Some media stories of note for Wednesday, May 15, 2013:

The Guardian is reporting that China is attempting to curtail the blogging activities of writers and intellectuals by closing their social media accounts. In recent weeks notable social justice critics have been silenced in social media. There were other recent efforts to curtail mainstream media's use of western-based content.

The U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, has defended the seizure of telephone records of The Associated Press. The New York Times reports he says the article that prompted the seizure arose from a serious leak of information with serious national security implications that put Americans at risk. The Times' public editor, Margaret Sullivan, weighs in with a critique of the Obama Administration as one of the most secretive and threatening to the press, with implications for readers and democracy. The Times' media writer, David Carr, looks at how it's not only government snooping on us, but all of us snooping on all of us. 

The New Yorker is releasing the technical specs on Strongbox, software that permits reporters to cover their tracks as they reach out to the magazine. It uses a particular network and masks your IP address, information about your computer and browser, and won't plant cookies or third-party content. AllThingsDigital surmises that the release of the program, created by the late Aaron Swartz, is aimed at letting other organizations create their own versions. 
 
 
The media blogger, Jim Romenesko, long popular among journalists and non-journalists alike for his sage curation of media stories, left the Poynter Institute's site abruptly yesterday after a dozen years as a contributor.

His departure followed a complaint that his blog (of which he is but one contributor) had been overaggregating content, making it less of an incentive to visit the original source. Julie Moos at Poynter outlined the ethical dilemma involved. There were some questions, too, about the techniques of attribution and linking. These came from a journalist working for the Columbia Journalism Review, who has outlined the saga in a post today.

The departure has drawn criticism for the way it was seemingly handled, and in that regard the Poynter faculty has weighed in with a variety of views. The always lively Reuters blogger, Felix Salmon, has chipped in on the matter, too, wondering about the validity of journalistic standards in an age of aggregation.

But the concerns are significant in an age of content curation, sharing and linking, because they raise questions about the obligations of media to provide credit and direct traffic elsewhere as they build upon stories.
 

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