Getting detained in Cairo

Andrew Lee Butters of Time magazine writes about how he got punched and threatened at a makeshift checkpoint on the way into Cairo's Tahrir Square, where the bulk of the protesters are encamped. He's one of dozens of reporters being detained or roughed up by thugs, some of whom are believed to be taking orders from the government.

An excerpt from Butters' post:

More young men arrived, and they punched and frog-marched me to a wall where there were several others being held by the crowd, including a pair of Russian journalists, a Lebanese video crew, a kid who had been caught with anti-Mubarak signs, men with Islamic-style beards, and a poor Nigerian house cleaner who had left home without a passport and whom one raving brute in the crowd accused of being a drug dealer. “Mubarak good, the Egyptian system good!” he shouted at us, though it was hard to see from his decaying teeth, tattered clothes, and yellowed toenails that the Egyptian system had done him much good.

Four today

1. Reuters is looking for News Ninjas to do New & Cool stuff. Context: Forge (via Nieman Journalism Lab)

2. The Society of Environmental Journalists awarded Charles Duhigg of the New York Times first place for his woefully under-read series on toxic water. SEJ (via Romenesko)

3. Google and Verizon are for net neutrality ... sort of. Time

4. If you ate paste in first grade, you're probably eating paste now. Gawker

Building walls around Time

Online readers will now only see abridged articles on the Time magazine website, unless they have a subscription of the iPad app, Peter Kafka at All Things Digital reports. Kafka doesn't think much of the paywall strategy:

Nearly every magazine publisher with a substantial Web site swears that their online audience is different than their print readers. And their sites are certainly designed that way: They’re supposed to attract twitchy Web surfers who want to read about something that happened today, not seven days ago.


So if that’s the case, what the’s real downside in keeping the magazine stuff free? Maybe that online/offline split isn’t as real as we’ve been told.

Four in the morning

1. Not sure if this is a consequence of the closure of the Orange County printing plant, but the Los Angeles Times got delivered late today in parts of L.A. and Orange County due to problems with its remaining presses. LAT

2. The iPad revolution continue to revolve, with Time magazine's latest app getting the Gizmodo staff all googly eyed. Gizmodo

3.Making Twitter shorter. New Yorker

4. (Self-promotion alert) On today's "To The Point," Wikipedia is more popular than ever but fewer people are contributing - that's led to an interesting change in policy. TTP

The "like" revolution

Facebook users probably have noticed the recent explosion of "like" buttons on various Facebook pages, and now a new "like" plugin is popping up on other media sites. When clicked, the reader's interest in whatever he's reading or seeing will be automatically posted to his personal Facebook page.

From Time:

Facebook wants every page on the Web to have a "like" button, which they released at the conference. Each time you indicate you like something, that information is fed back to Facebook and then to the website you're on. Enough of your friends like the same restaurant on Yelp? You'll see that on Yelp.com and when you login to Facebook. Like this article? Click the like button on it and your friends may see your recommendation when they come to time.com.

What you "like" will also be shared with other databases, giving the web a way to read your preferences. This, of course, raises concerns about privacy. From the Atlantic:

Facebook will allow website developers to collect and use our information when we connect to a site. When I press the "like" button, that goes into a social clearinghouse of information. Other sites can see the articles I like on CNN, the music I like on Pandora, the food I like on Yelp ... and that's in addition to any information I make public on my Facebook profile. The Facebook team calls this application "Open Graph." You can call it the future of marketing.

Given Facebook's preeminent popularity online, this web within the Web could have Google-like implications for how information is shared and online ad dollars flow.

And since every website wants to be liked, expect to be inundated with overtures to share your attention and approval... Like this one I just got in my email box from ABC News: "Like ABCNews.com? Like Facebook? Check out our new integration: http://bit.ly/bEmqQ8"

All the world is a popularity contest.

Making those dollars

The top 10 businesses on the Fortune 500 list are:

Wal-Mart
Exxon Mobil
Chevron
General Electric
Bank of America Corp.
ConocoPhillips
AT&T
Ford Motor
J.P Morgan Chase & Co.
Hewlett-Packard

As you ponder the billions of dollars they've made during the Great Recession, also consider this:

In 2009, the Fortune 500 shed 821,000 jobs, the biggest loss in its history -- almost 3.2% of its payroll.

And this:

The star of 2009 is undoubtedly health care. The sector's earnings jumped to an all-time high of $92 billion, placing it second behind tech at $94 billion.

Tumulty jumps to Washington Post

Karen Tumulty will leave her job as national political correspondent for Time magazine, where she's led coverage of health care reform, to become the national political correspondent for the Washington Post. Politico

Gellman moves to Time

Pulitzer Prize-winner Barton Gellman, author of "Angler," is leaving the Washington Post for a job at Time magazine. Poynter

Four in the morning

1. More eager gossip about Apple's iTablet - for journo-techs, this is the second coming. Time

2. The biggest loser in MediaNews Group's bankruptcy? Hearst Corp. Alan Mutter

3. LA Magazine profiles longtime KCRW general manager Ruth Seymour, who's stepping down in February. LAmag

4. Analyzing the collapse of the Washington Post. New Republic

Four in the morning

1. LA Observed gets a makeover. LAO

2. Dallas Morning News editor endorses "integrating" business and news: "I'm pretty much a traditionalist about journalism, but I'm also a capitalist." DMN

3. The cost to see Sarah Palin at a Tea Party? $349 + travel and lodging. TPN

4. Punditry: All the political spoils without all the responsibility. Time

Four in the morning

1. Remember when Dean Singleton said that it no longer mattered "whether your [news] desk is down the hall or around the world"? Well, more and more newspaper owners find themselves in agreement as they make plans to outsource their news desk functions. Alan Mutter

2. The New York Times plans to lay off as many as 26 editorial employees in the coming days to reach its goal of eliminating 100 positions - 76 newsroom staffers agreed to take buyouts. NY Post

3. The metro editor for the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group reviews the "Climategate" controversy and concludes that global warming is a hoax. SGV Tribune *(McClatchy has a primer on "Climategate" here.)

4. Time magazine and CNNMoney "de-clutter" their web pages to make room for bigger ads and cross promotion: "Time.com is also pushing its content partners like Huffington Post, AOL, and others in a prominent box of current headlines in the right rail of the page." min online

Four in the morning

1. Caught on tape: A spokesman for Attorney General Jerry Brown's office admits to surreptitiously taping conversation with reporters when questioned by the San Francisco Chronicle. Taping a phone conversation without informing the other party is illegal in California. Now the secret recordings the AG's office made could become evidence of a crime. Chronicle

2. Pep talk: After subjecting its papers to severe layoffs, Gannett company comes back with mission statement aimed at getting that old newsroom swagger back. The statement itself is pretty straightforward stuff for shrinking papers - emphasize local watchdog reporting, use online to break stories, try to get young people to read, be helpful to readers, etc. Editor and Publisher

3. Citizen shield law: The Senate version of the reporters' shield law would protect both professional and citizen journalists; the House version would cover only for the pros. AP

4. Layoff Time: Time Inc. plans to layoff or buyout about 540 employees and the news department - Time, Fortune, Money and Sports Ilustrated magazines - is expected to take the hardest hit. NY Post

A California pick me up

For the last year, California has been portrayed as a broken state. Fast-growing debt, high unemployment, irreconcilable demands for more services and lower taxes, an intractable budget, and an impotent state government. Waterless, traffic jammed and on fire. Time magazine's Michael Grunwald suggests that only those who have it so good could whine so loudly:

Ignore the California whinery. It's still a dream state. In fact, the pioneering megastate that gave us microchips, freeways, blue jeans, tax revolts, extreme sports, energy efficiency, health clubs, Google searches, Craigslist, iPhones and the Hollywood vision of success is still the cutting edge of the American future — economically, environmentally, demographically, culturally and maybe politically. It's the greenest and most diverse state, the most globalized in general and most Asia-oriented in particular at a time when the world is heading in all those directions. It's also an unparalleled engine of innovation, the mecca of high tech, biotech and now clean tech. In 2008, California's wipeout economy attracted more venture capital than the rest of the nation combined. Somehow its supposedly hostile business climate has nurtured Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Facebook, Twitter, Disney, Cisco, Intel, eBay, YouTube, MySpace, the Gap and countless other companies that drive the way we live. ...

"In the depths of the breakdown, you can see the next narrative," says Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution's metropolitan-policy program. "It's California. The next economy is already in place there, and it's amazing."

The complete article is here.

Wikipedia edits

Last month, the New York Times reported that the board overseeing Wikipedia would impose sweeping new rules to prevent erroneous edits on the pages of living people, especially those with high profiles.

Time reports today that the story was wrong. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told the magazine that the changes being contemplated are minimal, and in fact look a lot like the old rules:

Wikipedia's ruling body of volunteers never decided to impose restrictions on all articles about living people. Instead, the site will adopt "flagged protection" — the new method for requiring editorial approval before changes to Wikipedia go up — for a small number of articles, most likely on a case-by-case basis.

So the question is: Did the New York Times get the story wrong? Or is there a disagreement within the Wikipedia ranks about what kinds of rules need to be adopted?

Four in the evening

1. The Washington Post reaffirms its allegiance to impartial journalism with a new social media policy. WaPo

2. Tehran Bureau has teamed up with Frontline to expand coverage of Iran. NYT

3. Read a banned book, it'll be good for your soul. Scott Martelle

4. Given the challenges we face in Afghanistan, it's time to take a closer look at Yemen. Time

The audicity of trusting the reader

In the age of sloppily swung sledgehammers, scalpels are passé.

Four today

1. The camera always adds a few pounds... PolitiFact

2. The profit in shame... Time

3. Newspapers go upside putting ad revenue ahead of circulation... The Wrap

4. "The Rush To Be Wrong"...Jamie McIntyre