Bad news, good news

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Jeff Jarvis has some interesting stats about the parlous state of the print newspaper business. For example:

• In 2008, the Pew Research Center found that the internet surpassed newspapers as a primary source of news for Americans (following TV). For young people, 18 to 29, the internet will soon surpass TV, at nearly double the rate for newspapers.

• 54% of Americans do not trust news media, according to a Harris survey. A Sacred Heart University survey says only 20% of Americans believe or trust most news media.

• Jeffrey Cole of the University of Southern California Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future found in a 2007 survey that young people 12 to 25 will “never read a newspaper.” Never.

• In 2008, the American Society of Newspaper Editors took “paper” out of its name.

And the silver linings in this accumulation of dark clouds?

• But newspaper online site audience has long since surpassed print circulation, reaching 69 million unique users in fall 2008, according to NAA.

• And the total online news audience is about 100 million—more than half total U.S. internet users—according to ComScore.

The pen is…

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… dangerous, apparently. This from today’s Guardian.

A man has been given an asbo banning him from carrying felt tip pens in public after writing abusive comments about women in public lavatories and buses.

David Jell, 49, is also prohibited from carrying spray paint and displaying rude comments or nicknames in a public place under the terms of the three-year order.

Magistrates in Sevenoaks, Kent, served Jell with the order on 22 December after hearing that he had committed criminal damage and harassment between January and September 2007.

Er, what about all those misanthropes and misogynists who write similar things in the pages of the Daily Mail, Sun and Star?

The cluelessness of Andy Burnham

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Nice reproof by Charles Arthur of the Culture Secretary’s potty proposals for ‘regulating’ web content.

The cluelessness of so many of these ideas hasn't been lost on all ministers, however. Tom Watson, of the Cabinet Office, is inviting views about Burnham's comments on his personal blog. As he points out,

Internet regulation is not in my policy area but I promise you I will forward your views to Andy Burnham and Lord Carter.

One would have to say that the comments aren't really running in Burnham's favour so far, but possibly the Daily Mail's commenters haven't been alerted about the blogpost's existence. Except even they don't think it's workable.

I think, Mr Burnham, that if even the Daily Mail's commenters don't think it's worth trying to do, then it's not worth trying to do.

(We should point out, by the way, that Watson emphatically does get the net. Perhaps Andy Burnham should drop by for a quick briefing.)

What Should I Read Next?

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Interesting idea — What Should I Read Next?. You type in the title and author of a volume that you’ve finished reading and it comes up with suggestions. It’s based, I’d guess, on a collaborative filtering algorithm. It’ll get better with more signed-up users, but it wasn’t very impressive on first attempts. For example, it’d never heard of J.K. Galbraith’s The Great Crash, and produced weird follow-ups for Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.

The worst photograph ever made?

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Well, this is a pretty strong contender. And it’s by Annie Leibovitz too. It’s crass in the way that Woolworth prints used to be. (Remember Woolworths? Neatly organised kitsch — as Nye Bevan put it. He famously observed that listening to a speech by Neville Chamberlain was “like paying a visit to Woolworth’s: everything in its place and nothing above sixpence”.)

Minimising the risk of credit/debit card fraud

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Here’s a sobering way to start the new year — precautions you can/should take to minimise the risk of having your cards cloned or your bank account ripped off. By Saar Drinen of the Cambridge Computer Lab’s Security Group.

People often ask me what can they do to prevent themselves from being victims of card fraud when they pay with their cards at shops or use them in ATMs for on-line card fraud tips see e-victims.org, for example. My short answer is usually “not much, except checking your statements and reporting anomalies to the bank”. This post is the longer answer — little practical things, some a bit over the top, I admit — that cardholders can do to decrease the risk of falling victim to card fraud. Some of these will only apply to UK issued cards, some to all smartcards, and the rest applies to all types of cards.

Sobering because I’ve realised that I don’t take many of the precautions recommended.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for the link.

So what is ‘appropriate’?

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Thoughtful post by David Robinson on Freedom to Tinker.

A couple of weeks ago, Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica, Ben Smith at Politico and others noted a disturbing pattern on the incoming Obama administration's Change.gov website: polite but pointed user-submitted questions about the Blagojevich scandal and other potentially uncomfortable topics were being flagged as "inappropriate" by other visitors to the site.

In less than a week, more than a million votes-for-particular-questions were cast. The transition team closed submissions and posted answers to the five most popular questions. The usefulness and interest of these answers was sharply limited: They reiterated some of the key talking points and platform language of Obama's campaign without providing any new information. The transition site is now hosting a second round of this process.

It shouldn't surprise us that there are, among the Presdient-elect's many supporters, some who would rather protect their man from inconvenient questions. And for all the enthusiastic talk about wide-open debate, a crowdsourced system that lets anyone flag an item as inappropriate can give these few a perverse kind of veto over the discussion.

If the site's operators recognize this kind of deliberative narrowing as a problem, there are ways to deal with it…

There’s an interesting parallel here between the mindset of Obama supporters and that of ANC supporters when Mandela came to power in South Africa. I knew several South African journalists who had been passionate opponents of apartheid and who found it very difficult to report frankly on the deficiencies of the new black government run by people who they had hither admired and supported.

Lessig’s move

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From Jonathan Zittrain, relaying a message from Larry Lessig’s blog, which was down (maybe still is).

With the help of Joe Trippi, I launched Change Congress, which was designed to focus these issues in the context of American politics.

Throughout this process, however, I have felt that the work would require something more. That the project I had described was bigger than a project that I, one academic, could pursue effectively. This wasn’t an issue that would be fixed with a book. Or even with five books. It is instead a problem that required a new focus by many people, across disciplines, learning or relearning something important about how trust was built.

About six months ago, I was asked to consider locating this research at a very well established ethics center at Harvard University. Launched more than two decades ago, the Safra Center was first committed to building a program on ethics that would inspire similar programs at universities across the country. But the suggestion was made that after more than two decades of enormous success, it may make sense for the Center to consider focusing at least part of its work on a single problem. No one was certain this made sense, but I was asked to sketch a proposal that wouldn’t necessarily displace the current work of the Center, but which would become a primary focus of the Center, and complement its mission.

I did that, mapping a five year project that would draw together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to focus on this increasingly important problem of improper dependence. Harvard liked the proposal. In November, the Provost of Harvard University invited me to become the director of the Safra Center. Last week, I accepted the offer. In the summer, I will begin an appointment at the Harvard Law School, while directing the Safra Center.