Scripting News for 2/17/2007

Podcast: What I hope to talk about at the Public Media conference next week in Boston. 

Essential On the Media segment on NY Times coverage on the Iran connection. Pay close attention to the interview with NY Times reporter Michael Gordon, who sounds sincere, but has no sense of how his stories are read. Interviewer Gladstone holds back nothing. This is the kind of courageous challenge that the Times needs, they seem to have learned nothing from the run up to the war in Iraq.  

NY Times: “Seth Godin published a book under a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to republish and sell it. But he was a little surprised when someone actually did.” 

Law.com: The No-Asshole Rule.  

Public Radio Manifesto, part 1 

When Judith Miller went to jail, I was against her getting a special deal because she’s a journalist. I want all of us to have equal protection, everyone is a journalist now, or no one is.

The case of Josh Wolf re-opens these issues. The prosecutor said Wolf is a journalist only in his imagination, and I agree, and that’s the point. What other ratification should it require to be a journalist. In the country as the founding fathers imagined it, we would all be so involved in the governing, and in the evaluation of government, that there would seem nothing unusual in one self-proclaiming as a journalist. It’s a sign of how far we’ve wandered from the ideal that the prosecutor seems to be ridiculing Wolf instead of celebrating his pride of citizenship.

Progress on ‘codecasting’ 

In the wee hours of the morning I got code working that reads the code-feed, importing objects that are new or updated since the last time we looked. It was a very straightforward continuation of the project I discussed yesterday, and will easily fit into the OPML Editor (and Frontier as well if the developers there want to adopt this method).