Michael Moore on Olbermann

Allowed "free speech" as long as not effective speech? See video.

Times They Are A Changing

J schools a changing. (H/t Mary)
Music sites a changing. (H/t Matt)

Old Old Media -- NOT designed to be reader-friendly

No one will confuse the "design" of William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator -- examples here and here and here -- with a modern, colorful, heavily-illustrated newspaper like USA Today or NY Post. The Revolution, an early feminist newspaper -- here and here -- seems only a little less dense than The Liberator.

Hot Off the...er...Internet: Newsroom coming to S.F.

Big news: San Francisco financier Warren Hellman – in partnership with public broadcaster KQED, the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, and perhaps even the N.Y. Times – is about to launch a "nonprofit, locally focused, online news organization with a medium-sized newsroom of full-time journalists," reports the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Borat-like Activist Filmmaker vs. ACORN

Two young Borat-like pranksters -- one pretending to be a pimp and one a prostitute -- targeted the anti-poverty nonprofit ACORN and succeeded in getting advice from from ACORN workers in some offices for their fictitious prostitution/tax evasion plans. In other words, ACORN workers -- who are supposed to give advice to poor people on housing and taxes -- seemed to be aiding and abetting criminal schemes. "Activist filmmaker" James O'Keefe (who pretended to be the pimp) was behind the videotaping.

The video has been picked up huge on Fox News and elsewhere, leading to a move in Congress to cut off future federal funds to ACORN, which reportedly has averaged several million dollars per year. Now ACORN is suing O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, the actress pretending to be the prostitute.

The website behind the effort, BigGovernment.com, was launched by Matt-Drudge protege Andrew Breitbart, praised here by Slate's media critic.
(H/t to Laura G.)

Obama on Newspapers vs. Blogosphere & My Response

In a recent interview with newspaper editors, President Obama called himself a "big newspaper junkie" and said the survival of newspapers is "critical to the health of our democracy."

A key Obama quote: "I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding."

Despite the "serious fact-checking" that supposedly goes on at the N.Y. Times frontpage or Washington Post editorial page, both were publishing cartoonish distortions of reality in the run-up to the disastrous invasion of Iraq. That is, they were offering a lot of shouting across the void on one of the most important foreign policy controversies in years .

Despite the blogosphere's faults properly alluded to by our newspaper reader-in-chief, I respectfully respond to him by paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson and his preference for "newspapers without a government" over "a government without newspapers."

If forced to choose, I must admit to preferring "the Internet without newspapers" over "newspapers without the Internet."

Ida B. Wells High School, San Francisco, 7/09

That Jeff Cohen guy -- imitating the "Where the hell is Matt?" guy (but without the dancing) -- stands in awe of a pioneer in independent media.