Sherry Chandler » Saturday Morning with the NYTimes
Saturday Morning with the NYTimes
Another informative article on Wikipedia at the NYTimes online:
Wikipedia’s come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs.
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The system seems to be working. Wikipedia is now the Web’s third-most-popular news and information source, beating the sites of CNN and Yahoo News, according to Nielsen NetRatings.
If you’re interested at all, this article explains how the Wikipedia folk have compromised to maintain openness while protecting the site from malicious posts.
Projects like Wikipedia are what make me passionate about keeping the internet free and open. True, you get a lot of meanness—some of the porn spam I get, well, I don’t know whether it’s more sickening or just ridiculous. I mean, Harry Potter comics porn? But when all is said and done, this open access, people talking to people, seems to me the best bet we have for democracy and actual free enterprise.
Remember Americorps? Neither does the Bush administration:
Only lately recovered from devastating budget cuts imposed by Congress three years ago, the nation’s flagship program for volunteers, AmeriCorps, is again on the chopping block. Unless the Senate rescues it, or President Bush displays a sudden and unexpected burst of leadership, this proven force for good stands to be seriously harmed.
The current crisis originated with Mr. Bush. He voices strong support for AmeriCorps. Yet, the budget proposal he submitted to Congress in March called for eliminating the National Civilian Community Corps, an elite arm of AmeriCorps that is based on five regional campuses and is positioned to rapidly deploy well-trained teams to help out in national emergencies, like Hurricane Katrina.
Well, goodness knows, we don’t need any help with our emergency response capabilities.
Do you remember Dan Rather? Another Bush administration casualty, he, it seems, would rather not fade into memory:
Mr. Rather said he had been weighing several other offers for work, including two from what he described as major broadcast or cable networks. But as of yesterday, Mr. Rather said, “what I expect to do, what I hope to do, is bring this HDNet thing to fruition.”
Mr. Rather, who was anchor of the “CBS Evening News” for nearly a quarter-century and who, at one point also served as a correspondent on the news magazines “60 Minutes II” and “48 Hours,” acknowledged that it would “take some adjustment” for him to get used to being seen by perhaps tens of thousands of viewers in a week, as opposed to millions.
But he added that “the opportunity to build something from the ground up, I think, will have its own satisfactions.”
Mr. Rather also said that in April, in anticipation of what seemed to be his imminent departure from CBS, he had formed a company — he named it News and Guts, in a nod to what he considers the pillars of his professional life — through which he plans to create several other journalism ventures, including, perhaps, a blog. (Though he has not yet settled on a title, he says he has ruled out one: “I’d Rather Say This.”)
It has been impossible for me to separate out whether the Bush National Guard story that ruined Dan Rather’s network career was ill-conceived or a victim of Karl Rove’s spin machine. Maybe a bit of both. As one who admired the young Dan Rather, I wonder whether the increasingly infotainment environment of network news is the best place for him anyway. 60 Minutes seems to have become a parody of itself, more like The National Enquirer than the New York Times. I hope this forced move will let Rather re-invent himself.
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