Four today

1. Michael Pollan ("The Omnivore's Dilemma") and Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation") will join KCRW's Evan Kleiman on February 9 at USC to talk about the way we feed ourselves. LA Weekly

2. KOCE has rebranded itself PBS SoCal and plans to expand its staff in Los Angeles as it becomes the main PBS affiliate in Southern California, taking over from the PBS divorcee KCET. Franklin Avenue (via LA Observed)

3. When ordered to turn over information about several users in connection with the federal investigation of Wikipedia, Twitter successfully challenged the court's gag order and told the subjects of the investigation what had happened. Wired

4. Media organizations need to update their codes of ethics to keep up with the times. Poynter

How much time are you wasting?

A lot, according to Nieman Journalism Lab and Clay Shirky. So if you think you'll never find the time to write that novel, take a minute to read about what you might cut out here.

Four today

1. Aggressive conservative bloggers get Nina Totenberg's Christmas comment exactly backwards. But we all know what those NPR really people think, so why bother asking? WaPo

2. They call him Mr. Sunday? Amazon

3. Perhaps you've seen the cryptic commercials for RT.com and wondered what the hell it was, but were afraid to go to the website for fear of what might pop up. Well, it's a Russian news service, formerly known as Russia Today. Wikipedia

4. Facebook update of the day comes from Joe Mathews of the New America Foundation: "...believes it's the sixth-day weather story that separates the pros from the amateurs."

Japanese like newspapers

The six largest newspapers, by circulation, are in Japan. USA Today, America's most widely circulated paper, is 13th on the list.

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

Four in the morning

1. You might want to curb your sexting while at work, thanks to a unanimous ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court. LAT

2. Get to know the semantic web - before it gets to know you. Nieman Journalism Lab

3. Faced with a lagging number of contributors, Wikipedia plans to change protocals for editing "sensitive" articles. NetworkWorld

4. The L.A. Press Club bets on celebrities. fishbowlLA

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?

The more things change....

In what seems to be a case of creeping professionalism, Wikipedia plans to impose an editorial review process before information can be published about living people. Michael Snow, chairman of the Wikipedia board, told the New York Times:

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks ... There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”

The decision comes in response to several well publicized hoaxes - but also in recognition of Wikipedia's increasing influence as a primary online source. Again, from the Times:

The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.

-snip-

Under the current system, it is not difficult to insert false information into a Wikipedia entry, at least for a short time. In March, for example, a 22-year-old Irish student planted a false quotation attributed to the French composer Maurice Jarre shortly after Mr. Jarre’s death. It was promptly included in obituaries about Mr. Jarre in several newspapers, including The Guardian and The Independent in Britain. And on Jan. 20, vandals changed the entries for two ailing senators, Edward M. Kennedy and Robert C. Byrd, to report falsely that they had died.

Four today

1. The head of Wikipedia agreed to suppress information about the kidnapping of New York Times reporter David Rohde by Taliban mercenaries. NYT

2. In the old days, non-staffers hired on an interim basis to produce news stories were called freelancers. Now we call them "citizen" journalists so that we can pay them even less. Live Citizen is the latest to get into the act. The start-up is advertising for freelancers, er, citizens to produce do-it-yourself newscasts - up to five a week - for the site. Live Citizen will pay a fee per story on rotating three-month contracts. The only requirement is that stories be "relevant and intriguing." Berkeley's J-Jobs

3. The sluggish performance of some online news shortly after news of Michael Jackson's death has some scratching their heads about whether the Internet can handle the traffic when big, breaking stories hit (whether you consider Jackson's death big, breaking news is another debate). A new study says third-party advertising on websites, not internal content, may be to blame. Data Center Knowledge

4. YouTube is teaching people how to be reporters. YouTube Reporters' Center

Four in the morning

1. Forget about anti-trust and collusion and unworkable online subscription models - the Associated Press could be the Google News for newspapers. Temple Talk (via Romenesko)

2. The geography of job losses - and gains. Tipstrategies

3. A really first draft of history: Wikipedia updates of current events make Google News. Nieman Lab

4. Chinese rescue workers have recovered the bodies of two American climbers killed in an avalanche while trying to scale Mt. Edgar in Sichuan Province. The search continues for Lancaster native Micah Dash. Watershed News

The 24-hour diplomacy cycle

Did Google make our foreign policy stupid?

In an interview this morning, Former Sec. of State Colin Powell told CNN's Fareed Zakaria that he brought the State Department into the "electronic age" when he bought 44,000 computers and encouraged his staff to rely more on websites than books to do their jobs.

From the transcript:

And I used to tell them, get rid of all the books in your office. You don't need them anymore, as long as you have a couple of search engines and Wikipedia. And then I challenged my people to try to keep up with Wikipedia in terms of changes in countries. That was a challenge.

But I believe the electronic age has fundamentally changed the way in which we do business in every aspect of human life, but in diplomacy and politics as well -- instantaneous transmission of information, instantaneous knowledge.

As I like to say, we've gone from a lunar world where you measured everything in days, weeks and months, to a transactional world where every single transaction has to be put into your information system, into your decision system.

A State Department without the Internet and computer-literate staff would be ridiculous. But so is a State Department that stops referencing the collective wisdom of books in favor of the short-hand history of Wikipedia.