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Media Nation
By Dan Kennedy • Now online at www.dankennedy.net
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Howard Owens talks about The Batavian
My spring-and-summer video tour of innovative online news organizations continues with Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian, a for-profit news site in western New York state that he founded when he was director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media.
Owens left GateHouse earlier this year and took The Batavian with him. I visited him in late June and spent a few days interviewing him and other folks in Batavia. Owens, though, is the only one I captured on video.
Here are links to my earlier video interviews:
Christine Stuart, editor and publisher of CT News Junkie, which covers political and governmental news from the Connecticut State House, in Hartford.
Adil Nurmakov, Central Asia editor for Global Voices Online, whom I interviewed in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
The next stop on my online-journalism video tour is Montclair, N.J., where I recently interviewed Debbie Galant, co-founder of Baristanet, and Mark Porter, editor of the weekly Montclair Times.
Baristanet, founded five years ago, was among the first local blogs — and certainly one of the very first to be started by professional journalists with the goal of turning a profit.
Galant and I met at a local Panera; I interviewed Porter at his office.
Earlier:
Solana Larsen, managing editor of Global Voices Online
Paul Bass, editor and founder of the New Haven Independent
Adil Nurmakov, Central Asia editor for Global Voices Online
Last month I took two reporting trips for my book-in-progress about online journalism and community participation. I took advantage of the opportunity to shoot several video interviews, which I am now editing and posting on YouTube.
My first stop was in New Haven, where I spent some time with Paul Bass, the founder and editor of the New Haven Independent. I also interviewed his managing editor, Melissa Bailey, and Mark Brackenbury, managing editor of the daily New Haven Register. If you don't see my video (above), click here. I apologize for the sound quality; I should have interviewed Bass somewhere other than a loud coffee-and-bagel shop, but he's a busy guy.
The Independent is a non-profit community news site that's similar to Voices of San Diego and MinnPost. Bass, an award-winning New Haven journalist and former editor of the alternative New Haven Advocate, tools around the city on his bicycle with a notebook and a small video camera.
I spent last Wednesday with Christine Stuart, the editor of CT News Junkie, which covers Connecticut politics. Stuart, who's based at the Statehouse in Hartford, posts two to four times a day, often covering hearings on important but secondary stories that the mainstream media ignore.
CT News Junkie is a media partner with the New Haven Independent, one of the more interesting experiments in non-profit, Web-based community journalism. Projects such as these are crucial as we seek to grope our way forward through the economic crisis that has befallen the news business. (CT News Junkie is technically a for-profit company, but Stuart is looking into ways of taking it non-profit.)
I visited Stuart as part of a long-range project. But while I was there, I shot some video and put together a six-minute documentary. I hope you'll take a few moments and have a look.
Some technical notes. After spending about an hour trying to edit my video with iMovie '08, I gave up and used iMovie 6 instead. The lack of precision for coordinating audio and B-roll with iMovie '08 is a source of constant frustration, and I've finally given up. I can't believe I subjected my students to it last semester. Maybe iMovie '09 will be a better solution.
I also was unable to post the result to YouTube, even though the format (MP4), the length (well under 10 minutes) and the file size (under 100 MB) all meet YouTube's guidlines. Vimeo didn't work, either. I finally posted it successfully to Wired Journalists, which uses the Ning platform designed by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen.
If anyone out there has some thoughts as to why this proved to be YouTube-unfriendly, please drop me a line or post a comment. I'd still like to get this up on YouTube.
For those of us who were actually messing around with stuff like this in the 1980s, this news report looks more nostalgic than startling. My favorite part of the story: It took two hours to download all the text in a newspaper, and access cost $5 an hour. (Via Romenesko.)
It was an interesting experience, and I learned a lot from the other panelists — Perry Allison of EONS.com, Pam Johnston of Gather.com and Brian Halligan of HubSpot. The moderator was Debi Kleiman of Communispace in Watertown, whose Fenway Park-theme meeting room was where we held our presentation.
I've posted the slideshow that accompanied my talk. Slideshare appeared to choke on embedded links, so I've listed them below in case you'd like to check any of them out.
Howard Owens, GateHouse Media's director of digital publishing, has responded to YouTube's decision to remove the Beverly Citizen's controversial video of the "Horribles" parade.
According to Owens, YouTube acted after receiving a complaint from someone whose face was visible in the video. Apparently YouTube has a privacy policy under which it will take down a video at literally anyone's request. Owens sums it up as follows:
We simply cannot allow YouTube, or any other business partner, to subvert our editorial independence. If YouTube wants to get in the game of hosting video for established news organizations — which it is doing — then it needs to respect the editorial judgment and independence of the news professionals in those organizations. If YouTube is unwilling be a true media partner, then, at least for GateHouse, we will need to seek alternative means of distribution of our videos.
Now, it's easy enough to say that YouTube should act as a common carrier, similar to the phone company, and carry any traffic that comes its way, regardless of content. As a free-speech advocate, I would much prefer a policy like that.
But it's not that simple. YouTube is successful in part because it does a good job of keeping out pornography and graphic violence. It's the PG-13 nature of YouTube that makes it an attractive venue for media companies like GateHouse in the first place.
On the other hand, Owens is absolutely right that if the folks at YouTube are going to remove news videos arbitrarily, then there's no way a news organization can do business with them.
I haven't changed my mind about the video — I still would have edited it to remove the eight-foot-long penis and some of the more offensive signs. But that has to be the news organization's call, not that of the service hosting the video.
I realize this post is entirely one-sided, and I hope YouTube has something to say. Soon.
Wednesday morning update: An unnamed YouTube spokeswoman tells the Boston Herald that the video was "inappropriate," but leaves it at that.
Looks like GateHouse Media has taken matters into its own hands.
If you go to the Beverly Citizen's "Horribles" parade story now, you'll see that the video featuring the eight-foot-long water-spouting penis and the crude signs is back online.
Here's the kind of false propaganda Jay Severin pumps into the heads of his listeners, whom he likes to call "the best and the brightest." Within the past 15 minutes, he went into a riff about how the mainstream media, out of "professional courtesy," would not cover the fact that CNN had allowed Democratic ringers to take part in the YouTube debate. He specifically mentioned the New York Times as refusing to cover the story.
In fact, both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran prominent stories today, both of which were featured on Jim Romenesko's heavily trafficked media-news site, along with Media Nation. Now, the Times and the Post are only the two most important newspapers in the country. But just for good measure, check out the results of this Google News search.
Severin either lied about today's Times (and the rest of the media), or bloviated about what he imagined the Times had done without bothering to check. I'm not sure which is worse.
If CNN executives took citizen media seriously, then they wouldn't be facing charges that they're in the tank for the Democrats. Well, OK, they probably would, but the charges wouldn't seem as credible.
Following Wednesday night's CNN/YouTube debate, it was revealed that retired general Keith Kerr, a gay man who asked the candidates a pointed question about why they oppose letting openly gay men and lesbians from serving in the military, was a prominent supporter of Hillary Clinton's. And that turned out to be only the most notable of what conservative blogger Michelle Malkin is calling Democratic "plants."
Well, of course, it was incredibly stupid of CNN to do such a poor job of vetting the 5,000 or so videos that were submitted by YouTube users. And it certainly didn't help that Kerr was allowed to hector the candidates from the audience. His question was perfectly legitimate, but his Clinton affiliation should have disqualified him. (And it's too bad that Anderson Cooper is getting tainted by this. I thought he did an exceptionally good job of keeping the proceedings moving along while remaining substantive.)
But why is CNN deciding which videos to use in the first place? As my former Boston Phoenix colleague David Bernstein wrote after the first Democratic YouTube debate in July, CNN "pretty much created a TV show out of the free raw video materials, not entirely unlike an episode of America's Funniest Home Videos."
So let me repeat and expand on a suggestion I made back then: If CNN wants to harness the power of citizen media, then it should go all the way. Here's what I'd do:
Have people upload videos in six or eight subject categories — the war in Iraq, terrorism, taxes, immigration, the environment, whatever.
Subject those videos to light vetting to make sure none is tilted for or against a particular candidate, or is grotesquely offensive.
Let the YouTube community vote on the best video in each category. Those are the questions that will be asked.
Such a system wouldn't be perfect. One problem, of course, is that the candidates would get to see the questions ahead of time. But so what? We should be looking for thoughtful answers rather than making these debates a test as to who can spit out the best instantaneous soundbites.
There's also the possibility that the process would be hijacked in some way. But I think that's a risk worth taking. Besides, how would that be any worse than letting people associated with Hillary Clinton's and John Edwards' campaigns ask questions, as CNN did?
"Score this one for the people," says the Boston Globe in an editorial today. Well, no. This was CNN's show from start to finish. Let the people decide — then we can celebrate.
Jon Garfunkel has some thoughts on the 1994 Dick Cheney tape. There's a lot in here, including some ramblings from the conspiracy-minded left as to whether the media are deliberately ignoring evidence that George W. Bush is prematurely senile. But Garfunkel does get to the heart of the matter with this about the Cheney tape:
[W]hat's remarkable is that no one found this earlier — five years ago would have been a good time. Vice President Cheney appeared on Meet the Press with Tim Russerton September 8, 2002 and then on March 16, 2003, three days before the Iraq war. Russert asked him reasonably tough questions. In the March interview he showed a video clip from Cheney's appearance on the the show during the 2000 campaign. Cheney had said in 2000 that they didn't go to Baghdad on the advice of the neighboring governments in the coalition. What had changed, to Cheney and the war's supporters, was the world on 9/11. But while the specter of global terrorism may have changed the urgency for war, it could not have changed the expectations about the quagmire. Either the 1991 NPR clip or the 1994 C-SPAN clip would have brought that more directly.
Garfunkel makes an important point here. After I posted my earlier item, several Cheney defenders wrote comments saying, essentially, So what? Lots of politicians change their minds. Look at John Kerry! Karl Rove said the same thing yesterday in his appearance on "Meet the Press," telling substitute host David Gregory:
He [Cheney], he was describing the conditions in 1994. By 2003 the world had changed. It changed on 9/11, and it became clear — it should be clear to every American that we live in a dangerous world where we cannot let emerging threats fully materialize in attacks on our homeland.... [P]eople are entitled over time to look at the conditions and change their mind, and that's exactly what Dick Cheney did.
Well, yes. But, as Garfunkel observes, changing your mind about the threat posed by Iraq is one thing (John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"), but changing your mind about the consequences of war is quite another. We now know that Cheney got it exactly right in 1994. We have no idea why he later decided the invasion and its aftermath would be a cakewalk. Did Ahmed Chalabi really hold that much sway?
Not that it could have stopped the war, but it's a shame that Cheney's 1994 words couldn't have been thrown in his face in 2002 and '03, before the invasion. Forcing him to explain why he no longer believed the war would lead to a quagmire would have been a useful exercise. It's nice that it's come out now, but at this late date it only confirms what most Americans believe about a vice president they detest and a war they no longer support.
May I make a confession? I completely forgot about last night's Democratic debate, and thus missed the two-hour exercise in YouTube-fueled citizen participation.
But I can definitely see both sides regarding the one controversy the format engendered: CNN's decision to handpick the questions rather than let the YouTube community vote on them. The chances of campaign workers' monkeywrenching the results were high. On the other hand, if CNN is going to pick which questions it wants the candidates to be asked, it might as well let Anderson Cooper ask the questions.
David Bernstein of the Phoenix writes that CNN "pretty much created a TV show out of the free raw video materials, not entirely unlike an episode of America's Funniest Home Videos." He's right.
So here's an idea that might work. Let CNN pick six or seven (or 10) broad categories that it wants to put to the candidates. Let the YouTube community vote on the best question in each of those categories. Questions that mention any candidate by name can be thrown out. What do you think?
Over at YouTube today, you can watch the debate, question by question, and post your own video response.
