The net can raise millions - let's buy our own INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS

[arendt]

As I read the latest corporate bullshit and worthless
if-it-bleeds-it-leads crapola, I said "why won't anyone
pay for real journalism any more?".

Of course the corporations won't, but wouldn't DUers
pay $10 of Seymour Hirsch's salary to tunnel under
the wall of secrecy the Bushistas and the corporations
have built?

Anyone want to start a blog to fund REAL investigative
journalism? We could get people who have been
blackballed by the corporations, like Robert Parry
of Consortium News and Dan? Webb who broke the
CIA/crack story. We could publish their news on-line.

Of course, we might not want to tie this to DU. But,
there are plenty of websites that do investigations.
The former NarcoNews actually won court cases
proving their First Amendment rights as journalists.
Maybe MoveOn or TBTM wants to be the locus for
such activity. Is anyone aware of any websites that
have their own REPORTERS, as opposed to
commentators?

The big issue is liability. Investigative journalists get
sued, big time. So, does anyone from the newspaper
business know if papers carry liability insurance for
such suits? Or if they just have to hire lawyers?

Anyway, if the corporations won't do their job, we will
have to do our own free press.

Any DUers interested?

[truthspeaker]

1. I'll pony up, and I'll publish reports on my web site

I imagine there must be some unemployed investigative reporters.

Anyone have any idea how much freelancers get paid for stories?

[arendt]

2. We have to pay not only salaries, but expenses

Investigations cost money.

You have to send researchers to archives.
You may have to pay for subject-matter experts in arcane specialties.
These days, you may have to pay for forensic computer experts.
You have to pay for travel and lodging.
Above all, you have to pay for information or access to it.

My guess is that, including reporters salaries and benefits,
and some kind of defensive liability coverage, it could
easily cost upwards of $250,000/year to keep one investigation
going.

But, if only 2,500 people were interested in a topic, that would
be enough.

There are examples already out there. Look at what the 911
wives (Jersey Girls) are doing.

arendt

[Dudley_DUright]

3. I nominate Greg Palast

as our first hire. :-)

http://www.gregpalast.com/

[arendt]

6. Yessssssssssss!

At least, we could contact him to get estimates of costs
and pitfalls of lawsuits.

arendt

[rman]

21. the problem isn't that Greg doesn't get paid;

after all, he works for the BBC and the Guardian (and some freelance stuff afaik).
The problem is that very few news outlets will publish any truely critical journalism (because that stuff is critical of the ownwers of the media and the powers they pander to). You could hire all the investigative journalists you want, without some high profile news outlets no-one will see their work.

[arendt]

23. Good point, so when I say "promote" these guys...

we may have to become the Associated Press of the progressives -
a wire service that outlets like the to-be-prayed-for liberal cable
network can use as a source.

Also, we could probably get these stories published by overseas
outlets like the BBC or AFP.

The reason there is no media competition is that 75% of the cost
of producing a paper is covered by ADVERTISERS (read corporations).
If you want a mass outlet without advertising, you have to acquire
that 75% by other means.

Does anyone know off-hand, the income of a modest newspaper
(not the NYT, and not some huge chain like Ganett)? You would
need to raise 75% of that to put out a mainstrem paper not
beholden to corporations. Expect many lawsuits.

arendt

[Jose Diablo]

39. Are you kidding?

Newspapers are way too expensive to communicate news. Not all that effecient either. Plus, like you said, the advertisers will control the content.

Its got to be TV. A combination of Internet gathering and publishing and TV, either a show or a whole channel.

[scottxyz]

82. Not sure if this is right

Yes, paper is expensive. But so is spectrum. I don't know the actual numbers.

Also - I think Arendt was saying that there WOULDN'T BE advertisers - money would be raised via the Internet, much as Dean or MoveOn have done.

As for "controlling the content" - I think Arendt has also addressed this to some degree - implying there might be some sort of vote taken on-line to figure out what stories to cover.

I would go further and say that as a safeguard, we should NOT have a rule saying that whoever gives more money, gets to have more say over what gets covered.

The journalists themselves could decide - or some sort of editorial board could decide - or the readers themselves could decide what to cover. NOT the advertisers.

Would there be any advertisers on this thing? I though Arendt said there wouldn't. Wasn't "Ms." magazine done like this - ad-free? Anyone have any info on how that worked?

And let's not do it the PBS/NPR way. Their corporate underwriters aren't advertisers - but they sure do seem to be exercising a lot of editorial control nowadays.

Many newspapers used to have some sort of wall between the editorial and the advertising depts. I remember a few years ago the LA Times experimented with breaking this wall down - in order to please their advertisers more. Maybe that was the beginning of the end.

Anyways, it shouldn't be too hard to set up rules guaranteeing some sort of editorial automony and journalistic integrity.

[scottxyz]

60. "Promote" is one thing. "Distribute" is also important

People will pick up a paper if it's available where they live and work.

Distribution is a big part of promotion. Make an attractive, effective page design, enlist volunteers nationwide to spit out camera-ready each morning on their laser printers and run off copies at printing presses - and you've got a lot of distribution right there.

Place the paper in newsboxes around town, wholesale it to news-stand operators - and you've got distribution. If it's sitting next to WaPo and NYT and USA Today every morning as people are heading into work - and once people KNOW that the "real deal" the other rags are afraid to report is ONLY going to be in its pages - you've got a LOT of promotion right there.

As long as the investigative and editorial process is highly respectable, as long as this paper doesn't publish rumors that later turn out to be false - people WILL read it - without much promotion at all.

Anyone have any ideas for potential names for such a paper? I like the words "open" or "free" - they echo back to the "open source" and "free software" movement (eg, Linux) that is now creating high-quality software and giving "proprietary" and "closed" software vendors a run for their money.

[arendt]

4. Here's an organization that funds NarcoNews

http://www.authenticjournalism.org/

They seem to be trying to be "non-partisan". But, I
can't see how any kind of hard-hitting journalism
can avoid being labelled "partisan" in today's
corporate media environment.

arendt

[whatelseisnew]

5. Narco News is BACK!

www.narconews.com

[arendt]

8. I saw that. Still trying to figure out the relationship...

between it and the Authentic Journalism operation.

If you want the truth about what we are doing to South
America, NarcoNews is the only place to get it. I'm
surprised Giordano is still alive. South America is
the ugliest place on the planet, except for occupied
Palestine.

arendt

[whatelseisnew]

11. The Authentic Journalism School/fund was established to...

re-launch N.N. I think.

[whatelseisnew]

7. Lets get Symbolman to branch out: "Buy Back The Media"

www.buybackthemedia.com seems available

[arendt]

10. I know symbolman is some kind of media person...

didn't he go on some talk show with the son of a 911
victim?

Anyway, he is the kind of person who would be able
to tell us how to go about these things.

Also, as a true reportorial operation, we could hire
"stringers" to give us heads up on local news that
doesn't make it past the media filter, and truth to
debunk the sewage bubbling up from the bottom
of the RW food chain.

I'm not sure about stringers. Stringers and investigators -
we will wind up duplicating a major paper; and the readership
for serious journalism is going down all the time. Maybe
we should just stick to targetted investigations, like
the Kwitny Report.

Is Kwitny still alive? Have both his kneecaps?

arendt

[whatelseisnew]

14. I think Symbolman is a self made media person

I believe he recieved enough attention from his online media activism

to get him invited on a few tv shows, though , as I recall it was an attempt to discredit him and other internet activists

[Jacobin]

9. On the insurance issue:

With high risk ventures, you can buy insurance but it will be expensive and also will have what is called a Self Insured Retention provision, which means the insured will have to pay a large deductible for defense costs and claims, and only after the insured pays the deductible will the insurance kick in.

Would have to shop the risk with an agent and see what it would cost.

I like the way you are thinking!!! :-)

Count me IN as a contributor. It might even spark some competition among the "media" to jump into the fray. Since none of them are doing it now, there is no competition at all.

[arendt]

13. We could set up Cayman Island shell corporations to shield liability...

LOL.

Let's use the corporations laws against them and see
how they like it.

Hell, just put one guy down in the Caymans and let
that be the base of operations, the same way Kazaa
is headquartered in the Solomon Islands (or some
obscure South Pacific off-shore banking center).

Or, better still, make the whole thing float all over the
net. Let them try to sue the whole net.

Now I need some legal advice about virtual companies.

I'm a scuba diver, and I remember hearing the following
story when the first dive computers came out:

The company that made the computers was scared of
lawsuits if a malfunction killed a diver. So they set up
literally 10,000 separate corporations. Each corporation
owned 10 dive computers and had a capitalization of
about 1,000 dollars. There was basically nothing to
sue. Now, this story may have been an urban legend
25 years ago, but I think you get the idea.

arendt

[Jacobin]

17. The problem is the journalist himself could also be liable

If we can find someone as a reporter intrepid enough to be "judgment proof", or so broke a judgment is useless, that could help.

I don't despair of raising enough money to get some insurance and have a fund to defend the lawsuits. After all the lawsuits are often what gets the story out best. (Oh, we lied? Prove it) Truth is a defense, but it costs money to defend. Maybe some public interest lawyers could do some work at a rate we could afford.

[arendt]

19. I think Al Giordano has no assets...

he lives minimally. Sounds like a real committed activist.

But, should we encourage people to do that? I think not.
Instead, we should find a way to cover them with insurance
or good lawyers.

Again, we ought to talk to Greg Palast. He has been attacked
by Poppy Bush, yet he still is out there.

arendt

[sweetheart]

50. the sechelles

have no extradition treatys with the US and a first world
infrastructure for electronic news. Be honest, the editorial POV
of this endeavour is what maccarthy would have called "communist"
What they today call "terrorst" and what the cold war called "soviet"
as the editorial approach would pretty much be to
break through the iron curtain of american lies and global corporate
secrecy.

I brought this up a while back, thinking along the lines
of a real newspaper, as i believe that what is most needed
is a left-leaning USA-today... a daily nationwide newspaper
that sees things in a more clear light... one that would win
over hearts and minds in areas where other media (internet aside) are
only supporting evil republican murderers and perverts.

If you, Ms. arendt, were to attain enlightenment, it would far
outweight any benefits of such a newspaper. All that buddhist
theory is quite true in pracice... and if you make the decision right now in your heart to give up ALL but truth in your life...
If you surrender your ego, mind and life to (you know!!) blah blah.

Your enlightenment will defeat the bushies where no newspaper or
website can... it will inspire thousands of others to back you in
your deep longing to know the truth.

Given your capabilities, Hannah, you are closer to george orwell...
a visionary writer. Were you to write "big code" in english instead
of c++.... it would be a very fine contribution indeed. You wisely
set the challenge to us all to take this opposition to the next
level... and that begs the question of what the next level is for
every one of us. Perhaps it won't be much from weekend liberals.

From yourself, a wise seer of truth, surely there is a more
significant code you're capable of outside short chats on DU.

I love good code. 60,000 words. Make your essay perfect,
and publish it in India, the largest english speaking book
maarket.. and let it rattle around the planet until it hits paydirt
in the american market.

In sort lovely hannah, i agree. I wish there were 10,000 of you
cutting ground in this english language for truth.

peace,
-s

[arendt]

53. Ah, sweetheart, from the land of Robbie Burns, you are a poet...

Isn't the Seychelles (sp?) one of those island chains that's
almost underwater, like the Maldives?

I like the Indian English-speaking market angle; and the
scuba diving would be great! But, what happens when
your friendly neighborhood Tamil Tigers or Taliban or
IPI folks show up on your doorstep because of what you
wrote? Who ya gonna call? Spook-busters?

I think I would rather incorporate in a place like that than
live there. Its so far off the beaten track that "accidents"
aren't going to get reported.

> that begs the question of what the next level is for
> every one of us. Perhaps it won't be much from weekend liberals.

That's exactly what I'm asking myself right now, with the
Dean campaign shifting gears. DU is proving itself to be
more of a high-school food fight and hamburger-shack
hangout than an effective, activist organization. So much
energy wasted on really nasty infighting. But, I tell myself
that I must be a boddhisatva and set a good example for
these rude boys. So, I continue to try to be positive, in
a tough love sort of way.

Anyway, this thread is one of my ideas. Another was
the call for the Dems to attack fundie encroachments.
I'm just sending up balloons to see what gets shot down.

Mostly, unless I keep kicking it, I get ignored. Too much
fun to be had flaming each other over cheap shots at
various candidates and McCarthyite loyalty-oath campaigns.

So, thanks for the idea. I will look up Seychelles on the map.
Is it independent? Part of the UK Commonwealth? Did you
consider it?

peace

Hannah

[sweetheart]

58. seychelles once considered

For individual living, it is great, just very remote (off the east
coast of africa). Proximity to other developed economies is a distinct factor for economic development, and this factor works against the Seychelles. It is quite a stable nation of the british
commonwealth (that blair has holiday'ed there a year or 2 ago).

My meditation master considered going there when the congress when
nutters and started to use the RICO statutes to destroy our religious group in New York. One of the primary concerns was not having extradition to the US, where law is not about justice. When the american forces of government declare you illegal, even when you're not at all, the only hope is to be beyond their reach.... or
the second choice my wise guru chose... sepukku.

have you tried this new http://www.americanforum.net/ ? It is less
childish than DU, but it is no playpen either. It is open political chat with ALL persuasions... and can be rather ugly. I've been moonlighting a bit over there.

Accidents don't happen in british commonwealth nations, without
serious repurcussions in diplomatic realtions between america and the commonwealth. The likelihood of being "disappeared" is lesser outside the USA than in... and the seychelles could at least HQ a
liberal news org.

I live in scotland for more life-reality reasons.. proximity by air
transit to my dad in seattle and mum in minnesota, sis in LA. Also,
the scottish highlands are the least populated region of europe... that i live today with the space-standards of people in northern montana, yet with above freezing temperatures and no american government. The highlanders hate bush. To disappear me here would involve convincing the british MI5 that i was a criminal terrorist... which is gonna be a bit hard, given my only weapons are words and that i don't own firearms. Were they to come and search the house and hard disk from top to bottom, they'd look like fools.

I'd bring in the media overnight and anyone who opposed this liberal author would be an asshole for the world, and the british government would similarly have to sack anyone who messed around with a private citizen speaking freely, in relative anonymitiy on the internet.

However, scotland is too close to the USA for comfort, and i myself would suggest the seychelles for even further distance... as given
the kind of news that said org would produce... likely it will be
unpopular with republican criminals. They have a long reach in zones where they occupy, war, and make law by the gun, but in established democratic countries, they are not welcome... and i am grateful that nations of the world are wiser that the US... much wiser than the media pretends. No matter who wins in 2004, the
20th century goodwill of post ww2 america will never return... and the evil bush family has now driven the world to re-organize, to re-swarm and assemble around a multi-national consensus without washington. Clearly this is no longer the washington consensus, and rather a more intelligent global consensus to dump the USA in the sewer where the government belongs.

Anywhere in the world, there are 1000's of people who will support news media to break the bush iron curtain of fear. The world ia a friendly place to all americans except those criminals in the white house. It is not quite as dark as the media pretend. blah blah...

In short, i did consider the sechelles, and opted out for geographical reasons (same with NZ and AU). Yes, commonwealth, and
yes to a good home for such a business as you mention... mauritius
is a second idea... the carribean is simply too close for american war ships to invade under some pretext like grenada.

peace lovely hannah, i've missed you,

-sweetheart

[scottxyz]

81. "High-school food fight and hamburger-shack hangout"

"DU is proving itself to be more of a high-school food fight and hamburger-shack hangout than an effective, activist organization."

- Arendt

Excellent obervation! (Unfortunately.)

[scottxyz]

78. How did Drudge shield himself from his rumors about Kerry?

Those were pretty outrageous rumors - which were quickly proven to be false. Druge didn't point to any sources - so it looks like he might have just made stuff up. How does he get away with this - does he have lawyers?

In a similar vein, Murdoch's sleazy UK paper "The Sun" initially quoted the parents of Alexa Polier (the woman Kerry allegedly had an affair with) as calling Kerry as "sleazeball". Later, when Polier's parents released a statement, they said they LIKE Kerry - making it look like Murdoch's "The Sun" had simply been lying. (I hear The Sun on previous occasions has paid large sums out of court to people they smear - so perhaps this is just an operating expense for Mr. Murdoch's sleaze-rag.)

[central scrutinizer]

12. They are already out there - contribute

Another good one, and they claim to be the first investigative magazine on the net (1995) is:

http://consortiumnews.com/

Robert Parry is great. They originally sent out their stories by e-mail, before they got the site up and running. I have contributed since the beginning.

I especially encourage any DU'ers who still feel Colin Powell is respectable, read their series on him.

http://consortiumnews.com/archive/powell.html

[arendt]

15. Parry is great, but you miss my point

I already mentioned Parry in my original post.

But, he has no PUBLICITY. He is the Dennis Kucinich
of investigative reporting. He is the real deal, but he
gets no respect.

I am saying we need to build an organization that
PROMOTES people like Parry, and funds them.
Parry has to do his own fund-raising. That cuts into
his effectiveness.

I have gone to Parry's site for years. It is very low
profile. We need to raise his profile and give him
some kind of guarnateed revenue stream. You
know, start a "bat" for him.

arendt

[arendt]

18. One site has a list of "non-whore" journalists...

those are the people that we want to support.

I think you run this like a Dean or Clark campaign.
You put out a position paper about the issue you
think are being deliberately covered-up and
avoided - to the detriment of the American public.

Then you run a poll about the issues you most
want investigated. The poll tells you how to spend
the money, within certain limits. For example,
you have to commit a minimum of X dollars to
run an investigation. So if you only raise 2X dollars,
you could only run the two top issues. But if you
raise 10X dollars, you could cover ten issues.
OTOH, if only 3 of those issues gather more than
10% of the votes (a cutoff), then each issue could
be funded in proportion to its vote.

Repeating, the purpose of the website is NOT to
do the reporting. The purpose is to clarify the
issues people want investigated, to raise the
money, and to publicize the journalists.

arendt

[arendt]

20. The list is at, of course, MWO

http://www.mediawhoresonline.com/nonwhores.htm

[central scrutinizer]

24. another great list is at

http://www.commondreams.org

scroll down the main page and on the right hand side is a list of links to progressive columnists. BuzzFlash has another good list at the bottom of their mainpage.

[arendt]

22. Parry already was pushing this a year ago

consortiumnews.com
Gore & the Need for a 'Counter-Media'
Editorial
December 19, 2002

http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/121802a.html

I would certainly fund Parry.

arendt

[shimmergal]

16. I like this idea,

and would be willing to pony up with $10 once it gets planned out.

[Wapsie B]

25. Yes most definitely.

I don't know if it would be better to start our own think-tank or go with one already established. But the idea of bypassing the blow-dried talking whores of the mainstream press is a great idea.

[arendt]

26. Kick. n/t

[Silverhair]

27. Interesting Idea. Power to the people!! However....

What if your investigator showed that the person you were after was actually in the clear? Then what? Let's face it. Those investigations are going to be on the model of: "He's guilty, you find the evidence to prove it."

[arendt]

28. Why do you assume we would behave like a GOP lynch mob?

> Those investigations are going to be on the model of: "He's guilty,
> you find the evidence to prove it."

I'm sure that if you said this to Palast, Parry, or Sy Hirsch, they
would do a better job than me; but these are the bullyboy tactics
of the GOP. You assume that ALL investigations are as phony
and partisan as Ken Starr and his law-breakers. Boy has your
mind been poisoned by GOP tactics.

Besides, who says we are going after *persons*? There is vast
"structural corruption" in this country. Revolving doors, secret
deals, crony capitalism.

In the current New Yorker, someone has leaked a top secret
document from Cheney's energy meeting showing that the
proposal, as early as Feb, 2001, was to link "oil capture" to
"rogue state policy". I.e., Iraq.

Cheney is guilty, but he is just the tip of the whole iceberg. If
all we got were Cheney, they'd just put another figurehead on
top and continue looting. Look at "W", the gold standard of
empty figureheads.


arendt

[DUreader]

34. lol

typical, at least you are consistent

[arendt]

36. Huh? Inside joke? Please fill me in. n/t

[scottxyz]

77. There's different meanings to the word "investigation"

I'm sure Arendt meant "investigation" not in the sense of "criminal investigation" but rather in the sense of "investigative journalism" - trying to contrast this with many blogs, where you've got plenty of commentators commenting on other newspapers' news, but few actual "reporters" who go out and dig up their own news.

[Jose Diablo]

29. Hey, what's Palast?

Chopped liver? Buy a few of his books and tell him to get busy. We need him.

[arendt]

32. As rman said in post 21, he needs a mass outlet, as does Giordano

There are good investigations going on. And there
are good hi-hit websites, like MoveOn.

My proposal is to put the two together.

arendt

[Nlighten1]

30. Something similar has already been started at...

http://www.bigleftoutside.com

[arendt]

31. Ah, that's where Al Giordano went. But, where does it say...

that they are doing what I suggested?

They are just another part of the blogosphere. They are
cross-linking other bloggers. They are in the thick of the
debate, not behind the lines sending supplies forward.
There is no "outreach" on this site, what I referred to
earlier as "promotion".

Hell, there's not even a link to click on to donate. This
is a great site, but you either get it or you don't. Do you
see him *asking* anyone what issues are important
to them, like I proposed?

I'm talking about a site where people less committed
than gonzos like AG can be gently educated about
real vs corporate media via their involvement in voting
for investigations and seeing the results. With Al, you
get the issues Al decided to work on. That's OK; its
just not the same as what I'm proposing.

arendt

[Jose Diablo]

33. Need a channel on the idiot box n/t

[arendt]

35. Isn't that like faxing a floppy disc? :-)

You need a TV channel to get internet content to the public??

Sorry, just having a little fun with you.

Mainstream TV is for utter morons. I cannot justify the money
I spend on cable. It is manipulative, macho, sexist, crap. Guns
and babes. Fist fights and tits.

Public TV is neutered, spayed, bowlderized boredom. Frontline
used to be good, but now its the same castrated excuse for news
that McNeil/Lehrer (now minus MacNeil) is. Instead of the issues of the day,
we get This Old House, the 1900 house, the prarie house, the
antique auction show (whatever its name is), etc.

Sometimes I think PBS is a subsidiary of Home Depot.

How can I justify spending $50/month for cable when $49 of
that goes to support the corporate stations and the monopolistic
owners of the cable that keep shows I want off the air?

----

I think that IF this promised liberal network gets on the air (and
I doubt that it will happen before November - for obvious reasons)
what I am proposing should be ONE SHOW on such a channel.

My issue is getting important investigations done and getting the
results out to the public. As one person or one, non-corporate
web entity, those two items are way too much. I am proposing
a division of labor. I want to work on investigations.

arendt

[Jose Diablo]

38. Would one show be enough?

I seldom watch TV myself, but lets face it, for many the TV is the single source of news. For many, the analysis of what is going on comes to them through the 'idiot' box. This is what makes it easy for a corrupt government to stay in power.

I don't like any more than you. But its the truth.

Maybe one show would be enough, it would be better than just the internet.

You notice how if the lies are repeated enough they become the 'truth'. This is what we are fighting. Repetition of falsehood.

[Nlighten1]

99. Perhaps I was wrong but...

I think this is it.

http://www.narconews.com/jschoolopen.html

If it isn't what you are talking about maybe you should send an email to Al and talk to him about your idea. I am sure he would be supportive of it.

[arendt]

37. rush hour kick n/t

[LifeDuringWartime]

40. id donate what i could

when i could :)

[Dark]

41. Well, I'm going to college to become a journalist and

I am definately on your side. I hate the corporations destruction of the middle class and the disgusting artifices they use to hide it, euphimisms like "outsourcing" and "brightsizing". Ugh, it makes me sick.

[blondeatlast]

42. I hear will Pitt's available...

No offense intended, guy--I think you'd be great at this.

[Jose Diablo]

43. I agree

From the picture I have seen, he is stocky, has a strong square face. I think people trust people with square faces for some reason, maybe somehow it looks honest, trustworthy.

Yep, he would do well as a commentator presenting a view.

Isn't he busy on a campaign now?

[blondeatlast]

49. He was with our guy DK, but let go yesterday.

;(

I've shared a beer with him and seen him speak. He be DAMN good. He already does www.truthout.com , but I doubt he has the funds to really do IR work.

[veracity]

44. Not needed...the information is out there!

The information is available. There are a handful of really good alternative news sites that tell the truth. What needs to be done is for the TV news networks to be exposed to the public, so that they don't think they're listening to real news, rather than selective propaganda.

Support the sites that tell the truth. They survive on your donations. That's where the solution lies. Just as the Internet raised funds to set Dean on his way to reforming the message of the party, and just as the Internet organized and moblized the anti war movement, it can fight corporate media.

Check out the sites you like best and support them. You know which one I favor. Check out the freebies you get for your donations....they're really worth the tax deductibe dollars you'll spend.

One way to go: http://www.tvnewslies.org/html/donate.html

Just a thought.

[arendt]

47. I forgot tvnewslies. Thanks

Still, as I pointed out previously:

yes the news is out there, but it is not well publicized.

There are a large number of sites, each with a small
readership. And, there are a few "readers digest" sites,
like SmirkingChimp, Buzzflash, OnlineJournal that
TRY to filter and exert some kind of editorial focus
on the blogosphere.

But, its just too diffuse to go over to the attack against
the Evil Empire. Yes, the diffuse-ness gives it a classic
guerilla-style resistance to being wiped out. But, at
the classic guerilla cost of being unable to apply more
than pin-prick attacks.

What I am proposing is that we focus on raising the
money for very specific goals. Then let the investigators
sign on for a certain pay check. The people who pay
the money will get something for it: news they want to
hear. And, they will publicize this news.

You can't beat the Bush media WMD squad with a
bunch of two-bit blogs.

arendt

[grasswire]

45. or.......

...you could just contribute money to Robert Parry's web site. Gee, that's simple!!

http://www.consortiumnews.com

Please check out this blog for a current effort to re-tool the White House press corps.

http://webdems.blogspot.com

[arendt]

48. Thanks for wedems. I had seen the contents but didn't know where the site.

was.

> you could just contribute money to Robert Parry's web site. Gee, that's
> simple!!

It may be simple, but its not working. There are too many underfunded
sites. Someone needs to put some real money out there, separate
the wheat from the chaff, and get a viable, powerful liberal voice
up and running.

I mean no disrespect to the efforts already out there. They are brave,
committed people. I just want to connect them to semi-activist people
who frequent places like DU and MoveOn. The semi-activists could
contribute real money plus real feedback about what issues will
resonate.

I mean, the right wing runs "focus groups" all the time. Think of what
I'm proposing as a focus group to point the investigators into places
that will result in the investigators getting the best publicity for their
work - and continued support and work.

Please think of what I am proposing as a way to get all these
independent investigators working together as a team - trading
information, sources, etc. They could also use such a website
to post requests for informational resources pertinent to their
investigatiions. (Hard to keep it secret if you had a vote on what
to investigate. Of course, it might only be an area, such as: the
buying of the FCC; so an informational request might not tip
the investigator's hand.)

arendt

[grasswire]

57. I'm sorry to be pessimistic.

But all of our great sites are already underfunded.

Bartcop, onlinejournal, most of the blogs, Parry and the other big boys too. Salon.com! All under-funded.

Right here on DU a while back there was some fundraising going on for investigative journalists (including Palast) and very little attention paid to it.

DU-er ugnmoose has tried to organize funding, too. It doesn't happen.

I do not know why the powers that be will not harness the power of netizens. The core group of liberal politicos on the Internet is better informed and arguably more talented than those who are getting paid to inform America.

And yet many of these people who have set aside their own work, their families, their security and income to fight right wing extremism are too often barely one step from poverty.

What's really needed is a fund established. With a big startup $$. Someone like Soros. I sincerely don't think enough people can be tapped for significant donations.

I wish, I wish, things were different.

[scottxyz]

61. Just 10 or 20 dollars a month would be a LOT

People already pay 50 dollars a month to watch very unsatisfying cable.

I think a LOT of people would be willing to pay 10 or 20 dollars a month to be stakeholders in a non-corporate newspaper.

I also think readers would pay 50 cents or a dollar for a paper that had the REAL news about what's going on - this would help pay for paper and distribution and printing costs. Remember, if this paper were done right, it would be the ONLY paper on the news-stand that actually has the real dirt about what's going on. People who buy newspapers are generally inquisitive and they are probably quite bored now with the corporate whitewash they're getting from the censored press. If this new paper were done right, I bet a lot of people would be hooked after buying just one issue.

[scottxyz]

89. Don't be pessimistic - we can do this - without George Soros maybe!

We have content - thousands of great articles already written.

We have the equipment - thousands of computers and laser printers, along with page-layout software that can easily be used to put together a newspaper.

Go to your local grocery store or laundromat or bar and look at how many rags and newsletters are all over the place. Many are badly produced - irrelevant writing (either trivial vanity pieces by a small cadre of "publishers" - or thinly-disguised corporate advertising).

But they are PRODUCED - by amateurs, by people with a computer and a laser printer and access to a xerox or a printing press. This is America - this equipment is all over the place.

Think back to earlier examples of publishing that changed history: Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin - they were pretty brilliant thinkers, but they were also in the right place at the right time, smart to capitalize on newly available technologies for "getting the word out".

Think back to communist Russia - where xerox machines were BANNED - and people still got their underground samizdat newspapers out by hand-typing them on typwriters with carbon paper - typos and all. Now that's passion!

We don't need George Soros to print up the same kinds of brochures and Chinese takeout menus and newsletters that clog most of our mailboxes and doorsteps and are stacked up all over our laundromats and in our supermarkets!

= = =

The ONLY thing that's missing so far is a way of saying "These are the ten stories we want to run this week." Not because there's no stories written up - but because there's TOO many stories out there!*

We just need to use the web to take a national vote on which stories to run. The rest is just plain old-fashioned page-layout, xeroxing/printing and distribution.


= = =

* Remember that sometimes when there's TOO MANY choices, people feel overwhelmed. Social scientists have confirmed this by going into a supermarket with free samples of chocolate, for example. In one test, there will be 5 types of chocolate to sample - in another test there will be 50 types.

The results? In the smaller test, people not only had an easier time picking their favorite (that's obvious) but they RATED THEIR FAVORITE HIGHER than in the bigger test.

This might be called the "looking over your shoulder" or "the grass is always greener" syndrome. When people are confronted with TOO MANY choices, they get overwhelmed, and NONE of the choices look that great. When there are fewer choices, choosing on is easier - and people report being MORE SATISFIED with that choice. Ironic, but true.

[RedEarth]

46. I think it's a damn good idea.....

Keep everyone posted on what you come up with.

[bpilgrim]

51. GlobalFreePress.com

a data collection and dissemination site always looking for folks to add to the datamine :evilgrin:

http://GlobalFreePress.com

I'd be interested in discussing further if folks are interested.

peace

[Andy_Stephenson]

52. You all already have two investigative columnists.

Harris and Stephenson

[arendt]

54. Excellent point. They are already being supported.

Are they asking for money for legal expenses, travel?
Where is their funding coming from? Completely
internet? Bev's business?

----

Now, wouldn't it be great if you could find out about
more people just like them by going to one page
on one site?

arendt

[bpilgrim]

56. well...

GFP is run by me in my freetime - which is 0 lately - though we try to affiliate/helpout/promote as many like minded folks as possible and maybe that is where the precieved connection is but it is just me right now running the whole site.

since i can only do so many things at once - family, micro business, part time job, study and gfp - it is sufferring.

I need help and i have been trying to organize a team of folks to help me get the word out.

now i may be good at building websites but i suck at business, graphics, organizing, speaking, writing, etc.

so i was hoping one day some of the FANTASTIC talent we have at du could pool our resources - time and talent - to make gfp something useful for folks.

now i have plenty of big ideas and would love to talk in earnest with anyone who would like to help me start a grassroots mediaoutlet.

now i know there are other out there but none are as powerful - technologically speaking - as GFP - thanks to opensource and slash - and we can be pretty POWERFUL in tailoring the news to each user, they can create there own newspaer in essence.

anyways...

I am an expert at writing web spiders to automagically harvest info and dissenminate it via the web and would love to use my skills to help pass the word but i can't take this any further by myself so if folks are serious lets get together and start rapping about this and get it done.

i even created a private space online where we can collaberate easilly through our web browsers.

still interested? lets talk.

btw: i have been pondering a custom ticker that will show you scrolling headlines from our favorite lib/progressive sources based on your own keywords i.e. your interest, but i need some motivation... like a team of folks who are tired of the BS and willing to start a brand new industry.

even if start out as just a knowledge aggregator at first i think we can go places... just imagine... germany.globalfreepress.com japan.globalfreepress.com or even nyc.globalfreepress.com, boston.globalfreepress.com etc

every story posted is automatically syndicated to all of our affiliates but also to any other web site that supports syndication like yahoo etc.

I will check in and out but please du me if you ALL are serious about this.

we can do this if we do it TOGETHER.

peace

[Andy_Stephenson]

59. Most of it is coming from our hides...

and from several who have graciously donated to the cause.

But travel and legal expenses are not cheap.

[scottxyz]

55. Great idea!

I think starting a real newspaper/news-show is THE key issue (along with black box voting) that can fix the big problems we've been seeing in the US for the past few decades.

People aren't stupid - they're just unaware of what's going on - because all their news is funded by a particular class (the corporations).

The blogosphere IS starting to turn things around - but as arendt said it's diffuse.

I think a daily newspaper wouldn't be that hard to put together. Some investigative writing is already out there, and it would only be a matter of getting permission to reprint from the authors. For bigger investigations, as arendt said we could use the website as a place to pick which stories need to be followed and to raise funds for reporting and production.

There are probably still a lot of opportunities for leveraging the internet for collaborative purposes. Editing and page layout could probably be done collaboratively across the web by registered editors (using a secure login/password). Once today's edition is done (probably worked up in QuarkXpress and output as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file) then a national distributed volunteer network of tabloid-size laser printers could print out camera-ready, which would then go to presses around the country every morning (many of which could also be volunteering/donating time and equipment and labor as a way to reduce out-of-pocket costs).

This distribution structure isn't a whole lot different from the way the NY Times actually has started doing things over the past few years - they pay reporters from HQ in NYC, edit and layout stories in NYC, then send finished Postscript/PDF files around the country/world via satellite and then print them out locally on a few presses. There's no reason a few committed reporters, editors and graphic artists couldn't replicate this same setup - and there are tools which would allow some of the collaboration to be done via the internet so that we wouldn't be paying rent in downtown Manhattan.

The costs for page layout and printing have gone down radically with the desktop publishing revolution, and most big newspapers and magazines have adopted some form of it. No reason why we can't also. And as long as you have a CONSISTENT NATIONAL edition (possibly with a few pages customized for local content), you get MAJOR impact because the whole COUNTRY is reading you every morning.

One point to bear in mind: "networked" or "collaborative" doens't HAVE to mean the same thing as "public". Most public networked systems are easy to sabotage (for example, email has been threatened by spam, or bulletin boards get swamped by trolls, or Kazaa gets infiltrated by RIAA). Just because we might leverage the NETWORKED capabilities of the internet, doesn't mean the editing and reporting and production phases have to be PUBLIC and open for all to see (so any old freeper could barge in and start trolling). Passwords and encryption would allow us to conveniently work together, while keeping out disruptors. Then, when each edition is ready, zap the PDF around the country to a thousand laser printers, run out the camera-ready, go to press, and drop off around town.

It is so TIRING waiting for WaPo or the NYT to get around to covering the important issues. We get so pissed because everyone reads those corporate rags on the train every morning - and much of the REAL NEWS remains unheard. If a competing, non-corporate newspaper were also available right next to WaPo, NYT and USAToday in towns across the country, it WOULD get read. Notice how people are lapping up the new "reality" shows - and they don't even have very good content - but it's such a relief to have an alternative to the same old overscripted corporate crap on TV, people are thrilled just to be able to see other regular people on TV. Networks have discovered they don't need to pay big-name writers and stars to produce exciting content any more - content is becoming a COMMODITY.

The same thing is happening with news. "Marquee" names such as Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof are taking a beating nowadays on the internet, now that we are able to (1) critique them instantly and pass the critique around, and (2) take up our keyboards and try our hand at what they do. I love reading Will Pitt or the guy over at www.billmon.org and a dozen other internet-based writers - and these people were totally unknown a few years ago before blogging and bulletin boards became popular on the web, but I look forward SO MUCH MORE to reading a Will Pitt article rather than the Friedman or Kristof claptrap I used to think was "quality" for so many years.

This is the key here - quality. A LOT of people are highly sensitive to quality in writing and in analysis and in investigation. We know the difference now between when a Judith Miller is regurgitating a Washington Post press release versus when a Gregory Palast is really digging deep and getting at the heart of a story. WE appreciate this difference now - and as soon as people are able to just pick up a paper on their street corner, THEY are all going to appreciate this difference too.

We could probably CHARGE for a paper like this. Why not charge a dollar, or fifty cents? This would help pay for paper, and give the news-stand owners a profit incentive to carry it. Or, like the Village Voice, in certain downtown areas it could be free.

And I'm sure many people have noticed the amazing level of quality in some of the writing on the blogosphere or on the independent news sites. If you're a person who's spent many years addicted to regular newspapers, it's been such a breath of fresh air being able to go to the web and seeing feedback, analysis, and investigative reporting that is as good or often way better than much of the lazy stuff being peddled by the corporate media. There's really no reason this high-quality stuff should be put on paper every day. Once this happens - watch out! A LOT of people out there aren't on-line very much, and once they get exposed to this high-quality content, they're going to undergo the same transformation WE did once we discovered web-based news and commentary. They're gonna notice the difference - and they're gonna love it. We NEED to move selected internet content off-line and onto paper and onto video, because that's where most people get their news.

If a quality non-coporate-funded national newspaper were also available on street corners every morning - people would EAT IT UP! People are really starving for quality - and the quality writing and investigating is out there (we're seeing a lot on the blogosphere now, plus the alternative new sites, plus our "exiled" journalists such as Palast) - we just need some logistics to bring the supply to the demand.

The internet has already proven its fund-raising abilities via the Dean campaign. People who are already spending $50 a month for crap on cable would be very willing to pledge $10 a month to support a non-corporate news source.

I would love to see a daily paper, available for people to read in the morning or at lunch, covering International, National and Local news. (Local news could even be tailored by State if we got the collaborative editing and page-layout thing done right.) A lot of that generic news is probably already out there on wire services - and as you know, it's the editor who selects and headlines wire stories. Being able to fill out the paper by selecting and headlining generic wire stories from a NON-CORPORATE viewpoint would be an incredible step forward - and people would notice it - they'd eat it up.

This would knock the socks off the NYT and WaPo and all the other corporate media. They've gotten so soft and vulnerable now because they're too afraid to lose "access" by asking tough questions of goverment and they're too afraid to lose advertising dollars by asking tough questions of corporations. A national internet-samizdat newspaper that's not afraid of the government or the corporations would be AMAZING - and unstoppable.

[arendt]

70. Awesome, awesome response, dude. We are on the same wavelength

I have to run off to my "day job", but I will get back to this
over the weekend.

Does your city have one of those "giveaway" papers with
corporate rip-and-read news that they hand out at bus stops
and subway entrances?

Could you picture our paper being handed out there?
I bet the corporate giveaways would be bird-cage liner
in a week!

You seem to have a good grasp of the technology. Thanks
for laying it out.

I guess I'm moving away from just whining on the Internet
and towards getting my ass on the line and doing something.
This could be great.

How much does Quark Express cost? Does it run on a Mac
(dumb question - Macs are for Media)?

arendt

[scottxyz]

73. More ideas on the "new" newspaper - and TV channel (LONG post!)

Desktop publishing (DTP) technology is now cheap, mature and widespread
I used to work for several years in desktop publishing, back in the early 90s, at ad agencies and in-house graphics shops for banks.

At some point in the 90s, most newspapers and magazines also adopted the same technology.

The whole desktop revolution was made possible by the Mac - but all the programs now run on PCs and Macintosh.

QuarkXPress is the main page-layout program, and I bet lots of DUers and other web lurkers already have it.

The main thing that made the desktop publishing (DTP) revolution happen was the Postscript-based laser printer - also introduced by Apple I believe. These now cost just a few hundred bucks.

Big guys and little guys use Postscript to output pages
The cool thing about Postscript is that it's a "device-independent page-rendering language". This means that you can do your page layout in Quark on any computer, and print the resulting Postscript file on your inexpensive home laser printer (at, say, 300 or 600 dots per inch or "dpi").

But the really cool thing is that THE EXACT SAME POSTSCRIPT FILE can be printed on a really high-end printer - the kind the magazines use. This is the "device independent" part of Postscript. So what Postscript did was make it possible for ad agencies or publishers to lay out their pages on an inexpensive computer and get a completely accurate but perhaps slightly grainy "WYSIWIG"* printout on an inexpensive printer - and then when the whole page is laid out perfectly, you send the same Postscript file to a high-end imagesetter and produce camera-ready, color-separated film (typically with 2400 dots per inch).

By the way, when we download a PDF document (portable document format) to view it in Adobe Acrobat, that's also a Postscript file - now rendered to be viewed at various zoom levels on a computer screen. (Adobe invented Postscript and they produce a lot of the better DTP software. Quark is a separate company.)

This whole process is completely routine and highly competitive now - there are tons of companies doing page layout on Macs and PCs, proofing the pages in-house on a cheap laser printer, and, in the case of a high-end publication, sending the whole thing out to a professional imagesetter to produce the hi-res "seps".

So there's lots of options here. Home and small-business laser printers, even tabloid size (11"x17") are pretty affordable now, and resolutions of 600 dpi and over are very common. These printers can easily produce paper or film camera-ready originals suitable for black-and-white or color reproduction on a printing press - or even on a Kinko's xerox machine. Just look around you at the flood of flyers and newsletters in your mailbox and on your street corner - a lot of this stuff is produced at a very affordable price by people who picked up QuarkXPress by reading "DTP for Dummies" from Barnes and Noble. It's no longer something that just the big guys can do.

Getting up-and-running with desktop publishing is easy
I was involved with desktop publishing way back when it first started, I think it was around the mid-80s - I was a temp doing the word processing for the marketing VP at a consulting firm in Manhattan, and one week they were bidding on a big job and revising all their specs and bios in a massive Microsoft Word document (probably using the old reliable Courier typeface we all remember from IBM Selectric). We were a PC office but I already had my trusty Mac on my desk (a really tiny one called the Mac SE, probably only had a few MEGS of hard-drive, not even GIGS) and I ran the word processing document through a desktop publishing program and lo and behold the thing was now in a REAL typeface, proportionally-spaced Times New Roman or something instead of Courier. Everyone's jaw dropped, they pulled the president out of a meeting so he could sign off on a PO for a few hundred bucks to buy the page-layout software we needed, and the next day their bid proposal was desktop-published rather than word-processed. It looked great, they won the bid - and over the next few months they invested about a hundred grand in new hardware and software to set up an in-house desktop publishing department. (Nowadays if you wanted to be lean and mean you could easily set up the DTP production environment for under 10 grand. One excellent magazine that covers the technology aspects of this stuff is called "Publish!" - I think they're still on newsstands.)

The point is - this same scenario has played itself out all over the world for the past 2 decades, and now EVERYONE is able to do page layout and graphic design and be a publisher. There were a few shaky years where lots of ugly newsletters got published where an amateur "designer" got carried away and threw too many typefaces together on the same page - and these examples can still be seen occasionally - but on the whole the quality of print has gone way up and the price has gone way down because of this "digital revolution" called DTP.

A few years ago the New York Times adopted much of this technology, and I believe their pages are zapped around the country via satellite in the morning in a Postscript format (which involved some custom font-digitizing to capture some of their "signature" typefaces.)


The web, with the right networking software, produces the best content
The web has distracted us for the past few years with the new "blog" phenomenon, where now everybody can be a "pundit". Once again, the quality is uneven - there's some blogs which are insanely great, and some which are just boring personal diaries. Once again, this explosion of digital publishing was made possible by a new technology - in this case, "canned" bulletin-board software and blog software which made it possible for non-computer geeks to start typing and instantly have their posts incorporated into an organized framework including new stories, archives, comments, etc. Then the hosting itself became free as well, with big companies like Google (which bought Blogspot) allowing anyone to start up a blog today in just a few minutes - just like opening up a hotmail account. All totally free.

Now the culling and selecting process in the blog world has started to mature, as people are critiquing each other's blogs, we have the Koufax awards as well for great lefty blogs, and because of all the cross-linking and link-tracking we're seeing a sort of bunching-up effect where a few blogs are getting all the eyeballs while most of the remainder have very few readers. (Some people complain about this and say the great disparity between the number of readers of a top blog like http://atrios.blogspot.com versus the lack of readers at a less-read blog is somehow "anti-Democratic" - but I say hey, they started out on a level playing field, nobody had an unfair advantage because some corporate backer was flogging and promoting them - so let the best blogs win!)

You get better content when a million voices compete and critique
I used to deliver the morning paper from fourth grade on (The Boston Globe), and every morning I read the headlines and then flipped right to the editorial page to get the commentary and the showcase pieces that were the most carefully crafted. For two decades I've been riding the subway in New York with my NY Times, reading all the news they see fit to print - also doing the same sequence: first the front page, then the editorials, then everything else. And speaking as a lifelong news and opinion junkie, I can say one thing: the QUALITY of writing and analysis I've found on SOME blogs TOTALLY BLOWS AWAY the stuff I've been reading all my life in the daily fishwrap. Yeah, I think Krugman and Bob Herbert and Frank Rich are great at the Times, and I always get a kick out of the measured, balanced tones of their unsigned editorials as a great example of how to persuade without sounding feverish - but let me tell you it has been such a RELIEF to not have to sit through some elegant Bill Safire slander or pompous Thomas Friedman piece or self-aggrandizing Nicholas Kristof column and go away feeling like "Gee, it kinda makes sense what they're saying, but there's something fishy here I can't quite put my finger on."

WHAM! All I have to do now is log on to the web and check out http://atrios.blogspot.com or http://corrente.blogspot.com or http://www.calpundit.com and see them demolishing that casuistic crap that Safire or Friedman or Kristof was trying to pass of as wisdom this morning.

Collaborative filtering has revolutionized both music and print content
This is the same empowering, mindblowing thing that happened when I first discovered Napster or Audiogalaxy or Kazaa. No longer did I have to go to Tower Records and shell out up to 20 bucks for some CD to try and stimulate my senses (and more often than not get pissed off that there's only one decent track on the album). Instead, I would download tons of songs, delete about 90% that I didn't like, and burn a MP3 CD with 10 hours of songs I actually LIKE. Back in the 80s, you had to sleep with someone who knew a DJ to MAYBE get them to copy you a decent house tape so you'd have a few hours of continuous good music to give you a buzz. Not any more - the leap in quality made possible by the web was amazing - and for a lot of people, there's just been no going back. (Note the declining CD sales from the labels.)

The important thing to mention both about on-line music and on-line news and opinion: Although the corporate media may want you to believe this, it really ISN'T about "getting something without paying for it". Yes, that's part of the thrill. But there is another major difference about getting your media from the web versus getting your media on paper or plastic: you get way better QUALITY. And this quality doesn't even come in the straightforward way you might think - by just downloading thousands of songs or wading through thousands of blogs until you find the few you like: that sort of brute-force approach wouldn't work at all either. What's at work here is something the software gurus call "collaborative filtering". Collaborative filtering is what Amazon.com does for you when you're looking at a book: way down at the bottom of the page there's a list that says: "People who bought Anne Coulter's TREASON also bought Bill Frist's GOOD PEOPLE BEGET GOOD PEOPLE." Collaborative filtering recommends new choices to you based on your old choices - and the computer program that does it is real easy, it just looks at what YOU chose and then find other people who chose that and show what ELSE they chose.

Collaborative filtering helps you find stuff you can't google (because you don't know what it's called)
Collaborative filtering is at work when you find a blog you like and you click on their "blog-rolling" list - the list of other blogs they recommend. This is the guide which enables us to roam through the vast world of the blogosphere and find stuff we like. It really is nothing like Google's search either - because there you have to type in what you're looking for, so you have to already KNOW what you're looking for. Collaborative filtering and trackback and the interactive nature of blog comment areas have spawned an entirely new sort of discourse, where people are able to find the good stuff quick.

This is why I think that it shouldn't be all that hard to come up with some content that we want to move off-line, so that non-computer-users who just want to kill some time and casually pick up a paper by the supermarket exit or at the bus stop or at the laundromat or on campus or in the coffee shop can get some of the amazing content we now enjoy on-line.

I totally agree with Arendt's idea that we should be setting up a website that allows us to (1) pick a few topics to investigate and (2) raise some money to pay for the investigative reporters and pay for the lawsuits. (I'm very uninformed about the workings of journalism and the stuff about the lawsuits was news to me!) And we may also find that a certain portion of the content we need (articles, cartoons) is already out there, if we get permission from the copyright-holder to republish off-line.


A lot of the content has already been created - it just needs to be moved off-line - "off of the desktops and into the streets!"
In addition to a few major original investigations that we follow and finance long-term, there also seems to be a lot of existing content out there, whose copyright-holders might be more than happy to see moved off the web and into the streets. I'm talking about original writing on alternet, truthout, commondreams, counterpunch etc. This is high-quality stuff, it's already been written - and there's only so much I can do sitting here emailing my friends links to these things or haranguing my computer-averse roommate here by reading select pages out loud. A lot of this existing content could be moved IMMEDIATELY to paper, as long as the appropriate permissions are obtained. There's a lot of different formats available too - you've got some reporting, some commentary - you've also got editorial cartoons. A good editor should be able to come up with a very attention-getting mix of this stuff - and given the tepid, tedious nature of today's corporate media, we might be VERY pleasantly surprised to see how people would lap up this formerly on-line content once it moved off-line.

A daily consistent national liberal paper would have an amazing impact
For best impact, it bears repeating that the paper should be NATIONAL in scope. This means that every morning, the SAME paper is hitting streetcorners and workplaces under the SAME name. This has to do with building brand awareness and all that. (Some local variations might be cool, and not too hard to do - a few pages devoted to local news.)

With the amount of content available, I don't think there's any reason such a paper can't be DAILY - or at least 5 days a week to start off with. (I remember several articles in The Nation where people were wringing their hands about there being no daily liberal newspaper in the US. Well now we're gonna have one.) The crucial advantage the propagandists at Pravda on the Potomac and Izvestia on the Hudson enjoy is that PEOPLE READ THAT STUFF ON THE WAY TO WORK IN THE SUBWAY TO KILL TIME. We need to have this new newspaper on the same streetcorner, at the same time, in the same kind of pretty little box, or in the same news-stand, as the old-time corrupt corporate players. Plenty of other free and paid (advertiser-supported) or papers have done this on a daily or weekly basis, so it's not rocket science.

We're really only limited by the amount of paper available and the number of people who can do editing, page-layout, printing, and sales and distribution. Content we're gonna get. We all have a laundry list of our favorite underappreciated investigative journalists, from Seymour Hersh to Will Pitt to Greg Palast. And maybe other people who already have jobs in the corporate world (such as Molly Ivins) might jump at the chance to be on-board with a publication that's not beholden to corporate interests - as long as we can do enough fund-raising and organizing to assure them that their paychecks and benefits are stable for the duration of their contract. (Again, I don't know the details of how the corporate media works - all I know is there are lots of great writers I wish people in my neighborhood were reading, and I know writers love to reach an audience.) If this new newspaper is properly incorporated and funded so that these writers have job security and benefits and legal protections - and if permission to use some of the EXISTING on-line content can be obtained - then I think we have all the ingredients for a smashing success.


Today - a new national newspaper. Tomorrow - a new national TV channel.
Next, we'll tackle the video issue. Again, I'm starting to see lots of content out there (the MoveOn.org "Bush in 30 seconds" finalists, Symbolman's productions, IndyMedia video uploads, Arianna Huffington's really funny campaign animations comparing Arnold to an SUV that ran out of gas) so it shouldn't be hard to do.

By the way, WE own the airwaves, and there is specific language in the laws saying that the airwaves should promote the well-being of the people. We need to look up these laws and make sure they are being enforced. Maybe we are owed a certain amount of spectrum or bandwidth or hard cash in return for the billions of dollars in welfare we've showered on the likes of Murdoch and Clear Channel. Those airwaves are a public resource which belongs to The People.


We have the content - we can get the money. Then we just need to work on old-fashioned production and distribution.
The country is now flooded with print and video media - and nearly all of the corporate-produced stuff is crap. The cost of producing print and video has plummeted in the past few decades - the amount of grassroots content out there is skyrocketing - and competition and collaboration is yielding grassroots print and video content that's WAY better than the corporate stuff. "Power of the press belongs to those who own one" - and now many of us DO own one or more ingredients of a press: a computer, a laser printer. Other people who own bigger equipment - imagesetters, rotary presses - might be interested in donating some of their resources.

The time has come for us to use the power we have, and produce papers and shows that The People will love!


* "what you see is what you get"

[arendt]

83. Aw, dog gone it! Now you got me started thinking.

It always bugged me in newspapers that they didn't
simply give an event or a topic some kind of
Dewey Decimal Code, so you could easily fish
out ALL the stories about a subject and put them
in time order.

I want a newspaper that says, we will track N topics
from start to fiinish and give you back references
(on a website) if you come in in the middle of a
topic and want to catch up. Each day, we will have
M stories, where M is less than N (since stories
can go quiet for a while and then come alive again).

That way, the media can't get away with burying
a topic on Saturday, page 97. We can call them
on it by putting our method out there. Then we
say: on topic N, we ran X stories with a total of
Y column inches. While whore media ran ONE
story of 2 column inches.

----

Also, I think we should have distinct sections,
as opposed to just mushing all the stories together
in the front section. I think we should have sections
about, e.g.:

-our military, its budget, its lesser-known activities like
Plan Columbia

- fundamentalism in the world (Islamic, Christian,
Zionist, Hindu, Financial, etc.)

- non-laissez faire economics (i.e., the sensible
use of government regulation)

- European affairs
- Asian affairs
- Islamic/Middle East Affairs
- Latin American Affairs.

We might have to assign these sections to different
days of the week, as they now do for such "marginal"
topics as: science, medicine, education. (We must
have celebrities, sports, and right wing cause celebres
EVERY DAY.) But, the Dewey Decimal System plus
the topic index should keep the story lines linked.

----

I also would like the stories to have "abstracts",
like in technical journals. That way, the reader
could be informed of the gist of the article, and
if he wants more detail, he can read the body.

Today, the whore media has "leads" that are
up to half the story long, before you get to the
meat. Even journalists are calling this self-
indulgent crap.

And why do they get away with it? Because they
have NO COMPETITION.

----

Regarding your idea to get permission to publish
good existing investigative stuff:

We could have readers post LINKS to stuff
they want published. Then other readers could
VOTE on what to put in the paper. (Of course,
the on-line people could read the article via
the link, right away.) That is a step in the direction
of the audience being the editor. Of course,
the votes have to fall within the rules outlined
above (total of N topics, topics grouped into sections,
etc.)

----

As for funding, you catch my idea correctly. I figure
that it is a NO ADVERTISING paper, not even friendly
advertising. That avoids the whole issue of "you
stinking liberals are censoring our ads."

Yes, Ms. Magazine has no ads, and it costs about
$10 an issue. That is proof that ads pay about 75%
of the cost of publication.

If we want to sell this as a daily paper, I guess we
could use our donations as subsidies for publishing;
but I think we need to save them for content generation
and editorial and publishing overheads.

We might charge 25 cents per copy. But, we won't
be as big as a real paper, and I can get a local rag
for 50 cents. I don't know what Kinko's charges, but
I know that 3 to 5 cents a page is the best deal I've
ever seen for mass runoffs in such a store. If we
put out a five page paper, and charge 25 cents,
we just break even.

Anyone have numbers on page costs from Kinkos?

----

Anyway. I will keep trying to organize this material.
The flow of new content to this thread seems to
have ended (scottxyz excepted). So, I should
be able to sort through all of this over the weekend.


Thanks to all who posted; and stay tuned.

arendt

[scottxyz]

93. Arendt invents the "empty slug" in news - like the Hindu zero in math !

This is some amazing stuff you're writing, Arendt. Either I'm hallucinating or some of this stuff you've proposed is truly a "milestone".

In particular, your idea about the empty slug - a topic header in the Dewey Decimal System of news, which might happen to be quiet on a given day BUT STILL GETS LISTED SO WE DON'T FORGET IT AND IT WON'T GET BUMPBED OFF AND FORGOTTEN - is a major step forward in the field of journalism. (I'm not a journalist so could somebody confirm this??)

Arendt: I want a newspaper that says, we will track N topics
from start to finish and give you back references
(on a website) if you come in in the middle of a
topic and want to catch up. Each day, we will have
M stories, where M is less than N (since stories
can go quiet for a while and then come alive again).

That way, the media can't get away with burying
a topic on Saturday, page 97. We can call them
on it by putting our method out there. Then we
say: on topic N, we ran X stories with a total of
Y column inches. While whore media ran ONE
story of 2 column inches.

As far as I know, this is an original idea. (Can anyone confirm this?) This seems highly useful, as you don't forget about stuff that may be quiet for a while. You keep track of the "holes" instead of totally deleting them - to maintain the integrity of the body of work called the News. What a brilliant idea!

(1) Track a fixed set of stories (where some stories may go quiet for while).

(2) Provide a web link for further detail. (PBS sort of does this, and some papers now too.)

(3) The media can't get away with burying (or killing) a topic - since we "put our method out there" and when a story is quiet, we still list it in the story index.

These are VERY important ideas.

The news is a "subject" - a vast, complex, sprawling subject - every bit as important as "school" subjects such as science or history the Dewey Decimal System DOES so diligently index.

And how many times has an important subject disappeared from view - crowded off the radar by a blowjob or a boobie - or, God forbid - a bomb?

This forgetful, easily distracted aspect of the mass media is keenly appreciated by Goebbels disciples such as Karl Rove - and it's even called "Rovian", this sort of tactic.

We suspect for example that the fake Kerry affair was sitting around unused for a while and then leaked to Drudge during a tough news week, when W was taking it on the chin for being an AWOL cokehead. We suspect that Osama will be miraculously found in October when Bush needs him most - and that he's "on ice" now. We knew that the Iraq War was timed to wag the dog of the 2002 elections, and Rove or Andrew Card made some cynical remark about rolling out a new "product" in the fall.

Does anybody even remember the blockbuster stories that exploded a couple years ago? Enron? That was the BIGGEST bankruptcy in the history of the world - run by Bush's BIGGEST lifetime campaign contributor - and it just got swept under the rug. Then that Enron employee Baxter supposedly killed himself - and the county coroner was some corrupt Texas sleazeback who had doctored some other case for the neo-cons - and then some guy in Florida gassed himself to death in his garage, some Bush business connection who ran funeral homes or something - and then... the story just fizzled. Back to all-Chandra, all the time, or what some black guy did with his dick.

(Meanwhile, notice how the Clinton/Whitewater thing kept fizzling out on its own - no matter how kindling and lighter fluid the neo-cons kept throwing on the fire - until Clinton himself did something with his dick... But that's another story...)

Remember the outcry over Cheney's secret energy meetings - which every KNEW just had to have something to do with pre-planning a war on Iraq way back in 2000 - and possibly souring relations with our former Taliban friends over their refusal to play along with the Unocal pipeline - and then WHAM! - 9/11 - our very own Reichstag, "everything is different..."

You can bet your sweet ass these guys know how to manipulate the news cycle - how to bump off one scandal with an even bigger scandal - or, if some bimbo or bozo explodes - with SEX SEX SEX, the ultimate distraction.

The bloggers have developed a one-liner for this technique as well, saying "Hey look, over there!" when a big story gets abruptly shitcanned.


Arendt says here:

Also, I think we should have distinct sections,
as opposed to just mushing all the stories together
in the front section. I think we should have sections
about, e.g.:

-our military, its budget, its lesser-known activities like
Plan Col{o}mbia

- fundamentalism in the world (Islamic, Christian,
Zionist, Hindu, Financial, etc.)

- non-laissez faire economics (i.e., the sensible
use of government regulation)

- European affairs
- Asian affairs
- Islamic/Middle East Affairs
- Latin American Affairs.

We might have to assign these sections to different
days of the week, as they now do for such "marginal" {"school" or "classical"}
topics as: science, medicine, education. ... But, the Dewey Decimal System plus
the topic index should keep the story lines linked.

Arendt's indexing idea in itself is a really leap forward - a simple device for providing a "fixed" framework into which all the stories can be slotted - and in which any temporary "holes" will be glaringly obvious. You might even say that the application of such an index or classification scheme to News might be as important - and as subtle - a leap forward as the Hindu invention of "Zero" was in arithmetic.

"Why bother writing down something that isn't there??" - some of the benighted people still writing in XII and MCMLXVII might have complained back then.

"Ah - but that's exactly why - we write down a placeholder, a symbol for 'nothing' - to SHOW THAT SOMETHING IS MISSING" and to make our bookkeeping and analysis easier and more compact.

(I take it Arendt's use of the Dewey Decimal System nomenclature here is figurative - in that we would use alphabetic, web-style names for this indexing system,* and not the old meaningless numbers which Dewey actually used.)

{{{
Aside for computer-science theoriticians and logicians - feel free to skip:

This is very Zen-like. And I am quite serious in conjecturing that this sort of conceptual leap, which can be very difficult to make at first (involving as it does the writing down of "something" to recommend "nothing") - this conceptual leap, once it is made, can as we have seen represent the greatest leap forward in a field of thought: the Zero in arithmetic, or Arendt's PLACEHOLDER in journalism.

I say this advisedly because as an armchair mathematician and logician I have noticed a similar thing happening in computer science in recent years - the recently designed languages which have made the most progress are the ones which developed an explicit notation for:

(1) the "empty program" - a program which "does nothing" (and which is by default a legal, runnable program and interacts in all the usual ways with other programs-treated-as-data, being parameterizable and reifiable, importable and exportable, instiantiable and abstractable, extendible and prunable, composable and decomposable, etc) -

or for

(2) the "empty assertion" which asserts nothing (and which is by default TRUE and interacts in all the usual ways with other assertions under the operators "_ AND _", "_ OR _", "IF _ THEN _". and "NOT _").

}}}

= = =

Arendt's Dewey Decimal System

* Now, down to some orthographic specifics about Arendt's indexing nomenclature. I think we should AVOID using an unordered keyword list as a heading under which to classify a topic or a story - simply because "unordered" means there's so many ways to write it. Free Republic actually has a rudimentary multi-keyword thing where you can make a bunch of keywords for a story - but they didn't implement it very cleanly because you can misspell the keywords. (Filing a story under an unordered set of keywords works fine on-line, where you can do a search - but we're targeting this new newspaper mainly for PAPER not screen so we can't have a grab bag of keywords indexing each article, because there's no natural order to sort a particular set of keywords in, so the index couldn't be sorted in a natural order either.) I also think, as I implied above (and as I assume Arendt was implying) that we wouldn't actually use just ten numerals like Dewey - we'd use all 26 letters plus numerals for a total of 36 characters plus underscore - separated by dots on one end, and slashes on the other end, as explained in more detail below.

We could probably format the topic index the same as a web address. This is linear and ordered so it's suitable for print - no unordered keyword list you need to search against with a computer. A string of letters has two ends, which is there the specialization trails off to - so this would allow two main axes or dimensions of specializing in a topic heading.

For example: we have the websites:

www.craigslist.org

newyork.craiglist.org
miami.craigslist.org
losangeles.craigslist.org

showing how most web addresses do their first "axis" of specialization at the "head". (Dewey didn't have this - if you were in the 900s, you were in History or whatever - the specialization occurred only at the right side, and the left side was used only for rollups.)

Now within an address such as

newyork.craigslist.org

you've got

newyork.craigslist.org/msr (miscellaneous romance)
newyork.craigslist.org/cps (computer)
newyork.craigslist.org/cps (rooms - shared)

So you've got specializing on the left side of the string (New York vs Miami) and specializing at the right side of the string (miscellaneous romance vs computer).

So this two-dimensional, alphanumeric system that the web uses is already out there, and it would work nicely for the new newspaper.

I'd like to emphasize that if there is no news on a particular day about Enron, it still gets a slug:

enron.cronycapitalism.bush

No new news today.

enron.cronycapitalism.bush/SkllingOnTrial

awol.bush/WitnessCalhoun/Claims
awol.bush/WitnessCalhoun/Discredited

PlameAffair.Bush/BobNovak
PlameAffair.Bush/ScooterLibby
PlameAffair.Bush/Wilson

etc.

You know - I think I actually proposed a similar classification scheme a few months ago for General Discussion topics on DU when new rules were being debated banning duplicate threads. I actually went to the trouble of dumping all twenty pages of that day's DU GD topics into a thread, indexing them, and sorting them - but my idea was rejected. It's Leibniz and Newton all over again, Arendt - but I think the time is coming for our ideas!

Arendt: I also would like the stories to have "abstracts",
like in technical journals. That way, the reader
could be informed of the gist of the article, and
if he wants more detail, he can read the body.

>> Hell yeah! Like the "blurbs" they do in magazine articles and in advertisements and in scientific papers - where they really WANT you to read and digest and retain the stuff - not when they're trying to bury on page A17 something the White House released at 6:30 PM on a long weekend and the Times and WaPo had to run (for the "record") but obligingly buried (for "access").

Arendt: Regarding your idea to get permission to publish
good existing investigative stuff:

We could have readers post LINKS to stuff
they want published. Then other readers could
VOTE on what to put in the paper.

>> This is so simple and so effective! Links!

Do a thread (on DU or wherever) where people nominate their favorite stories, linking to them.

Do another thread with a POLL up top, showing all the choices which got more than a certain threshold of support in the first thread.

[scottxyz]

74. Speaking of "giveaway" papers

They have one here in New York now called "AM New York" or something. Beautiful 4-color production. I saw one on the train in the chair next to me yesterday and picked it up. (I'm trying to live up to my word to the Times ombudsman about boycotting his rag until he fixes it.)

So I see some article about real estate in New York - always a hot topic - and read that. Turns out it's some feature article on a new residential building going up in midtown - where a STUDIO starts at $1,890 a month - and one-bedrooms are around two and half thousand a month and 2-bedrooms are over three thousand!

Plus there was some "interview" with a realtor talking about this crap like "the New York market is very dynamic" and "there are deals out there, you just have to jump on them fast" and the best solution is to "find a realtor you trust, someone who might hear about the new apartments before they even come on the market."

Well, duh.

What kind of rag is that? What kind of subway-user would possibly be able to afford twenty-five hundred a month for an apartment? Why are they filling our heads (and wasting all this paper) with all this garbage?

Well - it's not a real paper. It's just advertising masquerading as a newspaper.

I bet a lot of people are sick and tired of this stuff - and a lot of people are even getting bored with all those other "alternative" local weeklies, which have become boring and predictable in their way. (Except I do love Nat Hentoff and James Riddgeway in The Village Voice.)

As we've seen from the on-line music revolution - and reality TV shows - and internet chat-rooms and personals and bulletin boards and blogs - people are STARVING for less-mediated, less-corporate content. Every time they're presented with non-corporate content, they go wild about it. As Arendt says, if a REAL newspaper were available next to these corporate pseudo-newspapers, the corporate rag would be birdcage-liner in a week!

Most media in America is now like Pravda or Izvestia - only the power these American propagandists serve is the Shareholder, not the State. We never thought it would happen here - but it did. Kinda makes sense, if you think about it: if you put the merchants in charge of the press, the press will come to reflect the interests of the merchants.

Paper and PCs and laser printers are cheap. The internet will let us raise money, pay and indemnify reporters, and collaborate on editing and production.

People who get their news on the web aren't easily lied to. (70% of Fox viewers fell for the lies about WMDs or the lies linking Saddam and Osama - and 0% of web news junkies fell for those same lies.)

All we need to do is move the on-line news off-line.

[arendt]

79. We are DEFINITELY on the same lambda. Leaving day job now...

talk later.

arendt

[bpilgrim]

91. let's do it

actually a lot of what you and scott have said is all ready up and running at http://GlobalFreePress.com

It has automated syndication - rss/xml - online aproval and editing process, print - which leverages the DTP/printing revolution since many folks allready have a printer and they would love to get involved as well by passing out articles and it saves big time on start up cost -

the newspaper is customizable to the reader meaning they can pick just the kinds of stories they are interested in, it is very scalable with excellant performance and it's opensource which means its FREE and very flexible.

and lots more...

let's just say i am a true believer and been practicing for over two years now and i am more than ready to team up with some other motivated folks to get this started.

i have most of what we are talking about in place so we can start right away.

so... who is onboard and when do we meet... i already have a private online spot to meet and organize so just DU me and i will create an account for you but lets try to come up with a date and time so we can all discuss this together.

looking forward to working together to make this happen :bounce:

peace

[RainDog]

62. Independent journalists are already online, and in print

as others have mentioned...not that others cannot also work in that area.

but one way they get money for research, etc. is by applying for grants. so if you wanted to help journalists, you could offer a grant for investigative reporting to help fund them.

or, as others have mentioned, donate to people like Robert Parry, who really, really, really deserves the support. He's the one who was so dogged in researching the Bush Sr. October Surprise Iran Hostage story and proved that the House was wrong, and that Casey, at the very least, did meet with Iranians to delay the release of hostages.

something which could be nice would be if there were a wire service of sorts which could pay for investigative pieces which could appear in the many alternative weeklies which already exist across the country.

wouldn't it be great if Parry, and Palast, and so many others..Waas, Vest, if they each had weekly articles in all the alternative papers around the country?

The alternatives are available for people who don't have the money to have computers at home, too.

just tossing out some thoughts.

[Lostnote03]

63. Bingo!!!!

.......I like the way you think!!!!.....good idea!!!!

[Zan_of_Texas]

64. there's no shortage of

people who love to do investigative reporting.

I'm one. And I love it more than eating, but somehow I've got to buy those pesky groceries too.

I was just commenting at another site the other day -- the writing and research on the web is SO much better than what we pay for in the daily papers, and let's not even mention tv news.

I was mulling over the thought that Move-on pays millions for ads -- why not buy something with it?

It's almost like the left needs a Public Works Project or something -- we rarely have gobs of money, just talent, and we need it to be put to work big time, building infrastructure for us, so we can move forward. Media infrastructure is especially crucial.

Yet, right now, a few hundred or few thousand people are carrying a huge burden of supporting websites, and doing the kinds of things Bev Harris and others are doing. Others may be sending psychic messages of support, but that doesn't pay the health insurance bill.

I'd like for us to be able to build a web of easily accessible real information and commentary.

One way would be to further refine the radio schedule that was listed above. Then, we could leverage those shows, to get word of more content out. Radio is cool because it doesn't require paper or any more distribution than already exists. And it's free to listeners.

[grasswire]

65. a wire service for independent newspapers...

...that's a brilliant idea.

A weekly nationwide newsletter might also be a good idea. One way to do that is this: The mockup can be uploaded to kinkos in the evening by the managing editor, and packages of finished product can be picked up at a hundred kinkos the next morning, all around the country, by volunteers. They could be sold in coffeehouses or left-leaning indy bookstores and internet cafes. Maybe at colleges, too.

If you used a news letter format, that could be doable. I don't think kinkos can handle newsprint.

[arendt]

71. Yes. We are starting to converge on something here.

Like scottxyz, you get the distributed publishing concept.

I will get back to you.

arendt

[arendt]

72. Yes, we can beat the corporate whores, because they are fat and lazy

Motivation beats money. These turds just get their lying orders
from the WH or the RNC, and put out the same tired boilerplate.

Just being different can work in a culture where boredom is
a major issue.

But, our format cannot have a "People's Daily, Comrade" flavor.
It has to look and feel serious. It has to avoid inflamatory rhetoric
and just present the damning FACTS.

got to run

arendt

[scottxyz]

86. Getting the word out the oldfashioned way - via "hard copy" - USA Samizdat

I was mulling over the thought that Move-on pays millions for ads -- why not buy something with it?

This is a good point made by Zan_of_Texas.

I might add also: we've identified the corporate media as the enemy - so we're fighting them by raising millions of dollars and handing it over to them?

Doesn't sound like a winning tactic.

Our new slogan should be "bypassing" or "obviating" or "going around" the corporate media. Not fattening their wallets.

= = =

In a way, we get kind of lazy. We produce a video - and we just want to call up CBS and hand them over millions of dollars to run it on the Superbowl.

We write an essay - and we just want to click the mouse to upload it onto the net, where hopefully somebody will read it.

Maybe we need to sweat a little more, apply some old-fashioned elbow grease. The right wing still spreads a lot of its propaganda by fax - not via the web.

Maybe once we create that video (and it wins a prize - from our celebrity jury panel or from our millions of on-line voters), we need to run off a million copies of it on VHS, snail-mail them to volunteers around the country - and drop them off in bars, in waiting rooms, on campuses, at bus stops. (Actually I got that backwards - first zap it around the country to "core" volunteers, and then dupe it locally - a hundred copies at each locale - and distribute.)

Maybe once we write that essay (and it wins a prize), we need to typeset, zap it around the country to the "core" volunteers (the "duplicators"), print it on paper, run off copies locally, and hand them out all over town all around the country.

= = =

A thousand "duplicators" - volunteers scattered around the country, who have access to VCR duping station, a CD-burning computer, a xerox machine - or a printing press.

Each volunteer runs off a thousand local copies.

That's one million copies.

Yes, there are expenses. But we were ready to pay how many millions of dollars to CBS to run a 30-second commercial ONCE?

Take those millions and give them to the volunteers to defray the costs of blank CDs, blank VHS tapes, blank paper, toner, and xeroxing.

= = =

Many internet theorists talk about "the last mile" as being the hardest gap to bridge. Meaning that it's easy to wire the whole world for broadband and stuff, but that last mile into the consumer's home is very tricky and expensive to wire.

In the same way, maybe we should be consciously designing a two-tiered distribution system for our text, audio and videos. The first tier gets the essay, interview or show out all around the coutry - from a central computer server to a bunch of volunteers' home computers.

These volunteers are special in that they also have some old-fashioned reproduction equipment at their disposal - a xerox, a dual-cassette deck, a dual-VCR.

Once the essay/interview/show is distributed via the internet to each of these volunteers, each of them runs off 100 copies and distributes them locally. That's the "last mile" which will give us a lot more visibility in people's lives.

If the content is good - and if we all vote on it and vet it, it WILL be - then people won't mind that it's on a VHS tape or a cassette/CD or a piece of paper. Most people are quite interested in carrying and passing around such things if there's something good on them.

Remember how the Russian samizdat network functioned - XEROX MACHINES WERE BANNED IN RUSSIA - so people had to laboriously copy things by hand-typing them on an old-fashioned typewriter, typos and all. (I studied in Leningrad/St Petersburg for a while - and when we did a lesson on Tolstoy, the excerpt we read was indeed a hand-typed carbon copy - complete with typos.

A physical artifact such as a CD/cassette, a broadside, a VHS tape - this has a certain cachet, a certain "personalness" and urgency which hand-crafted artifacts possess.

If we have the passion and dedication to photocopy and dupe the essays and videos we care about, it's totally legal and there's nothing Karl Rove or John Ashcroft can do to stop us. Instead of forking over millions of dollars to CBS begging them to run our ads, why not try a invest in a few blank CDs or tapes or xeroxing at Kinko's - and start a grassroots duplication movement - an American Samizdat?

We have the content. We have the duplicating machines - in our homes, offices and schools. All we need now is the coordination - a way of saying "THIS IS TODAY'S EDITION. PLEASE DUPE AND DISTRIBUTE."

[morgan2]

66. how about a nationwide volunteer investigative journalist

assistance network. Instead of having the one guy travel all around the country, have a network of people that will volunteer their time to check up on things in their area of the country. I guess that could be easily corrupted by the people who you want to investigate, but I'm sure it could be made to work with proper checking on the members.

[rucky]

67. This information superhighway could be really effective

if we get all the info in one place, and we all agree to accept that place as "home base". then the mainstream acceptance follows.

MWO is our best bet. even if there are better orgs out there - that's the most recognized one.

[AmericanErrorist]

68. If we buy our own journalists

wouldn't that remove them of their independece? "Fear and Favor..." and so on?

[scottxyz]

88. The phrase "buying journalists" wasn't the most felicitous. "Hire" instead

I thinnk what Arendt really meant was "buy" as in "purchasing the labor product of" - in other words HIRING journalists.

Not "buying" in the pejorative sense of "buying off".

This highlights an important issue, and an important technique - as an iteractive website, we are our own focus group to some degree. When a word sounds slightly off-kilter, we can chime in and change it.

[dusty64]

69. This is a wonderful idea.

:kick:

[scottxyz]

75. Some suggested content (book/video) - "The Corporation"

There's a new movie out in Canada that's playing to sold-out movie-houses, called "The Corporation".

It documents the pathological behavior of corporations run amok.

Part of the mission we're talking about here involves paying reporters to write original stories - and part of it may involve purchasing existing stories - either in written or video format.

This movie/book combo sounds like it could provide some excellent video and text content for the "new" newspaper and newschannel we're talking about here.

While we're waiting for Soros or Gore to set up this channel or the FCC to award us billions for the airwaves the corporations have received - how about just working out a grassroots distribution and payment system with the directors/producers of this film. (Check out this website for info on the coming VHS version.)

Could be the only way it'll get seen in America.

http://www.counterpunch.org/mokhiber02172004.html

The book is titled: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. It is by Joel Bakan (Free Press, 2004).

The movie is called: The Corporation. It is by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan.

...

Scrap the civics curricula in your schools, if they exist.

Cancel your cable TV subscriptions.

Call your friends, your enemies and your family.

Get your hands on a copy of this movie and a copy of this book.

Read the book. Discuss it. Dissect it. Rip it apart.

Watch the movie. Show it to your children. Show it to your right-wing relatives. Show it to everyone. Organize a party around it. Then organize another.

The movie and the book drive home one fundamental point -- the corporation is a psychopath.

Psychologist Dr. Robert Hare runs down a checklist of psychopathic traits and there is a close match.

The corporation is irresponsible because in an attempt to satisfy the corporate goal, everybody else is put at risk.

Corporations try to manipulate everything, including public opinion.

Corporations are grandiose, always insisting that "we're number one, we're the best."

Corporations refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions and are unable to feel remorse.

And the key to reversing the control of this psychopathic institution is to understand the nature of the beast.

No better place to start than right here.

Read the book.

Watch the movie (www.thecorporation.tv).

[scottxyz]

76. Wording - "hire" vs. "buy"

Just a suggestion -

Down the road, we could try the wording "hire our own journalists" rather than "buy our own journalists" - which sounds so much like what already happened to bought-and-paid-for hacks like Judith Miller.

I realize the initial headline of this thread may have been written in haste - and can't be edited now! Just throwing this in now for future reference as we refine this proposal. As I've said, I think Arendt's idea is one of THE MOST IMPORTANT things we can do to start healing our body politic.

[scottxyz]

80. A simplification?

I still see much of this as simply a question of moving existing content from the computer screen to paper. (I hear that when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail - and I've done a lot of work in desktop publishing, so let me know if I'm missing something here!)

There seems to be so much content already out there, being updated on a daily basis on the web. (Pick your favorite websites and blogs.) What if all we had to do was:

(1) Get permission to reprint some of this stuff.

(2) Do the layout in QuarkXPress, print, copy and distribute?

This would be a quick-and-dirty way to get a LOT more people aware of all this great stuff on the web, make the writers happy by increasing their readership - without spending any money on a new website or on paying journalists or hiring lawyers.

Of course, I also like Arendt's main idea about hiring our own investigative journalists to ORIGINATE news stories - because much of the web is just echoes and commentaries about stories researched and written by big papers and TV channels. (Note - let's say right now that this would NOT be a "pay to play" system - we should make sure we separate fund-raising from editorial oversight. We DON'T want a system where the people who pay the journalists get to dictate what the jouralists write - or who gets hired as journalists. In fact, we should probably have some sort of explicit wall between who pays for this system and who decides what to write about. We already have a corrupt system where the payers manipulating who gets hired to write and what they write about.)

I'm just trying to see if there's a way to start this incrementally taking baby steps - get a paper out there on the street for minimal cost (just coordinated editing, page layout and printing and distribution) - and then add to it by raising money on the web and hiring some of our own journalists (and lawyers) and having a sort of on-line editorial board to figure out what needs to be covered.

It almost seems like we could use the existing FREE blog framework (blogspot, moveabletype) to set up a new blog where a bunch of editors (with secure login/password) figure out which "best of the web" stuff to publish every day (making sure we have permission to reprint this stuff from the owners) - then we just pour that into Quark (it really is almost that easy!) - print out on a few dozen laser printers nationwide - print up on rotary presses or at Kinko's if need be - and have a volunteer network who distribute the paper every morning.

A lot of this could be done without raising money - if a good coordinated network were in place making it easy for the editors and page designers to work together. A lot could be donations - donated time, donated computer time, donated laser printer time and toner, donated xeroxing time, donated time distributing around town.

The main logistical point would be trying to ensure maximum impact by making sure that

(1) We have a process for picking the BEST stories to run every day. (Editorial board? On-line vote like the "Best of" category on craigslist.org? Panel of experts like the Koufax awards or the MoveOn.org Bush ads?)

(2) We have a process for laying those stories out into a multi-page newspaper format. QuerkXpress is one program which runs on PCs and Macs - but it would also be nice to have a more "workgroup"-oriented type of page-layout program, so people could collaborate on the editing and page layoug from all over the country or around the world.

I'm pretty sure there are "workgroup" versions of Quark out there, as well as other high-end page-layout systems (Interleaf?) designed to allow a bunch of editors and designers to work together on putting out a publication quickly and efficiently every day. (Do they run over the Internet - ie on TCP/IP? A lot of things do nowadays. Perhaps this a question for some slashdot.org types.)

On the one hand, we need to make sure a bunch of people are involved in writing and editing (and proofreading!) and page layout so we can leverage the people-hours and talents we have available.

On the other hand, it would be great if the final product every morning were THE SAME nationwide. That would really make a big splash and give NYT, WaPo, USA Today a run for their money.

I think some sort of workgroup page layout program (such as QuarkXpress) might be ideal.

Check out these promo websites from Quark. It sounds like lots of companies are already doing this - collaborating remotely on putting together a single publication:

http://www.quark.com/solutions/qps/
http://www.quark.com/solutions/wg_vs_enterprise.html

Quark Publishing System
At its most basic, QPS lets individuals collaborate on document creation while assigning, routing, and tracking revisions of each piece of content for a printed publication....

[Thtwudbeme]

84. No. DUers are not interested

My God, Guy James (www.theGuyJamesShow.com) has been promoting DU for over a year on the radio and streaming internet, and DUers could give a damn.

DUers just want to see their names on a website.

Their 15 seconds if you will.

[scottxyz]

97. There's a lot of different kinds of DUers

The kids who want to have food fights in the cafeteria - and the mature, hard-working people who just happen to come through here as a sideline to their other organizing work.

Think of Bev Harris or Will Pitt or any number of other people who have their own websites and their own real-world organizing project going on.

This proposal is being floated at DU. If it takes off, it would proabably involve a separate website, additional people (who might not already be on DU - reporters who might be hired), contributors (who might not post on DU but who might be interested in contributing to a newspaper).

But DU is a good place to air these ideas, because we can get feedback and develop them further.

[barbaraann]

85. Just in case anyone has missed this link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2843651.stm

It's a South Korean grassroots news organization. I posted about it on another thread.

Well, here it is--looks professional. Does anyone read Korean? :-)

http://ohmynews.com/

[scottxyz]

87. A quick-and-dirty, low-cost pilot solution

I'm a cheapo, and I like doing things incrementally.*

The system for doing editing, production, reproduction and distribution doesn't have to be pristine and perfect right off the bat. If we can get something "up and running" with minimal upfront cost and minimal software tweaking and minimal pounding of the pavement, it would be worth a try - as a "pilot" or prototype to see where this could go.

For example: Let's say we want to create a new newspaper WITHOUT doing any fund-raising and WITHOUT even setting up any new websites.

What have we got to work with so far? We have the DU website, we have lots of networked computers, we have laser printers (some of us, hopefully), we have Kinko's and other xerox machines at school or work or at home even.

So how would we go about getting say a pilot national edition of a newspaper out with minimal programming, minimal software and harware purchases, and minimal effort?

(1) We need "content". People have already mentioned lots of names of great commentators and writers who are already working on the web. In fact, we probably already have an "embarrassment of riches" when it comes to content - the only task is (a) picking the best stuff out there and (b) getting approval to use it.

Why not just set up a DU thread where we take nominations for "best of the best" articles we want to see published on paper - and then do a separate thread with a poll where we vote on the finalists (and root for them in our comments)?

(2) Once we have content, we need to do page layout. This isn't too hard - lots of DUers probably have Quark and a few volunteers could do the page layout of the essays, "flowing" the text into columns. There's probably some excellent graphic designers and editors and proofreaders on DU who could collaborate on this electronically, sending each other a zip file of the work in progress. (Maybe we'd have to set up a separate, central website where the current version would be located, so people don't get confused sending versions to each other. Again, not a biggie getting a website with a downloadable/uploadable file on it, from what I've seen.)

(3) Let's not forget a NAME. We would need a name for our new newspaper. Again, a thread could be developed to nominate names, and another poll-thread to vote on them.

(4) Finally, we need some people with laser printers (or access to one) - preferable that allow tabloid-size output (11" x 17") so the paper be of a decent size. These volunteers around the country output the final verson of pilot Issue #1 of the "new newspaper."

(5) Xerox - there's lot of machines around, either at Kinko's, school, work or home. (Again, tabloid-size would be nice!)

(6) Distribute - in laundromats, bus-stops, subway stations, restaurants, bars, campuses, etc.

Yes, it's a bit of work - and yes, there is a bit of equipment (computers, xerox machines, cars to drive around and drop off copies) and "consumables" (paper, toner) involved. But this is the USA, and these are computer users - a lot of people on DU HAVE these things.

Remember the underground "samizdat" press in Russia was implemented by TYPING ON A TYPEWRITER USING CARBON PAPER because xeroxes were illegal. They knew what they were up against (Pravda and Izvestia) and they were passionate about providing an alternative - and it was very exciting I imagine, circulating these clandestine broadsheets.

In the USA, under what's left of our Constitution, we have the advantage that distributing a newspaper is still LEGAL. In the USA, with what's left of our economy, we have the advantage that lots of people have computers and laser printers and paper and toner and cars.

(Maybe this whole thing doesn't even need to be centralized - maybe like the internet it could be a thousand different web logs blooming all over the country, now getting printed up on paper. But I think that with a little bit of coordination - picking a few stories we want to run nationally, picking a name for this paper, doing a single, attractive layout, and pooling our talent to make sure the whole thing reads right and looks right - we would have a lot more impact than a thousand rambling weblogs on paper. ONE NEW NEWSPAPER with REAL news in it would have a major impact on our news-starved populace.)

Probably the HARDEST stumbling block we have is recognizing the need for this problem. It was obvious in the USSR - they didn't HAVE freedom of speech. We think we do - but the reality is that the Judith Millers and the Robert Novaks are just propaganda mouthpieces.

People are tired of listening to that crap. They will support us very strongly if we put together a unified message and take it to the real world.

= = =

(*Not a bad way of doing things - see for example Christopher Alexander's "Pattern Language" books on architecture, where he puts up a whole house in Mexico for $5,000 per family using no blueprints - just rough designs, stakes on the ground, and gradual build-up.)

[RememberWellstone]

90. ENRON is a start.

We need someone to find the Ken Lay/Bush connection...someone has swept the truth under the rug. Find out how much money the corporate execs have funded the RNC. This is where the dead bodies are.Find them.

[Zan_of_Texas]

92. oops

Hey, RememberWellstone.

What? Finding the Ken Lay/Bush connection? That's like finding the connection between peanut butter and jelly. It's been done!

PS Guess how Bush the elder got to the inauguration of Bush the W.? An Enron plane flew him to D.C.


Okay, as to faxes -- you know, of course, that the right-wing sends out blast faxes every morning to their adherents? I have no idea how many thousands. But, it's their marching orders for the day -- harp on this, harp on that. The whole country full of right-wing talkies, columnists, etc. know what the party line is for the day.

Some people might want to be on a list for a fax from our side.

There's nothing wrong with conceiving communication as multi-option -- some people might get paper, some a fax, some an email.

I think distribution is less of a bottleneck than the editing function, and perhaps the layout (above, you say that's easy). Editing involves prioritizing, and a set of assumptions. And.....perhaps.......disagreements.

So, anyway, the thread has a lot of energy. But, it seems a step away from the original premise of investigative journalism.

[scottxyz]

98. Faxing is good. And yes, this thread seems to have 2 themes

Faxing is a tool used by the right-wing to give the "marching orders for the day" - as Zan_of_Texas points out.

And this thread is sort of covering two themes now:

(1) hiring journalists to do original investigating and reporting - so the web won't just be bloggers commenting on what WaPo and NYT found fit to print

(2) moving some web content off-line into a real paper newspaper (plus TV and radio) so more people can have access to it.

These are both great ideas. There's a lot of refining and enhancing we can do with these big ideas.

[scottxyz]

94. Let's remember our Dean - and our Ogilvy and Shirky and Scaife

Let's remember our Dean - and our Ogilvy and Shirky and Scaife

When we talk about creating a national newspaper edited and produced on the web - we're talking about a very new phenomenon - transferring stuff from cyberspace to the real world.

The virtual world is very fluid and frictionless - while the real world is full of obstacles. We need to be aware of the lessons already learned in trying to transfer ideas and momentum from cyberspace to realtime.

A lot of stuff can be learned from some of the more cogent post-mortems of the Dean cyber-campaign. The main essay is by Clay Shirky, and it has trackback links to a couple of dozen other articles responding to it. Shirky's article was something of a milestone in the analsysis of "what went wrong" in the Dean campaign - and anybody attempting to go from virtual to real should look at his article and the links below it.

http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/01/26/is_social_software_bad_for_the_dean_campaign.php

It is also instructive to study what went right - how the right wing has managed to set up and feed the Mighty Wurlitzer to make the country drift rightward. They are number two, so they do have to try harder - since they are essentially trying to convince the vast masses of average people to vote against their own best interests - so Lying is one their techniques which we won't have to use. Howevever, their organizational strategy is clean and simple, and resoundingly successful, so we would do well to study and learn from it. Links analyzing how they do what they do can be found below, at:

http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/archives/000242.html#more
http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/2002_09_15_seetheforest_archive.html#85461401



A great idea from Dean - that needed to be tweaked by Ogilvy
A few weeks ago, when Dean's campaign was starting to tank, I finally opened one of the emails from them, because it was from the new campaign manager, the corporate inside-the-Beltway guy.

Then I opened one from Zephyr Teachout. This one had a cool idea: on a certain Saturday at 4 PM, everyone was supposed to go to a streetcorner near their house, holding up a sign that says

I AM HOWARD DEAN'S SPECIAL INTEREST.

= = =

This was a step in the right direction. Later I remembered my Ogilvy - too bad Zephyr didn't and they didn't have an advertising guy who did either, like they do over at the right-wing's Heritage Foundation. You don't use the word *I* or *WE* in advertising, because it puts people off. Whenever possible, use the word *YOU* because it makes people feel addressed and involved.

Try it on the sentence above:

YOU ARE HOWARD DEAN'S SPECIAL INTEREST.

Think this might have brought a few more voters into the fold - whereas as to someone who's never heard of Dean (or only heard about the "anger" and the "scream") this can sound "cultish" or at least more remote - less interesting to ME.

= = =

Too bad Dean forgot his Ogilvy. But it was a great idea - something like a first practical application of the "mob logging" and "smart mobbing" ideas social software gurus like Joi Ito are toying with.

= = =

Anyways, the point of this story is - if we're gonna spend some money on paper and toner and wear-and-tear on our cars and bikes and sneakers - fly the content by an advertising guru and by some focus groups - and NOT just a bunch of motivated cyber-posters stuck in their chairs all day.

Yes, the web is amazingly empowering, netroots is a great thing - but the Dean campaign had a hard translating from cyberspace to the real world.

I have read some very good post-mortems on the Dean campaign and how it might have stumbled when it tried to transfer from cyberspace to realtime. Links are below at corante.

Yes the net is great as an organizing tool. But like any tool, it produces some weird side-effects, some ripples and kinks in the work you're trying to do so transparently. C'mon everybody, this is exciting and new, but it's not perfect - there are very real glitches that can happen when translating from cyberspace to realtime - as anyone who has had a chatroom-date go bust can also attest.

And marketing language and focus groups are the fire the right wing has been battling against us with for the past few decades. We would be idiots to ignore the lessons they have learned on how to get a message out from a website and onto the presses and the radio stations.

If the job at hand is translating the web onto paper for the purposes of informing and persuading, classical marketing and psychology results MUST be applied. It is not enough to be RIGHT - one must also be HEARD - and that's a marketing/pyschological issue.

= = =

By the way, since we're talking about how to craft our message, here's an important post about persuading the "uninformed":

http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/archives/000242.html#more

How many of you think you are too smart to fall for ads and blatant sales pitches? You probably are, and that is the problem that I am trying to write about today. The very fact that you are reading this means that you get your information online, and that you seek out alternative sources of deeper information than you get from your newspapers and TV. I am trying to say that you and I are informed and that blinds us to some realities. The very fact of OUR awareness can mislead us about most voters because most voters are NOT particularly informed at all. And they are busy or have other reasons that they are not likely to ever become highly informed about what is going on. Our state of informedness causes us to lose sight of what it is like to only hear what I call the “surface” messages that circulate – messages like “Dean angry” and “Edwards nice.” I think THIS is the reason that 50% of Americas STILL believe that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attack – because what news they DO hear has the President using 9/11 and Iraq in the same sentence repeatedly. Things like that. It isn't going to change. We need to learn to hear what THEY are hearing, and understand how those things are going to affect them.

As I like to say, the people behind the Republicans are the people who sold tobacco – people so skilled they convinced others to kill themselves and to hand over their money in the process. They are people who DO understand regular Americans. We should learn from them. That bulge in Bush's flight suit and the Marlboro man are are both designed to convey simple, basic, short messages on an emotional level to specific target audiences. That's marketing.

(I think the blog it was on won a Koufax Award.)

= = =

How the right wing does it - how the Mighty Wurlitzer is set in motion
Some groundbreaking articles about "How the right wing does it" (how the Mighty Wurlitzer is set in motion - how the SCLM - so-called liberal media - is "seeded" with pernicious neocon ideas) can be found here:

Some more strategy ideas, from the pros:
http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/2002_09_15_seetheforest_archive.html#85461401

How They Do It (Part 1)
Suppose you need to do some work involving an important issue like tax cuts, minimum wage, the environment, globalization, etc. Perhaps you'll be talking to a class or writing an article. Maybe you're in a political campaign or trying to get a law passed or just trying to build up public support for an environmental cause. Where can you get information and materials - perhaps even some coaching with the wording?

If you're coming from a moderate or progressive perspective it can be quite difficult to quickly find resources - information and materials - to help you prepare. But if you are in the "conservative movement" there are very powerful resources available to assist you. I've been looking at the resources offered by the Heritage Foundation, just one of the many "think tanks" that give the conservative movement so much power. These think tanks use a process that takes supposedly "academic" research and plugs it into a marketing machine, "popularizing" the language used so that it will connect with ordinary people, and finally sending this product out through dozens of communications channels. ...

Let's pretend we're right-wingers all worked up by Rush this morning, and looking for information to help us stomp some liberals. Let's take a trip to Heritage Research. ... Notice the list of issues to choose from. As the page says, "All thirty of Heritage's policy issue pages feature archived research, expert contact information, and links to related interactive products."

How does this work? Suppose you need information to help you argue from the right-wing perspective about taxes. Click on their Taxes research page. This page links you to research articles, backgrounders and WebMemos, all offering the "conservative" perspective on the issue, with the implied credibility of being prepared by "experts" and "scholars". ... On the right of the page are links to "Commentary" prepared by experts to feed you ideas, and even "Experts" for you to contact on your issue. There are links to multimedia materials, news about related events, and supporting materials like charts & visuals. ...

You have a one-stop shop for all your far-right propaganda points!

I'm not saying we should publish propaganda - but I'm saying when you spend the money to go to hard copy, you better have already PROVEN (with real marketing whizzes and real focus group type feedback) that your message works.


= = =

Here's a sample list of issues that our Dewey-Decimal Arendt Indexing system NEEDS to address - if only because they have been at the heart and core of the Mighty Wurlitzer for the last 3 decades - funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, worded by marketing geniuses, backed up by experts, and faxed out as needed to loyal media moles across the country. Our index NEEDS include AT LEAST these topics - if only to rebut them and rename them. (Example - the right-wing term "welfare queen" would need to be rebutted with the term "corporate welfare.")

http://www.heritage.org/research/features/issues/

By the way, THIS is the "progressive" answer to the Heritage Foundation's website:

http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/issues.htm

Not to be too critical - but if THIS is all we can muster, then we're doomed. I'm sorry, but I've seen more issue-rich websites from a lone blogger. This is pathetic and they should be ashamed of it, especially if they blew a lot of money on this fancy-schmancy minimal crap - given that a college kid could set up this and more for free in a couple of weeks by starting up a free blog at moveabletype of blogspot.

In our Dewey-Arendt system, EVERY right-wing issue needs to be included for addressing, monitoring and rebutting, not three or four out of a set of 20. EVERY topic needs to have a list of talking points, an abstract (as Arendt proposed), a variety of handy-dandy PDF formats which can be printed out. Remember our overall goal here is to take existing web content and MOVE IT TO PAPER: "crossover". So anyone who stumbles onto the website should be able to join the fun - if they feel like volunteering their laser printer, their xerox, or their sneakers.

= = =

No biggies here - just stuff we need to be aware of. Yes we can impart a slightly "academic" flavor to this new newspaper by indexing its stories like the Dewey Decimal System or like alphanumerical web-page names with dots and slashes as separators - but that academic touch does NOT mean our language has to be stilted or out-of-touch or our rhetoric has to be off-putting.

Our reporters will hopefully handle much of this - but remember that there were even some interesting critiques of off-putting MoveOn.org anti-Bush ads. Preaching to the choir is what we do all day on our meetups and blogs and bulletin boards - this is radically different from preaching to the "unconverted".

We're not preaching to the choir - we need to reach out to people who have been taking in by years of carefully vetted verbiage and imagery. (I get training in this when I write to my father, reared on network and loving Fox.)

We need to carefully develop and test OUR verbiage and imagery. I'm not saying we have lie (although I think the right wing has on many occasions, when they make up pernicious phrases like "special rights" for example) - we don't have to lie because the facts are on our sides, our goals are transparent and worthy and open for all to see, and we're not trying to get people to vote against their best self-interests. But still we should make sure that our "editors" and perhaps even our carefully composed, demographically targeted "focus groups" are able to work with our reporters to critique stories in a constructive way before we commit to print. This isn't advertisers dictating content - this is reporters having an interaction with editors seasoned in the arts of communication and persuasion and average readers who know what their real-life concerns are. We need to make sure our writing is not only true but effective before we spend lots of effort and resources on going to hard-copy.

Check out this interesting "contrarian" take on the MoveOn.org anti-Bush ads:

http://www.liberaloasis.com/bushin41point2.htm
http://www.blackstarsblog.com/bushin41point2.htm
(short video download)

We need to make sure that we never say "Don't be an asshole" to our readers. Yes, it follows Ogilvy's rule about referring to *YOU* - but in the worst possible way!

We should of course have a voting process whereby stories are vetted and voted on. MoveOn.org did this - and the vetting process managed to get rid of some ads comparing Bush to Hitler, which might have been to extreme to win people over. Let's make sure that our vetting and voting process is AT LEAST as good as MoveOn.org's - so that our information is as effective as possible.

Some will say - "Hey - this is supposed to be an UNBIASED and IMPARTIAL newspaper." Check your history. That notion of the unbiased press is a pretty recent invention - when the press decided to hide its partisanship to make it all the easier to be partisan. "Who, us? Biased? Nah... We report, you decide." Note that the most-partisan news outlets are the ones that beat their chest most loudly about being "fair and balanced". In the old days, newspapers admitted what side they are on. I propose we resurrect this, in the name of transparancy and honesty and fair play and being taken seriously.

[scottxyz]

95. Similar ideas

Here's some stuff I posted around the same time as Arendt - on a different website - in a similar vein. We are on a very similar track!

This is in the Haloscan Comments section at http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_02_15_atrios_archive.html#107707623004951249

And while we're talking about contributing - let's remember that much of corporate, centralized media is the ENEMY, and not throw too much money their way.

If you have $10,000 to spend, maybe you should stipulate that it NOT go to your local Clear Channel affiliate.

There may be BETTER ways to get a message out - bypassing corporate one-way centralized media:

The main reason the tide is finally turning in favor of the Democrats is because the internet finally allowed messages to get out without being censored by the fatcat corporate media.

One big problem now is that not everyone sits and reads blogs - hence we donate, airtime on TV is purchased, and maybe CBS will even run an ad selected by thousands of people in MoveOn.org. (Well, at least CNN ran it.)

How about some alternative media? If we have hundreds of thousands or millinos to spend, how about setting aside a portion to be spent on getting the blog messages out to the non-internet users out there?

Examples:

(1) Take a bunch of blogs and websites, vote on the best articles, get approval to reprint - AND PRINT THEM ON PAPER AND PUT TOGETHER A WEEKLY (or daily) NATIONAL LIBERAL PAPER. Then we wouldn't have to sit around "waiting" for WaPo or the NYT to run with stories we've been covering for weeks on the web.

(2) Do the same thing with blog/web news and opinion pieces - on go straight to video. Why not just put all the MoveOn.org videos on a tape, make a few million copies, and drop them around the neighborhood?

This battle is so EASY to fight on the web - bacause the web encourages two-way, decentralized, uncensored communication. Our stumbling block has been moving the message OFF the web - because we WAIT for the corporate media to pick the stories up. WE CAN GO AROUND THEM. A "best of the web" weekly/daily newspaper/video would be a BLOCKBUSTER in this country - people would be eating it up!

[scottxyz]

96. Rise up, publishers! You have nothing to lose but your toner cartridges!

Your mailboxes and laundromats are clogged with supermarket flyers and take-out menus and special-interest newsletters produced by motivated local hacks. With a little national coordination to create a standard daily (or intially weekly) content nationwide - and with great ideas like Arendt's here, we can create a new standard for convenience and integrity and discipline in journalism. The field is SOOOO wide open - these guys at WaPo and NYT are sitting ducks.

"Quack quack," indeed.


= = =

You have nothing to lose but your toner!

You have nothing to lose but a few cartridges of toner! Are you gonna let your grandchildren look back on you and whisper "For want of a few cartridges of toner and a few reams of paper and an indexing system, the Revolution was lost?"

[scottxyz]

100. Here's an example from Korea - "OhmyNews"

http://www.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?menu=04219&no=153109&rel_no=1
http://www.ohmynews.com/specialpage/special_view.asp?menu_code=04219

(It may say "downloading Korean characters" but you can just cancel that. Most of this website is in English.)

We have three main tactics.

-Abolish the threshold to being a reporter.
-Break down the set formula for news articles.
-Demolish all walls that separate media.

[methinks2]

101. Buy ME

For the right price we can talk. :smoke: