Dan Gillmor: Blog

AP: Five-Year Mortgage Rate Freeze Looms. Congressional aides say the Bush administration has hammered out an agreement with industry to freeze interest rates for certain subprime mortgages for five years in an effort to combat a soaring tide of foreclosures.

This sounds like the most dangerous bit of fiscal sleight of hand in years — putting off the actual problem and utterly rewarding the people who were the most reckless in the mortgage bubble.

Americans who didn’t join the sleaze will pay those who did. It’s reprehensible, and it’s going to put this nation further into the national bankruptcy that already exists for all practical purposes.

Meanwhile, the local paper endorses this idiocy – and more. Sheesh…

I’m looking for safer places to put my money at this point than my own country. We’ve lost all common sense here.

Over at Dopplr, we’ve just launched a mobile version — and if I may say so on behalf of the development team it’s just excellent.

I’m an advisor to NewsTrust, a site where people rate news articles and blog postings for accuracy and quality. So I’m happy to report that the site just was awarded a substantial grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Fabrice Florin and his team have done amazing work to bring the service this far. Now they’ll have the resources to take it even further. Congrats to all…

As an old friend once said of humanity on this best of all American holidays:

We need more pilgrims and fewer turkeys.

Over at Dopplr, a travel service for sharing trip information with friends and colleagues (I’m a co-founder), we’re still in pre-release mode — that is, open by invitation. But we’ve just given full access to people from 100 top business schools around the world.

So if you have an email address from

Arizona State University: Carey; Ashridge; Aston Business School; Australian Graduate School of Management; BI Norwegian School of Management; Babson Executive Education; Boston University School of Management; Bradford School of Management; Carnegie Mellon: Tepper; Catholic University of Portugal; Ceibs Center for Creative Leadership; Chinese University of Hong Kong City University: Cass; Columbia Business School; Copenhagen Business School; Coppead; Cornell; Cranfield School of Management; Drexel University: LeBow; Duke Corporate Education; EM Lyon; ESCP-EAP European School of Management; Edhec Business School; Edinbourgh University Management School; Emory University: Goizueta; Esade Business School; Essec Business School; Fundacao Dom Cabral; Fundação Instituto de Administração; Georgetown University; Georgia State University: Robinson; HEC Paris; Harvard Business School; Helsinki School of Economics; Henley Management College; Hong Kong UST; IAE Management and Business School; IE Business School; IESE Business School; IMD; Ibmec São Paulo; Imperial College London: Tanaka; Insead; Ipade Kelley; Executive Partners at Indiana University; Kellogg; Lancaster University Management School; London Business School; MIT: Sloan; Macquarie Graduate School of Management; Manchester Business School; McGill University; Melbourne Business School; Nanyang Business School; National Sun Yat-Sen University; National University of Singapore; Nyenrode Business Universiteit; Pennsylvania State University: Smeal; Pepperdine University: Graziadio; Purdue/Tias/CEU/GISMA; RSM Erasmus University; Rutgers Business School; SDA Bocconi; Stanford University GSB; Stockholm School of Economics; Thunderbird School of Global Management; TiasNimbas Business School; Trinity College Dublin; Trium; Tulane University: Freeman; UC Berkeley; UCLA: Anderson; Universidad Adolfo Ibanez; University College Dublin: Smurfit; University of Alberta/University of Calgary: Haskayne; University of California at Irvine: Merage; University of Cape Town; University of Chicago GSB; University of Maryland: Smith; University of Michigan: Ross; University of Minnesota: Carlson; University of North Carolina: Kenan-Flagler; University of Notre Dame: Mendoza; University of Oxford: Said; University of Pennsylvania: Wharton; University of Pittsburgh: Katz University of Pretoria: GIBS University of Texas at Austin: McCombsUniversity of Toronto: Rotman; University of Virginia: Darden; University of Western Ontario: Ivey; University of Wisconsin-Madison; Universität St.Gallen; Vlerick Leuven Gent; Warwick Business School; Washington University: Olin; West Point; Wits Business School; York University: Schulich

you’re welcome to join by clicking here.

This release was posted yesterday at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Here’s the top:

Dan Gillmor, an internationally recognized author and leader in new media and citizen-based journalism, will be the founding director of the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University announced today.

Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, will start Jan. 1 as Knight Center director and Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship. He will hold the faculty rank of professor of practice.

This is a hugely exciting opportunity, and I’ll be saying more about it in a subsequent posting.

My friends Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein have written an op-ed in the Chronicle, “Early admissions policies give children of the rich an edge,” noting that the practice of early admission to universities — something I confess to having had myself a long time ago — is tilted toward applicants from wealthier families. And early admissions are only part of the problem.

This, in the end, is about social and economic progress, and the op-ed makes some suggestions on how to fix things. This doesn’t involve dismantling the college admissions system, but the ideas collectively would be a significant tweak.

Also, Freada’s new book, Giving Notice: Why the Best and Brightest are Leaving the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay is getting lots of attention. Employers of all sizes should take a look.

We saw Lions for Lambs last night at its premiere in San Francisco. It’s an impressive picture that takes on some difficult issues of war and peace, personal responsibility and hypocrisy, and more. Robert Redford directed and is one of the stars.

Note, by the way, the user ratings score showing a weighted average of 5.8 points out of 10. (The median score is 7.5.) Since the movie hasn’t opened yet, this is plainly a political vote by people on the left who want to promote the film and people on the right who hope it’ll be a bomb.

In other words, don’t take the ratings in the least bit seriously. See the movie for yourself.

The SF Chronicle, which served as a major cheerleader for the housing bubble while it was inflating, reports “Foreclosures in Bay Area, statewide hit record highs in 3rd quarter” –

The vast majority of recent foreclosures stem from subprime loans made to people with poor credit, many of whom put no money down. After an introductory period with low interest rates, such loans often reset sharply higher, so monthly mortgage payments increase by hundreds of dollars. At the same time, home prices have stagnated or fallen, so struggling homeowners cannot refinance because they owe more than their houses are worth.

Never has a story been so predictable. This emerging crisis, which is real, was obvious for at least the past three or four years when housing prices were soaring at what anyone with even a tiny amount of economic knowledge realized was an unsustainable rate.

Now we’re seeing tales of woe from “homeowners” — a word that is ridiculous for the no-down-payment crowd — who are losing “their” homes. I feel badly for them, because it has to be a horrible experience. But they should have known, and so should their lenders, that this was a high probability.

Some solid journalism when it counted — years ago — might have prevented a part of this slow-motion mess.

The SF Chronicle reports, “Home sales in Bay Area crash to 20-year low after jumbo loan cut.”

Bay Area homes sales sank to a two-decade low in September, as tighter lending standards walloped an already-declining market. A total of 3,118 existing single-family homes changed hands in the nine-county Bay Area in September, down 44.8 percent from 5,645 homes last September and down 34 percent from August, according to a report from DataQuick Information Systems, a La Jolla (San Diego County) research firm.

Those “tighter” standards are, in part, about forcing borrowers to show they can pay back the money — something that wasn’t really on the agenda during the bubble.