One of the world's largest newsgathering organizations has called for the release of the visual evidence of the death of Osama bin Laden. The Associated Press has filed Freedom of Information Act requests for such material and its senior editorial official has asserted journalists must be given the chance to judge for themselves whether to publish the content.
Michael Oreskes, the senior managing editor of The AP, tells The Atlantic Wire that President Obama has pledged to run a much more transparent administration. While he notes this would be a difficult decision for the president, he says it is the job of journalists to seek this material. This material is important for the historical record, he argues.
Obama appeared on CBS' 60 Minutes Sunday and said the release of such material could incite violence and incur harm. Obama said he has seen the photo and "it is him."
Since the death of bin Laden, several organizations have sought the release of the visual evidence to support the assertion he is dead and to understand more about the confrontation that led to his death.
But there is an enormous debate on the necessity to release the evidence. Some argue that it does not add any important information to the issue and only runs risk. What do you think?
From the Global Human Capital Journal comes a study all media should evaluate: How Barack Obama's campaign team leveraged Web 2.0 to build support for his candidacy.
It's a thorough examination of the tools his team employed, how it outflanked better-financed and better-known competitors, and ultimately what lessons there are.
Among those lessons:
1. Standard-bearers need to respect the ability of stakeholders to organize and make a lot of noise. Trust them. 2. Web 2.0 happened faster with Obama than even his campaign expected, so its effects ought to spread faster in 2009 than businesses expect. Disruption is imminent. 3. Consider yourself part of an ecosystem and design plans involving social media. 4. Get to transparency and openness with stakeholders. 5. Think small and roll up many such achievements into big numbers.
Even relative geezers like me understand there is something afoot in the way media are being dissembled and reconstructed by consumers --- find a piece here, get a search result there, a send-to-a-friend, get-from-a-friend couple of clicks, and you've got an adequate fill of information to form a view. The U.S. presidential race is the best petri dish to study for any such new pattern of consumption, so today's New York Times story is welcome information on how younger voters are replacing conventional filters (CNN, Washington Post, even itself) with social media. They're sharing content like never before. It's clear that the enthusiasts of social media have new ways to distribute content among themselves. Some see this as one more sign that the traditional media are on borrowed time, but it's also clear that someone has to generate and edit content. How that content is distributed and shared might decide how well it is financed, but the challenge for conventional media is to determine how to (not if it should) participate.
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