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2013-05-16 14:30:24 (1 comments, 9 reshares, 6 +1s)

This week I started releasing a cycle of work that began 14 years ago when I read my first article about "open source journalism." I thought then, and still believe, that the craft of beat reporting would be changed by the discovery that, as Dan Gillmor put it in 1999, "my readers know more than I do." That, plus the frictionless ease by which information and expertise from knowledgable users could flow in would make possible a different kind of beat coverage. 

A lot has happened since I came to that conclusion 14 years ago: The rise of blogging after 2000, which changed the READ ONLY web into Read/Write. The rise of social after 2007, which changed the web into read/writer/share. The routine use of networked methods in journalism, as with finding sources over Twitter or Facebook. 

But we still haven't seen the networked beat emerge in full form yet, and thati... more »

2013-03-24 23:34:57 (42 comments, 52 reshares, 157 +1s)

2013-01-20 04:08:30 (8 comments, 9 reshares, 24 +1s)

The Atlantic magazine made a fairly large mistake recently when it ran some "sponsor content" from the Church of Scientology. What ran was something resembling an article from the Church about all the great things going on there. The Atlantic initially moderated the comments in a way that seemed to be cheerleading for the Church. Then when people around the web noticed they took the article down, plainly said "we goofed," and added that they would be conducting a review of what happened. (All were good moves.) That review was evidently completed, and the results were summarized in a memo that became public today. I've linked to it.

I see three problems. 

One: why is this a memo to staff (which was leaked) rather than a public statement by The Atlantic about what went wrong with the Scientology deal? I'd love to know. Seems to me there are almost no... more »

2013-01-16 23:54:41 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 24 +1s)

I agree with Glenn Greenwald that we need an investigation of the conduct of Federal prosecutors Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann in the Aaron Swartz case. I believe the right point of pressure is the Inspector General's office of the Department of Justice, but it is also a good thing that Congress is getting involved.

The victimized institution in the case, the JSTOR service, said it saw no point in prosecuting Swartz for a felony. As far as it was concerned, the case was closed when Swartz returned the data he downloaded from the MIT network.

The investigation should begin there. Why did the US Attorney for the Massachusetts district disagree? Also important, in my view: What principle of proportionality was in play in this prosecution?  

2012-07-29 15:47:27 (8 comments, 6 reshares, 27 +1s)

"CNN needs new thinking," said its big boss, Jim Walton, after announcing last week that he would step down as president of CNN Worldwide.

After years of observing this fact -  that CNN needs new thinking! -  I am too cynical to believe that Walton's admission will bring a change. The most likely result is that nothing will happen. CNN and its corporate owners, Time Warner, are fully satisfied with the money CNN makes as a worldwide news operation operating in all those hotels and airports and cable systems abroad. CNN International is the product, CNN in the US is just a spasm. For the actual product (the CNN of the hotel chain and airport lounge and foreign cable system) to work it has to feel harmless, safe, neutral, like beige carpeting in the convention center.

Just listen to Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, praising Walton... "When Jim Walton assumed thep... more »

2012-05-02 15:44:38 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 12 +1s)

Welcome to Jay's future of news panel. At Baruch College in NYC, Lex and 25th, I am joining with Jeff Jarvis of CUNY and Buzzmachine, Dean Starkman of Columbia Journalism Review, Josh Benton of Nieman Lab, Karen Dunlap of Poynter in a discussion moderated by Baruch's Geanne Rosenberg. Here are some notes I made for the first things I want to say.

What we call old media and new media are converging around a common set of problems, or, as I would call them, struggles.

There's the big one: the struggle for the sustainable public service press: by any means necessary.

There's the struggle to preserve what was dearly won and clearly best about the press we--North Americans! New Yorkers!--built by practicing journalism at a very high level... in many different ways... over a long period of time.

There's the struggle for employment: full time jobs... more »

2012-02-16 23:00:53 (11 comments, 27 reshares, 37 +1s)

My students and I just completed a study of ALL the questions asked at the 20 debates featuring the Republican candidates for President. That's 839 total questions. How many times did journalists ask about climate change? Two. How many questions about India as a rising power? Zero. How many about small business? One. (Hey: Aren't the Republicans supposed to be the party of small business?) How many about campaign strategy and the negative ads candidates have been running on each other? Uh... 113. Our package includes the study and several related features. Here's my introduction to it.

2012-02-16 14:40:21 (63 comments, 5 reshares, 19 +1s)

Some weirdness going on today with the Pulitzer Prize winning fact check site, Politifact. I know the editor Bill Adair, pretty well, and I support what he's doing. I think fact checking and calling out public untruths is something journalists should be doing much more of. The Politifact.com franchise is, in my view, a critically important addition to the news system. This makes criticism of it important, as well. Politifact needs to get this fact checking and "truth-o-meter" thing right. I hope it will. But some strange things happen along the way to that.

Last night Rachel Maddow went medieval on Politifact for the ruling I linked to below. I can see why she reacted as she did. Marco Rubio says a majority of Americans are conservative. Politifact looks into it, and says there's no evidence for that, but a plurality of those who identify as liberal, conservative or moderate... more »

2012-02-14 03:23:33 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

I want to speak to you tonight about someone who is lying about my work. Yes, "lying" is a strong word, but I think it is deserved in this instance. The man's name is Dan Mitchell. He has written for Slate, Fortune, Wired and other places. He is not some yahoo. He is a professional journalist. I have never met Dan Mitchell. I don't know him. But he lies about me and also about Mathew Ingram, a friend of mine and a solid journalist for GigaOm.

Here is his lie...."What all New Media Maximalists share is a default tendency to favor amateurs over professionals. You can tell by examining a wide range of their utterances, over time, what people like Godwin, Jay Rosen, or Matthew Ingram really believe, whatever they might say to the contrary when confronted with the question: They believe that amateur journalists are superior to professional ones, simply by virtue of being... more »

2012-02-14 03:23:06 (35 comments, 9 reshares, 30 +1s)

I want to speak to you tonight about someone who is lying about my work. Yes, "lying" is a strong word, but I think it is deserved in this instance. The man's name is Dan Mitchell. He has written for Slate, Fortune, Wired and other places. He is not some yahoo. He is a professional journalist. I have never met Dan Mitchell. I don't know him. But he lies about me and also about Mathew Ingram, a friend of mine and a solid journalist for GigaOm.

Here is his lie...."What all New Media Maximalists share is a default tendency to favor amateurs over professionals. You can tell by examining a wide range of their utterances, over time, what people like Godwin, Jay Rosen, or Matthew Ingram really believe, whatever they might say to the contrary when confronted with the question: They believe that amateur journalists are superior to professional ones, simply by virtue of being... more »

2012-01-18 15:24:48 (23 comments, 25 reshares, 43 +1s)

A Brief Theory of the Republican Party, 2012

I don't do political commentary. This piece--a departure from my normal work--will demonstrate why...

When I say brief, I mean 56 words. Here's it is:

A Brief Theory of the Republican Party: 2012:
In so far as a political party in the United States can "decide" anything, the party decided not to have the fight it needed to have between reality-based Republicans and the other kind. And so it is having that fight now, during the 2012 election season, but in disguised form. The results are messy and confusing.

Given the state of our political discourse, one should expect to be misunderstood with a theory like this. There is no way to prevent that, but I will try to qualify some of the key phrases.

1.) When I say "reality-based Republicans" I mean those who recognize the danger... more »

2012-01-04 01:09:15 (5 comments, 7 reshares, 11 +1s)

Let me know if this helps you make sense of Iowa Caucus coverage tonight. I wrote it in an effort to be useful.

2011-10-02 23:22:53 (13 comments, 15 reshares, 29 +1s)

NPR has a new CEO. He's the head of Sesame Street. In his blog post on the decision, +Brian Stelter of the New York Times writes, "NPR, formerly known as National Public Radio, has the benefit of tens of millions of devoted weekly listeners and a robust Web presence. But it is threatened by the prospect of funding cuts, by power struggles between the organization and its member stations across the country; and by the perception that some of its programming has a liberal political bent."

Can you be "threatened" by a "perception?" I guess maybe you can. But if you can, then I would say that NPR is equally threatened by 1.) the perception that it can be rolled or intimidated, especially after forcing its last CEO to resign in part because right wing trickster James O'Keefe pulled a culture war stunt that worked, and 2.) the perception that it's increasingly... more »

2011-09-16 02:21:08 (27 comments, 39 reshares, 62 +1s)

As a critic of the American press, I consistently have the following problem. Journalists receive my complaints, and change them into the complaints they know how to receive. This just happened between me and NPR, and I thought it was illuminating enough to write a post about it at PressThink. I said "he said, she said" journalism isn't good enough anymore. "We have no idea who's right" doesn't cut it. NPR changed that into: liberal critic wants our reporting to affirm what he believes.

2011-08-25 00:24:31 (7 comments, 5 reshares, 10 +1s)

My Australian adventures are about to begin! I will be a guest on 774 ABC in Melbourne, The Conversation Hour this morning. Then I will talk to the ABC Melbourne staff on innovation in journalism. Tonight it's ABC Radio National Late Night Live with Philip Adams. And I am scheduled to be on ABC TV's Lateline with Tony Jones tonight, as well. I was on that show last year when I was here.

The topics? Uh... that's up to them. I'm just grateful for the opportunity to be on the air. (Lateline is patterned after ABC's Nightline when Ted Koppel was doing it.)

My keynote presentation Friday at the Melbourne Writers Festival begins this way....

This talk had its origins in my appearance about a year ago on the ABC's Lateline with Leigh Sales. We were discussing election coverage that looks at the campaign as a kind of sporting event. Every day journalists can... more »

2011-08-23 00:44:53 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 9 +1s)

Preview....

http://www.theage.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/multimedia-messenger-20110806-1igin.html


The public revulsion at the phone hacking revelations has shifted that power in Britain. But Rosen says the same shift has not happened in Australia. He caused a controversy recently with a little tweet which read: ''If the story of criminal intimidation tactics at News Ltd in Australia ever came out, today's events in the UK would look different.''

Rosen refuses to say what he meant by this. ''It's not up to me to make it public because I'm not a participant,'' he says. ''I said it because I think that people in Australia are extremely intimidated by the Murdoch forces, and journalists especially, and they need to start speaking up. There is just too much silence and deference and fear and intimidation... more »

2011-08-23 00:21:58 (19 comments, 3 reshares, 37 +1s)

Jeff Jarvis has suggested I use Google+ as a kind of travelogue for my visit to Australia, where I will give a bunch of talks and interviews. I may follow his suggestion, if there is interest. (This is being posted from 28,000 feet on my way to Melbourne,) I will be giving a keynote address at the Melbourne Writers Festival on "why political coverage is broken." And I anticipate a lot of discussion about the Murdoch forces and the culture of News Corp. (which owns 70% of the press in Oz) especially after this tweet... http://t.co/HBeP61y which has already drawn a response from News Ltd, and this piece in the Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jul/19/rupert-murdoch-phone-hacking So how 'bout it, Google+? Is there interest out there in my dispatches from Australia?

2011-07-29 15:05:36 (31 comments, 6 reshares, 39 +1s)

Were any of you aware that I am a "strident" leftist who only wants to help Obama win; that I am actually a fan of media bias and want it to increase as long as it helps the communist par... sorry, the American left; that I have no valid intellectual purpose in criticizing "he said, she said" journalism, phony balance and the political reporter's "quest for innocence" (that's what I call it) in the news columns; that I just want my political preferences adopted as pure truth and if you don't see it that way-- well, then you must be insane? Did you know this about me? Well, you can read all about it in Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904800304576474234008959732.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

2011-07-24 01:45:39 (12 comments, 10 reshares, 39 +1s)

A lot of you have not seen this. The popular curation site, The Browser, has a "five books that shaped your discipline" feature in which they interview authors. They asked me to do one. So I asked them, "Can I do five URLs instead?" They said: sure! So here's the interview with me: five URLs you need to absorb to get where I'm coming from on the transformation on journalism. http://thebrowser.com/interviews/jay-rosen-on-journalism-internet-age?page=full

2011-07-20 14:06:08 (28 comments, 21 reshares, 48 +1s)

Let's see how this works. I expanded a tweet that went viral yesterday into a piece for The Guardian. My preferred title for it was, "A Brief Theory of News Corp." The Guardian wanted to change that to something more conventional. Anyway, what do think of the theory? Plausible? http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jul/19/rupert-murdoch-phone-hacking