Unpacking My Library

Howie Kurtz is a Media Analyst and Pundit. But is he a Journalist?

  Howie-- Journalist?
  Originally uploaded by Chanders.

He is being cast by some supporters as an old champion of the First Amendment, defending the rights of ex-reporters everywhere to pontificate freely about matters of public concern on the front pages of one of America’s most respected daily papers.

“Even in middle school he was shooting his damn mouth off for no apparent reason,” says Kurtz’s ex-5th grade teacher, Danielle Fishbaum.

But to others, Howard Kurtz, the media critic for the Washington Post, is just a pompous windbag.

“On the one hand,” says Martin J. Squib, a Law Professor at the University of Houston Downtown and First Amendment expert, “Kurtz writes prolifically for the Washington Post and, through his writing, draws a salary. Seems like a journalist to me. On the other hand, though, it seems that most of what he writes is opinionated dreck. He doesn’t seem to employ basic reportorial skills very often, and when he needs a quote it looks like he just opens his Rolodex and calls one of his old drinking buddies from inside the beltway.”

Controversy also surrounds Kurtz’s online column for the Washingtonpost.com,“Media Notes” an endeavor on which he appears to spend an increasing amount of time.

“Best I can tell, he just sits around his house in his bathrobe and reads the blogs all day,” says one ex-colleague of Kurtz’s, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution from the powerful press pundocrat. “What’s even worse, his analysis of the ‘blogosphere’ is superficial, at best. There are 16-year old kids on Myspace who seem to be doing a better job.”

Kurtz is the latest in a spate of editorial columnists and opinion providers for large media outlets whose usefulness has been called into question following the growth of online, user-driven content creation. “Sure, doing actual reporting is a little hard and requires a basic set of skills, as well as a willingness to keep odd hours and be generally disliked by large segments of the population,” notes “Web 2.0” marketing guru and venture capitalist Jack Flashdance. “But punditry? Maureen Dowd? Brooks? Broder? Who reads these guys anymore? Especially when somebody who actually knows something about a particular subject can give me her opinion about it for free.”

The legitimacy of Kurtz’s weekly TV show, “Reliable Sources,” is also a matter of some dispute.

“I don’t know which is worse, yapping on TV for an hour about the news media after doing it all week in print, or inviting your reporter friends—people who claim on the other six days of the week that they are ‘objective”—to come on the show with you and get paid to foist their opinions on the pubic,” adds Flashdance.

No matter how what the 24-hr cable networks have dubbed the “Kurtz Kontroversy” is eventually resolved, Squib expects the larger disputes to continue for some time.

“It’s ironic that the folks in the mainstream media who most often talk about who is or who isn’t a journalist are the people who haven’t done real journalism in years,” he sighs ruefully “The people who have the most to fear from the Internet and from ‘citizens journalism’ aren’t the reporters. The Howie Kurtz’s of the world-- at least the ones who get paid-- well, they're an endangered species.”

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For more on the Josh Wolf case, see the February 22 issue of The Indypendent.

Who Wants to be the Next Colin Powell? No One, it Seems. (Updated Below)

  Here We Go Again
  Originally uploaded by Chanders.

Just as the lefty blogosphere begins to crank up its dissection of mainstream media reporting on the Iran-Iraqi insurgency connection, along comes a Baghdad briefing that looks to set a new gold standard when it comes to the dodgy use of anonymous sources.

Some back story first: as Glen Greenwald noted yesterday, both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post (along with the AP) have recently published well-researched stories casting doubt on some of the more hyperbolic Pentagon claims about Iran's meddling in Iraq. Obviously, there's a history here: no one in the media should be willing to be a stooge for over-hyped way mongering "evidence" again, considering how well this all went the last time around. As Greenwald notes, "It seemed as though the media was treating the war-inflaming claims of Bush officials against Iran much more skeptically."

So a lot of people hit the ceiling when, on Saturday, New York Times reporter Michael Gordon penned a front-page article headlined "Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Made By Iran, US Says." Greenwald puts it well:

The article does nothing, literally, but mindlessly recite administration claims about Iran's weapons-supplying activities without the slightest questioning, investigation, or presentation of ample counter-evidence. The entire article is nothing more than one accusatory claim about Iran after the next, all emanating from the mouths of anonymous military and "intelligence officials" without the slightest verified evidence, and Gordon just mindlessly repeats what he has been told in one provocative paragraph after the next.

Editor and Publisher dryly noted that Gordon "wrote with [Judith] Miller the paper's most widely criticized -- even by the Times itself -- WMD story of all, the Sept. 8, 2002, “aluminum tubes” story that proved so influential, especially since the administration trumpeted it on TV talk shows." Raw Story alleges that the Gordon story "appears to violate the paper's policy on using unidentified sources ... Gordon's article doesn't contain any explanation why his sources were unidentified, nor does it even come out and explicitly say that anonymity was granted." And Think Progress highlights the little-noticed fact that the Bush Administration stepped back from the cooked-intelligence precipice once before, noting that "on Feb. 2, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley acknowledged that the Iran briefing was held back because it was “overstated” and not “focused on the facts.”

So, this is where we find ourselves Sunday morning, as the Pentagon prepares the Baghdad release of its long-delayed, much-hyped "Iran dossier," charging that "Iranian security forces, taking orders from the "highest levels" of the Iranian government, are funneling sophisticated explosives to extremist groups in Iraq, and the weapons have grown increasingly deadly for U.S.-led troops over the past two years."

Incendiary claims indeed. But here's the worst thing. The briefing was provided by "senior defense official ...  on condition of anonymity," according to the AP. Or as the Washington Post puts it, the briefing was supplied by "a senior defense official in Baghdad, who like the two other officials spoke on condition of anonymity." The AP attributes the briefing to "U.S.-led forces in Iraq," as if somehow the forces themselves stood up at the podium and provided a hundred-thousand man press conference.

This boggles the mind. A full-dress press conference, supposedly providing the best-evidence the U.S. has amassed so far on Iranian interference in Iraq, is given by three people, all speaking on condition of anonymity? And its taken seriously? And reported? And it gets better. Writes the Post:

"The officials said they would speak only on the condition of anonymity so the trio's explosives expert and analyst, who would normally not speak to reporters, could provide more information. The analyst's exact job description was not revealed to reporters. Reporters' cell phones were taken before the briefing, and the officials did not allow reporters to record or videotape the proceedings."

Or writes the Times:

"During the briefing, the senior United States military officials were repeatedly pressed on why they insisted on anonymity in such an important matter affecting the security of American and Iraqi troops. A senior military official said that without anonymity, for example, the military analyst could not have contributed to the briefing."

This is insanity. This press conference should have been boycotted by every self-respecting reporter in Iraq.

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Update: Editor and Publisher notes that the Voice of Iraq (VOI) has outed one of the three "anonymous sources":

In his new site, Iraqslogger.com, Eason Jordan observes in response, that "one of the three supposedly unnamed US officials apparently has been outed by an Iraqi news service, Voices of Iraq, whose report on the Baghdad news conference identified one of the three speakers as Major General William Caldwell, whose portfolio includes public affairs and who holds frequent news conference and grants one-on-one interviews.

"So, if the VOI report identifying Caldwell is correct, why did every other news organization apparently agree to grant anonymity to the general who's the official spokesman of the US-led Multi-National Force in Iraq? Why would Caldwell insist on not having his name associated with these allegations today?

From Power to Authority in Communications Research

This is a very early excerpt of a larger theoretical paper I'm working on. Its in an extremely preliminary state. Nevertheless, I'm happier with the ideas here-- how they integrate the sociological and theoretical concerns of my project; how they relate to larger issues I've thought about as an activist, how they bring anti-authoritarian concepts to the fore-- than I've been with much I've done for a long time. For various reasons, including a work in progress presentation I'll be giving in two weeks, I thought this was an appropriate time to share them with the larger web community that occasionally drops in and pays attention to my incoherent ramblings.

As always, comments are welcome and sought after. Please remember, this is all very nebulous at this point, so there's lots to be done.

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Despite fairly profound conceptual difficulties, arguments about power, authority, and the relationship between the two-- from the “three faces of power debate” that dominated much of political science in from the 1950's to the 1960's; to the provocative writings and interviews of Michel Foucault; to Bourdieu's more empirically grounded work on symbolic power-- have been some few areas of current research in which both social scientists and social theorists have felt compelled to produce voluminous and contradictory materials in equal measure. All, that is, but in the realm of communications and media research. For while questions of media power (and related questions of media effects and media influence) have dominated the field since its inception, the theoretical relationship between these questions and questions of authority and legitimacy have been rarely addressed, especially on a non-normative level. The few scholarly investigations tackling issues of (usually specifically “journalistic”) authority have been a theoretical and definitional muddle, often doing more to obscure the concept than illuminate it. All the while, of course, media-marketers and political communications researchers carry on merrily with their “media effects” experiments, (still, it seems) convinced that the proof of media power is in the purchasing.

In the pages that follow I try to tease out the conceptual distinction between power and authority in the field of media research and argue that non-normative questions of institutional media authority deserve more attention than they have thus far received from scholars in the communications field. I posit that, although my primary concern is with questions of media authority, such a problematic cannot be properly understood without first coming to grips with the genealogy of media power; in other words, investigating with the manner in which the notion idea media power has been articulated by communications theorists and researchers.  As media power has remained at the center-- either by its presence or its absence-- of most scholarship in the field of media studies, such a genealogy inevitably forces the researcher to take a position within the currently fevered debates over the history of communications research.  The argument is made in the pages which follow that, for most of the history of the field, media research has concerned itself with the overt exercise of media power rather than the capacity for such an exercise; furthermore, that most structuralist exceptions to this obsession with exercised power have remained beholden to a vulgar Marxist conception of power; and finally, that recent movements in the field towards more complex notion of symbolic power and its relationship with various other forms of power mark a welcome conceptual advance. Nevertheless, even these theoretical moves neglect issues of authority in media institutions.

If Part One explores issues of power in media studies, then, Part Two focuses instead on media and authority. I probe the conceptual distinctions between power and authority, noting that while authority necessarily involves questions of legitimacy and right, scholarship in this vein need not be necessarily and irreducibly normative. I examine the well-known attempt by Barbie Zelizer to move issues of “journalistic authority” towards the center of communications research-- an attempt whose serious theoretical shortcomings trumped  a deeply original insight into the differences between power and institutional authority.  I conclude by advancing my own understanding of the relationship between power and authority in media studies, highlighting some ways in which this understanding can be not only be applied to current questions in communications research, but also might serve to  draw the fields of media studies and the sociology of news into a closer, more  productive conversation.

Gorilla Suits and the Anti-War Movement (Updated Below)

  The Former Fringe
  Originally uploaded by Chanders.

Criticizing mainstream media coverage of political protests is like shooting fish in a barrel. People have been doing it at least since Todd Gitlin wrote The Whole World is Watching [PDF], and it's become common enough to spawn dozens of blogs and at least one media watchdog organization. Every once and in while, though, someone writes something that's so terribly bad, so truly awful, that one can't help but gripe about it. Alex Koppelman with Salon is the lucky man this week. In fact, his article about the January 27 UFPJ anti-war protest, "Protesting the war -- not just for giant puppets anymore!" was so bad, it made the friend who emailed it to me start ranting at her boyfriend in disgust. So congratulations, Alex-- you've even touched even the hard-bitten and cynical.

Lets get a few things straight right off the bat. I'll grant Salon that covering political protests isn't the easiest journalistic job in the world. Journalists thrive on a few types of stories-- stories that are spontaneous and unscripted, stories that are new, stories that involve elites, and stories that  bring to light the passionate nature of the human condition. Political protests combine the worst of all worlds in a way that drives journalists crazy. Obviously, something is going on that's serious enough to impel hundreds of thousands of people to get on buses and stand around in the cold for a few hours. But, all those people make covering the story so hard! And what's more, far from being orgies of spontaneity, most protests are incredibly scripted affairs. So here you are, Alex Koppelman, at the protest surrounded by all these hopeful people (which also pisses you off, because you're a journalist, which means you're also incredibly cynical) at an event your editor tells you is really important but which is just so damn boring.

And when journalists get bored, they get lazy. Which means they pull out the cliches, and dust off the old script they've written a thousand times before.

Here's Koppelman's money paragraph:

"Regardless of size, the protest felt different. The demographics of the crowd had changed. As opposition to the war in Iraq mounts, sparked by the president's decision to send 21,500 more troops, protesting against it has become mainstream. There were plenty of professional protesters in evidence Saturday, the kind for whom protests are a lifestyle choice, but there were also more yuppies, more families with small children, more older people and even a fair number of stylishly dressed young girls in North Face jackets and Ralph Lauren sunglasses. Just as important, the confused, off-topic rhetoric of so many past protests was noticeably muted."

There are two things going on here. For starters, this piece is incredibly poorly written. Koppelman dips into his reporters bag and pulls out every cliche in the book: the commies, the crazy dykes from Sarah Lawrence with the dirty signs, the man in the gorilla suit, the charging anarchists, the reefer (oh god, not the reefer!), and the Fletchers, from Harrisonburg, Va, presumably representative of the 99,500 or so people at the protest who weren't crazy druggies or from weird political sects.

Even worse than the poor quality of the article, however, is the way it reinforces the emerging media narrative about popular opposition to the current fiasco in the Middle East. Salon isn't alone in this regard; indeed, it's likely that Koppelman has read enough other press to pick up on the storyline without even knowing it. Here's a summary of story as it's being framed in the national consciousness:

"Once upon a time, a group of dirty Arabs flew some planes into some big buildings in New York. The American president rallied the American people to the defense of liberty and the homeland like the hero-cowboy he was, and everyone was united and happy, maybe for the first time in their lives. But then the president got carried away, and because Saddam wanted to kill his daddy, he decided he needed to kill Saddam first. And the American people, because they were: a) scared of the dirty Arabs; or b) tricked by the tricky President and his tricky advisors; or c) good hearted liberals who wanted to bring democracy and freedom to the dirty Arabs, all decided that invading Iraq was a great idea. (Of course, there were a few people who thought invading Iraq was a bad idea, but they were all dykes from Sarah Lawrence college wearing gorilla suits). But because the president wasn't very smart, and because we "won the war but lost the peace"; and because the Arabs were not only dirty but were ungrateful bloodthirsty barbarians who didn't appreciate our gift freedom, the war didn't go like people thought it would. Then, all the people who thought the war was a good idea realized in November 2006 that it was a bad idea, and opposition to the war became ... <drumroll please> ... mainstream."

OK, fine. Maybe this storyline, the "mainstreamization" of the anti-war movement will help the Democrats get a spine and end the war. But, it's just not true. In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in the face of a seven month p.r. campaign of post-9/11 fear probably unprecedented in modern American history:

"59 percent of Americans said they believed the president should give the United Nations more time. Sixty-three percent said Washington should not act without the support of its allies, and 56 percent said Mr. Bush should wait for United Nations approval ... Three-quarters of Americans see war as inevitable, and two-thirds approve of war as an option. But many people continue to be deeply ambivalent about war if faced with the prospect of high casualties or a lengthy occupation of Iraq that further damages the American economy. Twenty-nine percent of respondents in the poll, which was conducted Monday through Wednesday, disapprove of taking military action against Iraq ... These worries may be taking a toll on Mr. Bush's support. His overall job approval rating is down to 54 percent from 64 percent just a month ago, the lowest level since the summer before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks ... More than anything, Americans remained concerned about the threat of Qaeda terrorism far more than any threat from Iraq ... In January, 59 percent of the public saw Al Qaeda as a greater threat to peace and stability than Iraq. Fifteen percent saw Iraq as the greater threat. In this week's survey, 28 percent saw Iraq as the greater threat, but 51 percent still perceived the Qaeda threat as more serious ... more information has not translated into greater support for war, which remains at 66 percent. A year ago, a CBS News poll recorded 74 percent in favor of military action against Iraq. The support level for war has held firm at two-thirds of Americans, but this majority breaks down on questions of timing and diplomacy."

Or so wrote the New York Times on February 14, 2003.

A month later, the war had started, and the rallying around the flag had begun. But the doubts were always there, and we need to remember: a third of the country has always opposed war in Iraq, not to mention the two-thirds who thought the way we were going about it was a bad idea.

And then, there was what happened the day after the Times took its poll. 500,000 people in NYC rallying against the war, on the coldest day of the year with no permit, throwing themselves against police barricades on 2nd and 3rd Avenue. 1.5 million in London. 2.5 million in Rome, and millions more in the rest of Europe and around the world.

But hey, maybe they were all wearing gorilla suits.

There's more here than "I told you so." The point of this little history lesson is just this-- sometimes, people are smart. Sometimes they know that their leaders are full of shit, and that they're being lied to. Sometimes, Alex Koppelman, they agree more with the communists and anarchists and wild-eyed radicals than they do with their own elected "leaders," even if this doesn't fit your lazy journalists script.

They knew it then. And they know it now.

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UPDATE: Wow, I thought I sounded pissed off, but I've got nothing on this guy, who also wrote about the Koppelman article:

"Also, fuck Salon both for its choice of headlines when normal, mainstream, job-holding, non-puppet-waving middle class people like me and my wife were out marching three goddamn years ago and for quoting Wonkette as some sort of barometer on what’s worth complaining about ... Some days, despite my putative presence in its ranks, I wish the middle class would just get on with stuffing itself up its own corpulent ass and suffocating as it tries to choke out just one more foppish attempt at 'wry observation.'"

Our Ali G Moment in Iraq

There's a moment in the first season of "Da Ali G Show" where Sasha Baron Cohen is talking to James Baker. "During the Gulf War, when did you decide to invade Iran?" Cohen asks. "We never invaded Iran," Baker replies. "Which one did you go into?" Cohen asks again. Speaking slowly, as if to an idiot, Baker says, "Well we had  a troop presence for a short period of time in Southern Iraq" "Ain't they the same thing, though?" "They're two different countries." Cohen: "Do you think it would be a good idea if one of them changed their name to make it very different sounding from the other? ... Ain't there a real danger that someone give like a like message over the radio to one of them fighter pilots sayin bomb "Ira..." and the geezer don't hear it properly and bomb Iran rather than Iraq?" Baker: "No Danger."

We may have reached our Ali G. moment in the current war-- which isn't very funny at all. In fact, its downright terrifying. I started hearing rumors about plans to do some military action against Iran a few months ago, and dismissed it. It came mostly from the bloggers, and the unreliable bloggers at that: DailyKos diarists, Raw Story, Truthout, etc. Well, after Bush's speech last night, it seems a lot of people have decied it isn't so crazy after all. William Arkin writes on the Early Warning blog today at the Washington Post: "If there's anything in the President Bush's remarks tonight that we didn't already know or didn't anticipate him saying militarily about Iraq, it is his evident willingness to go to war with Syria and Iran to seek peace."

Later in the day, after two rounds of mysterious raids on Iranian targets in Kurdistan, the rumor mill really started to heat up. It     was still the bloggers, but, as Michael notes, its the sober sensible bloggers. The Joshua Michael Marshalls and the Steve Clemonses. Marshall, who is the closest thing on the Web to a real journalist, writes: "I'm getting some hints that this raid on the Iranian consulate in northern Iraq may be part of something much bigger. Is there a classified presidential directive to the CIA and DOD to take down Syrian and Iranian operations inside Iraq, even so far as operations into Iranian and Syrian territory? And is the aim here to provoke a conflict with one or the other of these states? To provoke an attack from Iran perhaps?"

And Clemons adds: "Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran. The President may have started a new secret, informal war against Syria and Iran without the consent of Congress or any broad discussion with the country." And ABC News reports two secret raids at an Ibril airport in Kurdistan, one which almost ended with an exchange of fire between Kurdish Pesh Merga and what can only be US Special Forces.

The Daily Kos has the roundup, such as it is, from the Democrats.

Now, there could be a number of things going on here. Maybe this is just saber rattling from GWB: a sort of "we know where you are" to the Iranians, to keep them off guard. Or maybe the main focus is on Iranian agents inside Iraq. Or maybe, we're going to bomb the shit out of Tehran and the whole thing will just to completely to hell. Now's the time for the journalists-- the ones who get paid, the ones with big time inside contacts, to justify their existence, and tell us what the fuck is going on.

I have a friend tell me the other day that she's never been arrested at a protest, but if we invaded Iran, she'd be on the phone in a heartbeat getting her friends ready for some serious CD. We've been down this road before.

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays

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This year, as part of its simultaneous rediscovery and denigration of all things ungodly, the New York Times Week in Review made the remarkable discovery that -- *gasp* -- atheists sometime put up Christmas trees. One can only assume that this festive decorating occurs in between biting the heads off babies and wallowing in the juices of personal self-loathing.

In true trickle-down-the-elite-media fashion NPR followed up the Times story with that hoariest of Holiday chestnuts, the "mixed faith" holiday celebration. "The Christmas Tree or the Menorah? Or both? For about 2.5 million families of mixed-faith marriages, the holidays are about respecting each other's traditions and balancing the needs of their faiths." Gee, no one has ever asked that one before.

All of this, of course, begs the question: what happens when you're part of a mixed "faith" household and that household's "mixed faith" is  more a cultural mixture than anything religious (I won't let the "agn" word slip out here, but you're welcome to infer whatever you like) ...  Should we expect ritual child sacrifice under the Hanukkah Bush? Or the molesting of defenseless farm animals?

I could just direct you to the blog of my friend Chris Fleisher for one answer. Or I could tell you that the first time I brought home a Christmas Tree (as a surprise) still probably ranks as one of the most romantic things I think I've ever done.

Or, I could leave you with some random best wishes from this solstice-y, globally-warmed Holiday season. May the time spent with your family bring out the best parts of spending time with family, not the worst. May your year ahead be better than the one you're leaving behind.  Happy Hanukkah. Peace on Earth. And Merry Christmas.

A Scholar Stares at the Exploding Newsroom

What a  coincidence! Just as I was starting to try and get my head around all the issues related to ethnographing the "new newsroom," I read on multiple blogs about the major restructuring that Gannett is undertaking. Jeff Jarvis thinks it's a great idea and quotes the relevant Wired story this way: "starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened “information centers,” and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like “data,” “digital” and “community conversation.”"

Other reaction in the blogophere? The go-to place on this story is Wired author Jeff Howe's blog, crowdsourcing.com. Dan Gilmor, though also enthusiastic, notes, in an understated manner, that "a major part of this initiative is to save money," and Andrew Cline reminds us that "it was Gannett that played a big role in damaging print journalism with the introduction of USA Today--the paper that convinced print it should be like TV," though he adds hopefully that perhaps the crowdsourcing initiative will make up for Gannett's earlier sins. The best roundup and discussion of the paradoxical financial implications, however, is at Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog where he asks:

"Who thinks unpaid (or very poorly paid) easily-replaceable labor is just the greatest thing ever? Who finds that exciting and innovative? There's not a lot of discussion of that issue."

I set down some of my own thoughts about these complexities and contradictions a few months ago with regard to the Inky/DN sale and I wont repeat them here, as I have other things I want to get to. I'll just note that, at some point, the cheerleaders for citizen / pro-am / networked / independent / indymedia journalism-- and I'm one of them, for the most part-- are going to have to start grappling with this stuff. Now seems as good a time as any.

But on to other questions. To start, I'd like to point out the irony that, just as sociologists are starting to revisit the notion of the newsroom ethnography, the very concept of the newsroom is "exploding," as Jeff Jarvis would put it, or at least changing in a fundamental way. So, how do we study the newsroom of the future?

Its useful here to tell a simplified story. In the mid- to late-1970's, sociologists such as Herb Gans, Gaye Tuchman, and others turned their ethnographic lenses on the American newsroom. The insights gained by Gans and others did much to flesh out the emerging notion of the journalist as a social actor, and have remained the stock in trade source for common concepts about the news media: now boilerplate notions of news routines, journalists "fear of the audience," the importance of peer approval, etc., first made their appearance in books like Deciding What's News. For the last twenty-five years, though, there has been a relative dearth of ethnographic analyses of the newsroom. (I think. Actually, I'm not entirely sure. From what I've seen, there isn't a main bibliography which lists the major newsroom ethnographies, or quasi-ethnographies since 1970. So its needed, or, if its out there, I need to find it.)

But assuming, for the time being, that the story is one of limited, productive interest, followed by neglect, the last five years have seen a resurgence in the sociology of news more generally, and the newsroom ethnography in particular. Benson's argument to "bring the sociology of the media back in," Klinenberg's work on the converged newsroom, and Boczkowski's examination of multi-media adoption in three newsrooms are all good cases in point.  But it seems that the newsroom has gone beyond being a newsroom, an actual, physical place where the news gets processed, or made, and is now something far more networked, and less bound by physical constraints. So how do we study this? After all, as Bourdieu would note, the gaze of the researcher helps define the identity of what she researches. So how long will academics keep reinforcing the definition of the "newsroom" (and with it, the definition of the journalist it helps support?) But at the same time, how do we  conduct deep, empirical research on unbounded space?

Here's a clue: "Actor-Networking the News," by Fred Turner. [PDF] And here's another clue: Chapter 4 of Science in Action, "Insiders Out," by Bruno Latour.

Deciphering these clues, and other alternatives, in a later post.

[For an earlier post hitting on many of these same themes, see 'Outsiders In': Yearly Kos, Boundary Lines, and Border Zones]

Death in Oaxaca

On Friday, my colleague Brad Will of the NYC Indymedia was shot and killed by government backed paramilitaries in Oaxaca, Mexico. For the last five months, Oaxaca has been the scene of an escalating confrontation between the Oaxaca Teachers Union, under their umbrella organization the APPO, and the state government led by the corrupt PRI functionary state governor Ulises Ruiz . Today, the endgame in Oaxaca looked ready to begin as the Federal government of Vincente Fox, which until now had sat out the conflict, looked to use Will's death as an excuse to break the protests for good.

There's a sickening irony to that, because Brad was in full support of the APPO and the people of Oaxaca, and had gone down there as a journalist and human rights activists specifically to document their struggle against Ruiz. Part of me can't help wondering if Brad was deliberately targeted by the paramilitaries to get Western journalists out of the way.

Here's an email I sent to a bunch of the people about the situation:

"Brad was a friend and colleague of mine. He was a true citizen journalist. He did more than sit behind a laptop all day and pontificate about what he thought the news meant. He wasn't an "official" member of any news organization, but he took his video camera and his notebook and traveled all over Latin America, providing passionate reporting about events and places few Americans knew (or cared) much about. In the past five years, he has committed more acts of journalism than many paid, "professional" journalists. He was killed today, as a journalist. 
We'll all miss him in NYC very much.
chris"

A number of people and professors in my doctoral program and in the NORG's group have sent emails of sympathy; thanks so much to all of them for the kind words. The Houston Chronicle had a great story on this that quoted Jay Rosen, and Jeff Jarvis has a nice post on this too.

Brad's death shows us the importance of journalism-- no matter who does it-- as an important tool of social justice and witness. Brad: !Presente!

Not-Liveblogging the Blogs and Politics Event at NYU

I attended the October 25 "Blogs and Politics" event at NYU, and couldn't liveblog it (as I had planned) because there wasn't any wireless. So I took really detailed notes instead. Here they are.

Some other attendees at the talk blogged about it themselves. They include Liza Sabater

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7:00 Can''t liveblog-- no wireless, at least, not anything thats available to non NYU peons like me.

7:03 The people here look like people who desperately care about “Blogs and Politics,” which, of course, happens to be the title of this panel, sponsored by the NYU Law Dems and DL2LC. The crowd here looks like a slightly less self-assured, slightly more awkward version of a crowd that would be comfortable hanging out in various  bookstores in Washington DC. . I need to come up with a name for this particular type of audience, the type of wonky audience I know really cares about this shit, but whom I would never encounter either at Indymedia or at Columbia in quite the same way.

7:06 Survey says: most visited blogs, 4 out of 5 (at least) are side projects of the mainstream media; Room8 (what's that??) seems to be the only real exception (maybe). So much for the end of professional journalism as we know it. So much for an insurgent band outsiders crashing the gates. Maybe this is a particularly NYC thing?

"On the Media," On Iraqi Bloggers and Journalists

Great piece from "On the Media" on the new-- and tenuous-- world of Iraqi journalism.