannot tolerate the openness and robustness of intellectual debate in the West have perhaps chosen to live in the wrong culture.
Of course, this begs a number of questions: just how open and robust is intellectual debate in the West; what and where exactly is the “West” these days; isn’t culture dynamic, changing over time; and, crucially, how much of a danger are European Muslims really to the ongoing march of liberal reason? European Muslims hardly constitute a coherent bloc. They tend to come from weak and marginalised groups which lack any great material or normative powers. Their representatives have generally condemned terrorist attacks.
If there is a danger to liberty, it comes from those already loaded with power and ready to exploit that power to secure even more power, surely? Balancing liberty against security and finding security lacking, governments have grabbed as much power as possible since 9/11. Smile you’re on a CCTV camera now and forever.
Ben Macintyre in the Times suggests that context decides the limits of free speech. The cartoons may have been testing the limits of free speech originally; today, they may amount to “inflammatory provocation”. What’s happening now is an “unnecessary battle”:
… both sides deliberately whipping up the furore, one side issuing furious death threats and demanding apologies and censorship, the other fuelling the flame by publishing the images in a way designed to stoke maximum anger….
– Times
But was the battle ever necessary? Or is what’s going on in Europe an example of the darker side of democracy?
The Guardian agrees that freedom of speech is only absolute in theory, that the wider context determines its limits. In the case of the cartoons, what needs to be appreciated is the political situation in Denmark, the power of the anti-immigrant party backing Denmark’s centre-right government.
– Guardian
The Independent argues that while the editor of France Soir had the right to reprint the cartoons, “in doing so he was throwing petrol on the flames of a fire that shows every sign of turning into an international conflagration.”
It adds:
The media have responsibilities as well as rights. There is a deceptive borderline between controversial and irresponsible journalism. Especially in these troubled times, we all must take care that it is not crossed.
I didn’t see any Westerners at all until my second day, when I contacted the acting bureau chief for an American paper who was staying in my hotel. As we were discussing the state of reporting in Baghdad and Iraq in general, he told me that I was a little late to the game. These days, more American reporters are leaving Iraq than arriving. In large part, for the U.S. press, “The party’s pretty much over.”
– Paul McLeary, embedded reporter, Iraq
We’re supposed to be the voice of the people, the truth-tellers and the ruler of accountability. But the blast walls between journalists in Iraq and the rest of the country grow higher as fear outweighs responsibility. I’m always told that no story is worth your life.
– Leila Fadel reported for the Knight Ridder Baghdad bureau
Governments around the world are failing to prevent the murder and assassination of journalists, says the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ):
The truth is that even democratic governments turn a blind eye to the crisis of violence against media… In Iraq, where media people hardly dare walk the streets, there are 18 cases of unexplained killings of journalists and media staff by United States soldiers. Justice demands that these deaths are properly investigated. If not, speculation about military targeting of journalists will persist.
“All that is newspaper melts…” – Scott Rosenberg on the end of print newspapers:
… the same process that ate their classified income is going to affect [newspaper owners’] other revenue streams. Just as classifieds went from costly to free, the display advertising will begin to dry up, as youth-seeking national advertisers follow their targets to the online world. And the very core of the newspaper product, the professional news report, is under siege, thanks to a myriad of missteps in the newsrooms and the rise of amateur (in the best sense), free alternatives.
… the only kinds of reporting and writing that will survive are those that individual entrepreneurs can find sponsors for, or those done by people who are financially independent or who work for nothing in their spare time.
It sounds like a mission impossible: set up a progressive publication, one which doesn’t shirk from flicking the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, and don’t worry if the money doesn’t immediately roll in.
Robert Scheer, former columnist at the LA Times, sacked, he says, because of his opposition to the Iraq War, is trying to do exactly this. Truthdig is “an attempt to put out a good solid magazine of substance that has a progressive point of view.” Rather than competing with old media, he aims to produce “evergreen” copy giving readers in-depth analyses on current news stories. How to keep the “webzine” financially afloat? No get rich scheme, Truthdig will eventually depend on ad revenue as well as sponsorship for specific projects.
– Online Journalism Review
Two further suggestions from Joe Mathewson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, banker and corporate lawyer. Newspapers benefit our civic health in ways which far outstrip the profits they bring to their investors. Simple tax legislation could make it easier for newspaper owners to convert ailing businesses into not-for-profit companies, into tax deductible gifts. Or newspapers could follow the US real estate investment trust model: distribute all profits to shareholders and get an exemption from federal taxes.
– Editor and Publisher
Spurred on by Google’s “clever new products”, Washington Post chairman Don Graham sees an electronic future ahead for news:
This year for the first time I have come to believe that we will be able to tell you about certain subjects better on the Internet than we will be able to in print.
It’s a real dark night of the soul for journalists. Feel their pain. The open season on media professionals shows no sign of stopping. Three o’clock in the morning and what’s up with journalists?
Take these three takes:
First, their business values make little sense, according to Huntley Paton, publisher of the Dallas Business Journal. When daily newspapers obsess over celebs and junk TV, they may as well be shining a light on their competition. And their liberal bias does them little good: by mocking “community standards”, they may as well be waving goodbye to their small-town readers. The solution? Get back to providing local information and original reporting.
– Dallas Business Journal
Second, their skills set is full of holes, according to Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of MAKE. He tracks the journalism mash-up, the positive feedback loop of modern journalism: how PR missives form the headlines which go on to form the common sense for reporters. There’s no conspiracy here. It’s just that too many journalists are sloppy and lazy and suffer from a herd mentality. They need a story to be either up or down; they can never just say that “nobody knows.” They swallow numbers in the hope of spraying their works with a crud of credibility.
– Boing Boing
Third, they tend to get blinded by disruptive technology, according to Terry Heaton, media consultant. Audiences are moving to an unbundled world – they want total control over their media items. Old-style media companies should stop thinking of themselves as “one-dimensional deliverers of bundled media.”
– Digital Journalist
While Paton is way off on the liberal charge, he’s right about dumbing down. It’s a race to the gutter. Newspapers can’t win that race against TV or magazines. There’s a certain threshold below which they can’t descend without becoming something other than newspapers, without losing sight of their role in the functioning of a healthy democracy.
Dougherty gets the process, the social construction of the way the media sees things, exactly right. But pity the poor shop-floor hack. Journalists work within wider structures. Perhaps it’s a case of take the corporate shilling, assume a corporate sense of social (ir)responsibility. Still, pity the poor shop-floor hack.
Similarly, Heaton, at least here, leaves out the wider context. His prescription may sort out the bottom line. Extract social relationships from already existing eyeballs and add value to them in the form of new media services to which advertisers are likely to flock. Paton’s point then becomes even more important for new media. Sure, if your values are out of kilter with your readers, you’ve got a potential advertising revenue hemorrhage ahead. But if your business model rests absolutely on a community of common interests, get out of kilter with that community and watch your business immediately crash and burn.
Looming over all these takes? The colossus holding his notebook and pen in the fist of his power salute. Here come the bloggers, left and right, on cue, tapping out their tales about the inadequacies of the mainstream media (MSM), over the barricades, the barriers to entry, scrambling up the giant. And look at that giant fall. Crash.
All his past glories won’t stop Woodward from looking like one of the President’s men.
At an in-house pow-wow last month looking at what’s next for the Guardian following its shrink from broadsheet to Berliner, editor Alan Rusbridger, chatting to blogger and Guardian Unlimited columnist Jeff Jarvis, downplayed the newspaper’s gleaming new printing presses.
They may be the last presses we ever own.
– Alan Rusbridger, Buzzmachine
Way to go, says Jarvis. While US newspapers fret about their problems – staff layoffs, increased competition, less revenue, lower stocks, general fear and loathing, European papers are reaching out to zeros and ones.
Like their European counterparts, US newspaper folk should seize the digital day. Newspapers need to become places rather than things. The trick is to create online communities which can then be tapped for oodles of advertising revenue.
– Buzzmachine
