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USA Edition | Today Is Friday, May 24, 2013 |
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Welcome To Newsroom Magazine
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Thanks To You We're Growing Faster Than Ever Before
Chances are you've noticed that Newsroom Magazine is a very different publication.
We care about journalism -- and we're well aware many other organizations do it far better than we.
Our editorial standards, rules of custody, and skeptical editing for everything we produce, disseminate or expose to public viewing reflects a seriousness of purpose.
Six years after our founding, Newsroom Magazine continues to evolve the online publishing and preservation model we pioneered.
There is good news to share: Newsroom Magazine is is thriving.
And some less good news: Our limited resources, both journalistically and financially, are limiting our expansion of content.
Online News Preservation
In the six years since its founding, Newsroom Magazine has extended the field of news publishing into previously uncharted areas.
We take a long range view of news -- one that considers both timeliness and historical merit.
What we do, and how we do it, was not possible in the print media era -- for our content is both timely and timeless in the sense that we share the power of immediacy with all online media plus the perseverance of an encyclopedia.
Newsroom Magazine's publishing model goes beyond immediacy -- for unlike the newspaper era -- what we publish is permanently preserved. And tagged, indexed, and constantly updated by automated sitemap sharing with Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Sogou, Ewatch, Alexa, Facebook, and others at home and far away.
All of our content, is meant to be preserved. Thanks to the capture and storage of our content at Google, including all updates and changes, and full collection archiving by the U.S. Internet Archives, everything we say, write, opine -- whether wise, foolish, or inconsequential-- is preserved.
Newsroom Magazine content remains forever online, searchable and accessible 24 hours a day worldwide.
What's Hot Is Rarely What Matters
What we publish today is rarely as timely as the more traditional publications and online newspapers. What we choose to publish, sometimes days or months after a story first breaks, or on a subject neglected by most commercial media, is chosen to reflect one aspect of an ongoing reality for long term preservation.
From a handful of English-only readers when we published our first article -- the 1958 Edward R. Murrow speech before the Radio Television Directors Association in Chicago -- we have grown and wizened about our responsibilities to our readers and our own limitations and shortfalls.
Our most read article so far this year, The Adventures Of Bernie In Wonderland, was published November 23rd, 2009. The article consists of the unexpurgated SEC interview of Harry Markopolos in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi swindle case. It is not very interesting reading and it is very long -- but we published it in the belief that what it revealed was important and unlikely to remain online in its original format.
Newsroom Magazine's Storehouse Grows Every Day
The number of publications who devote themselves to publishing credible, responsible and probative content for posterity has dwindled.
Today Newsroom Magazine publishes a storehouse of credible, probative and relevant content -- well over 5000 articles including commentaries, essays, definitions, photographs, stories, reviews, discussions, tutorials, and logical explanations.
Our readership is nearly three times was it was only last year. Few might come to our content for entertainment -- for our purpose is otherwise.
If You Publish, They Will Come
We are read on Capitol Hill, along K Street, and in the halls of government inside the beltway and around the world.
We are read daily on college campuses at home and abroad. We're visited from military ships at sea. We serve law-firms, major corporations, Wall Street the UK Parliament, state governments and cities with credible useful information.
Some of the world's most prestigious news organizations use Newsroom Magazine for fact-checking.
Government Information Unfiltered, Sometimes Imperfect
The amount of official news proffered each day by government, whether at home or abroad, is accelerating. Some of it newsworthy, most of it not.
Our job is to thoughtfully choose what's worthy of the attention of our readers.
About 1% of government issued news we receive each day qualifies as newsworthy. Only the most relevant, or reflective of government at its best, or at its worst, or evidence of overreach, or ineptitude makes it newsworthy.
We leave the issue of deciding which if any of these qualifications applies to what we publish up to the reader.
Formatted For People On The Go, Or On The Hunt
All of our government news content includes above the headline call out meant to convey the principal facts, action or information for those with little time to read a long document.
Our job is to carefully and skeptically choose relevant governmental content for our readers -- and to include the unexpurgated original source material, whose chain of custody we control.
Online Editorial Standards, Ethics And Purpose
Our commitment to time-honored journalistic standards and a clear statement about the ethics to which we agree to be held today and tomorrow, Newsroom Magazine began publication when the Internet was young -- 2006.
Our prime mission then, as now, is to publish non political ideas, definitions, essays and editorials.
To speak to the state of this honorable calling.
And to inform the public about those things, events and ideas that matter most to us all.
Today, tomorrow, forever.
Editorial Standards & Policies
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The other day I read that if you get a service for free you’re not the consumer, you’re the product.
Mark Schreiber
Washington
Who Owns The Internet?
For several weeks the Internet’s most venerable and ubiquitous search service has been promoting public acceptance of a new and more integrated privacy and data sharing policy. The parallel between how Google has approached this change, and to the degree to which the change is beneficial to Google and potentially damaging to users both as individuals and as a group, has the look and feel of credit card lenders filching easy money from their unsuspecting and largely uninformed users.
Newsroom Magazine Privacy Policy
Those who wonder if Newsroom Magazine’s Privacy Policy is any different will find ours at the link above.
Unlike the unilateral contract term changes foisted upon credit card holders, the Google announcement has spawned some grumbling among users and denouncement by Google critics. For some, Google’s new policy has the quality of usury — at least in the sense that banks make money by charging interest renting liquidity while search service operators make money by renting user eye-time to advertisers.
Google has defined a new user privacy policy that substantially changes and standardizes how Google gains information about a user, where that data is stored, how such information is monetized through advertising revenues, and other specifics.
What Google has said about its privacy policy change is as much at issue as the policies themselves, for in what may well have been an honest attempt to make something arcane and complicated seem benign and friendly, Google’s online materials concerning the changeover had the look and feel of misdirection if not outright deceit.
Based upon extensive criticism and vitriol directed at Google’s privacy policy change on the Internet it is clear that what went unsaid by Google was at least as troubling as what was said. As for example, claims about how user privacy and protection were principle goals of the change when there are very obvious and potentially lucrative long term benefits to Google.
The result, from what we have read, is that Google traded some of its benign image and ethical credibility in exchange for enhancing its long-range economic prospects. But Google’s gain came at some cost, due in part, to having decided to make the transition very public while concealing policy consequences for uninformed users by means of what some have described as weasel wording, obfuscatory terminology and even misdirection.
For those who find Google’s new privacy policy either injurious, usurious, or egregious, Google’s claims of benign intent may not pass even the most generous smell test. Accordingly, many who sought to understand Google’s advertising style presentation, the issues remained muddled in what some readers sensed to have the feel of salesman’s misdirection and lawyer-parsed overstatement.
One way of speaking more clearly about the issues is to strip the rhetoric, misdirection and obfuscatory foreplay in favor of enhanced understandability. Here’s what a clearer statement of the issues might look like:
When Google started it understood the Internet was owned by the user community. What Google is telling users through their assertion of providential ownership of users’ private information is that Google now owns the Internet. We’re big. You’re small. You pay.
Nothing says I own you quite as clearly as a unilateral, non-negotiated change in contract terms. Every credit card holder knows what it feels like when terms are changed at the whim of one, and only one party to an agreement absent either arms-length negotiation or any meaningful opportunity to opt-out.
What About The Rhetoric?
Readers are invited to add their voice to this and other commentaries. Submissions that meet our published standards for probity and language will be considered for publication under the writer’s name.
One pays for Google search result services by tolerating advertising, paid placements and possibly undocumented adjustment to placement positions.
In the beginning search engines were optional as were cell phones, credit cards and other new products or services during their infancy.
Mark Schreiber
There appears to be some truth to allegations that Google takes advantage of user ignorance concerning the quality or fairness of their unpublished placement policies. To the degree that such allegations have merit, it might be fair to tag Google for being cunning, or even duplicitous — both of which fall far short of rape and pillage.
Google, for all of its immense power and global reach, has never been benign, nor has it openly behaved in ways damaging to its users.
Even so, the company’s detractors, critics and competitors are not entirely wrong in their concerns and worries when it comes to Google’s strategic move to capitalize upon and monetize information which it garners from its users absent a clear statement of intent, ramifications, risks of disclosure or other unwanted or unstated consequences.
Nor, as Mark Schreiber has so clearly argued, legitimate opportunity to opt out, or so much as negotiate.
Google’s Way Or The Highway
Search services and technologies have become necessities.
As search service companies become bigger and bigger opting out may become similar to someone who decides not to drive, or use electricity.
A kind of postmodern Amish.
Mark Schreiber
In today’s competitive Internet marketplace opting out is an illusion. Every bit as much as it is with your friendly credit card issuer. And for most of the same reasons — an uneven playing field that favors the powerful at the expense of the weak and aggressive asset management strategies behave as if government — i.e. freely wielding the power to tax at will.
The competitive Internet drives today’s 3 year olds toward social media. All the better to condition young and accepting minds to accept whatever they get for free — absent either disclosure or understanding that there is no free lunch. Never, was, never will be.
Whatever Happened To Google?
Google is a maturing company far from its collegiate roots. Its once lofty notion of Do No Evil was never realistic — for had Google’s intrusive search strategy not been successful at exploiting Yahoo’s apply for listing vulnerability the budding company’s thoughts of doing good in preference to bad would not have mattered.
Public corporations are secular institutions whose purpose is to optimize economic rewards at whatever expense is consistent with survival. Absent restraint, or regulation, public corporations become uninhibited, if not predatory.
What happened to Google was what happened to the world’s largest financial institutions and banks when they assumed having the power to do wrong justified doing so.