Bangladesh Seeks To Throttle Independent News Sites And Their Awkward Stories

One of the great things about online news sites is that they are so easy to set up: you don't need a printing press or huge numbers of journalists -- you just start posting interesting stories to the Web and you are away. That is, you do unless you happen to live in Bangladesh, where new regulations will make it much harder to set up news sites, as this story from Access Now explains: 

On Techdirt.

Welcome to the New (Networked) News

There's some fine writing coming out of the current newspaper crisis. Here's some more, from one of the my favourite thinkers, Yochai Benkler. He's replying here to an earlier article in The New Republic; two paragraphs in particular caught my attention:

Critics of online media raise concerns about the ease with which gossip and unsubstantiated claims can be propagated on the Net. However, on the Net we have all learned to read with a grain of salt between our teeth, like Russians drinking tea through a sugar cube. The traditional media, to the contrary, commanded respect and imposed authority. It was precisely this respect and authority that made The New York Times' reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so instrumental in legitimating the lies that the Bush administration used to lead this country to war. Two weeks ago and then last Friday, The Washington Post was still allowing George Will to make false claims about the analysis of a scientific study of global sea ice levels without batting an eyelid, reflecting the long-standing obfuscation of the scientific consensus on the causes of climate change by newspapers that, in the name of balanced reporting, reported the controversy rather than the actual scientific consensus. On some of these, the greatest challenges of our time, newspapers have failed us. The question then, on the background of this mixed record is whether the system that will replace the mass mediated public sphere can do at least as well.

Absolutely: newspaper have their virtues, but as Benkler says, they certainly have their vices too. So criticising potential weakness in nascent news forms is perilously close to pots calling the kettle black.

This other point also struck a chord (well, it would do, wouldn't it?):

Like other information goods, the production model of news is shifting from an industrial model--be it the monopoly city paper, IBM in its monopoly heyday, or Microsoft, or Britannica--to a networked model that integrates a wider range of practices into the production system: market and nonmarket, large scale and small, for profit and nonprofit, organized and individual. We already see the early elements of how news reporting and opinion will be provided in the networked public sphere.

In other words, welcome to the new news: it's the future.

And Here Is The (Open) News...

The BBC has unveiled its long-awaited Open News Archive. Actually, it's made some 80 news reports available - not quite an "open news archive". But to be fair, it's a start, and potentially the beginning of something quite bold.

There are plenty of restrictions, including the fact that the content is only available to Internet users within the UK. But as the BBC itself says, this is just a pilot. Moreover, the issues that need resolving - notably those to do with "rights clearance" - are by no means trivial. Kudos to the BBC for at least trying. Like the open access book project reported below, this is yet another indication of which way the (open) wind is blowing....