Wikileaks is a relatively new media player with a promising approach. Somewhat like The Smoking Gun, it gets the proverbial brown envelope and publishes. It made a big mark in getting some records on Guantanamo Bay.
But its latest strategy is raising questions. Wikileaks has come into possession of a number of documents involving an aide to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and rather than publish them, it wants to auction them to a news organization for a presumed window of exclusivity --- then publish them.
Now, without knowing exactly what the documents contain (let's assume they're terrific), Wikileaks is running a little risk in changing its open-source delivery system into one that is no different than any other researcher.
Concerns are being expressed about so-called chequebook journalism, but news organizations pay freelancers and researchers for their documentary work all the time. The bigger issue here seems to be that Wikileaks feels certain documents will qualify for auctions, which defeats some of its purpose to publish readily and in a timely fashion.
If I were buying these documents, I'd want a very large window, proprietary online rights for some time, and copyright protection of some sort to shield my investment and derive the greatest possible benefit.
I was given the new novel from John Darnton about a string of newsroom murders. It took me a long time to get through it, for good reason. My review for the Sun. The American hegemony on the Internet --- the carriers and other infrastructure that made using U.S. superhighways such a pleasure --- is slowly but surely diminishing. Where it once held about 70 per cent of traffic, now that number might be 25 per cent. Philip M. Stone writes in FollowTheMedia that U.S. newspapers might be in their worst possible situation: Print revenues in decline and online revenues barely ticking upward. Given the necessity for online revenues to go through the stratosphere to compensate for the plummet in the U.S. print market, the economic strait has threatened many media companies with collapse or radical propositions. The Pew Internet and American Life Project is watching many digital trends. Its latest report involves the impact and use of podcasts. Pew found 19 per cent of Americans had downloaded podcasts for later use, up from 12 per cent from August 2006. What it means is that the podcast is not yet a "fixture" in society (only one per cent downloaded "yesterday") but that they're growing. One of Roy Greenslade's more controversial columns has surfaced in the Guardian, in which he decries a fellow writer for seeing journalism through a commercial lens. Many new models of interactivity are emerging in journalism, but a new strain on this comes from the New Statesman in the U.K., Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine has posted his PowerPoint for his interactive journalism class at City University of New York. It's an extension of many of Jeff's more prevalent themes in new journalism models. If you're having difficulties gaining access to the file below, here is its link to Buzzmachine. Jill Geisler, one of Poynter's prominent contributors, has weighed in at the 10-year mark at the institute with a thoughtful piece on five myths on managers. The business model for newspapers is posed as so: The decline of newspaper advertising revenue (and circulation or readership) is expected to be offset by the gains in digital revenue (and audience). |