I've seen these stories floated on other sites for days now.

"Accordingly, these measures may only be taken with due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy."

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This is a win for intelligence agencies and other organizations who want to be able to inspect every packet. This decision has reduced the likelihood we will get real privacy by the development of encrypted anonymizing p2p systems.

http://litl.com/dotAsset/372089.jpg

How does litl make navigating easy and fun?

litl replaces the keyboard, touchscreen, mouse, and touchpad with one simple WHEEL

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/06/macbook-wheel-debuts-on-the-onion/

I appreciate your analysis, but would like to add a few things.

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You said:

The deciding factor is therefore the reliability of the product. Unfortunately, the news industry has made several very bad decisions regarding this:

First, was catering to certain groups (liberals, conservatives, etc.) and following the demographics rather than the story. While this improves profitibility over the short term, it sets things up for a diminishing returns cycle -- to maintain the higher profitibility the product must be targeted more with each iteration, leading to an alienation of those who do not share the increasingly-restricted viewpoint. That is to say, they become aware of the bias and lose confidence in the product. This "short sell" ideology permeates many industries -- in some cases, the results are more dramatic and immediate than other cases.

Thesis: The MSM has to deal with an audience that is polarized, distracted, transient, and lazy. The appropriate product for that audience is biased, sensationalized, cheap, and simplified. The thougthful online audience doesn't pay the bills. This leads the MSM to pander to the polarized, lazy audience, resulting in a product whose content and style alienates thoughtful people. A vicious circle that results in a gradual loss of reliability.

1) The polarization of the audience is a pressure external to the MSM to which the big papers and television have had to adapt. Culture War is a term that describes the aggressive, polarized public sphere America has been experiencing for about 30 or 40 years. The idea that America is at war with itself has appealed to political activists who promote extreme rhetoric advocating their point of view. We have seen the rise of privately funded "think tanks" producing analysis and science that c/overtly promotes a certain line of thinking. The MSM has been met by the non-MSM, like conservative talk radio, which has taught millions of people the New York Times is a commie rag. This is the atmosphere to which a MSM news organization has to adapt. The MSM papers are caught up in a whirlpool of accusations of bias from 2 sides (and more) from which it is very difficult to escape. Read the comments sections of many papers for signs of the insanity, especially on articles linked from the DrudgeReport.

You have called this a loss of reliability of the news paper. We might call it a loss of reliability of the reader who is so consumed by his point of view that he interprets every alternative point of view as a declaration of war. These readers can no longer be trusted to demand quality journalism. Instead they want affirmative journalism. This leads to a lowest-common-denominator media analysis that screams bias everywhere it goes.

2) The MSM no longer has a lock on the attention of the average person. Hard news is hard to make and hard to consume, and most people don't bother.

Just over four in 10 adults said they had read a newspaper, in print or online, the previous day, compared with 58 percent in 1994. The number of people who read a newspaper online only was relatively small, though it has kept the total from slipping further.

... But young adults also are more likely to not follow the news at all — an ominous reminder of the challenge still facing the industry.

... The number of people who regularly watch nightly network news is down to 28 percent, half the total from 1993.

... For example, 7 percent of those polled get news from new technologies such as cell phones, personal digital assistants and podcasts. Among those age 18-29, the number is 13 percent, according to the poll of 3,204 adults conducted from April 27 to May 22. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.

With all these new options, people spend about the same time keeping up on the news — just over an hour in a given day — as they did a decade ago.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14109032/

This readership is transient and oriented to what is easy. The MSM responds to this. Articles are shorter to fit into the new devices and the attention span of readers. They push stories about celebrities, anything sensational like abductions, and the human interest angle. They render simplified versions of world events, turning everything into good and evil.

3) What about the thoughtful news audience? It is becoming increasingly difficult for the MSM to maintain a reliable audience of thoughtful people. These are the ones clever enough to gather their own news, from 100 sources. Even readers of a powerhouse like the NYT will go elsewhere. Their reading time is fractured across many more papers now. Web ads were supposed to do make this kind of readership pay the bills, but it has failed for the most part. That is why we are seeing paywalls.

ERP is being used to organize one of the most fundamentally disorganized business models: filmmaking.

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The software begins with contracts and actor/object/location definitions; connects all this to the script; semi-automatizes the previsualization process; links into all aspects of camera work, lighting, equipment rental and purchasing; defines and limits purchases for the art department and costuming; brings the design teams in direct, continuous, and streamlined communication with the director and department heads, via hand held computers; links into all aspects of post production; cuts the checks.

Far from being a failure, the software boasts a 5:1 ratio of footage-shot:footage-exhibited, compared to the average of 40:1.

This software has been used on major features like No Country For Old Men.

The financial benefits of the software-led creative process is impacting the traditional centers of film production.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7979381.stm

You said: "The real problem for the journalism business is there's simply too much of it. Barring the prospects of consumers suddenly getting vast amounts of new free time, it simply needs to be massively downsized. In the modern world we don't need 100 reporters at a White House press conference. The job can be done by three or four, and then aggregated and translated."

The problem is not numbers but culture. If 100 uncritical, unsavvy, cowards show up at the Whitehouse, nothing will be accomplished. If 3 or 4 critical, savvy, and courageous journalists in the pocket of the big corporations show up, nothing will be accomplished. Personally, I'd rather we have 100 journalists than 3 because 100 are more difficult to control than 3.

What we need is a strong culture of quality journalism. This culture has been in decline for decades now. We are at the point where the major network television is imploding with sensationalism and irrelevance. Their failure to ask critical questions in the run up to Iraq ought to prove their value.

I agree with you. We should distinguish between television journalism and newspaper journalism. The best television report rarely reaches the average newspaper article. Look at the report transcripts available on television stations (local stations, ABC/CBC/CTV, CNN/FOX/MSNBC). Then compare them to related articles in print newspapers. Throw the New York Times in the mix. (Compare to a quality monograph or academic journal to deflate the pretensions of the quality of journalism; but you'll have to wait 6 months to a year.) Television, either by its nature or the way we use it, is not conducive to analysis. In print it comes easy. On TV it requires principles and money.

Years ago, shows that had 7 millions viewers in the USA would be canceled as failures. Today, everyone is crowing about how Fox is destroying the competition by getting 3.5 million viewers. All these stations are being demolished. They are on an unstoppable declining path which they are accelerating by replacing quality journalism with sensationalism.

I watched the CNN global network during the Mumbai terrorist attacks. The world report is superior to the American CNN. But not by much. I see CNN/MSNBC/FOX as roughly equivalent stations, not in terms of explicit political ideology -FOX is extreme right, where as the others are merely far right. Instead, they hold roughly the same principles sensationalism. The differences we call ideological are just what gets sensationalized, who the pundits are, and what they think we should fear. That is the real ideology of these news stations -sensationalism- and it destroys political discourse in America.

Let's see...

They spend the least amount of time pushing sensational stories.

They report the news evenly. They do not stop everything just to get a shot of the Balloon Boy.

They do not manipulate the viewer with false outrage or emotionalism.

They promote dialog (the Doha Debates), not punditry.

They gather stories from all over the world, not just one place, i.e. the USA.

They do hard-hitting indepth interviews with intelligent people (Hardtalk)

I could go on.

Yes the BBC is slanted: towards quality journalism.

There is no comparison between the it and CNN/MSNBC/FOX.

I think many people here defending CNN/Fox/MSNBC (pick your poison) confuse the righteousness of their political beliefs (and therefore the villainy of any news organization that promotes alternative ideas) with the qualities of good journalism in general. Good journalism is what furthers their beliefs. Bad journalism is the other guy.

"How would government financing of media be anything but state-run media?"

It takes more than just funding to have state-run media. It would require direct or indirect oversight of reporting by government bodies.

Countries with quality publicly funded journalism do not dictate what can and cannot be reported. Instead there are ombuds positions through which complaints can be lodged after the fact.

That's how!

You said: "The CBC is notoriously biased and uncritical of government." The CBC is not notoriously biased and uncritical of government. Anyone who spends an hour watching the CBC will see stories raising issues about government policy. Nobody believes the CBC is in the pocket of Stephen Harper. Nobody but you!

Forgot to login.

You said: "Whoever holds the purse strings is in control."

The Canadian government funds the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). While the CBC has a mandate to promote Canadian unity, which I feel compromises its reporting on Quebec nationalism, I think nobody in Canada would say the government controls what the CBC reports. It is well known the current government has very little use for the CBC.

The CBC has in the past had a very strong independent culture of high quality reporting. That is the key, no matter who is paying.

As the MSM audience bleeds away, the danger to quality journalism at the CBC comes from market forces, not government forces. We don't need to worry so much about someone in power whispering into an editors ear. Desperation to remain relevant (measured in mere-eyeballs) will lead the newsroom to compromise itself until it is nothing but infotainment, sensationalism, shock stories, and panic.

The court system would collapse under the weight of so many cases. They need to deal with this like parking tickets. See a violation, give a ticket. If you want to fight the ticket, show up at court. Most people don't fight it, because they have no grounds to. The government gets their money and influences behavior. The court system isn't destroyed. People's lives aren't severely disrupted. Yes they'll probably do it again.

How can the Slashdot script not paragraph breaking right?

Sometimes crafting a good answer means ignoring certain elements of the conversation that impede a good answer. Lesson for the autistics in the room.

It is the (2nd!) 40th anniversary of the Internet this week, and the network is exploding with activity. It is worth thinking about the direction we are going in. 10 years ago, open protocols ruled the Internet. We ran clients that followed rules available to anyone.

Today open protocols are used to transport proprietary, closed systems. HTTP sends us Facebook. Instead of an RFC defining an open protocol on social networking, to which Facebook humbly obeys, we obey Facebook. As closed proprietary systems effectively gain monopolies over ways-of-doing-things, it makes it more difficult to imagine a world without them. We risk becoming digital serfs. We hand our information to corporations to do with as they please. We pour energies helping to develop products that we ultimately have no control over. It doesn't really matter if our software is GPL'd if the platform upon which it runs is proprietary, like Facebook or the iPhone/iPod. They can change their protocols over night, granting or revoking access at will.

This control is real, and it has political and social implications.

It really has nothing to do with the right of every company to decide for themselves how their network will function, or the complicity of the consumer in producing this result, two points raised in comments dismissing this article. That is just how things are. We need to think about how things ought to be. What should it look like even in the face of the right of the proprietary powers, and unfortunate consumer complicity?

Android will not be the answer. Google is part of the problem.

Perhaps the recent crackdown on piracy will lead to P3P (that's P2P with some awesome anonymity ensuring 3ncryption) massively shared infrastructures upon which alternatives can be developed. The motivation to access movies and music online is a great motivator, proven by the popularity of BitTorrent. Piggyback onto that other functions. But will this motivator always exist? In the next 10 years, incredibly cheap music and movie downloads may become the rule, siphoning the casual downloader off onto closed, proprietary systems. Without mass participation, there will be little energy for the work, little effect, and no real defense against government intrusion.

This may amuse some ears. File sharers are the proletariat of our generation, the revolutionary class. When they are bought off, a whole world of possibility will disappear. As long as they exist -as long as the desire for free content and a corresponding war against that exists- there will be energy for grand new software projects. Let's make those projects open, and let's make them now.