journalism

Journalism Online, the start-up that plans to monetize newspapers websites by charging readers for content, has announced that more than 500 publications have signed onto to its platform, which is slated to launch in the fall.

Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search and User Experience at Google is testifying on Capitol Hill today before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet.

It would take steely nerve or extreme romanticism to major in journalism these days. The pay was never great for the green and the aspiring, and hence consideration of journalism as a career required some stubborn devotion to the importance of the Fourth Estate. But a decade ago, one at least assumed there was security, honor, and even prestige in the profession, which was motivation enough.

Webmasters scored another victory in the court system recently when a Vermont judge tossed out a defamation lawsuit brought by a woman upset by comments made about her by a third party commentator.Superior Court Judge David Howard upheld provisions set forth under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, enacted by the US Congress in 1996, which protects providers of interactive computer services from liability for content posted by third parties.

After declaring (again) the death (or at least the dying) of print, bloggers and academics have clothed their straw man with proposals that include even government subsidies. It's not just print that's in peril, but real, investigative, long-form journalism. But print's not dead yet, neither is the argument, and bloggers might just lead the resuscitation efforts for journalism itself.

Scott Karp makes a good point in a post about Nick Denton taking the helm at Gawker again (something I also wrote about on earlier). It’s pretty much the same thing I’ve been saying over and over when I talk to companies — including media companies — about blogs and social media. Let me say it again: Blogs are just a publishing system.

Via David “DigiDave” Cohn (who got it from Dan Gillmor), I came across a mind-boggling piece of commentary from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in which former NBC correspondent and journalism instructor David Hazinski argues that “citizen journalism” needs to

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, gave a long and passionate speech in London last week at a memorial event hosted by The Guardian — the full text of which is here — and in it he said many valuable and wise things about the practice of journalism (although he kind of glossed over stuff like Jayson Blair and Judith Miller, but whatever).