All Blog Posts from Public Eye

A few years back, the Government Accounting Office decided -- according to the New York Times -- that the “Bush administration violated federal law by producing and disseminating television news segments” – deeming them “propaganda.”

These news segments were pre-taped Video News Releases (VNRs) that aped the look and feel of a news story – complete with the quote-unquote correspondent closing out by saying “I’m Karen Ryan, reporting” – discussing the positive effects of Medicare policy.

The tapes were then sent to local news stations nationwide where they all-too-frequently ran without the disclosure that they were government produced. The practice was thoroughly dissected by the famously prolix Jay Rosen. (Where he cites the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in all its brilliant ‘plain’-ness editorializing “Karen Ryan, you’re a phony.”)

Lesson learned? You’d think.

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In Howard Kurtz’s piece today, he writes of a growing trend in MediaLand: E-interviews.

He writes:

In the digital age, some executives and commentators are saying they will respond only by e-mail, which allows them to post the entire exchange if they feel they have been misrepresented, truncated or otherwise disrespected. And some go further, saying, You want to know what I think? Read my blog.

You might think this is taking things a bit too far, but it makes a lot of sense. When you’re contacted by a reporter, you want to come across as more knowledgable than the next guy. And clever. Clever’s very important. (And if you get really good, maybe Syracuse will give you your own department.)

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Chris Dodd Is Totally Going In My Top Eight: MySpace, "a place for friends," is now a place for presidential candidates. As the New York Times reports, the site is introducing a politics section this week, which "will make it easier for the site’s 60 million American users per month — many of them from the traditionally elusive and apathetic youth demographic — to peruse the personal MySpace pages of, so far, 10 presidential candidates." Vote, consider yourself slightly more rocked.

The Wisdom Of Crowds: Wired magazine and NYU professor Jay Rosen wants to bring the open-source model driving Wikipedia and Linux to journalism. "Assignment Zero will use custom software to create a virtual newsroom that allows collaboration on a discrete, but open-ended, topic from the very start," reports David Carr. Regular citizens will do the lion's share of the work, but experienced journalists will oversee and edit it. "This is a new approach to watchdog journalism. Crowdsourcing is engaging the wisdom and expertise in our communities early on in the reporting process,” Jennifer Carroll, vice president of new media content for Gannett, told Carr.

Johnston Still Missing: A week ago, BBC correspondent Alan Johnston was abducted in the Gaza Strip. "We are growing increasingly concerned about Alan's safety," says the BBC. "Over the past week, we have worked intensively with the authorities in Gaza and elsewhere to try to locate Alan and we continue to receive assurances that everything possible is being done. However, it is disappointing that after seven days there has still been no firm word either about his whereabouts or his condition." As the Guardian notes, a number of foreign correspondents and aid workers have been kidnapped in the region in the past year, but all have been released, usually within days.

The indefatigable Jay Rosen over at PressThink this morning has announced a new adventure in “open-source” journalism – NewAssignment.net. With the help of a $10,000 grant from Craig Newmark, the man who put the “craig” into craigslist, the idea is to bring together professional journalists and the audience in collaborative effort. Jeff Jarvis explains it this way: “This is publicly supported journalism. The public will come to NewAssignment.net with story ideas and will collaborate on honing them there.” Rosen has a lengthy Q&A up on the new effort that you should read. Here’s the opening answer to the question, “what is it?”:

In simplest terms, a way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit called NewAssignment.Net.

The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion; it employs professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards so the work holds up. There are accountability and reputation systems built in that should make the system reliable. The betting is that (some) people will donate to works they can see are going to be great because the open source methods allow for that glimpse ahead.

In this sense it’s not like donating to your local NPR station, because your local NPR station says, “thank you very much, our professionals will take it from here.” And they do that very well. New Assignment says: here’s the story so far. We’ve collected a lot of good information. Add your knowledge and make it better. Add money and make it happen. Work with us if you know things we don’t.

But I should add: NewAssignment.Net doesn’t exist yet. I’m starting with the idea.

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Each week we’ll invite someone from the outside to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. We asked Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and author of the widely-read blog Pressthink, to get things started. The opinions expressed in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours. As you can clearly see below and in the weeks ahead, we'll seek opinions and thoughts from a wide variety of voices. So, take it away Jay:


To: The People of CBS News

From: Jay Rosen

Re: The Internet and You


Welcome to the Internet, everyone. And I do mean everyone. According to Larry Kramer, the boss of CBS Digital, "all 1,500 people at CBS News now also contribute to CBSNews.com." That means you're all Web journalists now -- by decree, as it were.



Kramer, after selling Marketwatch.com to Dow Jones and making a bundle, told CJR Daily that what excited him about coming to CBS was running an online news operation "that is funded largely by television revenues." Not having a cable network has become an advantage for CBS, because "with the advent of broadband on the Web, the Web is really a much more attractive place to get news, even news video, now." In other words, the Web site is your cable channel.



Things are looking up for you guys. Public Eye is part of that. The transparency revolution in network news has started, and CBS gets the credit for going first. But I want to make sure you understand it, and how we got here.

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