Subterranean Homepage News

Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!

April 23, 2004, 6:40 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

New Diebold memos, e-voting wrapup: Let's back into this one. A new set of memos from Diebold, makers of ATMs and of electronic voting machines used in 34 states, was leaked this week. Here's J.D. Lasica's writing about what happened next.

Here's a story that isn't getting enough attention in the mainstream media:

Damning internal legal memos from Diebold's law firm were leaked to the Oakland Tribune. Now Diebold's lawyers are trying to suppress their publication. The judge has ordered the documents returned, except for those already published on the Internet.

Lesson No. 1, says Ernest Miller at Corante, is this: If a newspaper acquires documents that the public should see, the paper should publish them online in full before they get sued to stop publication.

Among the documents published online:

- ACTION AND BUDGET ESTIMATES: TWO MONTH PLAN [PDF]

- DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEMS Re: Alameda County Agreement [PDF]

- DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEMS, INC. Re: Issues Regarding California Secretary of State Investigation [PDF]

- DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEMS, INC. Re: Supplement to 11/24/2003 Memorandum Analyzing the Alameda County Agreement [PDF]

Ernest has all this and more in his roundup today. He's absolutely right: This should be the first step taken by any news organization -- get the docs live on the Web. Even if a judge orders their removal under censorious trade secret laws or similar laws, the Net's viral nature will ensure that the public retains access to news they clearly have a stake in.

Principle aside, if you want to read the latest leaks, there they are. These links are at Corante.com (once the files were out, they spread quickly); they're linked on the Oakland Tribune site too, at the end of the first story below. Reporter Ian Hoffman wrote the stories linked below.:

4.20: Diebold knew of legal risks - (The Tribune published the memo links with this story)
Attorneys for Diebold Election Systems Inc. warned in late November that its use of uncertified vote-counting software in Alameda County violated California election law and broke its $12.7 million contract with Alameda County.

Memos detail lawyers' strategies
In a series of internal memos, attorneys for Diebold Election Services Inc. depict California as a legal minefield where the electronic-voting giant faces a false-claims lawsuit, potential grand jury investigations, investigations by state and local elections authorities and lawsuits by counties.

E-vote woes a drag on firm's finances
Diebold Election Systems Inc.'s troubles in California and other states are producing a financial drag on its corporate parent, boosting operating expenses and hurting profits despite solid performance in Diebold Inc.'s core ATM and security businesses.

4.22: Diebold apologizes for failure: E-vote firm asks for another chance, critics remain skeptical; decertification recommendation is expected today

It is an uncommon day when the nation's second-largest provider of voting systems concedes that its flagship products in California have significant security flaws and that it supplied hundreds of poorly designed electronic-voting devices that disenfranchised voters in the March presidential primary.

Diebold Election Systems Inc. President Bob Urosevich admitted this and more, and apologized "for any embarrassment."

"We were caught. We apologize for that," Urosevich said of the mass failures of devices needed to call up digital ballots.

Poll workers in Alameda and San Diego counties hadn't been trained on ways around their fail-ure, and San Diego County chose not to supply polls with backup paper ballots, crippling the largest roll-out of e-voting in the nation March 2. Unknown thousands of voters were turned away at the polls.

"We're sorry for the inconvenience of the voters," Urosevich said.

"Weren't they actually disenfranchised?" asked Tony Miller, chief counsel to the state's elections division.

After a moment, Urosevich agreed: "Yes, sir." ...

4.23: Decertification urged for some touchscreens
SACRAMENTO -- Easing the nation's rush toward electronic voting, California elections officials proposed Thursday the decertification of most touchscreen voting machines supplied by Diebold Election Systems Inc.

Slashdot is also all over this, here and here (check the related stories links on the right sides of these pages, and the many comments below them.)
Link to this item | Comment

Wall-to-wall coverage of Washington march:

Women's eNews, a New York-based nonprofit independent news organization, will be dispatching a team of eight journalists to cover every angle of the March for Women's Lives in Washington, D.C., on April 25.

The team will update Women's eNews home page, www.womensenews.org throughout the day of the march.

Link to this item | Comment

Anonymizing Google's Cookie: This ties into GMail, Google's new web mail that will save everything you write and put ads on it based on words you use in your emails.

You use Google a lot, right? If someone was peering over your shoulder, watching every Google search you made; making a note of what you looked for; what you found; and sometimes where you visited from the results; (and maybe every email you sent and received); and did so for years and years: they'd grow to know quite a bit about you, eh? Well, that's what the cookie allows Google to do, forever, if you don't take simple precautions. ...

www.iMilly.com then offers a couple of easy ways to stay out of Google's clutches. I found this at Shell Extension City, a useful repository of free little utilities and system enhancers.
Link to this item | Comment

Google's chastity belt too tight? "Safe search" shuts out PartsExpress, which has the word "sex" hidden in its name. At News.com.
Link to this item | Comment

Weekend fun: Floats is a new Flash game from Ferry Halim. She's a virtuoso at this: check out her work and her other games at Orisinal.
Link to this item | Comment

Romenesko headline roundup on the coffin photos:

News execs didn't know military was taking photos of coffins - New York Times (reg. req.)

Russ Kick of The Memory Hole website received about 350 photos of coffins returning from Iraq after filing a Freedom of Information Act request. "We did not file a F.O.I.A. request ourselves, because this was the first we had known that the military was shooting these pictures," says "World News Tonight" executive producer John Banner. The photos were released one day after Tami Silicio got the boot from Maytag Aircraft for giving a coffins photo to the Seattle Times.

Kick: Trying to hide the photos is dishonoring fallen soldiers (SeaTimes)
Defense Department orders that no more photos be released (WP/r.r.)
LAT editor: "This is about government censorship, not sensitivity" (LAT)
Seattle Times is sorry about firing, but doesn't regret using photo (E&P)
"This was not done as an anti-war thing," says Silicio's mom (SeaTimes)

Link to this item | Comment

April 22, 2004, 7:40 p.m.

The Memory Hole has the photos -- 361 of them (Alternate site ). Here's the note on the site:

Technical notes: The Headquarters Air Mobility Command, Department of the Air Force, sent these photos (on CD-ROM) on 14 April 2004 in response to an unnumbered FOIA request from Russ Kick. The request was originally sent to Dover AFB and was denied in full. Upon appeal, all photos were released. Name tags and other personally-identifying information were removed from the photos by the Air Force.

5:25 p.m.
Woman loses her job over coffins photo: You can see one of the photos at this link. Please take the survey above -- it's also serving as my first experiment in comments on the blog.

A military contractor has fired Tami Silicio, a Kuwait-based cargo worker whose photograph of flag-draped coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers was published in Sunday's edition of The Seattle Times.

Silicio was let go yesterday for violating U.S. government and company regulations, said William Silva, president of Maytag Aircraft, the contractor that employed Silicio at Kuwait International Airport.

"I feel like I was hit in the chest with a steel bar and got my wind knocked out. I have to admit I liked my job, and I liked what I did," Silicio said.

Her photograph, taken earlier this month, shows more than 20 flag-draped coffins in a cargo plane about to depart from Kuwait. Since 1991, the Pentagon has banned the media from taking pictures of caskets being returned to the United States.

...Silicio said she never sought to put herself in the public spotlight. Instead, she said, she hoped the publication of the photo would help families of fallen soldiers understand the care and devotion that civilians and military crews dedicate to the task of returning the soldiers home.

"It wasn't my intent to lose my job or become famous or anything," Silicio said.

The Times received Silicio's photograph from a stateside friend, Amy Katz, who had previously worked with Silicio for a different contractor in Kosovo. Silicio then gave The Times permission to publish it, without compensation. It was paired with an article about her work in Kuwait. ...

Link to this item | Comment

Images of war dead a sensitive subject: The Seattle Times discusses the history of the policy of banning photos of soldiers' coffins, and reactions to it:

The National Military Family Association, one of the largest military-advocacy groups, supports the policy. "The families that we've heard from are more interested in their privacy and would hope that people would be sensitive to them in their time of loss," said Kathy Moakler, deputy director of government relations for the organization.

Moakler, who has two children in the military, said The Times was right to tell Silicio's story and to describe the respectful process by which the dead are transported home.

But the photograph, she said, was an invasion of privacy for families who might be wondering if their dead loved one was in that array of coffins.

But even among military families, such feelings are not universal.

Marianne Brown, the stepmother of an Army reservist serving in Baghdad, said Silicio's photograph was long overdue. The Michigan resident belongs to a group of military families who support the publication of photographs of coffins.

"We have to show that, because that's what we're paying for" in Iraq, said Brown, a 52-year-old artist living in South Haven, Mich. "Let's show the truth — the death of our kids. Otherwise it's just statistics."

The Seattle Times story Sunday about Silicio's work in Kuwait: The somber task of honoring the fallen
The Times editor's explanation of the decision to run the photos: Powerful photograph offered chance to tell an important story
Link to this item | Comment

North Korean railway explosion at Ryongchong: Rebecca McKinnon is blogging it at North Korea Zone.

South Korean media now reports as many as 3000 killed in the North Korean railway explosion at Ryongchong. Full AP report below. Yonhap has an updated report also.

Thanks to Nurri Kim for pointing out that the Korean version of the Yonhap story - and Korean media generally - contains some more detail and a lot more speculation, including:

- The N.Korean government cut national phone service to prevent news of this getting out.
- It's speculated that the trains carrying oil and liquefied petroleum gas may have been gifts from China.
- Even wilder is the speculation that Kim Jong-Il had passed through the area not terribly long before the explosion, and there is a outside chance that this was intended to decapitate the NK leadership.

The above points are being made in the South Korean media. NKzone in no way endorses their accuracy.

Marmot, a translator at the Chosun Ilbo in Seoul, is on top of the story and monitoring the South Korean news reports. He will be posting updates as he gets them.

Now a media fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, McKinnon describes herself as

A former CNN correspondent with 12 years of experience covering the Northeast Asian region. I have served as CNN's Bureau Chief both in Tokyo and Beijing. North Korea and related issues were part of my beat, and I had the rare opportunity to travel to North Korea 5 times (4 times to Pyongyang, once to the Kumho light-water reactor site).

Link to this item | Comment

3:10 p.m.
Awards: EFF, Webby nominees, us. Let's start with...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Awards: The online civil liberties group chose to honor Kim Alexander, David Dill, and Aviel Rubin for spearheading and nurturing the popular movement for integrity and transparency in modern elections.

Since 1991, the EFF Pioneer Awards have recognized individuals who have made significant and influential contributions to the development of computer-mediated communications or to the empowerment of individuals in using computers and the Internet.

These folks, who devote their expertise, passion and integrity to preserving the integrity of voting in America deserve our gratitude -- and all the help they can get.

Webby nominees: This annual trophy honors to the best of the web. Finalists lists are up in many categories; you can vote for your favorites in the parallel People's Voice awards through May 7.

Nominees are all over the lot, some you've heard of, some you probably haven't, making it another good new links list.

My personal strangeness award goes to the artist who will paint a portrait of you with Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac's front woman. There's a lot of competition in the Weird category -- not just among the nominees, of course -- with weirdomusic, Cliff Pickover's Reality Carnival and the venerable Fortean Times in the mix. Given the state of pop culture, the gimmicky blondes at carstuckgirls will probably take it.

NEAPNEA Web award winners: It sounds like a disease, but it's the New England Associated Press News Executives Association. Here's AP's announcement:

Here are the winners of the 2004 newspaper Web site contest sponsored by the New England Associated Press News Executives Association. The winners will be honored at the organization's May 11 conference at The Providence Journal in Providence, R.I. The two competitive classes are for Web sites affiliated with newspapers over and under 40,000 in daily circulation. Only first place was awarded in each of the seven categories.
Best Overall Site:
Class I -- Projo.com, The Providence (R.I.) Journal
Class II -- Nashuatelegraph.com, The Telegraph of Nashua, N.H.
Engagement:
Class I -- Projo.com
Class II -- Nashuatelegraph.com
News Presentation:
Class I -- Boston.com, The Boston Globe
Class II -- Timesrecord.com, The Times Record, Brunswick, Maine
Sports Presentation:
Class I -- MaineToday.com, The Portland (Maine) Press Herald
Class II -- Foster's Online, Foster's Daily Democrat, Dover, N.H.
Public Service:
Class I -- Projo.com
Class II -- Foster's Online
Special Section:
Class I -- Boston.com, The Boston Globe
Class II -- Foster's Online
Entertainment Section:
Class I -- Projo.com
Class II -- Foster's Online

Some of this was not unexpected: Public service, for instance, the category in which our Station nightclub fire coverage was a finalist for a Pulitzer.

But I don't really know what Engagement covers -- but we must be good at it. The big surprise was Entertainment. Hey, that's my features sections! (Well, mine and Frank's and Kathy's and Beth's and Mike's and Donna's and...)

When I took this job almost 5 years ago, I argued that the features section should be called "Your Life" because they were about what you do with your life apart from work; not merely entertainment, but the stuff of daily life after the workday is over, including an mp3 site for local bands. (We link the band's name in the club listings to their pages so readers can hear what they sound like before they pop for the cover at a club. We also invite local artists to upload their work) Readers upload photos of their gardens and big fish they've caught. And I guess my blog is part of these sections, too.

In the past year, I noticed, Boston.com has changed the name of its Entertainment section to "Your Life" as well.
Link to this item | Comment

Related: ASNE -- the American Society of Newspaper Editors -- is meeting in D.C. right now. Here's their ad hoc publication, a story on yesterday's blogging panel, and panelist Jeff Jarvis, blogging it all nonstop.

Political strategists Carville, Luntz dope out the Bush-Kerry battle in Rolling Stone.
Link to this item | Comment

April 21, 2004, 7:55 p.m.

Skeletal blog today, busy doing Earth Day stuff.

Spoils of War from public radio's Marketplace, in cooperation with the Center for Investigative Reporting, with funding from The Economist magazine.

The spoils of war add up to more than capturing expansive palaces and luxury cars. As Marketplace reporters have discovered, not all of the $22 billion being spent to rebuild Iraq is going where it should. Who's watching the money as it streams through Baghdad? Just about no one, and bribes and black marketeering are rampant, witnesses say. A leading anti-corruption group claims that massive amounts of U.S. money spent in Iraq is being lost to corruption. From Halliburton subsidiaries charging double for gas, Iraqi officials and Arabic translators unrestrained from pocketing millions of dollars, or even members of the interim governing Council accusing each other of taking tens of millions in bribes. Trouble is, the root of the problem can't be found anywhere near the Green Zone. Try the White House, and Capitol Hill, where oversight of Iraqi construction crews and U.S. contractors like Halliburton has only just begun to be assigned… more than a year after the war began.

Halliburton responds.
Link to this item | Comment

When pictures become news: Tom Mangan, grizzled desk editor, on the Seattle Times' coffin photo:

So, yeah, it's a storytelling photo. But what's the story? That we're shipping our dead home by airplane? Everybody who cares already knows that. That our soldiers have been dying in a war? Given the hornet's nest they're serving in, it could be argued that the biggest news is not how many are dead, but how many are still alive.

The Times' editors provided all the standard "hey, this is news, it's a compelling image" reasoning, which was true to the extent I've outlined here, but they're telling only the side of the story which reflects most kindly on them.

There's another story here that isn't so high-minded. It's about how we go with a photo like that because we have it and we're reasonably certain nobody else does. And because we know the authorities don't want us to publish it. The Pentagon/White House have forbidden us from taking pictures of coffins arriving home from the war, which instantly puts the thought in my head, "I'm running the first good flag-draped coffin pic I get, just to show those bastards they can't tell me what pictures I put in my paper."

It's true that the picture is a scoop in the sense that (I presume) it's the first planeload-of-coffins pic to land in the Times hands. But it's not really news that this is happening -- it only becomes news when they have a picture of it.

This will always happen, it's the nature of the business. Still, I think people will respect us a lot more if we dump the pieties and just tell 'em: "look, it was a great scoop, and you'd have done the same if you'd been in my shoes." Otherwise we sound like politicians making the usual empty pronouncements.

Link to this item | Comment

The Depressive and the Psychopath: At last we know why the Columbine killers did it. At Slate.
Link to this item | Comment

Butterflies of North America. Here's our subsection: Butterflies of Rhode Island.
Link to this item | Comment

Violets in German: Friday's page included a photo of pansies from a German blog, Metamorphine added to Garden Blogs, but the photo was named the German word for violets. The blogger noticed the visitors from this blog and clicked back to see what I wrote about it.

Then she wrote to clear up the confusion:

Hi Sheila,

you found me! Thank you for linking to my little garden page. :)

To answer to your question about pansies/violets on your garden blogs page: In German we use to call the Pansies Veichchen AND Stiefmütterchen. We don't distinguish strictly - I think because pansies and violets are both Violaceae.

I'm gardening in a mixing climate - Zone 7 - 8 btw - close to The Netherlands.

Happy further blogging and greetings from here. :)
Domenica

Link to this item | Comment

April 20, 2004, 7:02 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

Amid fighting, Iraq gets car showroom: From Al Jazeera,

"We have sold 38 Hyundais already, but no coupes. They are considered too flashy in these circumstances," said Nihad Abd Al-Rahman, assistant general manager of al-Kasid, exclusive agents for selling Hyundai Motor Company cars in Iraq.

"Iraqis are looking for something affordable and reliable, and Hyundai fits the bill," he said after selling a $10,200 Elantra to a retired officer.

The two-storey showroom near the elegant German embassy has models ranging from the $7,200 compact four-door Getz to the $17,500 140-horsepower Coupe.

The timing for opening a new glass-fronted showroom filled with new cars may seem odd. Bombs have destroyed several buildings in the area in the past few months and residents say theft and hijackings have been on the increase.

But Abd Al-Rahman said his trading company could not wait to enter a virgin market and take advantage of an environment car dealers consider heavenly - if it was not for the bombs.

Petrol costs about one cent a litre in Iraq. There is no income tax in force and government attempts to impose a 5% tariff on imports have repeatedly failed.

"We are merchants and part of our profession is taking risks. The country is still in a war mode, but at least Iraqis have choice," Abd Al-Rahman said....

Link to this item | Comment

E-voting: Diebold knew it was violating law, blogs J.D. Lasica:

Important e-voting news from the Oakland Tribune: Diebold knew of legal risks. Attorneys warned firm that use of uncertified vote-counting software violated state law.

He also links to Ernie the Attorney: What's it cost to steal an election with e-voting?

Reknowned security expert Bruce Schneier does the math. His conclusion? "The risks to electronic voting machine software are even greater than first appears."

J.D. also emailed a link from the Indy Star: Questions raised over 2003 election:

Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler announced today that a portion of the voting system used in last November's election was never certified by the state of Indiana -- raising questions about last year's election results two weeks before the May 4 primary.

The uncertified software tallied votes for more than 150,000 voters who turned out Nov. 4 and, Sadler said, has since been replaced by the company that sold the machines, Omaha-based Election Systems & Software.

"With complete disregard for business ethics and with intent to deceive, (the company) worked to keep their actions from the Marion County Election Board and their employees," Sadler said.

The Marion County Election Board has scheduled an emergency meeting for Thursday to discuss what action to take. Election officials may try to get out of their $11.1 million contract with the company or could ask Indiana to ban their voting systems statewide.

Sadler said local officials caught the problem late last month, when an ES&S technician came to perform a routine maintenance update. What he was actually doing, Sadler said, was replacing the bad software with a version that had been certified two years ago.

There's a great quote in that story, from Marion County Democratic party chairman Ed Treacy

"Last year we talked about waking up in Florida, now I think we've woken up in Taiwan," Treacy said...

Link to this item | Comment

Powerful photograph offered chance to tell an important story: Seattle Times editor Mike Fancher explains the paper's decision to publisha photo of the coffins of returning soldiers. ( "...the press has been largely denied access to take photos of coffins returning from war since the 1991 Gulf War.")

The caller said she had a picture a friend had sent to her. "Somebody should see it," she said.

Barry Fitzsimmons, a veteran photojournalist, has handled many of those calls and knows most of the pictures are never published. The Seattle Times photo editor also knows, "one in a thousand is a gem," so he agreed to give this one a look.

When the photo arrived, "I just said wow," Fitzsimmons recalls. "The picture was something we don't have access to as the media," and yet it seemed undeniably newsworthy.

What the caller had was the picture on today's front page. It shows rows of flag-draped military coffins inside an airplane in Kuwait. These were America's war dead on their way home at a moment when U.S. troops are experiencing their deadliest month of the war.

Fitzsimmons felt the picture should be published, but "it's too powerful an image just to drop into the newspaper." The Times would first need to learn the story behind it.

Here's the story that accompanies the photo: The somber task of honoring the fallen.
Link to this item | Comment

AAN Promises Important Iraq Story Tomorrow, read the headline in Editor & Publisher yesterday:

NEW YORK In an unusual move for the organization, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) will release what it promises will be a bombshell article related to the Iraq conflict at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday. It will be made available free of charge for publication on all AAN-member Web sites, as well as for print, and more than 60 members papers have expressed interest in using it, according to Executive Director Richard Karpel.

The 3,000-word story, embargoed until Tuesday but obtained by E&P today, is based on a "closely held" memo purportedly written by a U.S. government official detailed to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). It was provided to writer Jason Vest by "a Western intelligence official." The memo offers a candid assessment of Iraq's bleak future -- as a country trapped in corruption and dysfunction -- and portrays a CPA cut off from the Iraqi people after a "year's worth of serious errors."

The article is titled, "Fables of Reconstruction," with a subhed, "A Coalition memo reveals that even true believers see the seeds of civil war in the occupation of Iraq."

Karpel commented, "We have no question that the memo is authentic."

Vest is an experienced investigative reporter who is currently senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He has worked on staff at U.S. News and & World Report and The Washington Post, written for The Atlantic Monthly, and was named as an "Unsung Hero of Washington Journalism" by American Journalism Review in 2002.

Okay, here's the story, and here's a PRNewswire story at Yahoo summing it up.
Link to this item | Comment

Mice in the Denver Post newsroom.
Link to this item | Comment

3:30 p.m

AOL reviving Netscape browser: IDG News service reports,

The Netscape Web browser may not be dead after all. After being written off by industry observers last year, America Online Inc. (AOL) plans to release an update to the Netscape Internet software package as early as next month.

The update appears part to be a broader effort by AOL to revitalize the Netscape brand it acquired in a US$4.2 billion deal in 1998. AOL is also testing a new Netscape Desktop Navigator product and in January launched the Netscape Internet service, a low-cost Internet service provider.

The Netscape update will replace the aging version 7.1, released in mid-2003. The new release, which could come as early as next month, will likely be called 7.2 and will be based on version 1.7 of Mozilla, an upcoming release of the Mozilla Internet application suite, a source familiar with the product plans said....

...Netscape 7.1 is based on Mozilla 1.4, which was first released in June last year. A first beta of Mozilla 1.7 became available last month, according to the Mozilla Web site. The Mozilla bundle includes a browser, e-mail and newsgroup client as well as a chat client and Web page editor and offers features such as tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking.

In the UK Inquirer, columnist Fernando Cassia exults, and sniffs at those who think Netscape is just Mozilla with bloatware:

For the record: it's got AIM and ICQ integrated in the browser's sidebar, support for "@netscape.net" webmail accounts in the Mail program, includes the free "Netscape Radio" program, and more. In short, the Mozilla aficionados basically told me to "get with the programme" and switch from Netscape 7.1 to "the latest Mozilla".

Related: Nonsubscribers will get AOL content from USA Today:

Since its launch nearly 20 years ago, America Online has remained the No. 1 Internet service provider largely by offering exclusive content to members only.

But in a strategy shift, the struggling Time Warner unit plans to publish a larger portion of its news, sports, music and other content on the open Internet, making it available to any online user, AOL executives said.

The strategy, underway to a limited degree, is a nod to continuing defections of millions of AOL’s dial-up subscribers to high-speed Internet providers and discount dial-up services. Fewer pay an extra $15 for AOL content in addition to a phone or cable broadband subscription.

“We now have the option to grow our audiences beyond (AOL) onto the open Web,” said Jim Bankoff, AOL’s executive vice president for programming. “We’ll have the flexibility to leverage our fixed investment in publishing.”

And, from Leslie Walker at WaPo: AOL's world view slowly getting wider:

America Online is uprooting its walled garden and replanting it on the World Wide Web. The move raises the question of whether AOL may one day wind up with fewer walls and more open turf, like the rest of the Web.

AOL executives insist they have no plan to give away their online content and become mostly ad-supported, like Yahoo! Still, something significant appears to be happening under the hood of AOL's technology.

Over the past year, the Dulles, Va., new-media pioneer built a fancy system to publish its fare not in the company's proprietary programming language called Rainman but in hypertext markup language (HTML), the open standard used to create regular Web sites. AOL fired up the system two weeks ago.

Already it has moved several channels out of Rainman, including sports, news and personal finance. By the end of the year, all of AOL should be ported to the Web-based system, with a subscription screen still preventing nonmembers from viewing most of its content....

... While it's not clear exactly what the new approach will enable, the change does alter part of what made the company unique. AOL, you see, never really was a Web site, even though it had a Web site called AOL.com.

AOL's colorful, graphical service existed in a parallel universe on the Internet, created by special software, some of which had to be installed on each subscriber's computer.

Finally, Netscape is hiring, from news.com:

In an attempt to revitalize its mostly gutted Netscape division, America Online is seeking to hire product management and business development professionals.

On Monday, Jeremy Liew, general manager of Netscape.com, posted a message on a jobs mailing list calling for candidates to apply to work for the organization, which played a key role in the development of the Web but has since faded from glory.

"Netscape is aggressively hiring right now," Jeremy Liew said in the posting. "We are treating Netscape as a 'restart,' with a mandate and a budget to take Netscape in a dramatically different direction, although still focusing on its current businesses as the No. 2 Web browser and No. 3 general audience portal."

Liew said the company had multiple positions in product management, with "experience in search, browsers, consumer-facing Web sites, consumer software, authentication/personalization, or Web publishing all valuable."

The openings are for positions in Columbus, Ohio, Liew said.

Link to this item | Comment

Blogging is a form, journalism is a discipline, Part 2: Following up to last week's post by that name, I posted this in the comments at the BloggerCon site in response to a post by Dave Winer:

"When a journalist writes a story, she calls a bunch of experts, and writes down what they say."

Dave, calling "experts" is "getting some reactions" to news that's already been gathered, fact-checked and explained. (How does this affect the reader?)

Journalism is not focused on experts but on primary sources: witnesses, participants, targets, victims, principals, suspects, those with the power to change something in readers' lives.

The prime directive is accuracy.

But sometimes the reporter is on the wrong side of the building wondering where the other reporters are. (Flop sweats)

Other reporting would help a lot.

Late yesterday I put something on my blog called "Blogging is a form, journalism is a discipline"

But there's more: Web journalism is different from the print route I described. Lots of wild cards are possible, since news web staffs are small and versatile, juggling thousands of details and pages, brainstorming, coding, newsgathering and packaging and headline-writing and photos and links all at once.

And Web news staffs are often separate entities, not subject to newsroom hierarchies.

More enterprise is possible.

At the same time, print is focused on getting the paper out, TV in making the show, and neither inclines to consider how the Web crew might run with their leftover raw newsgathering. Historians may later pore over interviews only excerpted in the time- or space-limited broadcasts and publications.

But bloggers can publish everything they get, adding immeasurably to the whole story and generating stories.

There are a helluva lot of stories that happen with no reporter present. If somebody there makes an effort to gather facts and tell us what happened, or just takes a picture (if you can figure out what happened by seeing it), that's journalism. It should check out.

People tell such stories to their families and friends all the time. Now they can publish them.

Maybe in a blog, but that's just a page on the web, a story typed between tags. It's pretty easy to tell the dancer from the dance here.

And, Jay Rosen writes to suggest my excerpts from Doc's post excerpting Rosen suffered from misattribution -- my apologies if others' comments ended up seeming to be from Jay. I'll delve into this more, just scanned an email from him, and this is a first "Oops!".

Link to this item | Comment

Saved from the ax: overtime pay for middle-class workers: We've been following this for almost a year, but the rules, which originally would have reclassified police, fire, and emergency workers and some journalists as managers, exempt from overtime, have been modified.

Washington Post reports (Plan Expands Eligibility for Overtime Pay):

The Labor Department will allow workers who earn up to $100,000 a year to be eligible for overtime pay, a substantial shift upward from an earlier proposal that Democrats had promised to make an issue in the presidential campaign.

More low-wage workers would become automatically eligible for overtime under the final rules, due to be released today, according to Labor Department documents describing the regulation. Police, firefighters, paramedics, emergency medical technicians and licensed practical nurses will also be assured of eligibility for overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours a week.

The overtime rules, which haven't been revised in 50 years, have become a major subject of political dispute. The changes have been avidly sought by a wide coalition of business groups. But both houses of Congress voted last year to block the Bush administration's attempt to issue the rule because of controversy over the number of workers who might be adversely affected.

Link to this item | Comment

Antiwar teens 'cleanse' flag: A Journal report (reg.req.) on the flag-washing on the State House lawn yesterday. Bob Kerr's Sunday column, Some students who truly care step up (also reg.req.), focused on the event.
Link to this item | Comment