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Pay to Play in the Sports Section

by James Vasile

It’s sad, but when it comes to newspapers, all the heavy thinking on how to keep the presses running comes from outside the industry. In this case, it’s just the sports pages, but one section at a time is better than nothing.

The iconoclastic owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, has some interesting ideas. He argues that in the next five to seven years, sports teams need newspapers because they have no other effective way to reach their fans. Blogs just aren’t doing the trick (yet).

[I]f you count the entire universe of LOCAL Mavs fans that go to [Mavericks blogs], they are a fraction of people who read about the Mavs in the Dallas Morning News and the Ft Worth Star Telegram print editions.

Unfortunately, he says, newspapers are not financially healthy enough to cover sports for much longer. He proposes that teams form cooperatives to pay beat writers. He doesn’t want editorial control. The writers would report to the newspapers, not the cooperative. All he wants is the coverage.

My suggestion to the powers that be in the leagues I have spoken to is to have the leagues work together and create a “beatwriter co-operative” . We need to create a company that funds, depending on the size of the market and number of teams, 2 or more writers per market, to cover our teams in depth. The writers would cover multiple teams and multiple sports. They will report to the newspapers where the articles will be placed, who will have complete editorial control. In exchange, the newspapers will provide a minimum of a full page on a daily basis in season, and some lesser amount out of season. That the coverage will include game reporting that is of far more depth than is currently in place, along with a minimum number of feature articles each week in and out of season.

So far, so good. Coverage funded by the covered can be a good idea. Cuban drives it off the rails, though, when he says all these articles should be confined to print editions. He doesn’t realize revenue from the newspapers, so I’m not quite sure why he would create coverage and then hide it from the fans. If he thinks keeping content offline is a way to save newspapers, he should look at the counter example of every single newspaper on the planet.

Cuban knows more than anybody that even the most successful pro sports team is local news. He sees the connection between local teams, local papers and local fans. And it’s great to see somebody taking real steps to salvage some worth from the newspaper industry. But for such a forward-thinking guy, he’s a bit blind to the experiments and failures that have come before him.

28 December 2008 | Comments (0)

Susan Crawford: Computers and Society lecture

by James Vasile

Title: Susan Crawford: Computers and Society lecture
Location: NYU\’s Warren Weaver Hall, 251 Mercer St
Description: Susan Crawford joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School on July 1, 2008. She teaches internet law and communications law. Last year she was a visiting professor at Michigan and at Yale Law School (spring 2008). She is a member of the board of directors of ICANN and is the founder of OneWebDay, a global Earth Day for the internet that takes place each Sept. 22.
Start Time: 15:30
Date: 2008-12-01

For more FOSS and free culture community events, check out the NYC community calendar

23 November 2008 | Comments (1)

Andrew Rasiej: “Democracy, Civic Action, and Politics in a Networked World”

by James Vasile

Title: Andrew Rasiej: “Democracy, Civic Action, and Politics in a Networked World”
Location: NYU’s Warren Weaver Hall, 251 Mercer St.
Description:
Andrew Rasiej is a social entrepreneur and the Founder of Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference and community website about the intersection of politics and technology. He is also the co-founder of techPresident. He has served as an adviser to Senator Barack Obama, Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Tom Daschle, Congressman Dick Gephardt, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on the use of Information Technology for campaign and policy purposes. Mr. Rasiej also maintains the position of senior technology adviser for the Sunlight Foundation.
Start Time: 15:30
Date: 2008-11-19

For more FOSS and free culture community events, check out the NYC community calendar.

12 November 2008 | Comments (0)

Steal This Film

by James Vasile

Free Culture @ NYU is screening the second installment of Steal This Film, a documentary series about the rise of copyfighting as a political and social movement as well as the battle to break the stranglehold of intellectual property law on culture. They’re showing the movie this Sunday at 7pm at NYU’s Warren Weaver Hall, Room 109 (251 Mercer Street).

Just found out: One of the film’s creators, Alan Toner, is going to be at the screening. I assume he’ll be answering questions and whatnot after the movie. Also, free culture NYU has a blog post up.

For more FOSS and free culture community events, check out the NYC community calendar.

12 November 2008 | Comments (0)

Amanda Michel: Technology, Networks, and Journalism

by James Vasile

From MoveOn.Org to Change.Gov, it’s easy to be impressed by the tremendous power of online electioneering and political organization. Maybe too easy. Everybody wants to see these sites as political rather than social phenomena. I just don’t think you can gather that many people in one place without it being a social thing, first and foremost.

It’s too bad nobody is doing much to understand these movements as online communities. To my mind, the forums at FreeRepublic and the diaries at DailyKos are free culture in the sense of people who have gathered to form their own communities. They have their own servers, write their own code, and publish their own words. They’ve gone beyond disintermediation— not only do they speak directly to each other but they also critique the traditional informational filters. I’d like to see people who are smart about such things talk about what rabid politics forum posters and rabid free culture warriors have in common.

Maybe Amanda Michel can help. She’s talking at NYU on Wednesday at 3:30. Room 109 in Warren Weaver Hall (291 Mercer St). Her bio:

Amanda Michel is Director of HuffPost’s OffTheBus. Amanda started in politics during the 2003-2004 campaign cycle, working as the National Director of Generation Dean and then creating and managing the MediaCorps program for the Kerry-Edwards campaign. Along with several other Kerry-Edwards coworkers she helped co-found the New Organizing Institute in the wake of the 2004 election. Since then she’s taken her online organizing skills to media, working at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and on Assignment Zero, a Wired and NewAssignment.net collaboration. She is also a Knight Digital Media Fellow.

For more FOSS and free culture community events, check out the NYC community calendar.

11 November 2008 | Comments (1)

Wikimedia NYC Organizational Meeting

by James Vasile

There’s no such thing as Wikimedia NYC. They don’t exist. But they’d like to. This Sunday, interested parties will gather at Columbia University’s Pupin Hall to extend flaps and pour on the jets.

Take the elevator to the 13th floor and then walk up one flight of stairs. Meeting to be held in the library at the east end of the hall. It runs from 2:30 to 5:00, and the group will be dining in the neighborhood afterwards.

For more FOSS and free culture community events, check out the NYC community calendar.

11 November 2008 | Comments (0)

Biella Brings The Lulz

by James Vasile

This Thursday, Gabriella Coleman (or, as I like to think of her, Professor Chanology) breaks down the epic clash of cultures that is 4Chan vs Xenology. The talk is called “Old and New Net Wars over Free Speech, Freedom and Secrecy or How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz battle against the C0$” I’m not fancy enough to know what that means, so here’s her translation:

In this talk I present a cultural history and political analysis of one of the oldest Internet wars, often referred to as “Internet vs Scientology,” which in recent times has witnessed a different incarnation in the form of “Project Chanology,” which is orchestrated by a group called Anonymous who has led a series of online attacks and real world protests against the Church of Scientology. I argue that to understand the significance of these battles and protests, we must examine the culturally antipodal relationship between Scientology and hacker/geek culture. In so doing I will demonstrate how long-standing liberal ideals take cultural root in unexpected ways in the context of these battles and I will use these two cases to reveal important political transformations in Internet/hacker culture between the mid 1990s and today.

This happens Thursday the 13th from noon to 2 at Columbia University’s International Affairs Building, room 270B. See you there.

For more FOSS and free culture community events, check out the NYC community calendar.

10 November 2008 | Comments (0)

Lessig’s Talk at NYU This Sunday

by James Vasile

I previously mentioned that Larry Lessig is speaking at NYU this Sunday. The time was listed as TBD, but now I see it’s been updated. The talk is scheduled from 6 to 7 pm.

07 November 2008 | Comments (0)

FDL 1.3!

by James Vasile

Finally, tons of wiki content will be available for CC remixing! FSF has published GFDL 1.3. The new license allows Wikipedia content to be published under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. There are a few minor hoops to jump through, though, so please read the license and act fast. If you don’t relicense before next August, you miss your window.

This document represents many, many hours of my life. I am amazed each time I think about how many revisions these few paragraphs took. Thanks to the good people of FSF for keeping this moving forward despite multiple stalls. Now to start thinking about SFDL.

03 November 2008 | Comments (1)

Larry Lessig: “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy”

by James Vasile

Title: Larry Lessig: “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy”
Location: NYU\’s Warren Weaver Hall, 251 Mercer St.
Description: Lessig delivers a lecuter in the Computer and Society series.

Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school\’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

For much of his career, Professor Lessig focused on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. He represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

Professor Lessig is the author of Remix (2008), Code v2 (2007), Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). He serves on the board of many organizations including the Creative Commons project which he founded.
Start Time: TBD
Date: 2008-11-09

For more FOSS and free culture community events, check out the NYC community calendar

02 November 2008 | Comments (4)