Tag: journalism

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Jailed Blogger Josh Wolf Uploads Video, is Free

After 226 days in federal prison, and nearly two weeks after his father began a “non-stop” vigil, Josh Wolf is free.

Wolf was jailed for longer than any journalist in U.S. history for protecting source material requested by the feds. Wolf refused to turn over video he shot of a chaotic 2005 San Francisco street protest during the G-8 summit. The courts issued him a subpoena after parts of the video (originally posted at IndyBay) were picked up by the mainstream media.

After posting the full, unedited video on his Web site (also embedded below), the prosecution announced that Wolf had complied with the terms of the grand jury subpoena, and the judge approved his release.

“Journalists absolutely have to remain independent of law enforcement,’ he said as he left the prison. “Otherwise, people will never trust journalists.’

In his post accompanying the video (which he uploaded to Blip.tv), Wolf wrote:

During the course of this saga I have repeatedly offered to allow a judge to be the arbiter over whether or not my video material has any evidentiary value. Today, you the public have the opportunity to be the judge and I am confident you will see, as I do, that there is nothing of value in this unpublished footage.


Click To Play

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Yahoo! Goes Underground

Choosing to launch on April Fool’s Day, Yahoo! is live with its eccentric, odd news portal, Yahoo! Underground.

Despite whispers that this may in fact be a hoax, this project was mentioned in an October interview (as set for January ’07) with Y! News exec Scott Moore for the PBS Frontline series “News War.”

According to the transcript, Moore says, “We have another project coming out in January that’s called Odd News Underground, and it involves a journalist who also writes songs. So it’s a singing reporter, if you will, and he will be covering a number of very interesting sort of eccentric subject areas.”

In the televised version — you can stream it here — at just over halfway through Chapter 20 of News War, we see a snippet of what would qualify for a great April Fool’s prank, were it not broadcast in February on PBS.

The clip matches up to the content in the Gay Rodeo post, which promises: “We’ll lasso you into a two-step in April.”

The idea is a good one — everybody loves Odd News and profiles of fringe culture, and Brad Miskell has the talent to attract a younger audience to dig the news but unfortunately, the UI is pretty outrageous as you can see below.

As far as making the news fun again, I’m more optimistic about the proposed Luke Burbank-hosted Morning Edition alternative planned for NPR or even (OK, now this is sort of a joke) ONN, the Onion‘s planned 24-hour “news” network.

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Dan Rather’s Keynote at SXSWi

Though I wasn’t at South by Southwest, I can now tell you that this keynote speech was rather extraordinary. Among other things, Dan Rather suggested (as posted earlier) that perhaps journalism has “in some ways lost its guts” in recent years and is in need of “a spine transplant.” Alot of emotion poured into this keynote (with questions from firedoglake‘s Jane Hamsher) and quite worth listening to the entire hour. There’s more audio from this year’s SXSWi sessions here.

Press “play” to listen.

Dan Rather Keynote Speech at SXSW Interactive 2007 [ 58:41 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
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Perez Hilton Was Scheduled to Speak at Annenberg?

perez hilton with pink hairI’m befuddled to learn that a March 28 lunchtime discussion at USC Annenberg with Perez Hilton (aka Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr.) was not canceled by the school, but by Hilton himself.

It’s not mandatory to hold one’s blogging standards up to the those embedded in the rigid ethics taught at a Journalism and Communication school, but inviting someone so painfully lacking in journalistic integrity to speak as a role model to an admiring student body?

I’m pretty sure Annenberg didn’t invite Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass after they were unceremoniously canned for their breaches of journalistic integrity.

The students who would have filled Room 207 at Annenberg for this event may not have been aware that Hilton is the defendant in an ongoing $7.6M copyright infringement lawsuit. While I’m a strong proponent of fair use, and believe copyright rules need to be revised for the digital age, Hilton’s fair use defense doesn’t stand a chance. He stole copyrighted, non-Commons-licensed photos from multiple journalists, bloggers, news agencies and photographers alike and re-used them on his hugely popular (and profitable) Web site. More recently, he was sued for posting topless photos of Jennifer Aniston.

Had he not been too chicken to show up (and I hope he reconsiders) I would give my colleagues the opportunity to ask as many questions as they want: how does it feel to party with Paris and Linds? OMG what are you gonna wear when you host MTV’s Australian Music Video Awards? After all, it was billed not as a discussion on journalistic ethics but as “An Insider’s Take on Celebrity Culture, Blogging, and Gays in Hollywood.”

But I sure hope I wouldn’t be the only one (I’d wait until the end of the hour) to out him as a decent model for snuffing out gossip and aspiring young celeb-bloggers, but an even better example of journalism-gone-wrong and how ethics and laws still apply as equally to the blogosphere as they do to print and radio/TV.

photo by Mai Le via flickr.