Blogrolling, interrupted

We'll get to our next blogrollee in a moment, but first, I have to stop laughing. The only way that can happen is if I stop looking at this ludicrous, but deadpan-serious, report in The New York Times, a report by the Times' media writer Jacques Steinberg (i.e., an employee of The New York Times) on Wednesday's "town-hall-style" staff meeting at that institution, part of a massive damage control effort in the wake of revelations that ex-reporter Jayson Blair plagiarized and fabricated many of his reports, and several layers of editors failed to either discover his fraud or stop it until another newspaper, one of many Blair plagiarized from, complained.

If you're sitting at your computer with a beverage, and you've just taken a gulp of that beverage, you'd better swallow before you read this "editor's note" that accompanied Steinberg's report, just to make sure you don't spit it out with your first guffaw:

"The Times meeting was closed to news coverage. As a  result, Mr. Steinberg, The Times's media writer, did not attend it."

What on earth was that supposed to accomplish? Apparently somebody at the Times is operating under the delusion that a pretense of fairness and objectivity about itself, by a person who depends on that organization for the money to pay his bills, will help repair rather than exacerbate the damage caused by the Blair scandal. OK, so Steinberg did not attend the meeting. But then he goes on for 21 paragraphs, reporting about it as if he were there, with direct quote after direct quote from the discussion with no explanation of how the absent reporter heard those quotes, and sentence upon sentence of description detailed and vivid enough to rival Blair's own creative writing. Steinberg does throw in the occasional vague attribution here and there: "according to notes taken by an audience member," apparently pretending for a moment that "audience member" in this case does not mean "the reporter's co-worker."

As all regular readers of The Dagley Dagley Daily already know by now, I don't think much of Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, nor do I trust his company's products (Fox News, The New York Post, among others). But I got a bonus giggle out of a Post headline yesterday that referred to the Times as a "scandal broadsheet." The Post, of course, is a tabloid.

Here's an essay question for anyone and everyone at The New York Times: In what ways, if any, would Steinberg's report on the meeting have been better, or worse, if he had covered the event himself rather than relying on other people's notes? 500 words or less, please. If anyone at the Times tried to answer such a question, we couldn't publish the answer here because the Times owns all rights in all media for all time to all work by its employees, and tries to claim those same rights for writers who AREN'T its employees. It also owns the rights to Blair's work, unless the plagiarized news organizations take action to reclaim their property.

Blogrolling, Chapter 4: Lawrence Lessig

We now return you to our regularly scheduled blogrolling. Today's featured blogger can fit his entire resume onto a single page, that is if the page is at least six feet long. He's currently a professor of law at Stanford University, formerly the Berkman professor of law at Harvard University. And he's chairman of the board of Creative Commons, which is working to preserve a public common area in the increasingly privatized, copy-protected world of intellectual property. The Creative Commons license allows creators of intellectual property: writing, music, films, web sites, etc., to make their work freely available or to reserve certain rights in an open-source sort of way. Instead of "all rights reserved," a Creative Commons license is "some rights reserved."

Lawrence Lessig has taken on both Microsoft and Attorney General John Ashcroft and lost both times. He's now taking on an even more formidable opponent: spam. Lessig has proposed a simple, wild-West solution, a law requiring simple labeling of e-mail ads, and a bounty of $10,000 for each cyber-vigilante who tracks down a violator of that law. Lessig believes so strongly in his spam solution that he's betting his job on it: if such a law is passed, and if it does not substantially reduce the amount of spam showing up in our mailboxes, he will resign.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) introduced just such a bill earlier this month. Lessig is hopeful: "The key to this idea is, as Congresswoman Lofgren puts it, that the Act would enlist a bunch of 18 year olds in the battle against non-complying spammers. 'Between the 18 year olds and the spamsters,' as she puts it, 'I’ll bet on the 18 year olds.' Me too."