Media Sphere- Page 6

Grades for sale at Naples High

Do you remember school fund raise drives? Perhaps you recall being a child having to sell boxes of chocolate, or maybe you recently ran into a young fund raiser outside the supermarket with candy for his band or choir. Then again you might even have the halfway-depleted box your son or daughter couldn't sell last week. I remember being saved from fund raiser hell on more than one occasion, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one. In a twist on this common theme, a high school journalism class at Naples High School has been tasked to sell advertising in their school's yearbook and their grade depends on it.

According to NBC2, the students must sell $600 in ads to receive an A, $500 for a B, $400 for a C, $300 for a D, and students who are unable to sell at least $300 in advertising for the school yearbook will receive an F. While it's certainly true that advertising is an essential component for almost any news organization, it is typically not the role of journalists to solicit these dollars. In fact, there is usually a wall between the advertising staff and the news staff to prevent conflicts of interest when an advertiser ends up in the news.

Maintaining journalistic integrity while handling human remains

A reporter is sent on an unusual assignment. A distraught women claims to have a deceased man's scalp and the reporter has been chosen to cover the story. Upon his arrival, the teary-eyed women implores the reporter to take the man's remains to the coroner. It sounds like the plot for an episode of Picket Fences, but for police reporter Steve Lannen at the Herald-Leader in Kentucky this perplexing scenario was far more than just a plot device.

As reported by metro editor Peter Baniak for the Behind the Headlines blog:It was one of the strangest phone calls I've taken as metro editor at the Herald-Leader -- and I've taken plenty of odd phone calls over the years. The woman on the line was despondent because she said the county coroner had left her friend's scalp in wooded area along Newtown Pike. The man had died there, apparently under accidental circumstances, and the coroner had removed the rest of the body several days earlier. But the woman said a piece of her friend's scalp, including hair, had been left behind. Further, she said she couldn't get the coroner's office to come out and get it.… Read more

What does the Earthlink shake-up mean for the future of city wifi?

Update: SFGate reported this morning that Earthlink will be withdrawing their contract with the City of San Francisco to provide wireless internet. It is unclear what the City's plans for future broadband development are at this point in time.

It was almost four years ago that Philadelphia became the first major city in the US to announce their plans to blanket their city with wi-fi connectivity. It was a big deal, and other cities followed suit using a variety of approaches.

After Pennsylvania passed legislation prohibiting municipalities from getting into the wireless business, Philadelphia partnered with Earthlink to develop a wireless infrastructure that offers free service in certain parks while offering wifi in private homes and business at market rates with subsidies for the poor. In San Francisco, where I live, the bid was awarded to a partnership between Google and Earthlink. With today's news that Earthlink is restructuring its company and losing the head of it's municipal wi-fi intiative, it remains unclear what the future of Earthlink's projects will be and what effect this news will have on the future of other city-wide wi-fi initiatives.

State high court rules public has a right to know

Open government is a central tenet for democracy. After all, if it's your government then you have the right to know what your money is going toward. But what about the rights of public employees' personal privacy? As reported in today's SFGate , the California Supreme Court has ruled that "the public has the right to know the names of police officers and the salaries of local and state government employees."

Friction.tv promises to spark the debate

It was awhile ago that YouTube first allowed video comments on its service, and over time responses in video form began to populate the site--including those that address the original video and those that don't. In theory, Friction.tv is a Web portal built around YouTube's video response feature. In practice, there are few, if any, response videos, though people have been active leaving text comments. (In the interest of full disclosure, Friction.tv is a sponsor for the NewTeeVee Pier Screening Series in which I have been asked to speak on a panel).

Content passes communication in recent internet use study

With the rise of social-networking sites galore, interactive web 2.0 features being incorporated into just about every enterprise and blogs becoming ubiquitous for the young and old, you'd think that internet usage would be moving away from content consumption and towards interactivity, but a recent study by the Center for Media Research shows otherwise.According to the Online Publishers Association, Internet users are spending nearly half their online time visiting content, a 37% increase in share of time from four years ago. The Internet Activity Index, conducted by Nielsen//NetRatings, shows that communications accounted for 46% of consumers' time online in 2003. A dramatic shift has taken place since then, with consumers now spending 47% of their time with content and only 33% with communication.… Read more

Like television, radio and print, blogs are just a medium

When radio was first pioneered, print journalists were quick to dismiss it as inferior. This same scenario repeated itself with the advent of television and again with the rise of technologies that allowed solo journalists to produce their own stories single-handedly. As blogs and other community media become more popular and more relevant, the assault on this new medium continues to grow.

Michael Skube's recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times provides a reasonable critique on the blogosphere but neglects to look at the larger picture. He points out that many blogs are nothing more than commentary and suggests that many of these blogs are "noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined." While I can't argue with this conclusion, his analysis misses the fact that blogs have broken a number of important stories in recent years and fails to mention the non-news that the establishment media finds itself focusing on with alarming frequency.… Read more

War coverage drops in second quarter of 2007

The war in Iraq is still the most important issue for many Americans as we prepare to vote for George Bush's replacement, but according to a recent study, the US media's coverage of the war has dropped off during the second quarter of this year. As Reuters reports, much this of this decrease is largely due to the diminished focus on the Washington-based policy debate.… Read more

A media blackhole in Colorado

Having spent time in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), I wasn't surprised to learn that the agency's highest security prison has denied all media requests for the past six years. Known as the ADX, the super-maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado is home to some of the most notorious convicts in history including Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, and the so-called "American Taliban," John Walker Lindh. While simultaneously being very conscious of public relations, the BOP exercises tremendous secrecy under the guise of security.

According to Westword News, there have been exactly 100 media requests submitted to interview inmates at the ADX facility since 2002 and none of these requests have been granted.… Read more

Strayform offers platform to get you paid for your creative work

Once a month media creators from the San Francisco area gather together for the Bay Area Media Makers Meetup. Each meeting is a new opportunity to meet a wide variety of creative people, and occasionally someone comes to the meetup with a truly inspirational idea. Wednesday night's meetup was one of those nights. Brandt Cannici has a new start-up called Strayform that promises to offer creatives a new way to establish economic sustainability for their projects.