PressThink: Each Nation its Own Press

Each Nation its Own Press

Part of what I plan to say at the Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures in Melbourne next week. I'm on my way there today, and may report in next week. Expect guest blogger Len Witt. Big wave to Blognashville.

Today I am off to Australia to participate in the 2005 Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures in Melbourne, where I will join Lance Knobel on the May 11th program, Reporting Change: the media and innovation. It’s a big honor to be part of this series, and to be visiting Australia for the first time. (I will be in Melbourne May 8-12th, Sidney May 13-15.) Larry Lessig and Joi Ito will be speaking in the same series, among many other accomplished people.

(In my place Leonard Witt of the Public Journalism Network will be guest blogging.)

You can read Lance’s lecture, Navigating Through the New Media Democracy, here. Below is part of my lecture— an excerpt from the more scholarly and prepared remarks. In Part Two I will be speaking more from notes, personal impressions and web pages.

Each Nation its Own Press

2005 Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures
Melbourne, Australia

by Jay Rosen, New York University & PressThink

In a state of nature there is no such thing as a free press. It has to be created— typically, we think, by law. Therefore we have not one press in the world, (which would be frightening) but one for each nation that has launched a free press, and kept the experiment going.

Laws making it legal to publish news tend to be the laws of one country. The publics gathered for news tend to be national publics, composed of many smaller, intricate and overlapping parts. It makes sense to speak of the Australian Press because it makes sense to speak of the Australian state, nation, people, political tradition, and public. There are institutions that correspond to these abstractions, and thousands of rituals bind them all together.

It dates from only 1976, but the Australian Press Council is of course one way we know the press is organized by category of nation. So is The Australian, the newspaper, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, to name the obvious examples. They reflect press identity as national identity. They also create it. (We have no press council in the United States, by the way. It was tried once and the New York Times, among others, killed it.)

The Canadian press is an empirically observable thing. The North American press? No. Nothing there, no rituals to observe. The English-speaking press is a valid abstraction, but that’s about all. There is no institution to correspond with that idea.

With English literature, however, we find a different story; an observable social history and family tree—a field—stretching across English-speaking countries. They study English literature in English Departments in the United States, but in Journalism Departments like mine at NYU, we take it as given that the American model is normal journalism. The British press might be a curiosity; but it is not a starting point for educating young journalists in the United States.

The American experiment with a free press begins in the eighteen century at a certain point in our political history, prior to the war of independence. When arguments for breaking away from England were sustained by writers and printers in America, the writers and printers became actors in those arguments, and by such means a national experiment with a free press was born in the United States.

A little while later, arguments for how to form a government, and what kind was best, were floated in newspapers and pamphlets. The mythology of the American press rightly begins with the famous patriot, writer and international trouble maker Tom Paine, who wrote Common Sense in January of 1776. Today, tompaine.com is a news and opinion website that I read, and occasionally write for. That’s what I meant by a social history. Then, as now, the press is a circulator of public argument, pushing ideas against events to create editorial traction and grab attention.

Many sharp people have noticed that we are living today in a great era of pamphleteering made possible by the Internet, along with one of its native forms and most powerful inventions— the modern weblog, which is only an aspect of an even more powerful invention: the interconnected sphere of weblogs.

I happen to have one, a blog called PressThink, and it exists within that sphere, so I can tell you a lot about blogs, blogging and the blogosphere later. My point at the moment: it is one press from Tom Paine’s Common Sense in 1776 to tompaine.com today, and to PressThink, and thousands of similar sites. The American press has a specific life “span” and of course the experiment is still going today.

Let’s dig a little deeper, then, into the start of the story in America. I won’t state them but I think you will find certain points of contact with the Australian puzzle.

Among the objections to the proposed Constitution was the “extent of territory” to be put under one federal government. All wisdom alive at the time said that a republic could survive only if it remained small and homogeneous. A huge territory like the United States could be governed from the center only as an empire, or monarchy. History gave no enduring examples of a republic so large. (A typical title for a pamphlet about this: “Extent of Territory Under Consolidated Government Too Large to Preserve Liberty or Protect Property.”)

One of the replies to this argument, put forward by supporters of the new scheme, involved the press, and communication channels generally, which at that time included transportation because messages moved at the speed that goods and people did. So in reply to fears about “extent of territory” it was said that while people could not easily circulate around such a large space, the newspapers would circulate instead, bringing news to people that those people might have once brought themselves to the local marketplace. A jump in scale was said to be possible because the circulation of news on that scale was thought possible.

With the press as part of the grand design, one could extend republican government—and political imagination, national symbols, patriotic feeling—over a larger territory than once thought, because with good roads, canals, mail service and newspapers the scattered parts can yet be in touch with the whole. What happens at the center can now reach the margin. Citizens can read about what they cannot hear about or experience directly. But that is enough, it was argued, to keep in touch with their representatives. While news flowed from the capital to the towns and farms, word also filtered back, through letters and the press, so that the margin could talk to the center, too.

And it was this rhythm—which was imagined, before it actually happened—that made political life in an extended republic seem almost practical. In fact it was a great gamble to set up the kind of government the founders of the United States wanted. A jump in scale requires imagery to jump into, and we had that. Some of it came from press.

And because arguments like this one, about scale and the circulation of newspapers, won the day, the press as a practical instrument—a connector, and circulation system—figures in the founding of the United States. The broad distribution of news was factored into the design as one solution to how a scattered population in a big and menacingly empty space might be expected to elect its governors, and recall them if needed.

This is one reason freedom of the press is spelled out in the Constitution of the United States, in the very First Amendment. The press helped make the American Republic imaginable when it was first drawn up, and argued into existence. That is a constitutional thing to do.

An organization called the Freedom House has published every year a report called Freedom in the World, a comparison of political rights and civil liberties in 192 countries and 14 other territories that are country-like. The current report lists 75 countries where there is a free press (39 percent of the total); 50 that are partly free, (26 percent) and 69 not free at all (35 percent.) The freest, and number 1 on the list is Finland. Australia is Number 30, just behind the United States at 29. North Korea, of course, is at the bottom of the list. New Zealand is number 10.

I should like to think that we have in our imaginations reserved a place for a free press in every place on earth where there could and should be one. China, for example, does not now have a free press, except in zones where something resembling it is allowed by the authorities to go on. But there is a place in the club waiting for China, if you will forgive the flip expression. When that place is taken up what an adventure in liberty it will be.

But not just liberty. The Indian economist Amartya Sen examined the record and concluded as follows:

One remarkable fact in the terrible history of famine is no substantial famine has ever occurred in a country with a democratic form government and a relatively free press. They have occurred in ancient kingdom and in contemporary authoritarian societies, in primitive tribal communities and in modern technocratic dictatorships, in colonial economies governed by imperialists and in newly independent countries run by despotic national leaders or by intolerant single parties. But famines have never afflicted any country that is independent, holds regular elections, has opposition parties and permits newspapers to question the wisdom of government policies.

And so there is something to the idea that the circulation of news will sustain liberty over the extended territory of the modern nation. It’s not just an abstraction. Sen says so. And that’s one reason why the figures shown in the Freedom House report matter.

If every free press we have around the globe—which is a finite though changing number—had to be created somehow, who is the creator? Well, it is not god, it is not nature, it is not publishers and editors and journalists (who are key to the story) it is not, typically, kings. I would say it is nations— civil societies when they become open societies. They have been the creators of the press, and of traditions in journalism. Within the national frame the practice of journalism becomes legal, the press becomes stable, local traditions can develop, and institutions with life spans emerge.

Each nation its own press has always been true. But it is a fact of special importance today because, due to changes in the world that an honest lecturer must call “historic,” (even though he is wary of a term of hype like that one) each nation will shortly have a chance to re-establish or overhaul its own press. Or to create one anew. And that is a moment for careful thought.

For as the great migration to a new platform, the Internet, is made, while the very media tools once commandeered by professionals fall into public hands; as the larger media universe is re-built around many-to-many rules, following 300 years or so of one-to-many improvements that created the Mass Media; as vertical communication (moving messages up and down the social hierarchy) adjusts to all the effective horizontal forms (including e-mail, instant messaging, weblogs and others) we now have; and as the makers of mass media discover that the old, atomized, passive and one-way audience is no more… there will be moments of slippage, when suddenly “the press” falls apart, and has to be put back together again, but with new parts.

Or something fails in the old way of defining and imagining the press, and a new image is urgently needed.

Or maybe people ask questions like, “wait a minute, who is a journalist?” or my favorite, “what are journalists for, anyway?” and the old answers just no longer work.

Or maybe after years of preaching detachment journalists suddenly have to decide what their a-ttachment to the republic and to people is.

They are here now and more are coming: These moments of rupture in the life and times of a free press, when the story leaves off, or gives out, and we have to begin it over again in order to keep it going.

It is at those moments, each one a little adventure in liberty, that we should be ready with our best ideas—about news, journalism, political communication, authorship, nation, patriotism, citizenship, and the purpose of having a free press—for these may be necessary. Watch out: They may also spring to life.

It goes without saying (well, maybe it doesn’t) that in the Australian public sphere it will have to be Australian ideas about the press and what journalists are truly for. It goes without saying (well, maybe it doesn’t) that there is a big opportunity for innovation there. No one knows what a many-to-many journalism looks like, after all.

If for me as an American, there is one story from the founding of a free press in the 1770s to the ruptures of the present, the natural question, from an international trouble maker’s point of view, is where to take that story today.

Are you with me?

The Internet presents us with the extension of “the press” to the people we have traditionally called the public. The experiment in press freedom has been given a new set of conditions, another start in a long series of fits and starts. It’s time to start talking about what in the world we want from the next press, since in this sphere we are free once again to invent.
_____________________________________________________________________

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links compiled by guest blogger Leonard Witt…

Hello, all, I’m Leonard Witt. I blog over at PJNet.org, which was set up as place to give public journalism a navigation tool into the 21st Century. One of the blogging spinoffs is that I get emails from people around the globe interested in public journalism. So I was struck by Jay’s comment that “each nation will shortly have a chance to re-establish its own press. Or to create one anew. And that is a moment for careful thought.”

I personally have been giving a lot of thought to just that topic in the last couple of weeks because I have been asked to give a weeklong – 20-hour workshop on public journalism for journalists in Quito, Ecuador.

Ecuador in Freedom in the World gets a “partly free” rating and ranks 92 worldwide.

Of course, I am looking for advice from others who have given journalism workshops internationally, especially around the topic of public journalism.

Cheryl Gibbs, a journalism professor at Miami University, Ohio, wrote in an email about her experience in Colombia: As I recall, I had the graduate students in my one-week class do brief “listening post/talk to citizens” exercises that were pretty revolutionary for them. They were so focused on covering the news from the perspective of those in power that they had never listened to regular folks to find story ideas or thought of positioning them in their thinking as experts based on their experiences as citizens.

She added: Citizens in Colombia were often very reluctant to be quoted, due to the potential dangers of going public with a point of view.

And the statement that impressed her the most was from a student in a Q&A session who stood up and said, “If you’re not willing to die for journalism, then you shouldn’t be a journalist.”

Sounds like he should be giving lectures here.

Jay, Grant Young, in Australia, asks this about the Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures, “Is there a podcast in the works?”

Posted by Jay Rosen at May 6, 2005 1:32 PM Print

The People Formerly Known as the Audience: "You don't own the eyeballs. You don't own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don't control production on the new platform, which isn't one-way. There's a new balance of power between you and us." More...

Migration Point for the Press Tribe: "Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable." More...

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over: "Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation-- for the user's trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There's a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times 'brand,' and creating it from scratch." More...

"Where's the Business Model for News, People?" "It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods the future production of which is in doubt are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?'" More...

National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News This American Life's great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that "information" and "explanation" ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. More...

The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. "Just so you know, 'the media' has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not 'get behind' candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.." More...

They're Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial: "I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think." More...

Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: "We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening." More...

Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well." More...

A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism "It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the 'so-called' from in front? With video!." More...

The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...

He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User "Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in." More...

Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: "It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?" More...

Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...

What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...

If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue: "Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world." More...

The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...

Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...

Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...

News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...

Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the userï¿½s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...

Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...

Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...

Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...

Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...

The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...

The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...

Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...

Notes and Comment on BlogHer 2005 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldnï¿½t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...

Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today's journalism comes out of the market economy." More...

A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...

Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...

The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...

No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...

Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...

Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...

Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...

Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...

Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...

He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...

Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...

Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...

What Time is it in Political Journalism? "Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending." More...

Off the Grid Journalism: “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music. More...

Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...

I gather that Margo Kingston of the Sydney Morning Herald will be responding to your ideas for a book Melbourne University Press is putting together after the conference.

Source: Webdiary Commentariat

Have a safe journey ... Back in 1990s I walked the grounds of the various Deakin campases and was punished with BA ;-)

PS: To paraphrase Milton's Areopagitica, 'The Order is hostile to truth . . .' The Alfred Deakin Debate: Barons to Bloggers

Posted by: Jozef Imrich at May 7, 2005 10:01 AM | Permalink

Article 19 (of UN Human Rights) is about press freedom. There should be an HR Enforcement Group that starts imposing a free press on regimes that have signed the UN dec'l but do not have a free press. Not including imposition on China, but yes on Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe.

Freedom House is a great org. Belarus needs its own press.

Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at May 9, 2005 5:15 PM | Permalink