Four Wednesday

1. More layoffs at the Oregonian, though not on the news side. Willamette Week

2. Online journalism lets you feel the pleasures of being a rodent inside a plastic ball. Wired

3. Pandora Radio follows Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn, GroupOn and Twitter into the tech bubble that's not a bubble. NYT Dealbook

4. LA>Forward goes dark because of cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. LA Observed

Schmidt failed to conquer all of the Internet

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt regrets not dominating the social-network side of the Internet - one of the few places one can escape Google's gaze. Wired

Four to break the silence

The blog has been quiet for most of the week, as my new job has required much more of my time. That said, here are some links to get you through Good Friday:

1. Yahoo! News Network helps prove once again that you don't have to best to be first. According to the number crunchers at Poynter, the online network is the top destination for news and information on the web, besting CNN by about 6 million unique hits a month. Poynter

2. Forbes surmises that the unpaid bloggers at Huffington Post provide more value to the site than Arianna Huffington wants to admit. Although they don't drive enough traffic to boost ad revenues in a significant way, they are the reason that Google treats HuffPo as a news site rather than a content farm, Forbes concludes. That means HuffPo stories get ranked alongside the New York Times and Los Angeles Times in a Google News search, rather than pushed down to the Demand Media level. And if you look at the Poynter link above, you'll see Huffington Post is sixth on the list (and partner AOL News is fourth). Forbes

3. As the use of wireless mobile devices increases, the companies that make them want to claim a wider swath of the broadcast spectrum from television broadcasters. The lack of public debate in the process is notable. New York Times

4. The news that Oscar-winning filmmaker Tim Hetherington had died in a mortar attack in Libya came from a fellow photographer's posting on Facebook. Wired

Google wants you to "like" them, too

In response to the Facebookification of the internet, Google has decided to move ahead with a competing ubiquity initiative to keep up with the Facebook "like" button. Google calls it +1 and it sounds just vague enough to fail. But what do I know? Mashable has a description of the new feature here.

We are all urban homesteaders now

The Dervaes family has garnered a good deal of favorable press for their family farm in Northwest Pasadena. But in 2006, the family farm, and its sustainable-living model, became The Dervaes Institute, and the "presiding officer," father Jules Dervaes, got trademark happy. Now the family is garnering bad press for the legal threat letters sent to anyone who uses "urban homestead" or "urban homesteading" without adding a registered trademark symbol - the circled R - and acknowledging the phrases are the institute's intellectual property.

Which is a bizarre tactic for a non-profit that wants good attention. Nevertheless, the institute has sent out 16 such letters, according to its own press release. Here's a key paragraphs from the letter sent to KCRW's Evan Kleiman, host of Good Food:

We realize that your use of Dervaes published words and/or trademarks may have been inadvertent. We are generally able to resolve any such uses without involving our legal counsel. This would require that you update your ____[webpage]____ to properly cite our works. For example, the writings of Jules Dervaes about sustainable living are original protected works in which Dervaes owns exclusive rights. Content from the Dervaes websites, including text and photographs, are also protected works.

To threaten a public radio show - a fellow nonprofit - for using the term "urban homestead" in a blog post promoting a free event seems, frankly, dumb (Good Food did comply and deleted the phrase). Dervaes has argued that these aren't cease and desist letters, but mentioning the possibility of legal action makes them so.

Of course, a Facebook page has sprung up to protest the attempt at word control.

Four in the afternoon

1. Using social media to report on Egypt. Mashable

2. The Burbank Leader has followed through on its pledge to sue the city of Burbank for merit-based bonuses paid to city employees. Burbank Leader

3. The nonprofit California Watch has launched a new partnership with several newspapers across the state. CFIR

4. Facebook is making an aggressive push to get in the comments game on media websites - especially startups. CNET

Al Jazeera and social change in the Middle East

Broadcast news, whatever its allegiances and whatever platform it uses, has great power to organize the collective mind around ideas, ideals and events. While Twitter, Facebook and other social media have been profiled as part of the coverage of protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Iran, not as much has been said about the role of Al Jazeera. The New York Times yesterday published a fascinating piece on just this subject. From the story:

In many ways, it is Al Jazeera’s moment — not only because of the role it has played, but also because the channel has helped to shape a narrative of popular rage against oppressive American-backed Arab governments (and against Israel) ever since its founding 15 years ago. That narrative has long been implicit in the channel’s heavy emphasis on Arab suffering and political crisis, its screaming-match talk shows, even its sensational news banners and swelling orchestral accompaniments. 

“The notion that there is a common struggle across the Arab world is something Al Jazeera helped create,” said Marc Lynch, a professor of Middle East Studies at George Washington University who has written extensively on the Arab news media. “They did not cause these events, but it’s almost impossible to imagine all this happening without Al Jazeera.”

Read the rest here.

If you want to hear Al Jazeera's coverage, the live English-language stream is here.

Four in the afternoon

1. The New York Times readies its tiered paywall for launch in February. NYT

2. Could new Google search protocol weed out Patch? OJR

3. Poynter talks Twitter/Facebook mini-narratives. Poynter

4. Convict monkey escapes from cage. AP

Four in the morning

1. The Pearl Project has completed its investigation into the murder of Daniel Pearl. Key finding: "Twenty-seven men were allegedly involved in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal bureau chief Daniel Pearl, but only four have been charged and convicted." The rest of the report is here: Pearl Project (found via LA Observed)

2. 25 essential writing tips you may or may not agree with. Guardian

3. NPR and its 1.4 million Facebook fans. Nieman Journalism Lab

4. The USC j-school news site Neon Tommy is having an open house "today from 3-4 p.m. in the West Lobby of the Annenberg School. All are welcome."

The anti-social court house network

The Los Angeles Superior Court has a Facebook page, but Facebook and other social media sites - Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube - are blocked on the court house's public WiFi, according to fishbowlLA blogger Pandora Young, who spent the day trying to surf the web as she did her jury service:

Stuck at jury duty in downtown Los Angeles, this fishie is tapped into the web via the courthouse wi-fi. Infuriatingly, they block access to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and a number of other worthwhile websites. ... To the courthouse’s credit, they do not block access to Wikileaks.

LANG likes Facebook, readers not so sure (updated)

Back in October, San Bernardino Sun editor Frank Pine sent around a memo saying the nine papers that make up the Los Angeles Newspaper Group chain would be dropping their Topix commenting system for one that interfaces with Facebook accounts. One of the primary reasons for the change was to chase off trolls, who, shielded by anonymity, often veered in racist invective and personal attack - even when stories had nothing to do with race or a particular person.

The new system requires readers to be logged into Facebook and comments are by default linked to the person's page. This transparency (Facebook's privacy critics might laugh at the word) is supposed to create an environment where comments follow a socially correct etiquette, the argument goes.

The changeover happened on Friday, Dec. 3, with all nine papers publishing an online story describing the system and soliciting feedback. So far, most of the responses have been negative, with readers decrying the loss of anonymity, which they say allows for more honest viewpoints, and criticizing the papers for putting "civility" ahead of free and open debate.

A few readers warned that trolls would simply create fake Facebook accounts and return with the same aggressive madness. Some readers worried about their own privacy, saying they didn't like that comments were automatically posted to their Facebook pages. A few readers said they liked the new system and hoped it would make for more civil discussions.

Change always comes hard in the daily newspaper world. Take away a comic strip and you're likely to swamp every department with cranky phone calls - the kind of reaction news editors would love to come in response to, say, actual news. Still, there are interesting questions surrounding anonymous posts and the question of when an opinion become unacceptable as well as the thought of newspapers aligning themselves with Facebook's private profit machine to promote a kind of civility.

Below, I've rounded up a few of the comments that came in over the weekend.

From an unhappy reader in the Whittier Daily News:

I feel the lack of anonymity restricts the truth, people are more inclined to say what they think when they're not being monitored by a moderator. Sure most of the remarks were rude and bigoted, but some stated hardcore facts and relevance to the post.

A dubious Pasadena Star-News reader:

The anonymous comments were the best part of this paper. 

Compared to the Glendale News Press which requires comments to be approved, Star News had a lively conversation.

1. Why do conversations about the news need to be "civil?"

2. Thanks for defining civility for us all.

Good luck with this.

 An aggressive rejection in the LA Daily News:

I will never participate in your comments again. "Civil" means repression in this context and I will stop reading your FUCKING SWILL. 

 The San Bernardino Sun had a few positive comments, like this one:

I think the new Facebook-based comment feature for The Sun, Daily Facts, and Daily Bulletin is great. The public comment feature on too many online news outlets have been overrun by immature, offensive, and asinine comments from users protected by anonymity.

One Inland Valley Daily Bulletin reader sees a conspiracy:

The Daily Bulletin sold out! This is just a move to protect corrupt politicians and their Shady developer Godfathers. Nothing is worse than when they steal from the tax payers, name libraries after themselves and then have to hear the negative comments of the victimized public. Although alot of mud slinging whent on in the old style of posting, at least it was an open public forum that people could use to express their true sentiments and beliefes , good or bad. This new method of traceable commenting and a lack of true public input will only mean that the cancer of corruption will choke up the wheels of justice and crush the common citizen. Good luck to us all.

Cooks Source got pwned

"Cooks Source steals your wallet then helps you look for it!"
"Cooks Source thought the walkie-talkies were a nice touch in the re-release of E.T."

These are two of hundreds of snark bombs (some funnier than others) lodged at Cooks Source's former Facebook page after the food magazine's publisher, Judith Griggs, told a food blogger that she could lift an entire recipe and republish it for free because "everything on the Internet is in the public domain," the Los Angeles Times reports.

Here's a little more background from the Times story:

Food blogger Monica Gaudio found out that Cooks Source published a piece that she wrote about apple pie, but did not get her permission to do so. Gaudio contacted the publication, half expecting it to be some kind of unfortunate mix-up, and asked for a nominal sum of money as compensation. That's when Griggs -- or someone using her e-mail address -- responded, blasting Gaudio for even raising the issue: "... honestly Monica, the web is considered 'public domain' and you should be happy we just didn't 'lift' your whole article and put someone else's name on it!"

It gets worse. The e-mail continues that not only would Gaudio not be getting paid, but that Gaudio should have paid her for the editing work she had to put into the piece.

This didn't sit well with bloggers and others, who hijacked the Facebook page today. As of this moment, the Cooks Source page has 4,223 "likes" - the overwhelming majority dislike Cooks Source.

LANG likes Facebook, mobile apps

The nine newspapers in the Los Angeles Newspaper Group (LANG) plan to use Facebook's commenting system. Readers will have to sign into their Facebook accounts to leave a message at the bottom of a story. The system should make it easy to offer a comment, as long as the reader has a Facebook account; editors also hope to the system discourages people from leaving nasty comments since Facebook provides a link on the person's Facebook page.

Here's part of the memo from San Bernardino Sun/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin editor Frank Pine:

Just a heads up that we’re planning to make a fairly significant change to all of our websites in the very near future: We’ll be switching our commenting functions from Topix to Facebook. BANG is already doing this on insidebayarea.com, and it’s a substantial improvement over what we have here in that it makes commenting much easier, and by linking the comments to users’ Facebook accounts, it cuts down the more objectionable anonymous comments. While the traditional thinking is that requiring registration or real names with comments reduces traffic, insidebayarea.com has actually seen an increase in traffic and referral traffic from Facebook.

The memo goes on to say LANG is working on mobile phone apps for each of the newspapers and will soon get started on apps for computer tablets.

Facebook and private conversations

Facebook users will now be able to create closed groups within their social networks that should allow them to share information that is too private, political, racy, or whatever for the group as a whole. The change gets at a problem raised yesterday by Judith Donath on "To The Point" about the inability of people on social networks to create nuanced relationships for different contexts - how does one share information with a close friend without offending or "oversharing" with a professional acquaintance? Is a political or religious discussion appropriate to have in front of everyone on your friends' list? What if you want to share party photos with a small group without letting someone who wasn't invited to the party know you attended? Etc. There is an interesting tension here with the idea of being your honest self with everyone, an idea some social media proponents would prefer we pursue - to blow up things like cliques, exclusivity and class hierarchy.

The social and the anti-social networks

Why go to an entertaining movie when you can listen to an informative radio program? On today's "To The Point," we discuss the rise of online social networks, starting with Facebook, and consider the ways our logged-on lives are changing society and culture. With Judith Donath of Harvard's Berkman Center, Walker Smith of The Futures Company, Fred Vogelstein of Wired, and Michael Kaiser of the National Cyber Security Alliance. Listen to the show here.

Facebook localizes the Internet with news searches

Facebook has installed a new feature that lets users search for news updates while on the site. As this post notes, it is not exactly clear how the search results are chosen, but this is expected to be a challenge to Google's efforts to expand into social networking.

Comings and goings

City Hall reporter Dan Abendschein has left the Pasadena Star-News to become editor of AOL's Patch site for Altadena. Abendschein wrote on his Facebook page that he was told to leave the newspaper a week earlier than planned because of an apparent conflict between his new job and his duties at the Star-News - the town of Altadena is in the Star-News coverage area.

Pay with your publicity

The rise of social media could make pay walls for news sites unnecessary, according to Felix Salmon, who argues that advertisers will pay more if they can target their ads to consumers with Twitter or Facebook accounts than consumers who merely subscribe to the site.

From his post:

The fact is that if I sign in to a free site using my Twitter login, I’m actually more valuable to advertisers than if I paid to enter that site. That’s because the list of people I follow on Twitter says a huge amount about me, and a smart media-buying organization can target ads at me which are much more narrowly focused than if all they knew about me was that I was paying to read the Times.

He goes on to say news sites would be smarter to let readers register through their existing social-media accounts, rather than use their own registration systems:

At that point, they’re not “useless tourists” any more: they’re highly valuable and targetable news consumers. And the question of whether or not they’re paying for their news becomes much less important to advertisers. And, therefore, to publishers as well.

The success of such a system depends on whether news sites draw a large enough crowd that advertisers actually do find the information useful. The New York Times probably does, but are there enough Twitter users in Pasadena to make this registration system profitable to the Pasadena Star-News?

(Found via Recovering Journalist)

Out to make friends, or to dominate the grid?

The Facebook/Twitter social divide, as explained by Gene Weingarten, of the Washington Post:

Twitter is about competition. It is about one-upsmanship. It is about an endless race to accumulate devotees, or followers. Note the term, "followers," not "friends." On Facebook, the people who read what you write are your "friends," and they are the same people whom you read. Not on Twitter. On Twitter, there are two distinct groups: Your followers, and people you follow. Some Twitter people (me, for example) have thousands of followers, but follow only a few dozen. The more clever you are, the greater this disparity...

As I long ago pointed out in a tweet, Twitter assigns a Human Worth Value to every participant; this is never actually stated, but it's there for all to see: All you have to do is to subtract the number of people you follow from the number of people who follow you. The higher the number, the greater your Human Worth. If the number is negative, you are pathetic.

Four today

1. On Facebook, just like everywhere else, sex sells. Social Media Scientist

2. Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly wins the Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Reviews award from the James Beard Foundation. Eater

3. How the Hoiles family lost the Orange County Register. OC Register

4. The Arizona Republic goes front page with an editorial against the state's new immigration law. AP