Dan Gillmor

At a conversation site where I spend some time, someone noted a Twitter posting from earlier today — well worth repeating:

“What I like about April Fool’s Day: one day a year we’re asking whether news stories are true. It should be all 365.”

For a number of reasons I’m now using a Blackberry Curve as my main phone. But its email system is beyond dreadful for anyone who’s not locked into a Windows-Outlook-Exchange environment.

Mainly, the Blackberry IMAP connection is pathetic, a kludge that is almost worse than nothing. It doesn’t understand folders. It doesn’t reflect answered messages on the server. All this is because Blackberry pretty much makes you go through its own servers to use email, and because its maker is only seriously interested in working with Exchange.

So I’m looking for an acceptable IMAP mail client for the Blackberry OS, one that connects directly via the Internet to my personal mail server and others. I don’t need fancy, just usable — and I’ll be delighted to pay good money for it.

Send me an email if you know of anything useful.

I hope some of you can join us May 15-16 at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society for the Berkman@10 Conference: The Future of the Internet. This gathering, marking the center’s 10th anniversary, is shaping up to be an extraordinary affair.

As a Berkman Fellow the past several years, I’ve had a chance to spend (not nearly enough) time with some great people who are doing some of the best work on understanding the Net’s already powerful impact on our lives. The May conference will, in part, offer a summary of where we are and where we may be going. As the conference home page asks: “In tracing the trajectory of the past and attempting to lean into the future, what are the contours of the moment we find ourselves in? What are the most important questions that will propel us into the next decade?”

Among the many, many great speakers will be our lunchtime keynoter on Friday, May 16 — someone who’ll need little introduction to regular readers of this blog. He is Joshua Micah Marshall, founder and editor of Talking Points Memo and several related political blogs. What he and his team do each day has become essential reading for people who care about politics and policy, and he recently was honored for his work with a truly high honor in journalism, the George Polk Award.

I’ll have the honor of introducing Josh Marshall. He has been a touchstone for my own work, and has shown one way forward for the journalism “by the people, for the people,” in which I so fervently believe.

Editor & Publisher: Newspaper Biz Editors Defend Mortgage Crisis Coverage. Did the growing mortgage credit crisis, which took a huge turn with last week’s collapse of Bear Stearns, get enough early coverage from newspapers? Top business editors at several of the nation’s major papers say yes, although a few admit some of the more complicated elements may not have been broken out enough for readers.

What tripe. The newspaper industry almost totally failed to do its job, and the public got screwed once again.

Citing a story here and there, as several editors do in the E&P piece, is not evidence of newspapers doing their job. It’s quite the opposite.

When an economic catastrophe of this sort — and entirely predicable one — is building, journalists are failing to do their jobs when they don’t harp on it.

As I said in a previous posting, newspapers and broadcasters were raking in billions in advertising from the real estate and banking industries as this bubble inflated. I do not believe this is a coincidence. I also don’t believe it was deliberate malfeasance; but you just don’t see lots of tough coverage in media of the people and companies paying the bills.

Many if not most papers have special weekly real estate pages or sections where you would find little hint of the potential for trouble. I know I looked for it in the papers I read. That’s where the discussion belonged — as well, of course, as Page One — not solely in the occasional business page stories. Hundreds of references to bubbles, most in the past year and not when there was a chance to slow down that train, were dwarfed by comparison to the buying advice that dominated coverage of real estate overall.

Oh, sure, there were extremely infrequent stories containing warnings in a few publications — and occasional quotes from skeptics in the prices-just-keep-rising stories that overwhelmingly dominated the coverage. But the reality is that journalists mostly didn’t have a clue, or didn’t want to have a clue. I don’t know which is worse.

Some bloggers, and some economists, did shout warnings. They were ignored, or worse, insulted by wishful thinkers and (I suspect) people who stood to gain from the continuing bubble.

Again, from a previous post, here are some questions the media all but ignored until too late:

Where were the stories we should have been seeing, noting that “buyers” — a word that is ludicrous in context –were running headlong toward a financial cliff? What happened to the coverage of a housing market that fewer and fewer people could afford to enter except with no-interest or no-down-payment loans, where home prices were so far out of sync with the economy that there was no precedent for such imbalance?

Where were the stories pointing out that the secondary (and far beyond) mortgage markets were salting hugely risky debt all through the American economy? You think your bank or pension fund doesn’t have some of this garbage somewhere in its books? Think again.

The media also bungled by not fingering the makers of this bubble apart from foolish “buyers” who proved to be such suckers. This boom was fueled by people who knew it couldn’t last: brokers, bankers and, above all, Wall Street’s ever-clever wizards who risk other people’s money for gigantic fees.

This is another journalistic scandal. It’s not quite on the order of the bended-knee, pre-war coverage — stenography of government officials’ lies and deceptions — that helped steer America into the Iraq war, but only because it’s not killing people in large numbers.

It’s a massive enough scandal, though. There’s plenty of pain left in this deflation, possibly including an outright tanking of the economy.

The journalism craft should take a long, hard look at what it’s failed to do, yet again, in the housing bubble. It has failed to warn — as loudly and incessanty as it did in promoting the housing bubble — that a financial crunch was on the way.

There’s plenty of blame to go around in this mess. The finger-pointing has barely begun. But when it gets going for real, I hope that journalists who do some of that pointing will at least look in a mirror.

When I played music for a living, my band and I made a couple of albums. Here’s a link to a song, “You Don’t Know How Lucky,” which I wrote and we recorded back in the 1970s. Yes, very folky.

I’ll be digitizing more of that record soon…

(Thanks, Casey!)

Christopher Hitchens: Who needs a state censor when the press bites its own tongue so effectively? Do you ever wonder what is the greatest enemy of the free press? One might mention a few conspicuous foes, such as the state censor, the monopolistic proprietor, the advertiser who wants either favorable coverage or at least an absence of unfavorable coverage, and so forth. But the most insidious enemy is the cowardly journalist and editor who doesn’t need to be told what to do, because he or she has already internalized the need to please—or at least not to offend—the worst tyranny of all, which is the safety-first version of public opinion.

I’ll be visiting the Twin Cities for an event called New Media, New Standards: Ethics in Online Journalism, co-sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists and Minnesota Public Radio. Hope to see some of you there…

UPDATED

Good grief. Look at the members of ProPublica’s Journalism Advisory Board:

Jill Abramson, a managing editor of The New York Times; Martin D. Baron, the editor of The Boston Globe; David Boardman, the executive editor of the Seattle Times; Robert A. Caro, historian and biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson; John S. Carroll, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun; L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal; David Gergen, professor of public service at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of its Center for Public Leadership; Shawn McIntosh, the director of culture and change at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Gregory L. Moore, the editor of The Denver Post; Priscilla Painton, the new editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster; Allan Sloan, a senior editor at large for Fortune magazine; and Cynthia A. Tucker, the editor of the editorial page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Board will advise ProPublica’s editors from time to time on the full range of issues related to ProPublica’s journalism, from ethical issues to the direction of its reporting efforts.

Great people and journalists, every one of them. But what a disappointing list in one major respect.

This is not a group with any serious understanding of the Web, nor a board that will instantly grasp why the new digital platforms are made to order for melding traditional investigative journalism with what technology enables. Not one of these people is a digital native, or even close to it.

That’s a stunning oversight, and it the journalism will almost certainly reflect it.

UPDATE: Paul Steiger, ProPublica’s editor in chief, replies via email: “Understood and anticipated. Watch whom we hire.”

NY TImes: Putting Candidates Under the Videoscope. (T)he embeds have changed the dynamic of this year’s election, making every unplugged and unscripted moment on the campaign trail available for all to see. One particular video shot of American flags tilting over behind Hillary Rodham Clinton last November has been viewed more than 300,000 times on the ABC News Web site. A video of the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly shoving a member of Barack Obama’s staff at a New Hampshire campaign rally has drawn almost 150,000 views on YouTube.

The dynamic was changed earlier, actually — supporters and opponents have been making videos of candidates for some time. What has changed is the notice of this by major media organizations as an endemic part of the process.

What is still not part of the understanding is the sheer unfairness of letting a single moment on video reflect a person’s reality. Yet this is what seems to happen on a regular basis.

When, as in the case of former Sen. George Allen — he of the famous “Macaca” comment — there is a history of racially charged words and deeds, then you have something worth discussing. When it’s simply one of those weird moments on the campaign trail, it’s nothing or close to it.

I could follow anyone reading this with a video camera for an hour and post something on the Web that would make you look ridiculous. You could do the same to me. Neither posting would reflect who we really are.

A culture of gotcha is a shallow culture. Is it the one we really want to promote?

Marc Andreessen has inaugurated “the New York Times Deathwatch” — and the data he cites should be giving the Times-folk nightmares. But then, the company’s board of directors is a particularly inept group considering the absolute need to move, fast, into the digital world for real, with all that means.

Marc writes, with utterly appropriate snark, of this crew:

Well, given that the Internet is the central force dismantling the company’s business, I’m sure that by now they’ve stocked their board with noted Internet experts. Let’s see:

• Brenda C. Barnes — CEO of Sara Lee; noted snack cake expert
• Raul E. Cesan — former CEO of Schering-Plough; noted Levitra expert
• Daniel H. Cohen — president of DeepSee LLC, “an oceanic exploration and submarine leasing company”; noted Jacques Cousteau expert
• Lynn G. Dolnick — former head of exhibits for the National Zoologic Park in Washington DC; noted marsupial expert
• Michael Golden — current publisher of the International Herald Tribune; former head of the company’s Women’s Publishing Division; noted sundress expert
• William E. Kennard — former head of the FCC; noted “seven dirty words” expert
• James M. Kilts — former CEO of Gillette; noted smooth, smooth shave expert; prior to that, unindicted coconspirator at Philip Morris; noted expert on your grandfather’s hacking cough
• David E. Liddle — here I have to take a pause as I actually know this one; based on what’s happening at the company, it could be reasonably asked whether he’s actually attending the board meetings.
• Ellen R. Marram — former CEO of Nabisco; noted Oreo expert. Oh, wait, she actually ran an Internet company: “From 1999 until 2000, Ms. Marram was president and chief executive officer of efdex Inc. (the Electronic Food & Drink Exchange), an Internet-based commodities exchange for the food and beverage industry.” Ooh. I wonder if that ended well.
• Thomas Middelhoff — former CEO of Bertelsmann; noted expert on complicated family politics — well, that’s probably coming in handy…
• Janet L. Robinson — current CEO of the New York Times Company; noted expert on horrific business implosions
• Doreen A. Toben — CFO of Verizon; noted 30-year debenture expert
• And finally, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. — the Big Kahuna — the Man — the Guy In Charge — the chairman and scion — the dude with the cojones to actually defend Judy Miller. Not noted Internet expert.

Now, some hedge-fund investors who quite plainly care only about the money — and not the public trust aspect of publishing the nation’s best and most important newspaper — are trying to persuade the company to add some board members who have a clue. One of the people they hope to put on the board is Allen Morgan, a friend who is managing director at Mayfield Fund in Silicon Valley. He gets this stuff more thoroughly than almost anyone I know.

I own some NY Times Co. shares, and they’re worth a lot less than I paid for them. I will continue to hold these, even if the company utterly tanks, because I believe in the mission of newspapers and believe the Times has some of the best journalists in the world and could make the move to the Net much better than it has done to date — and that there is absolutely no choice but to move more quickly.

The hedge fund speculators could care less about journalism or the public good, no doubt. But they’re doing a stodgy institution a huge favor. Sadly, the institution is so hidebound that it doesn’t recognize the writing on its own wall.