By Edward Wasserman
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

As traditional news outfits migrate online to become dot-coms, one of their biggest headaches is how to adapt to the sprawling new frontier of public comment.

In the pre-Internet world of TV and newspapers, public comment wasn’t a problem. Broadcast news didn’t have any—aside from the weekly guest spot, usually some hapless civic association president reading from a prompter and staring terrified into the camera. Papers had their letters pages, but allowed only enough space for a few dozen a week, and they were generally written with care and were easy to prune for taste and diction.

Things were nicely under control.

But on the Internet, public comment isn’t kitchen table talk, it’s saloon brawl. Postings are sharp and rough-and-tumble. Harsh and derisive exchanges are common. So are personal attacks. Chat rooms and message boards routinely allow people to post comments anonymously. Only when postings are so egregious, so outrageous, racist or vile that other participants cough up hairballs do managers strike the comments and banish the authors.

That’s the cyber pond that traditional news organizations are diving into. They understand that their own futures hinge on re-establishing online the central role in civic life that they’ve played offline. So they are eager to host forums where people in the communities they serve go first to offer comment.

What about taste, civility?

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—Edward Wasserman

By Alex Rodriguez
Chicago Tribune (MCT)

SYKTYVKAR, Russia—Savva Terentyev doesn’t hide his disdain for police. The anger threading through a rant he posted on a friend’s blog made that clear. Bad cops, the young Russian songwriter wrote, should be taken to this city’s downtown plaza and burned alive.

Terentyev meant his remarks for a small circle of friends who vent and muse on each other’s blogs. He had no idea local police were watching.

The blog on which Terentyev posted his message was run by Boris Suranov, a Syktyvkar journalist whose newspaper had irked local authorities. Police were regularly checking entries on the blog when they came across Terentyev’s posting.

Terentyev, who will be tried this week on charges of inciting hatred and faces up to two years in prison, says he never dreamed his Web comments_no matter how coarse—could constitute a crime.

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—Alex Rodriguez

The world is changing before our eyes. Fidel Castro has brought his rule to an end in Cuba. President Musharraf is accepting defeat in elections in Pakistan. Kosovo has declared its independence. The International Herald Tribune has mused about Kosovo’s future by drawing comparisons with the world’s other tiny, impoverished, newly free state, East Timor, whose President, Jose Ramos Horta, remains seriously ill in a hospital in Darwin in Australia after what seems to have been a failed kidnap attempt.

The large media organizations, who for the last century have explained the world to us, wherever we are, are making further cuts to their news gathering operations. The New York Times is cutting one hundred news staff.

The Times has 1,332 newsroom employees, the largest number in its history; no other American newspaper has more than about 900. There were scattered buyouts and job eliminations in The Times’ newsroom in recent years, but the overall number continued to rise, largely because of the growth of its Internet operations…

The Times Company has made significant cuts in the newsrooms of some of its other properties, including The Boston Globe, as well as in non-news operations. Company executives say the overall head count is 3.8 percent lower than it was a year ago.

But with the industry’s economic picture worsening, the company is under increased pressure from shareholders — notably two hedge funds that recently bought almost 10 percent of the common stock — to do something dramatic to improve its bottom line.

More disturbing are editorial changes being suggested by Los Angeles Times publisher, David Hiller, who, along with another round of staff cuts, is seeking to further collapse the walls between editorial and advertising.

Top Times executives have discussed letting marketing executives control the monthly Sunday magazine, rather than leaving it to editors, though Mr. Hiller says no decisions about that have been made. The idea touches on the traditional tension in journalism, between profiting as a business and making independent judgments about what information to deliver, without concern for advertisers’ interests.

The costs of maintaining foreign bureaus and extensive newsdesks have contributed to their demise. The Frontline Club in London grew out of the ashes of the Frontline Television News Agency, in London.

The Frontline Club opened its doors soon after the Frontline Television News agency closed down. Frontline TV was created over Christmas lunch in the midst of the chaos and confusion of the Romanian revolution. It went on to become a key player in the independent fringe of television newsgathering. The Club was set up by the surviving members of the original team of maverick cameramen, and dedicated to the memory of friends and colleagues who lost their lives gathering news and images from the world’s conflict zones. This history is reflected throughout the building in our changing photographic exhibitions. The current War and Protest exhibition is made up of iconic black and white from some of the world’s finest photographers, including the legendary Robert Capa. The Club quickly became a centre for a diverse group of people united by their passion for quality journalism and dedication to ensuring that stories that fade from headlines are kept in sharp focus. It exists to promote freedom of expression and support journalists, cameramen and photographers who risk their lives in the course of their work.

A recent entry on the Frontline blog discusses a model for a new kind of foreign correspondent, with reliable, portable technology. It’s a fascinating, inspiring assessment of the future of reporting, from economic and editorial perspectives, well studded with links to background and further reading.

—Jillian Burt

by Edward Wasserman
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

Beneath the somber tales of shrinking revenues and staff cuts is an even more somber reality about the news business: The nearly 2-century-old marriage between consumer advertising and journalism is on the rocks.

In the United States the union dates from the advent of the penny press in the 1830s, when newspaper owners realized that by slashing what they charged readers they could send their circulations soaring and get rich off advertising sales. News found a durable source of funding, and manufacturers hitched a ride into the homes of the burgeoning masses of American consumers.

That era is now ending, not because the public no longer needs news or because people mistrust news any more than they always have - but because new technologies are churning out better ways to reach customers who are shopping for cars, jobs or homes.

The result is a calamity for the news business. Newspapers get the greatest attention, but all news media are being shaken hard, and the luxuriant growth of online news initiatives shouldn’t be mistaken for a rebirth: Most of those sites are still burning through their start-up money and haven’t figured out how to sustain themselves except by praying to advertisers who, it seems plain, will never be back with anything like the money they once lavished on news.

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—Edward Wasserman

By Jodi S. Cohen and Tara Malone
Chicago Tribune (MCT)

Journalists love to debate the use of anonymous sources, but the discussion this week at Northwestern University’s journalism school is no hypothetical: the texts are published columns by the controversial dean of the school, John Lavine.

Earlier this week, a columnist for The Daily Northwestern, a student newspaper, questioned the use of anonymous quotes in two introductory letters Lavine wrote last year for the Medill alumni magazine.

“I sure felt good about this class. It is one of the best I’ve taken,” reads part of one quotation, which, Lavine wrote, “a Medill junior told me.”

The unnamed student appears to be talking about a class in which students developed “a fully integrated marketing program,” an emphasis which Lavine has promoted over the protest of some alumni and students.

In the same piece, Lavine quotes “one sophomore” who glowingly praises a new reporting program, concluding, “This is the most exciting my education has been.”

At Medill, one of the country’s premier journalism schools, training in the careful use of unnamed sources is emphasized.

Professors routinely require students to submit names and contact information for every person quoted in their articles, a guard against fabrication.

So Lavine’s use of anonymous quotes raised the suspicions of David Spett, a Medill senior and Daily Northwestern columnist.

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—Jodi S. Cohen and Tara Malone

Photo by Adam Graham

Louis Braille’s genius was in realising that reading is something that’s done in the brain, the mind and the heart, that the eyes see or fingers feel the letters but the mind brings them to life. He also understood, as Gutenberg did before him, that his technology allowed people to have a private, contemplative relationship with the written word. In some ways technology is no friend to the visually impaired person. It may be convenient to turn printed words into sound, and books may be simpler to produce and make more titles available, but something crucial is lost if we can’t turn our ingenuity towards keeping braille alive, and even advancing it. A simple, refreshable book reader for sighted people has been difficult enough to produce, but more valuable than that, and infinitely more useful to society, would be a smart, ecologically sound refreshable braille device.

Colors magazine has devoted an entire issue to blind and visually impaired people. They profile a blind rapper from Texas.

I’m the only blind rapper I know, but I still come and go, flip, screw, get down and get around just like I could see. Bein’ blind is just an inconvenience and I carry myself like I can see. People been telling me, “Man, you got killer flows” and it’s my turn next. I’m getting ready for a 40-city tour and I’m lookin’ for a Grammy. You know my kids need some good food to chew on.

I don’t rap about bein’ blind. Not that I’m ashamed or anything but I don’t want no sympathy claps and I don’t want to use my blindness as a stepping stone. I want my music to represent me. I want people to walk away from my
show wondering to themselves, ‘Was dat cat blind?’

And eighteen year old Ricardo Steimetz, who said: “I had no interest in birds. Then I went blind.”

My favourite birds are the ones that sing the most. I guess that makes sense, because I build my relationship with them through sound. The birds that don’t sing are graceless. At the moment my favourite birds are the blue ones. Some don’t sing when their feathers are molting, or when they get sick with fever or something. They become silent. Spring is the best time of the year for birds, it’s when they sing the most. In winter only a few of them sing, but it’s ok, it’s a cycle.

The blog Search and Destroy has several photographs of pages from the blindness issue of Colors.

Braille Without Borders began as a project in Tibet in 1998. The website Climbing Blind has a story about the origins of Braille Without Borders.

Run by Sabriye Tenberken and her Dutch partner, Paul Kronenberg, instruct about 30 Tibetan students who are blind. They teach them to navigate independently with their canes through the chaos of Lhasa, to weave along narrow streets through moving cars and mopeds, around construction sites never protected, and over random holes in the streets, several meters deep, filled with dirty water and excrement. They’re also taught Tibetan Braille and how to use computers with voice synthesizers.  Most importantly, she instills in her students a sense of self-respect and hope. Sabriye funds her center on a shoestring budget, only recently having the funds to buy the school building with an advance from her newly released book, My Path Leads to Tibet It is a small international development organisation which aims to create training programs and Braille book printing houses for blind and visual impaired people. Braille is used as the basic tool to impart literacy to blind people. “Without Borders” on one hand means BWB can work anywhere in the world, but more important BWB doesn’t want to set any borders for blind people.

There is also now a project in Kerala in India.
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—Jillian Burt