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New York Times: Google in China

It's the cover story this week in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, and it's required reading for anyone doing business -- or thinking of doing business -- in China.  Biggest eye-opener:  the Chinese government's approach to censorhip --  rather than expressly telling companies what is or is not on the blacklist, the government lets companies figure it out for themselves.  The Times article suggests that the government benefits from this approach in two ways:  (1) it shifts most of the burden of censorship to companies, and (2) it enables the government to use a tried-and-true behavorial modification rule:  random shutdowns and crackdowns of errant companies work far more effectively than an omnipresent police state.   But mostly this is a story of the choices that Google made after weighing several options on how to serve consumers in China.  This is by far the most informative and balanced piece I've read on the subject, and I believe it will raise the level of discourse on what increasingly is becoming one of the most important stories on globalization today.

Will New Media Stop Hillary?

Great cover story in yesterday's edition of the New York Times Magazine.  Matt Bai looks at former Virginia governor Mark Warner's probable run for the Democratic Party's presidential primary.  Most interesting parts of the article are where Bai looks at (1) Hillary's iron grip on party support, and (2) how Warner might use Web-based support to subvert the party establishment's control on the nominating process.

Can Warner turn to online communities to derail the process, which includes a primary schedule that makes it virtually impossible for small challengers to continue after the first major races?  Warner, who made riches in the technology sector, is already scouting talent for this effort.   And he has already enlisted political blogger Jerome Armstrong (MyDD.com), the online director of the Howard Dean campaign.  If Warner succeeds, we'll get the greatest new-media case study of all.   

Posner to Media Consumers: "You Can't Handle the Truth"

See Richard Posner's roundup of eight -- count 'em -- recent books on the media in this week's issue of The New York Times Book Review (the cover story).  For those of you old enough to remember, Posner is the fabled and prolific conservative academic/jurist (he sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, and is a lecturer at the University of Chicago School of Law) who has led the "law and economics" movement since the dawn of the Reagan era.  Posner and others have used L&E to do battle with many longstanding laws and precedents, interposing the economic cost/benefit analysis as the basis for deciding all manner of legal dispute.   He's applying a similar economic lens today to the media scene, arguing that negative trends like sensationalism (think Michael Jackson) and polarization (think Fox, talking heads, and angry bloggers) are the result of "the vertiginous decline in the cost of electronic communication and the relaxation of regulatory barriers to entry, leading to the proliferation of consumer choices."   But greater choice hasn't created a competitive market for truth and accuracy, says Posner.  "[P]eople don't like being in a state of doubt, so they look for information that will support rather than undermine their existing beliefs. They're also uncomfortable seeing their beliefs challenged on issues that are bound up with their economic welfare, physical safety or religious and moral views."  It's like a page from George Lakoff -- people generally prefer to listen to what fits their views, filtering out the rest. 

A proponent of new media -- see the article for a lengthy and passionate defense of bloggers against charges from mainstream journalists -- Posner himself is a blogger, sharing a site with University of Chicago economist Gary Becker.

UPDATE, 8/1:  Fellow PR blogger Elizabeth Albrycht writes that Posner's analysis has dangerous assumptions.  Meanwhile, Slate's Jack Schafer accuses the professor of laziness, sloppiness, and verbosity ("[d]eploying four words where one will do....").

Open Source Education

Lawrence Lessig waxes eloquent/romantic about the good old days, when libraries helped to level the educational playing field for all comers, rich and poor.  A timely post, given the local-library budgetary crisis that the media is just beginning to notice.... But he points to MIT's innovative OpenCourseWare initiative, through which the university is making available -- free of charge --course materials from numerous departments.  Similar experiments are underway at Utah State University, Johns Hopkins, and Tufts.  Only a matter of time before this really catches on, and an enterprising soul proposes a way to distribute all these teachings.

Microsoft Censors Chinese Blogs

Caving in, or realpolitik?  AP reports that MSN Spaces is cooperating with the Chinese government to censor banned language.

Chinese bloggers, even on foreign-sponsored sites, better chose their words carefully - the censors are watching.

Users of the MSN Spaces section of Microsoft Corp.'s new China-based Web portal get a scolding message each time they input words deemed taboo by the communist authorities - such as democracy, freedom and human rights.

"Prohibited language in text, please delete," the message says.

However, the restrictions appear to apply only to the subject line of such entries. Writing them into the text, with a more innocuous subject heading, seems to be no problem.

A Thousand Throats

The latest cover story in Newsweek provides an honest look at the one of the biggest coups in journalism.  The newsweekly -- a property of the same company that owns The Washington Post -- concludes that the Watergate investigation was less about journalistic heroics than a struggle for power (at a time when the fifth estate was poised well enough to wage a meaningful assault on government).  It also provides a less-than heroic portrayal of Mark Felt, the subject of much opinion in this hyper-editorializing age.  This dressing down comes at an interesting time, we think.  The Internet has been particularly unkind to anonymous news sources, and it is doubtful that a Deep Throat today could survive the throngs of inquisitive bloggers.  What will happen to the anonymous, now that their most famous brother has outed himself?   

Pelosi Bashes Mainstream Media

Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) sounds off against mainstream media and lauds bloggers in an interesting profile in Raw Story.  The U.S. congressional leader claims reporters told her that "journalists couldn’t tell the Democrats’ story because they feared losing access."

The On-Demand Generation

See Christine Rosen's essay in the New York Times Magazine about the perils of "ego casting" technologies such as the cellphone and the DVR. While we're on the subject, let's add a few new media tools to the mix.

Is the on-demand economy wreaking havoc on existing and important social norms? Is there anything we can do to reverse the trend?

The near future promises even more of these ego-casting technologies, which offer us greater control and encourage the individualized pursuit of personal taste. Soon we'll carry cellphones that double as credit cards, toll passes, televisions and personal video cameras. At home, we'll merge the functions of these many technologies into a single streamlined machine that will respond to the sound of our voice, like the multimodal browser being developed by I.B.M. and Opera. This expansion of choice and control will foster the already prevalent expectation that we can and should be able to have anything we want on demand.

This is not a world without costs. Having our every whim satisfied at the touch of a button might encourage a childish expectation of instant gratification and could breed intolerance for the kinds of music, film and literature that require patience to enjoy fully. As we use these technologies to increase the pace and quantity of our experiences, we might find that the quality of our pursuits declines. Nevertheless, whatever ambivalence we might feel toward these technologies, we end up buying and using them anyway, not only because they make life more convenient but also because everyone else uses them and so we must as well. The traveling businessman without a cellphone will not have a business for long.

Goals for the Blogosphere

See The Nation's recent excerpt from the January conference on blogging at Harvard University. Dave Winer's eloquent talk about the journalists-versus-bloggers debate appeals to a common cause:

I think I can speak for most, if not all, of the bloggers in the room when I say that we have never woken up thinking about how we can get rid of professional journalists. If anything, we have worked hard to bring them in.

If you want to understand the blogger mentality, think of us as evangelists. We're zealots. We want to bring you in. We want you to use our tools. We want you to learn what we have learned and then make the world a better place. We are the idealists. We are into, you know, truth and justice and so forth. We have a passion for news, and maybe that can act as a reminder to the professionals that somewhere deep inside of your core is that same passion. That's the thing that unites us. That's the bond that we share.

Rather than looking at it as an adversarial relationship, let's look at the ways we can help each other, because God knows we have much bigger problems to solve. Look really, really seriously at how you can adopt practices of blogging in what you do. For example, providing full transcripts of every interview that you do would be something that a lot of your readers would appreciate.

The Problem with VNRs

Just as VNRs (video news releases) are falling out of favor in the corporate PR world, federal agencies are using them to promote their views, says The New York Times.  The big problem:  often, TV stations run the VNRs without attribution, leading viewers to believe that the segments are the work of independent journalists.

The unethical practice of packaging VNRs as "news" is not new. What is new is that the practice is getting the full treatment, in a 4,500-word story on page one of a national newspaper, and all who profit -- the media, the PR industry, and the organizations that fund them -- are being held accountable.