"The Internet weakens the press' authority"

In graduate school my understanding of "sphere" was almost entirely from Jürgen Habermas' expositions.

Imagine my fascination, then, to be able to reconstuct the term through Jay Rosen's counterintuitive lens.

Rosen, the activist-scholar who advocates citizen journalism as a predicate of democracy, argues, via a conversation with Daniel C. Hallin, that the Internet actually weakens the authority of the press:

Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.

"There's a plane in the Hudson"

U.S. Airways flight 1549 touched down on a frigid Hudson in New York shortly after 3.31 p.m. on Thursday.

When I read about it on AP around 3.50 p.m., I immediately expected Captain Sully's crash to make citizen journalism (I'm a bit embarrassed to admit).

And it did. Twitpic contributor Janis Krums (jkrums) beat AP to the story.

Update: Check out Lisa Respers France's CNN report of Krums' scoop.

"Shift from serious journalism will doom the Times"

Is the message killing the medium? Michael Hirschorn of the Atlantic offers a provocative analysis of the New York Times.

[T]he business strategy of The New York Times, as practiced since Abe Rosenthal’s editorship in the early ’70s, when New York magazine first threatened the daily’s stranglehold on the city’s lumpen upper-middle class—and as imitated by countless papers around the country—has undermined the perceived value of serious newspaper journalism as well. Under the guise of “service,” The Times has been on a steady march toward temporarily profitable lifestyle fluff. Escapes! Styles! T magazine(s)! For a time, this fluff helped underwrite the foreign bureaus, enterprise reporting, and endless five-part Pulitzer Prize aspirants. But it has gradually hollowed out journalism’s brand, by making the newspaper feel disposable. The fluff is more fun to read than the loss-leading reports about starvation in Sudan, but it isn’t the sort of thing you miss when it’s gone. Not many people would get misty-eyed over the closure of, say, “Thursday Styles,” fascinating as its weekly shopping deconstructions often are.

The New York Times Company is piqued enough to send a rebuttal. Catherine Mathis, senior vice president, scoffs at Hirschorn's guess that it is "certainly plausible" the Times would go kaput as early as May of 2009. “Uninformed speculation,” she scolds.

Are citizen contributors liable to pay gift tax?

Might citizen journalists have to pay a gift tax when their work is used by mainstream media organizations?

Rhonda Roland Shearer and Danielle Elliot investigate at StinkyJournalism.org.

Is the "donation" of a citizen's content (video, articles, commentaries, images) to for-profit media outlets that exceeds a fair market value of $12,000 in any single year subject to gift tax? Judging from the IRS guidelines, the answer is "yes."

Find the whole deal here.

Rhonda directs New York's Art Science Research Laboratory, a non-profit she co-founded with her husband, the late Stephen Jay Gould.

Instructions to submit to AEJMC

Today AEJMC published instructions for paper submitters. Here's the Uniform Paper Call for the Boston convention for your reading pleasure.

If you plan to direct your submission to CCJIG, here's our call, to be read in conjunction with the instructions. I look forward to all the good research!

AEJMC Boston convention hotel open for booking

AEJMC has opened a block at the Sheraton Boston Hotel, the venue of its 92nd annual convention August 5-8.

The hotel block will be available until July 3.

If you plan to attend you may want to reserve a room early: Boston's hotels can be famously expensive!

"Who will adopt the orphan news?"

Leonard Witt at PJNet.com:

What is it that subscribers to The New York Times really pay for each day? The paper without the news on it is worthless. At the same time, consumers refuse to pay for news served up on the Internet. So right now as a consumer product, news without paper is also worthless. People only seem to be willing to pay for two worthless commodities when they are combined into one. In the case of The New York Times they pay $10 a week, $500 a year. Strange isn’t it.

In the past, you could argue that people also wanted the ads, but you won’t be able to make that argument much longer. Ads and news are decoupling. News and paper are decoupling. You will still have ads, news and paper, just not together any more.

No one wants empty paper, so you can push that aside. So we are left with ads and news. There will be plenty of places to get your ads. So no worry there. Now we have that orphan news.

Without proper nurturing that little orphan will wilt away. Who will adopt it? Who will nurture it? Who will help it stand on its own?