While I'm on the topic of how online content can engage and enrich a journalist's traditional product, the Online Journalism Review at the Annenberg Center has a terrific interview with a Tacoma, Washington sports reporter who covers the Seattle Seahawks. Some highlights of the Q&A with Mike Sando:

OJR: Do you modify your voice when writing for the blog? And if so, how hard is it for a newspaper reporter to adapt to blogging?

Sando: . . . [T]he first thing reporters need to do is lighten up and realize that the blog is not the newspaper. If a columnist somewhere makes an off-the-wall proposal that has people talking, or if you want to throw out some analysis on the topic of the day, the blog is the place to do it. In that sense I have definitely modified my voice for the blog. That was a little tough to do initially, but after running the blog for a while, I'm figuring out what works and where I want to go with things. I used the word "analysis" and not "opinion" because it's important for me to remain true to my identity as a journalist (that probably sounds higher-minded that I'd prefer, but hopefully the point holds up). [note: washingtonpost.com should probably stress the "analysis" category rather than stick the "opinion" label on their non-traditional-reporting online product, such as Dan Froomkin's daily White House review. It would help them avoid the Froomkin Froofraw (Joel Achenbach's term) they got into with the left blogosphere over Deborah Howell's swipe at Froomkin's "liberal" quasi-blog -- that supposedly needed to be distinguished from the paper's political news coverage, even though their reporters often provide "analysis" stories, and required a "conservative" countervoice. Followed by the infamously aborted experiment with a red-meat conservative blogger, Ben Domenech.]

OJR: What reporting and information do you put in the blog that you can't or won't put in your newspaper stories?

Sando: Here's a recent example: The Flint, Mich., paper published a story about former Seahawks receiver Daryl Turner, who enjoyed some productive years in the 1980s before disappearing in a haze of drugs and alcohol. It wasn't something we needed to chase for the paper, but I turned it into a quick blog item. There are numerous other examples. The blog allows more room to discuss (and sometimes debunk) rumors, too.

OJR: Is there a difference in the feedback that you get for what you do on the blog versus what you do for the paper?

Sando: I get way more feedback about the blog. In years past, I might answer 15 emails asking the same thing. Now I address the matter once on the blog and that's it; my time spent answering emails has almost disappeared. Along the same lines, having your own blog is sort of like hosting a radio show. It's more about the host, whereas people don't pay much attention to non-columnist bylines in the paper. For years I have written 350-500 stories per year for the paper, only to have people recognize me as the guy who spends 30 minutes a week during the NFL season as a guest on a sports-radio show. It's not that the radio station had more listeners than we had readers; rather, it's that the listeners were listing to me, whereas the newspaper readers were merely reading my stories. This is an important distinction. Blogs make reporters more relevant as individuals. This would seem to be good for reporters, long term.

OJR: What is the editing process for your blog, if any?

Sando: I post directly to the Internet. A blog with filters is not much of a blog, in my view. Immediacy is very important. The News Tribune trusts my ethics and my judgment. The paper also realizes, shrewdly, that online standards differ from print standards. This doesn't mean that anything goes in a blog. Basic journalism values still apply and management has a responsibility to enforce them wherever its name appears. It's just that reporters have more freedom on a blog.

OJR: What do you see as the potential risks for a newspaper reporting in blogging? What have you done to try to overcome them?

Sando: I think a blog will expose a poor reporter more quickly, while allowing a good reporter to flourish more demonstrably. Also, the comments section of a blog will test a reporter's restraint. I've spent a fair amount of time maintaining the comments section by discouraging crassness, hot-temperedness and overall idiocy.

For some time now, I've been a fan of the way the Washington Post's online presence has been evolving. Last September, when the New York Times introduced TimesSelect and moved various features, including its columnists, behind the paywall, it was clear that the two companies were pursuing very different business models. And I speculated that those divergent business models were likely to produce very different models of a "news organization."

The Washington Post Company and washingtonpost.com are continually engaged in product innovation -- using technology to redefine "news" as dynamic, conversational, contextual content which is networked with related content across the internet (especially the blogosphere, but also including their other properties, Slate and Newsweek), and linked with their other media properties -- now including their new radio station. By contrast, the NYTimes is focusing on production/distribution innovation of their existing product -- using technology to improve the timeliness, relevance to the customer, and revenues from their traditional product, tweaked for online capabilities such as video. As I explained in September:

The overall impression from [washingtonpost.com's] changes is that content is growing more dynamic -- no longer simply the electronic publication of a series of static stories, or photos or graphics. Each Post page becomes the center of, or portal to, a constantly changing network of relevant linky goodness.

The changes are also increasingly reflected in the approach reporters are taking to their respective "beats." Certainly, the "stories for publication" remain fixed by the size, form and flow that are dictated by the conventions of newsprint distribution. In that domain, the Post competes with other news outlets in its attempts to tell news stories better and, in its particular government-related specialties, with greater coverage. But the news stories are being enriched with complementary content by those same reporters, who are bringing more than simply extra information.
[...]
If the printed news story is history's first draft, a permanent record however partial of "what happened," the new types of complementary content implicitly acknowledge the limits of that permanent printed record. The stories are shown to have added layers. The complementary content also celebrates the fact that the stories are constantly evolving -- evolving not simply in the sense that tomorrow's events will overtake today's or that we will have more information about those events in the future, but that their context and meaning are always in the process of morphing as they become part of broader conversations.

Washingtonpost.com has now introduced another example of precisely the sort of product innovation I described, called PostGlobal. It's potentially very good news for those of us who focus on US foreign relations.

David Ignatius (WashPost) and Fareed Zakaria (Newsweek and his TV show, Foreign Exchange) will host roundtables on various timely issues. The responses will come from their stable of about thirty editors and journalists from around the world, their "PostGlobalBloggers." Readers have a thread for their own comments. And Ignatius and Zakaria will provide some sidebar notes and roundups in their "Editor's Inbox" blog. Here's how the site describes what they're trying to do:

PostGlobal is an experiment in global, collaborative journalism, a running discussion of important issues among dozens of the world's best-known editors and writers. It aims to create a truly global dialogue, drawing on independent journalists in the countries where news is happening -- from China to Iran, from South Africa to Saudi Arabia, from Mexico to India.

At least twice a week, we'll post a question then solicit responses from members of our diverse network of experts, whose combined views, we believe, will reflect what the world thinks about important issues more quickly and completely than would those of any single commentator. We will also post comments on the question from readers around the world, highlighting the most interesting.

As news breaks, PostGlobal will ask leading journalists to offer quick insights in our "Editor's Inbox" area. Look here for assessments of the latest stories and for links to useful resources for making sense of what's happening. We're also talking with potential partners about additional features that will allow PostGlobal to pull together and analyze information from around the world.

The first question, posted on Wednesday, was "If Iran becomes the dominant regional power in the Middle East, the region will be safer and more stable. True or false?" The True/False framing isn't all that interesting -- not surprisingly, it produced more "false" than "true" responses from the journalists. Far more interesting were the varied perspectives about the dynamics of the Middle East from journalists from around the world -- including Japan, India, Mexico. They had distinctive views on the prospects for Iran becoming "the dominant regional power," and just what that might mean. Good exercise in revisiting unstated assumptions that underpin a lot of what passes for debate in the US.

The readers' comments were also interesting and, as Ignatius noted in his roundup post today, "in many cases adding a dimension you would not find sitting around a discussion table in Washington." Readers who don't parrot the conventional wisdom of Washington foreign policy elites -- who woulda thunk?

As a further example of the potential for enriching content and conversation, Ignatius' first "editor's inbox" post broadened the discussion by asking "what would Kissinger do"? -- and linked to two documents detailing Henry Kissinger's secret diplomacy with China, which have just been released by The National Security Archive. A lovely reminder of just what a piece of work was Henry the K. And just how far the Bush Admin has moved away from anything resembling strategic thinking and effective diplomacy, even after its supposed return under Rice.

Today's question is: "Should the U.S. and other countries send representatives to the G-8 counter-summit?" (being held by some Russian "liberal dissidents" such as Gary Kasparov at the same time as the G-8 summit in St Petersburg in July). Wonder of wonders, Masha Lipman actually provides a thoughtful response with considerable context for understanding the issue. Wish she'd bring the same nuance to the stuff she produces for Fred Hiatt and the WashPost op-ed pages! That suggests that this more conversational format -- with Ignatius and Zakaria as sponsors -- may actually be as liberating for the opinion-peddlars as for readers and commenters.

One of the reasons why the Post's "global view" experiment may work is that, rare for American pundits, Ignatius and Zakaria both can put themselves in the shoes of non-Americans when looking at US policy and actions. Admittedly, neither has positioned himself as a contrarian, but rather as a mainstream observer whose insights don't fit neatly within the conventional wisdom. I fault both of them for timidity -- for sometimes not extending the logic of their observations to more forcefully challenge US policy. But it's refreshing that they aren't simply a part of the echo chamber on either side of the US political debates. And here's hoping that the voices they assemble  will expand the views available to those debates.

So back to the difference in business models between the WashPost and the NYTimes, and what that may mean for redefining the relation between traditional print and online media. Here's my speculation from nine months ago.

I expect the difference in the two approaches will in the long run have an impact on the content of the two newspapers and ultimately their philosophy of what it means to be a news organization. The NYT proposes to continue to "deliver" its "product." The Post, by contrast, is becoming a portal to a dynamic network of content, only a portion of which is home-grown. But by placing its own content at the heart of the portal and letting its home-grown content interact both with other Post-produced content and with content produced by others, the Post is pursuing a far different model than a classic portal, which aggregates content produced by others. In the process of distributing that home-grown content via the portal, the Post's own way of producing content, and the content itself, will continually be changed or enriched by the interaction with other content and content producers. Maybe, if Eric Nelson is right, the process may even produce added insight from Post reporters on their blogs, or from the commenters or trackbackers or Technorati-linkers, even if they're not named Friedman, Dowd, Brooks, Tierney, Kristoff or Krugman.

Very, very different bets. The NYT's business model is easier to discern than the Post Company's business model -- which clearly incorporates not just the Post but its other media properties. But then again, the NYT's model is easier to understand because it's basically defensive -- do better, whether in terms of quality vis a vis competitors, advertising revenues or satisfying their existing customer base, with their current newspaper business. The Post is, bit by bit, devising a new type of multi-media news business.

The new Ignatius/Zakaria joint venture appears to fit squarely within that prediction. I wish it great success!

P.S. -- While we're on the topic of media, the Huffington Post (NOT my favorite site) has a new section/portal that's devoted to the media, Eat the Press. It's an aggregator, blog and linkroll that's a bit of cross in style/content between Romenesko, Media Matters, CJR Daily, Jeff Jarvis and the Guardian's media section. If you like tracking the nexus of media as a business, politics, and tech, it looks promising.

[cross-posted at american footprints]

I was flipping through the newest issue of Foreign Affairs and what should I see but an ad for the hot-off-the-presses book by Mark Lynch, aka Abu Aardvark, on Arab media: Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, al-Jazeera and Middle East politics today. Here's the catalog description:

Al-Jazeera and other satellite television stations have transformed Arab politics over the last decade. By shattering state control over information and giving a platform to long-stifled voices, these new Arab media have challenged the status quo by encouraging open debate about Iraq, Palestine, Islamism, Arab identity, and other vital political and social issues. These public arguments have redefined what it means to be Arab and reshaped the realm of political possibility. As Marc Lynch shows, the days of monolithic Arab opinion are over. How Arab governments and the United States engage this newly confident and influential public sphere will profoundly shape the future of the Arab world.

Marc Lynch draws on interviews conducted in the Middle East and analyses of Arab satellite television programs, op-ed pages, and public opinion polls to examine the nature, evolution, and influence of the new Arab public sphere. Lynch, who pays close attention to what is actually being said and talked about in the Arab world, takes the contentious issue of Iraq-which has divided Arabs like no other issue-to show how the media revolutionized the formation and expression of public opinion. He presents detailed discussions of Arab arguments about sanctions and the 2003 British and American invasion and occupation of Iraq. While Arabs strongly disagreed about Saddam's regime, they increasingly saw the effects of sanctions as a potent symbol of the suffering of all Arabs. Anger and despair over these sanctions shaped Arab views of America, their governments, and themselves.

Lynch also suggests how the United States can develop and improve its engagement with the Arab public sphere. He argues that the United States should move beyond treating the Arab public sphere as either an enemy to be defeated or an object to be manipulated via public relations. Instead of wasting vast sums of money on a satellite television station nobody watches, the United States should enter the public sphere as it really exists.

Amen, to that last point in particular. And just maybe the much-hyped and much-criticized new public-diplomat-in-chief, Karen Hughes, has figured that out? One indicator is the decision to pull the plug on the innocuous teen-oriented Arabic lifestyle magazine, Hi. Another potential indicator is the doubling of the number of the State Department's media interviews in Arabic this year, to about 100, as reported by Steve Weisman, in a profile of Hughes in the NYT. Weisman also reports that Arabic satellite television is definitely on Hughes' radar screen.

Ms. Hughes departs from one common policy among top American officials. She appears on Al Jazeera, the popular Arabic satellite television station accused by the Pentagon of cooperating with anti-American extremists. This past week, Ms. Hughes sparred with a Jazeera moderator over Iraq, Israel and democracy in the Middle East. "I came here because I respect Al Jazeera," she said. "You have a large audience, and I wanted to address that audience to communicate with the Arab world."

Afterward, Ms. Hughes said that she had been advised not to appear on the station but that she disagreed.

"We have to be out there," Ms. Hughes said. "We may not like everything they report. They may be putting out misinformation. They may incite violence. But we have to be out there."

Marc Lynch has set up a separate blog for discussions of the book, reviews, and his book-promotion schedule, and you can buy it there through his Amazon links. For a good intro to his views, see this recent article in the Wilson Quarterly, Watching al-Jazeera.

cross-posted at American Footprints

Over the past couple of years, I've been an interested observer of the ongoing attempts by major US/UK newspapers to come to terms with the web. Other than the Guardian, which seems to have made an early decision to drive much of its emerging identity from its internet presence, and then tackle its newsprint redesign, most papers have taken a fairly unimaginative incremental approach to figuring out what the web means for them. Each newspaper made its big structural decisions -- subscription or not, registration or not, archives access -- and then tinkered. The vast majority of the tinkerings have been fairly no-brainer, such as links to relevant visual content (e.g. videos, graphics or photos), navigation to related articles in the same paper, and a growing use of text links to other sites -- the latter being a common feature of business articles, where names of companies are hyperlinked to the company's home page or stock market data.

With the summer slow-season at an end, we are seeing some bigger-than-incremental steps that suggest the big players are starting to place their bets on one or another route for developing their business. The most striking -- and strikingly different -- approaches are from the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Some months ago, the NYT gave advance warning of its big upcoming change -- placing more premium content behind an online subscription wall and adding some services (mainly archives access) to the subscription package. Courtesy The Agonist, here's the most recent promo from the NYT:

On Monday, Sept. 19, NYTimes.com will launch a new subscription service, TimesSelect, an important step in the development of The New York Times.

Subscribers to TimesSelect will have exclusive online access to many of our most influential columnists in Op-Ed, Business, New York/Region and Sports. In addition to reading the columns, TimesSelect subscribers can also engage with our columnists through video interviews and Web-only postings.

All of our news, features, editorials and analysis will remain free to readers of NYTimes.com, as will our interactive graphics, multimedia and popular video minutes.

As part of TimesSelect, The Times is also opening up its vast archive of articles reaching back 25 years and eventually back to the paper's founding in 1851. TimesSelect subscribers can read up to 100 articles from the archive a month. For many years our readers have asked for seamless access to The Times's historical archive, and we are now making this available as part of TimesSelect....

TimesSelect will cost $49.95 a year and will be free for home delivery subscribers to the newspaper. This week, you can sign up early to get uninterrupted access to the columns when TimesSelect launches Sept. 19.

The move to put the NYT's famous op-ed pages behind a subscription wall has generated a great deal of, mostly humorous, blogospheric comment over the months since the move was announced. Some bloggers regularly count the days until their least-favorite pundit disappears behind the wall so they "don't have to read him/her anymore." But in practical terms, the great question is usually framed not as "will I subscribe?" but rather "will I still link?" The impression from remarks by most political bloggers who have to pay subscriptions out of their personal piggybanks is a "wait and see" attitude. As John Aravosis of Americablog explained to Editor & Publisher -- most will figure that any op-ed or column that's a real "must read" is going to be passed around by email or available somewhere on the web by hook or by crook. The "will I link" has always been a protocol challenge for bloggers who want to link to news items that are subscription only -- such as the WSJ or even the NYT where, without a link generator, the original url of an article disappears into the black hole of a paid archives in relatively short order.

Yet the "to link or not to link" issue doesn't seem to have been a prime consideration of the NYT's management. Perhaps that's due to their overwhelming current margin of links over all other competitors. As reported by Technorati's State of the Blogosphere August 2005, the NYT clocks in at 50,000 links, with the Post the closest behind at 30,000. With that web presence as a base, the thinking at the NYT appears to be two-fold. How to use the technology of the web to differentiate content distribution for different segments of the paying public. And especially important in a world of declining print circulation and resulting threats to traditional advertising revenues, how to make the paper's online offerings reinforce rather than cannibalize its print audience.

Although the NYT's parent company, The New York Times Company, produced a flurry of excitement and speculation about their internet strategy when they acquired about.com last February, the NYT seems to have decided to be on the web, not of it. Jay Rosen applied that distinction initially to the Guardian, which under Simon Waldman, clearly has decided to strive to be of the web. Now it looks like the Washington Post has made the same decision the Guardian took awhile back.

The Post's new directions are being introduced with little fanfare by comparison with the NYT's big change. But over the past several months it seems as if every week brings innovations to the Post. The most visible immediate change is the revamped home page -- not terribly exciting visually, but tailored geographically for the user, which is great if, like I am, you're a resident of the Washington metro area. It's convenient for out-of-towners as well, since they don't have to wade through DC/VA/MD politics, the latest in traffic nightmares, and the town's Redskins obsession which us locals can't live without. Advertisers, whether local or national, will undoubtedly enjoy better targeting. Yes, I know, it takes an extra step at registration, but set your cookies and you're ready to roll. It's not as if the Post is one of those rarely-used sites that makes registration such an aggravation -- a small price to pay for great free content, and a mini-extra-step that enhances user experience.

The visual and navigation overhaul of the Post's Opinion section is even more recent and, given how poorly most online newspaper Opinion pages are organized, highly welcome. But the real innovation is arriving via weekly introductions of more and more reporter-produced content in a variety of shapes, sizes and publishing rhythms. The "live online discussions" seem in recent months to have attracted more enthusiastic attention both from Post writers and from the online audience, perhaps because the discussions appear to be more relevant to other content on the site as navigation continues to improve. Blogs for different purposes are popping up everywhere. Some reporters' blogs are now actual Typepad blogs with comments and trackbacks. RSS has become ubiquitous, no longer limited to a handful of pre-defined categories. And all of this content -- both traditional "for publication" stories and the more informal reporter journals -- is increasingly integrated with a whole range of internal and external content. Not only are The Washington Post Company's other properties on the web (Slate and Newsweek) highlighted, but now the entire blogosphere as captured by Technorati shows up for each piece of content.

Just take this week's special live-blogging of the Roberts hearings as an example. A nice little Typepad blog, with comments, trackbacks and RSS syndication. A regular stream throughout the day of summaries of each segment of the proceedings, interspersed with links to the video of the relevant portion of the hearings and with helpful links to case law under discussion. And further links to relevant sections, news stories, analyses, online discussions, video, transcripts, etc., both on and off site. Sweet.

The overall impression from these changes is that content is growing more dynamic -- no longer simply the electronic publication of a series of static stories, or photos or graphics. Each Post page becomes the center of, or portal to, a constantly changing network of relevant linky goodness.

The changes are also increasingly reflected in the approach reporters are taking to their respective "beats." Certainly, the "stories for publication" remain fixed by the size, form and flow that are dictated by the conventions of newsprint distribution. In that domain, the Post competes with other news outlets in its attempts to tell news stories better and, in its particular government-related specialties, with greater coverage. But the news stories are being enriched with complementary content by those same reporters, who are bringing more than simply extra information.

The more conversational format discourages the "neutral observer" voice, the practice of passing along press releases as news, and the "he said/she said" scripts. Along with the practice of linking to other sources comes the reporter's commentary on what each link means in the overall picture. A more candid perspective from the reporter emerges from this conversational voice. The most striking example has been the daily White House "briefing" now written by Dan Froomkin. As his daily column has become more bloggy in format, it's also become far more informative. Well before Katrina, which seemed in Froomkin's words to bring the political press to an "emperor has no clothes" moment, Froomkin had broken out of the normal constraints of the White House press corp -- which seems doomed to play either stenographer for press secretaries or Presidential psychoanalyst. It's as if the more liberal form of expression has been equally liberating for the content being expressed.

If the printed news story is history's first draft, a permanent record however partial of "what happened," the new types of complementary content implicitly acknowledge the limits of that permanent printed record. The stories are shown to have added layers. The complementary content also celebrates the fact that the stories are constantly evolving -- evolving not simply in the sense that tomorrow's events will overtake today's or that we will have more information about those events in the future, but that their context and meaning are always in the process of morphing as they become part of broader conversations.

Those broader conversations are being showcased by the Post's new features. Whereas the NYT appears indifferent to the potential loss of links to their stable of famous columnists, the Post is promoting on its own site every link from every blogger, no matter how obscure, to each of its articles or blogs. Whereas the NYT is creating an incentive for its home delivery subscribers to keep paying subscription fees and maintain current circulation levels for advertisers, the Post is creating an incentive for every blogger or website to see the Post the preferred place to get and link to the news.

Now why might links matter in the great grand scheme of things? Here are some thoughts on that very point by Eric Nelson, a Senior Editor at John Wiley and Sons, specializing in current affairs and history, who explained in a post on Jay Rosen's PressThink "why you don't do a book deal with the big name columnist to whom no one links."

[T]here are some major newspaper and magazine columnists, whom I won’t name, but I never see them linked to, ever. These people are all “famous,” but to me, if absolutely no one is blogging your stuff, no one’s reading it in the paper either.
[...]
In real estate, it’s location, location, location. In publishing, it’s insight, insight, insight. When a reader picks up a book, they don’t just want to know about a subject, they want to understand it. Even those hot new biographies you see advertised promising new information from uncovered archives or letters, only sell because of what that new information means. No one would want a whole book about Nixon’s newly uncovered dental records, unless they revealed something important about him. (Like he had microphones in his teeth.)

The book that sells the best on a hot new topic, like terrorism, is usually the one with the clearest insights. And now, the article or blog post with the clearest insights is often the most widely read one as well.

One idea I’m always pitching to Jay, and anyone else who will listen, is that we’ve moved from the “Information Age” to the “Age of Insight.” When Bush announced his budget, for instance, you could get that information from any one of thousands of sources. But a handful of people presented the best explanations (left and right) of what his budget really means. Because of blogs, it’s easy to figure out who those people are, and sometimes they’re even bloggers.

Not only are the economic cost/benefit analyses for the NYT and the Post remarkably different. I expect the difference in the two approaches will in the long run have an impact on the content of the two newspapers and ultimately their philosophy of what it means to be a news organization. The NYT proposes to continue to "deliver" its "product." The Post, by contrast, is becoming a portal to a dynamic network of content, only a portion of which is home-grown. But by placing its own content at the heart of the portal and letting its home-grown content interact both with other Post-produced content and with content produced by others, the Post is pursuing a far different model than a classic portal, which aggregates content produced by others. In the process of distributing that home-grown content via the portal, the Post's own way of producing content, and the content itself, will continually be changed or enriched by the interaction with other content and content producers. Maybe, if Eric Nelson is right, the process may even produce added insight from Post reporters on their blogs, or from the commenters or trackbackers or Technorati-linkers, even if they're not named Friedman, Dowd, Brooks, Tierney, Kristoff or Krugman.

Very, very different bets. The NYT's business model is easier to discern than the Post Company's business model -- which clearly incorporates not just the Post but its other media properties. But then again, the NYT's model is easier to understand because it's basically defensive -- do better, whether in terms of quality vis a vis competitors, advertising revenues or satisfying their existing customer base, with their current newspaper business. The Post is, bit by bit, devising a new type of multi-media news business.

I'm enjoying watching this new creature emerge as the Post writers and managers learn from their growing laboratory of experiments. Now if they'd just trash the old Newsweek site, with the clunky MSNBC frame, and build a totally new clean one from scratch!

Jesse Walker, Hit and Run:

"When We Act, We Create Our Own Reality" (Baghdad Bob Redux)

CNN contrasts FEMA chief Michael Brown's account of conditions in New Orleans with the reports emerging from the trenches.

Actually, the CNN piece is a lot more shrill than Jesse suggests.

Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans emerged Thursday. The sanitized view came from federal officials at news conferences and television appearances. But the official line was contradicted by grittier, more desperate views from the shelters and the streets.

These conflicting views came within hours, sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN's transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here's what they had to say:

And then the CNN article proceeds to recite, chapter and verse, an utter disconnect between statements by federal officials and what Americans were seeing -- simultaneously -- with their own eyes and hearing with their own ears on the air, regarding conditions at the Convention Center, uncollected corpses, evacuations of hospitals, and security.

Amazing. It really is like Baghdad Bob -- "there are no trapped, desperate, dying people regardless of the fact that you think you see them on your TV screens."

Do they think the public are total fools? Or has their command, control and communication system come to a complete halt but they're still behaving as if it were completely operational? If their emergency communication network is totally out of order, somebody at FEMA should just assign a couple of folks to watch cable TV and read the NOLA blog and simply relay the information to the folks who are titularly in charge.

There's hardly a spot in the political blogosphere where you won't find some commentary on the right-wing slime-fest over Mark Felt. I'm not sure which cri de coeur I've found more offensive -- so far it's a toss-up between Ben Stein and la Noonan, who equate Nixon's resignation with the unleashing of Pol Pot's killing fields.

Yet I find a certain sympathy for their all too evident agony. The frustrations they have suffered, for more than thirty years, are all gushing forth in one grand orgy of angst, resentment, fear and loathing. Because try as they might, they've lost the battle over the framing of one of the great pieces of American political mythology. As one of the commenters to a Josh Marshall post noted at the new TPMCafe:

I listened to some local wingnut radio on my way home yesterday and was surprised by the reaction. The majority of the callers in my 30 minute drive, not only rejected the false choice of hero/snake, but overwhelmingly agreed Felt did the right thing. Many also noted that most of the criticism was coming from members of the Nixon admin.

It must be profoundly gauling for the ex-Nixon gang to realize that the real battle for myth and memory isn't with their great political and philosophical enemies, the liberals and hippies. No, they're up against Hollywood, the home of their own myth-making hero Ronald Reagan. They know to their chagrin that when it comes to political mythmaking, Hollywood trumps all.

So when they dutifully pen their steaming op-eds or show up to foam on the cable shows, they're not fighting the Democrats of today, or even those of an earlier generation. They're taking on Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Hal Holbrooke, and Jason Robards. They're trying to erase the memorybanks of all those millions of cable and DVD viewers -- in both the US and international markets -- who have watched a clattering teletype announce the list of indictments and convictions amid the sounds and images of the unwinding Nixon presidency and the peaceful transition of power. They're trying to eradicate the emotional experience of sharing with Redford and Hoffman -- and with Deep Throat -- the bittersweet vindication of exposing the crimes of all the presidents' men.

That's a fight over American mythology that a bunch of over-the-hill speech writers and cable show pundits just aren't going to win.

For those of you interested in the Senate hearings on the legislation to update the FOIA being sponsored by Sens Cornyn and Leahy, they begin at 10:00AM EST today (Tuesday March 15) and can be heard via streaming audio at the CapitolHearings.org site that CSPAN runs for Senate hearings. Just scroll down to Judiciary -- Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security Subcommittee.

... of open, accountable government and our system of checks and balances -- including the press -- doing its job, there's this side-splitting piece of work from the normally rather staid Independent Institute, courtesy MaxSpeaks.

But then again, as Eric Martin asks, "Why bother to revise history when you can bury it?"

A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both. President James Madison

If I were a betting woman, I'd say it's pretty good odds that most bloggers aren't aware that today marks opening day of the first national Sunshine Week. What, you may ask, is Sunshine Week? The NYT sums it up as " a weeklong campaign for government openness spearheaded by the AP and more than 50 news outlets, journalism groups, universities and the American Library Association."

The whole thing got started in 2002 with Sunshine Sunday in Florida, an initiative to heighten public awareness of the importance of access to information and government accountability in the wake of 9/11, which had opened the floodgates for some "particularly egregious open government exemptions" considered by the Florida state legislature. As Barbara Patterson, who helped organize the first Sunshine Sunday, explains in American Editor (pdf p. 10), the newsletter of the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

Any opposition to the proposed bills was summarily dismissed by sponsors and lobbyists as a “press problem,” even though most of the proposals raised serious constitutional issues and would have curtailed the public’s ability to hold its government accountable. A “press” problem?

Since the first Sunshine Sunday -- selected as the Sunday before James Madison's birthday, which is National Freedom of Information Day -- several other states have joined in. The impact in Florida has been considerable, if measured by the new-found sensitivity of both state legislators and the public, which voted overwhelmingly in the 2002 general election for a measure limiting the ability of the legislature to restrict open access. Probably most important, according to Patterson:

Legislators and other key government officials have begun to realize that being tagged as a supporter of open government is a good thing.

The recognition that being seen as an open government advocate is good for your political health seems to be slowly catching on in Washington as well -- on both sides of the aisle. Here's Sen John Cornyn (R-Texas) in an op-ed he penned for Sunshine Week about the new FOIA legislation he and Sen Leahy are introducing.

Just last month, U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), a longtime champion of open government at the federal level, and I joined forces to introduce the OPEN Government Act of 2005, to strengthen and enhance our federal open government laws. It has been nearly a decade since Congress has approved major reforms to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And the Senate Judiciary Committee has not convened an oversight hearing to monitor compliance with FOIA since 1992. So this week, I will chair a Senate hearing to examine needed improvements to our open government laws.

The legislation we introduced contains important Congressional findings to reiterate and reinforce our belief that the Freedom of Information Act establishes a presumption of openness, and that our government is based not on the need to know, but upon the fundamental right to know.
[...]
Moreover, our legislation is not just pro-openness, pro-accountability, and pro-accessibility—it is also pro-Internet. It requires government agencies to establish a hotline to enable citizens to track their FOIA requests, including Internet tracking, and grants the same privileged FOIA fee status currently enjoyed by traditional media outlets to bloggers and others who publish reports on the Internet. [ed. emph added]

There are actually two pieces of proposed legislation being sponsored by Cornyn and Leahy: the OPEN Government Act of 2005, announced Feb 16, and the Faster FOIA Act introduced March 10. The latter bill would establish a 16-member advisory Commission on Freedom of Information Act Processing Delays, which would report back within a year to Congress and the President on ways to reduce delays (including fee issues) in the processing of FOIA requests.

Now the last bit -- that bloggers may get reduced FOIA fees -- seems to have permeated the blogosphere's collective consciousness. However, the big brouhaha about blogging-press-government relations has been over the Apple litigation, covered here by Donna Wentwoth at CopyFight. Most of the other blogging-press-government flap-a-doodle has been devoted to the FEC-related firestorms (so far more smoke than fire). But a quick Googling didn't find much attention by the blogosphere to the FOIA initiatives, beyond an effort launched last week by the student activist IP-oriented site FreeCulture.org to promote a blogshine Sunday. And CopyFight is one of the few spots I've found with a blogshine.org button and blogging about the Cornyn-Leahy legislation.

The public's access to information and -- equally important -- how information intermediaries and consumers choose to use that information, ought to be a major focus of the blogosphere of "ideas," whether politics or science and technology, medicine, environment, social services, law and law enforcement, labor relations, financial services, education, you name it. For the great majority of blogs that aren't engaged directly in electoral politics or who don't see themselves competing with "journalists," the ability to access the vast amount of information that federal, state and local governments have collected, analyzed and archived is far more important than the debates over "who is a journalist" and whether/how blogs will be regulated if they support partisan activities.

The first reason why open access is important is the "business model" issue. If blogs are to be something more than partisan voices or provide more than entertaining critiques of stories developed in the mainstream commercial media, one major type of blogging will be digging into substantive topics requiring some background knowledge, pulling disparate pieces together, and bringing stories and analysis to a broader audience of interested readers. These are the sorts of activities that few news organizations can afford these days, or at least not on the range of subjects that the blogosphere is capable of covering.

Niche blogs offer the prospect of important stories being identified, fleshed out and debated with attention to detail by people who are knowledgeable about the subject area even if their "business" isn't blogging. Bloggers, unlike most news organizations, also have the ability to stay with a story that interests them for a long time, even after it's moved off the "hot" list.

But the success of this model of blogging depends on widespread, low cost access to raw material -- information. Collecting information isn't the blogosphere's competitive advantage -- that remains and will remain, even with the advent of citizens media, the competitive advantage of commercial media in many instances (though whether they will exploit that advantage is a different matter). But the public sector is also a major source of that raw material. Open access to information in the hands of governments is a critical element of this emerging role of the blogosphere going forward.

The second reason why open access is important is the "functioning democracy" issue, where the blogosphere has an important potential role to play in the coming years. I count myself among those concerned about info-tainment increasingly dominating much of what passes for news and analysis, as well as the trend for government and corporate communication machinery to find congenial forums to pass off counterfeit "objective" information to suit their persuasion agendas.

I also believe, however, that the impulse to counter these trends with ownership or content rules is often a misguided one. Rules are easily gamed by those they are supposed to control or, when the rules are binding, turn out to have some unfortunate unintended consequences. More often than not, the benefits of new rules inure to those with vested interests, unless the changes are truly revolutionary, and then the outcomes are likely to be highly unpredictable.

Technology and the changing economics of media are, in fact, offering the beginnings of a revolution. I was intrigued by a recent analogy attributed to Joe Trippi, that blogging and e-media today are about where we were with television in 1955 when it comes to politics. That suggests lots and lots of changes ahead, not just in content and technology of communication itself, but in all sorts of social structures and patterns about how we use different forms of media and what we expect from them.

I for one would prefer to focus on enabling that revolution. Opening more space for ideas, and ensuring open access to and flow of information, seems to me preferable to trying to make the existing large commercial information gatekeepers perform "better." This is especially the case as the very gatekeeping role for large corporate media is being redefined with technology and competition, and the cost of producing and distributing ideas and information is declining so dramatically.

So with that lecture on why sunshine is important to all of us -- as both citizens and bloggers -- here's some info on what's on tap for Sunshine Week. Of course, check out the extensive website that the sponsors of Sunshine Week have assembled, including calendars of goings on all over the country. They've got lots of great background material on the First Amendment and FOIA as well as "toolkits" (articles, op-eds and even editorial cartoons) for their participating newspapers to run. AND you can order your very own bright yellow "sunshine in government" wristbands. Knew you wouldn't want to pass that one up.

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings are on Tuesday, March 15 at 10:00AM. Editor & Publisher has a summary of some of the events scheduled for Sunshine Week in various locations. Here in DC, in addition to the hearings that are being held by Cornyn et al on Tuesday, the big events are:

The National FOI Day Conference will be held March 16 at the Freedom Forum's center in Arlington, Virginia. Speakers include Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), Cox Washington bureau chief Andy Alexander, and First Amendment attorney Lee Levine. The event is free and open to the public.

A symposium titled "Confronting the Seduction of Secrecy: Toward Improved Government Access on the Record" will be held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on March 17. The event will begin at 8:30 a.m. with a continental breakfast and conclude at 10:45 a.m. This is the 5th Annual Curtis Hurley Symposium and is co-sponsored by the Missouri School of Journalism. The event will be moderated by Geneva Overholser and will feature as panelists Bill Kovach, Tom Curley, Mike McCurry, Jack Shafer, and others. For more information or to register, e-mail Billie Dukes at dukesb@missouri.edu.

Coming up next on chez Nadezhda for Sunshine Week -- "how to get Congress to walk the walk" -- or how to save poor Steven Aftergood from the totally unnecessary chore of being our sole online source of Congressional Research Service reports, which are controlled by our elected representatives to dole out when it makes them look good or makes a constituent happy.

{March 14 12:56AM EST -- updated to correct graphics & links; added several links & trackbacks}

But seriously, is this supposed to be some kind of new form of argumentation whereby you cite evidence that completely eviscerates your point and then claim you're right?

Public television, its supporters say, is especially important for people who cannot afford cable or satellite television. But 62 percent of poor households have cable or satellite television, and 78 percent have a VCR or DVD player.

George Will to 38% percent of poor households: you do not exist.

As for his larger point ... really now. Television completely sucks in terms of transmitting actual information and ideas, and everyone knows it. And come on, George Will has PBS written all over him! Bowties? Also funny how Will mentions BBC America in his list of other channels worth watching.

PBS is the last DJ.

A Thought: Maybe he's just lashing out because his show is cratering?