Last night, spurred on by e-mail questions from Mark Glaser, I dug a little more into “the Comedy Central yanks vids” from YouTube story kept adding to my original post. I’m raising questions about what’s going on. Yes, videos have been removed, but is it a purge, or is it something else, a negotiating tactic, maybe?

Meanwhile, the No Fact Zone lives up to its name (which I realize is a satire, but … ):

Look, here’s the deal: YouTube did two searches for TCR videos, from what I can tell: “Colbert Report” and “Stephen Colbert”. It’s almost impossible to find a decent video with those two tags. However, many of the “saved” videos have obscure tags, or simply say “Funny” or “Comedy”. Those videos are much harder to find in the system. You pretty much have to know they are there. Those are the videos that have survived, and the videos that are circulating among fans.

No Fact Zone doesn’t link to search results for “Colbert Report” or “Stephen Colbert,” but I do … “Colbert Report,” 859 videos (roughly what it has been the past three days; “Stephen Colbert“, 1,149 videos (first time I’ve ever run that search). Pretty much all the video I’m seeing with those searches is “decent,” and much of it has been up for months and months, and some of it is new. As far as I can tell, Comedy Central video (1,890 videos) isn’t hard to find at all. YouTube is still the mother load.

More later, I presume.

UPDATE I: The Washington Post story this morning is balanced, and absent “the great purge” angle of most media coverage so far, adding some perspective.

UPDATE II: Scott Karp addresses the truth vs. rumor aspect of this story.

The blogosphere is a tremendous force for spreading rumors and, in some cases, disinformation — this story’s “truth” or lack thereof may well be surfaced by the blogosphere as well, given the countervailing force of self-correction.

Also read Dan Blank and Mathew Ingram. They are all addressing this post by Mark Cuban.

UPDATE III: Jeff Jarvis reports that NBC reports that Viacom is asking only for full programs be brought down. As comments on the post note, that doesn’t make any sense either. He also links to a post from FishBowlNY that notes a lot of CC clips remain on YT.
[tags]comedy central, youtube, colbert report, stephen colbert[/tags]

Bakersfield District Attorney Ed Jagels has his latest sensational attack on The Bakersfield Californian posted.

As a matter of fact, the District Attorney’s Office has been extraordinarily successful in its misdemeanor prosecutions. But your reporters couldn’t know that, because they are too busy writing the “impact stories” you demand, i.e., inventing conspiracies and scandals.

You’ve got to love the ad hominem attacks and hyperbole. What a great way to show you’re better than the guy you’re tearing down.

Mike Jenner responds:

“I’m glad Ed Jagels is finding time to prosecute these misdemeanors,” Jenner said in response to Monday’s report. “That’s certainly not the impression I’ve gotten from his comments in the past about staffing issues, or from actions by the city of Bakersfield, which has hired its own prosecutors to press misdemeanor cases that Jagels’ office didn’t have time to pursue. We appreciate the story idea, and we’ll take a closer look.”

Previously:

• The DA’s lame attempt to become a citizen journalist
• TBC responds to Jagels

[tags]bakersfield, district attorney, law enforcement, newspapers, bakersfield californian[/tags]

Smart post from Terry Heaton.

In my presentations, I often use a slide featuring a picture of George Costanza from Seinfeld and a quote of George’s from one of my favorite episodes, “The Opposite.” In it, George has decided that his whole miserable life was built on bad decisions, and that if he’d just do the opposite of what he thought was right, he’d end up better off than his current state. The show is filled with hilarious lines built on the premise, but none is more memorable than the one repeated in the slide. In the diner, Jerry, Elaine and Kramer convince George to try his new theory on a beautiful woman sitting at the counter. He does, and she shocks him by agreeing to a date.

Leonard Witt:

I want our journalists to be wise, thoughtful members of the community, rather than cold and calculating distant observers. In this new participatory culture we will need information providers, aggregators, mediators and navigators, who are part of the community but who have status because of their wisdom and accomplishments, not because of their degree.

Amen, brother.

To take the religious metaphor a step further — though switching faiths — it’s high time for a Reformation.

Previously: A manifesto for change that isn’t.

[tags]journalism, media[/tags]

Alan Jacobson has been at the forefront of modern newspaper design recently, pushing for designs that publishers hope will increase readership. Here’s a list of his recent redesigns, topped by my former employer, The Bakersfield Californian (”the most dramatic and innovative design in America,” according to Alan).

The news is everywhere today: Circulation is down across the nation.

I’d like to know how Alan’s redesigned papers are doing? Did they decline, too? If so, how much, and now did they compare to the averages in their circ category? Did any show a circ gain? If so, why?

If I can get my hands on the full Fas-Fax report, I’ll share.

Interesting observation from Steve Yelvington:

I think it’s significant that the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe and other traditionally “great” supermetro newspapers are at the top of the list of those suffering major circulation declines. Newspapers that are clearly local, or clearly national, are less affected.

The New York Times has picked up on the rumor that YouTube is yanking Comedy Central video. And to me, it’s still just a rumor, because the same “colbert” search that I’ve been running for the past several (several is an overstatement — I first heard about this on the morning of the 28th … I don’t know why I wrote “several”) days as a spot check still returns the same well-populated results.

UPDATE: Mark Glaser writes an open letter to Steve Colbert and invites readers to make their own response videos.

To re-emphasize my previous point: Here’s another YouTube search of Comedy Central videos.

It should be noted that the apparent original source for the story is Jeff Reifman, who operates NewsCloud, which appears to me to be a somewhat competitive user-generated content site. His claim is that he an e-mail from DMCA Complaints, a YouTube department.

Doesn’t that sound fishy to anyone?

Possible explanations for the disconnect between what I’m seeing on YT and what the news reports are telling us:

• Google attorneys are studying the matter without further action
• The mass removal of video from YT is far more difficult than I can imagine (and I imagine it’s pretty damn easy, knowing what I know about web programming)
• Reifman jumped to an incorrect conclusion about the meaning of the e-mail, since it references only one specific video
• That specific video contained an interview with Steve Wozniak, and Wozniak or an associate didn’t want the video on YT, and that’s the mysterious third party involved here

At any rate, I see a lot of big and independent media jumping all over this story without one bit of confirmation that Reifman’s report is accurate or that he has drawn the correct conclusions from the e-mail he received. I still say it’s a rumor.

UPDATE II: Other blogs publishing unskeptical accounts of the story:

• Huffington Post
• BoingBoing
• BlogWorks
• Media Law Professor Blog
• Lost Remote
• Wise Law Blog
• The No-Fact Zone
• John Battelle

On the flip side, here’s a copy of another letter to another user about another clip (an interview with Al Franken (somebody should check on whether Franken and Woz have the same agent).

UPDATE III: I just found this YT video that speculates that only clips longer than five minutes have been removed, but here’s a guy called “colbert clips” that has uploaded many longer-than-five-minutes clips in the past week (the videos preroll a plug for colbertclips.com). Here’s a long one uploaded by another user. Then again, here’s somebody reporting that a bunch of CC clips from a favorite list have disappeared. As for the classics, there’s a couple of versions of “Truthiness” and “Wikiality.”

UPDATE IV: Lost Remote goes along with Glaser’s update to his post above that maybe this is a negotiating ploy by Viacom.
[tags]youtube, google, comedy central, daily show, colbert report, south park, viacom, copyright[/tags]

Danah Boyd at Corant calls into question reports (powered by comScore data) that MySpace is growing grey.

They have found that the unique VISITORS have gotten older. This is not the same thing as USERS. A year ago, most adults hadn’t heard about MySpace. The moral panic has made it such that many US adults have now heard of it. This means that they visit the site. Do they all have accounts? Probably not. Furthermore, MySpace has attracted numerous bands in the last year. If you Google most bands, their MySpace page is either first or second; you can visit these without an account. People of all ages look for bands through search.

Jim Romenesko links to this article by Edward Wasserman for this graph:

I don’t think I ever met an owner, no matter how rich, who would pony up a nickel of his own money to cover shortfalls in the operations of a company he owned unless somebody was holding a gun to his head, and even then, not before he’d had a moment to think it over.

But I think the next is equally insightful:

True, Wall Street can be tough. Stupid, too. But generally, public investors aren’t buying today’s profits, they’re buying tomorrow’s promise. That’s what the newspaper industry has so dismally failed to articulate — and that failure will be no less vexing for hometown rich guys than it has been for stock portfolio managers.

And it will be vexing for our readers, too, as we slip further and further behind serving their needs in the manner they demand. We need to build a future that serves readers and investors (both public and private), because in reality, they have an equal stake in our future.

My wife has a problem, and the problem is, too many clerks and waiters seem to think serving her is a problem. Billie explains.

Bob Benz is in London at a media conference and he spoke there on innovation and shared a little about the E.W. Scripps Entrepreneur’s Fund, which is $1.5 million pile of cash available to any entrepreneur with in Scripps willing to make a pitch for a project or business model.

“Let’s stop being prey, let’s start being predators,” he says. “Think like a venture capitalist, think like a start-up. There are opportunities here but if you look at Craigslist and Yahoo and Google and cry in your beer, you won’t get anywhere. Start looking for opportunities to attack and start looking for opportunities to do it in a calculated way, in a business-like way.”

I’ve been excited by this idea since I first heard of it a few months ago. I think it’s an idea more newspaper companies should emulate.

[tags]scripps, newspapers, new media, innovation[/tags]

Good advice via Danny Sanchez for young multimedia staffers: Don’t be a cut-and-paste expert.

If your job is to repurpose print content online, and that’s all you know, you’re in trouble. Increasingly those jobs will vanish. As news operations become more Web centric, the days of some graveyard shift guy uploading all the content will close (frankly, they should already be gone, but I know they are not). The future is reporters writing directly into a Web-based CMS that can publish straight to the Web (some times without an editor’s prior intervention!) and repurpose the story for print.

Beyond that: have some ambition. You shouldn’t be in the news game if you don’t have ambition. Regardless of your current position, you should be doing more, learning more, and on your own time if necessary, and it probably is necessary.

And just to pound on my new favorite dead horse these days: You should blog. Everybody should blog.

[tags]journalism, career[/tags]

I finally opened a Flickr account.

I’ve always resisted Flickr because I felt locked in to Buzznet. I think Buzznet has a superior design and I like the way social networking works on the site. That said, Flickr is where the action is, so I thought I should give it a try.

Given that there is a monthly limit on how many photos I can upload, and I don’t have that limit on Buzznet, I think Buzznet will remain my primary photo sharing service. My best shots will go on both Flickr and Buzznet.

Speaking of trying out social networking sites — a week or two ago, I finally set up a MySpace page, just to try it out, but I haven’t done much with it.

This morning, I was up early for some odd reason. At 6 a.m., I’m sitting in my living room with my laptop and I look up and see Fiona sitting on the hi-fi, gazing up at the light in the ceiling. “Damn, I wish I had my camera, I thought.” As she sat motionless, I thought, “Maybe I can creep into the other room and get my camera without alarming her?” (she gets jumpy sometimes). I did, and she didn’t move. I made it back to my chair without her moving. I was able to snap off six pictures before she jumped down. This is the best of them.

Unfortunately, I didn’t notice the poor positioning of the clock behind her. It should be either fully visible or fully hidden, I think. I’m not sure I could have done much about it, but I might have tried had I been more mindful. I was more concerned about exposure and focus.

Also, check out my long, long rose stems.

[tags]cats, kittens, roses, photography[/tags]

OJR has set up a wiki page for tools for multimedia journalists. It is already a great page. I expect it will get better as more people contribute.

[tags]journalism, multimedia[/tags]

I haven’t downloaded and installed Firefox 2.0 yet. After reading this Slashdot post, I’m glad I haven’t. I think I’ll wait.

Wouldn’t it be ironic, and wouldn’t it shake up the open source community a bit, if Firefox 2.0 turns out to be the buggy, security-plagued browser and IE 7.0 was stable and secure? I’m not saying that’s the case, just saying …

[tags]browsers, firefox[/tags]

Great idea from Greg Yardley: You read a story, figure there will be follow ups, so you should be able to right click the headline and subscribe to subsequent stories.

NYTimes.com used to offer a service some what similar, but it vanished long ago (you could “subscribe” to topics”).

When a journalist as renowned and respected as Geneva Overholser writes a paper boldly titled, “A Manifesto for Change,” an optimistic guy like me desperately wants to read a authentic call for innovation and reinvention.

Unfortunately, Overholser, one of the true red-robed cardinals of the Church of Journalism, seems to merely restate the same old orthodoxy.

It is the norm in the world of American business to place an emphasis on profitability – an emphasis that has grown across most sectors of the economy in recent years. But journalism is not just another business. As Hutchins said to the National Conference of Editorial Writers in 1948, “The sole test of the success of a steel business or a cracker business may be, for all I care, its ability to make money, but the public concern with the large elements in the newspaper business suggests that, though a newspaper must make money to stay in business, it should meet a further test; it is proper to ask whether it is discharging its responsibility for public enlightenment.”

And here’s the crux of my differing opinion: If we had been doing a good job of informing the public and taking seriously the call to civic enlightenment, we wouldn’t be in the pickle we find ourselves in today.

If we had been doing our jobs instead of feeding our egos, we would have readers and we would be relevant, and we would be much further along in building the kind of Web sites that people want to visit. In the marketplace of trust, we would be winning.

Our chief problem isn’t technology. Our chief problem is attitude.

Leonard Witt, who gets credit for pointing me to Overholser’s PDF (a PDF with no ability for feedback, comment or links, in itself a rather obvious blunder in the age of conversation), is also unhappy with Overholser’s manifesto.

This week at the Huffington Post she fairly begs for citizen help, but read my italicized sentence to understand why she and the mainstream media folks are adrift:

Please meet me there, oh fellow citizen of this unsettling time, at my immodestly named Manifesto, and check out those Action Steps. Typical of us legacy-media types, we haven’t quite gotten our site interactive yet, but we will, very soon. We’ll be posting progress along these various paths. We’ll need your views on the action steps we’ve thought of, and your suggestions for others. I hope you’ll join us.

Geneva, the problem isn’t that the legacy-media types haven’t quite gotten their site interactive yet, but that they have not gotten their minds interactive yet. And I am afraid your manifesto is in some ways clueless.

I took the time to carefully read Geneva’s manifesto today, and as much as I wanted something revolutionary, I came away paragraph after paragraph feeling that I was reading a call to arms for business as usual.

First off, Overholser spends way too many words consumed with the state of newspaper ownership. Ownership isn’t the problem. Knight-Ridder didn’t fail because of public ownership. KR failed because its basic new media strategy was fatally flawed and it lacked any true vision for 21st Century media. Journalism isn’t in trouble because of public ownership. There are plenty of bad privately owned newspapers. Journalism is in trouble because we’ve lost connection with the people we believe we serve (that, and the multitude of choices available now). There isn’t one privately held company that is doing any better at meeting the business and journalistic challenges of today than any of the best publicly held corporations.

But that’s only part of the problem within Overholser’s manifesto.

Her entire premise is built on the notion that big-J journalism is needed, a necessity, like water and air

Sorry, but it’s not.

The first step to healing is honesty. We need to be honest: journalism as traditionally defined is not needed. There is a sizable minority of people today (from what I know of various ratings/readership studies, I’d guess in the 30 to 40 percent range) who get along fine without journalism. We all know people who don’t read newspapers or news magazines, or watch TV news, or listen to the radio (even something as uninformative as talk radio). Sure, journalism should play a watchdog role in a free society (ideally), but that doesn’t mean people perceive the need for journalism. It doesn’t matter how much we want them to perceive it — if they don’t, they don’t. Add to the lack of interest, the fact that more and more people without pedigree or training think they can do it for themselves, and you wind up with a world where traditional journalism is left without mooring or direction. So you can’t say, in all honesty, that big-J journalism is needed. It’s a good to have, but needed, it ain’t.

Of course, there will always be a need for people who ask questions and publish answers, and I call that journalism (though not within the orthodoxy of the Church of Journalism), but it doesn’t take training, it doesn’t require editors, and it certainly shouldn’t be credentialed, as Overholser suggests.

One of the most detrimental and dangerous thoughts we can hold is that professional journalism is necessary. That is the path to destruction.

As media organizations are learning, citizens want to be part of their media. The media no longer exercise the control they once did but, through embracing interactivity and engaging the readers, they are coming up with new kinds of power …

Here is a fatally flawed assumption: that citizens want to be part of our media organizations. Actually, people want a voice, and they aren’t looking at it as our media or their media. That’s why Dan Gillmor’s book title was so apt: It’s “we the media.” To Overholser, apparently, interactivity is just another path to power and control. But in a true conversation, there is no position of power. There can be no true communication where one person dominates the patter and jive. The true power is in the network, and networks are a path to the truth journalists supposedly regard so highly. Networks are more powerful than the omnipotent voice of a journalism organization.

Overholser extols the virtues of professionalization, but it is professionalization, created by early 20th Century publishers to satisfy advertisers, that has separated us from our communities. In the age of networked communication, professionalization is irrelevant. In the age of networks, conversation will create the standards, transparency and accountability Overholser seeks.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said: “I think there is a really poisonous atmosphere out there. What those Times people are reacting to are the attacks by partisans and bloggers. The environment is really pretty tough, and you have to be prepared to make your case.”

What Kohut calls poisonous, I call healthy. What Kohut is defending is a New York Times that is arrogant and insulated — two characteristic anathema to truth. That isn’t to say all media critics are right or accurate, but within the cacophony of voices, intelligent people can sort out relevance and meaning.

Near the end, Overholser notes that bloggers are beginning to see themselves as journalists and are getting “more and more obsessed with accuracy.” Beginning? As far back as at least 2001 Ken Layne was noting that “we can fact check your ass.” I know many bloggers who would argue that over the past six or seven years, bloggers have been far more obsessed with ethics and accuracy than many MSM journalists.

It is this disparity between reality and perception that separates Overholer’s manifesto from a true call to arms.

One last observation to lament: Overholser’s paper opens with nine propositions – propositions drafted by a panel of industry experts, with no opportunity for others outside that clique to weigh in, or for the public to comment. So what we’re given is a manifesto for change that fails to recognize the true change going on – that small groups of elite insiders no longer dictate what media is. A better approach would have been to publish the propositions in a blog or wiki and seek a broad range of input – what should journalism be in the 21st Century?

While I applaud the effort to find a way to grapple with the changing role of journalism, I think Overholser and her group still have a lot of work to do, and attitudes to change.

Newspapers are very concerned about competitors getting in between them and their customers — competitors like Craigslist or Google, but what happens if some of the biggest advertisers for advertisers go out of business because of the Internet. Michael Arrington shares his experience in buying a car from CarsDirect.

On Monday evening I called two local Honda dealers, told them I was going to buy through CarsDirect but would get it from them instead if they would match the price. Both said no. One laughed at me before saying no.

Dealers and classified managers across the nation should cringe.

[tags]classifieds, newspapers, car dealers, car buying[/tags]

I keep preaching — everybody should blog!  But in my own house, I’ve been the only blogger for years.  Today, this minute, that changes.  Billie Owens has a blog.

It was a shock to my system a couple of weeks ago when Billie came to me and said, “Will you register cockamame.com for me?”

“Why?”

“Because I think I want to start a blog.”

Wow. Cool.

The need to create a blog for Billie is part of the impetus to switch to WordPress.

Read her first post. It’s pure Billie and a good example of her superior writing talent.