Blogs, blogging. Bloggers, journalists, and confidential sources on a collision course.

Mr. Abrams said he thinks many bloggers should be entitled to the same kind of protection he is seeking for his client and other traditional journalists. “I think a blogger who communicates with and tries to communicate with thousands of people is not less deserving than a journalist who may communicate with a smaller audience through a small-town newspaper,” the attorney said. “There should be protection so long as information was obtained for the purpose of dissemination to the public at large in some sort of analogous way to what ‘journalists’ do.”

Bloggers Blur the Definition of Reporters’ Privilege

Future of news and WIKI. Here is the new wikinews. I was interested in the Ukraine story, as it included phonecam photos from the people in the streets. Then I noticed the thread about the illness of Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko (?????? ?????????? ??????) because it mentioned chloracne, something that I had heard about when my husband worked at UIC School of Public Health. I was browsing on Friday. Over the weekend, the mainstream papers picked up the story about Yushchenko's illness. Interesting sequence especially since the Wikinews was in all the blogs last week. Who is scooping whom? Main Page - Wikinews

Future of newscontinued. Time-shifting, competition from Internet, cable, and radio have already signaled the end of the dominance of broadcast news. The networks, and sadly, lots of educators, are still looking at the future through a rearview mirror, and don't see the necessity of preparing students for the 24 hour news cycle and to give them the skills they need to do better news reporting than bloggers or citizen journalists. The question isn't "if" TV news is going, going, gone. The question is "when." NETWORK NEWS COULD SOON SAY GOODBYE

Ethicsand blogging. When is a blog a sneak attack by unscrupulous admen? MediaPost Communications: "'For 18 years, we have worked very diligently to ensure that the entire PR industry and the video and audio providers within it, endorse full and complete disclosure. So a blog that does not clearly disclose its sources, violates so many of the tenants we've worked to create,' says Laurence Moskowitz, chairman, president and CEO of Medialink, a leading provider of VNRs for corporate marketers."

The future of news doesn't seem to lie in print on paper. I have been following the story of "EPIC 2014" because it is a typical example of how a network creates and transforms a meme into a frenzy, in EPIC's case a Flash movie, into a web phenomenon. EPIC 2014, a simple animation that purports to document the history of the news from the present to the year 2014 in which no news organization is left publishing in the face of "Googlezon" and the "Google Grid," is simply an 8 min. projection of trends and "what ifs" showing how customization, reputation rankings, computer algorithms, and P.O.V. editing could transform both how news is gathered as well as how it is presented to its users. Is it profound? Yes and no. The tech discussion communities like metafilter and slashdot discuss some of its shortcomings in terms of technology (Friendster is an economic joke, for example) and its relatively unsophisticated production values. Should you watch it? Yes. Watch it with your students and discuss it with them. It works for me like a good cartoon, or a koan, presenting complexity in simple form. McLuhan notes how we tend to view the future through the rearview mirror. Newspaper circulation figures show a steady decline. Studies of the vital 18-34 group like the one reported in this brief Wired article Wired News: Newspapers Should Really Worry point to an electronic future for those who are in the business of gathering and reporting news information. Tom Curley, CEO of A.P. gets it, noting that "The franchise is not the newspaper; it's not the broadcast; it's not even the Web site," Curley said. "The franchise is the content itself." The current buzz comes down to this: today's readers are used to being viewer/users (v/users), not simply readers. V/users want to do things with information "as they may think" to paraphrase Vannevar Bush. News is what the v/users are going to make it, as they search, link, use RSS, blog, Wiki, and talk back to the news media and each other in worldwide, networked "multi-log." Join or perish.