Caitlin Burke

Darren Barefoot talks a little about the difference between citizen journalists and beat or investigative reporters, and suggests a couple of methods that can be used right now to mitigate the risks of losing those supported roles:

We’re covering stories. But how often are we uncovering them? [...]

• There are examples of an emerging kind of citizen statistician, who uses access to open governmental data to uncover political or corporate malfeasance.
• Another solution is to divide the work of one journalist among 15 citizen journalists, and have each of them attend four town hall meetings a year. Collaborative tools make this approach possible if challenging.

The more I think about it, the investigative citizen journalists of the 21st century are the activists of the 20th. They care enough about a particular topic to dig into it with enough effort and fervor to uncover new truths.

Citizen Journalism: Covering and Uncovering the News

This is a fun reel, showing how heavily chroma keying is used in productions. It also has a very soothing score, a song called “Lionheart,” from Emancipator’s album “Soon it will be cold enough.”

One of the things I like about this video is that the creator, Stargate Studios (who has made effects sequences for dozens of television shows, films, and other commercial video projects), makes it so easy to find the music. Also that Emancipator makes it so easy to buy their albums and individual songs from their own website. You know, and that the effects house is called Stargate.

More about this spot, including a video about making this ad at Ken Tucker’s Entertainment Weekly blog – 20 wonderful minutes about the production.

Can you imagine Kellogg’s running the Special K “Pinch an Inch” campaign today? What kind of response would it get?

Oh, and happy American Stuff-Yourself Holiday!

I really love Scott C, and I would post something of his here pretty much every day if it were not for my vanishingly small sense of self-preservation. It’s been over a year, though, so I think I can get away with another one. This is from a series of illustrations he did for an ad campaign by Portuguese film group Show Off! (Fuel Lisbon), about what happens to great ideas when Marketing gets ahold of them.

Many more at his post about this project.

(Also, Advertolog has a couple more on its Fuel Lisbon page, notably The Toilet One and The Shark One.)

New York Times: No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund

I am thrilled to read this. The American Academy of Pediatrics weighed in on this issue years ago, and mild pressure from a child-advocacy group was sufficient to get the company to drop “educational” from the label. The best news? It was the mere threat of a suit, through efforts begun just a couple of years ago, that succeeded in bringing this refund offer about.

Products are no substitute for parenting. Hopefully that message will get across to well-meaning parents misled by Baby Einstein marketing.

I love these old illustrations showing women using computers/displays in the kitchen. To do kitcheny things. It’s simultaneously prescient and yet a far cry from the mother’s-little-helper that network technology has come to be.

I have no opinion on the head-to-head iPhone/Android comparisons, but does Verizon really want to be the company that’s marketing Sidekick right now?

Journalist and, now, Journalism PhD CW Anderson thinks about how the fair-use test could expand moving from a mostly print environment to an online environment. (See the Wikipedia breakdown of the current fair-use test at in its section on fair use under US law.

The major difference today is that an “appropriating work” can do more than just tell you where it got the information: it can actually link you directly to it, thereby explicitly increasing the audience for the original work. This doesn’t make people feel any better, it turns out. As Ian Shapira notes, in an article discussing a Gawker post that distilled a story of his, “Would the average visitor have clicked on the link to read the whole story? I probably wouldn’t have.” I did, but then I’m older than Shapira.

Anderson is jumping off from the AP’s plan to use beacons to track repurposing of their content, but I encountered it in a Nieman Journalism Lab article analyzing the Shapira story according to the 4 fair-use criteria.

Anderson is trying to spotlight the online ease of funneling traffic to source, but he is sidestepping some of the revenue concerns here. The AP and major metro newspapers aren’t facing the same kind of revenue-source problems, for one thing. The AP sells access to its work to venues that put it in front of the eyes of readers, so it has good reason to treat Google as a newspaper rather than just an indexer, or try to get into the ad-supported news or aggregation business itself. Or any number of things – Google is a direct threat to AP. Newspapers like the Washington Post are already bringing eyes to pages on which they sell advertising, so they can potentially treat sites like Gawker as a promotional venue – as long as they can make their websites sticky and surfable for people who get referred to them, or at least make sure they are extremely visible as the kind of hardworking, careful-reporting sources that Gawker neither could nor wants to be.

The very basis of creativity is the recombination of existing elements into something new. No, it’s deeper than that – it’s the basis of a nuanced communication, the most exceptional and essential distinguishing human trait. Recombination and adaptation trace ideas through time and can offer a cutaway view of the mind. They delight and instruct.

I wouldn’t normally consider any of this controversial or even necessarily interesting to discuss. It seems obvious, especially if you study history or literature. It’s very difficult to comprehend these fields without context, and literature in particular is enriched immeasurably by a web of allusions, references, and borrowings. Even originality is praised for its new perspective, rather than its utterly novel content. And particularly where narrative is concerned, there are no new stories, only new combinations of circumstances and personalities and approaches. Life is remix culture.

Today we’re grappling with a new threat to this essential aspect of human interaction: corporate exploitation of intellectual property. Because consumerist, corporate culture is so interested in generating revenue, and because revenue opportunities are optimized where traffic is controlled, we now live in a matrix of labels of what belongs to whom and how it may be transferred, copied, or licensed. This can work well in a particular environment – as when statutes provided a method for publishers to obtain rights to make copies of written works in at a time when printing was expensive and uncommon, or in the case of the US Patent Office, which grants inventors a term of exclusive commercial opportunity in exchange for prompt publication of their inventions.

Intellectual-property claims can also be used as a cudgel, as when corporations acquire patents for the purpose of bringing legal action against other entities that they claim infringe on those patents. Or when corporations use technological means of control to limit fair use (under cover of protection of property) of copies of content sold into the marketplace. These strategies carry the risk of if not outright limiting creativity, at least skewing it toward the best capitalized entities in the culture, something we might understand here today as Disneyfication.

This issue populates thousands of articles, books, blogs, court cases, legal letters, and conversations around the world. If you don’t know much about it, you might be interested if you like being able to listen to the music you buy on any playing device you own. Or like lively teaching that uses clever and memorable examples from works in the culture to help students more rapidly understand their subjects. Or just enjoy art.