Over one hundred years ago armed white men overthrew the LEGALLY elected government of Wilmington, North Carolina killing many people, driving out the local Republican leadership, and terrorizing the Black community. (Lest we forget the Republican party of those days was supportive of equal rights. It was the Dixie Democrats who were the racist segregationist.) You can read more about this untold historic event in the book “Democracy betrayed: the Wilmington race riot of 1898 and its legacy” and the website For The Record.

An interesting part of this story is the suppression of African American free speech. During the attack the Daily Record, reported to be the only black newspaper in the country at the time, was burnt to the ground. Some say this action was the spark that lit the massive violence of November 10. The Commission report writes of the involvement of North Carolina newspaper editors like Josephus Daniels – founder of the Raleigh paper The News and Observer.

Involved in the conspiracy were men prominent in the Democratic Party, former Confederate officers, former officeholders, and newspaper editors locally and statewide rallied by Josephus Daniels of the Raleigh News and Observer.

– Wilmington Race Riot Commission [PDF], Summary, pg. 5

Its important to note that the beginning of many coups and military actions begin with the destruction of communications. First a rally cry to those sympathetic to the cause via racist newspaper articles. Then outright physical destruction of the source of the oppositions communications. In this case it was the destruction of a black owned newspaper.

So when the modern conservatives try and dispel this report saying it doesn’t have anything to do with people in the present, tell them, “This violence was committed in your white name. To preserve white dominance over politics and power. Help restore the damage of the past now!”

I second the recommendation of the Commission that an endowment be created for young black journalists in North Carolina.

Newspapers (News and Observer, Charlotte Observer, Wilmington Star, Washington Post, etc.) should acknowledge the role of media in the events of 1898 and work with the North Carolina black press association to prepare a summary of the Commission report for distribution statewide. The Commission calls upon said papers to study the effects of 1898 and impact of Jim Crow on the state’s black press and to endow scholarships at the state’s public universities.

Hopefully these funds will be available to all types of media makers. Not just for young men and women entering corporate media outlets. Community journalists in small magazines, blogs, podccasts, public access tv, vloggs, etc. should be included too. Fund the salaries of several committed black activists to mentor and encourage young media makers.

Read what other bloggers have to say about the report from Wilmington.
Eric Muller
Sally Green
Y. Carrington

I was once told that the real definition of a professional is someone who gets paid for what they do. We know that there is more to the definition. I bet if you were to compare bloggers with journalists you’d find we’re both professionals.

Real bloggers write and link because they love. We’re news and politics junkies. We like our info fresh and witty. This propels many of use to write like mad. So we write to give other bloggers what we want from them.

Most of us don’t do it for pay. So what happens when corporations like Technorati and AP get together to aggregate bloggers work and put it up on their websites? Pro business people are always saying nothing is free. So how is Technorati and AP paying bloggers for the services we’re providing them?

One form of payment could be the ‘Neato Effect’. This is when you see your name or something you wrote in the paper. The first couple of times its a rush. The realization that hundreds if not tens of thousands of people are reading what you wrote. For most people this rush is payment enough. What happens when you have a blog and millions of people all over the world read your writing every day? What about when a smart weekly newspaper recognizes you as an expert and pays you to write it? You become a professional. Many bloggers have become pros in one way or another. The ‘neato effect’ as a form of payment just ain’t going to do it for me. Or many of other good bloggers out there I suspect.

Another form of payment is in website traffic. If a local or national newspaper site links to your blog post whether purposely or automatically via Technorati you should get a few more hits. What is that worth to most bloggers? In dollars and cents probably not much. You need tens of thousands of unique visitors to make money on advertising. So a few more from a newspaper of two won’t make a real financial contribution. If Digg or Slashdot links to you then your hits might jump for a day or so but it’ll also cripple your site too. Your Google ranking could increase over time. This might help your ad revenue. But in the end isn’t this just gaming the system?

What if you don’t care about making money on your blog? What does Technorati, AP, or newspaper website have to pay you with then? How about respect as an subject matter expert. That’s good for some karma and community value. How about influence? Political power? Publicity for good causes? Social change? There has to be some other kind of fair trade value.

The fact is for profit groups (newspapers) and a not for profit groups (bloggers) exist with different values that aren’t always compatible. Even if you’re a blogger and want to make money doing it do you think newspapers need your blog enough to pay you well? Hell they can’t seem to pay stringers very well.

Bloggers freely available content is being hijacked. Technorati is helping us find each other and in return is cashing in huge. So will their partners. Main stream media needs us. We’re vanguards of the future. We write in the trenches and get dirty doing it. Its true that many pro journalists have seen the light and are innovating too. I respect old school journalists. Really!

Its the masses of people creating on read/write web that will fill the bank accounts of businesses in the future. How will individuals get in on this? The future will be a giant negotiation for digital labor. We have serious leverage. Content creators like bloggers have real value in their ability to be creative.

Until newspapers decided to admit bloggers are another kind of professional and treat us as such these new relationships just won’t be fair at all.

I recently trained the faculty of the journalism school where I teach how to blog, vlog, podcast, wiki, and Digg. Actually, my son demonstrated Digg, and that was the most controversial moment of the day, as the professors fretted about second-rate stories getting on the front page. Jake showed them how the members can label a story “lame” and off it goes. He made it clear that Digg is owned by its public and that’s why it works. Shouldn’t all news organisations wish the public owned the news?

read more | digg story

Sounds like a great tag line.

I’m not turning the original question around to avoid answering it. Nor am I interested in obfuscating the core question. It’s just that when you start discussing such fundamental human issues you MUST take into consideration the complexity of human history and culture. There are a lot of different points of view. We can not just accept one ethical definition. We must analyze many.

Yet we must also consider what context, what frame of reference, we’re discussing these ethics within. The areas I’ve been thinking about recently are blogging, podcasting, citizens and professional journalism. Recently I was asked about my journalistic ethics during a talk about Audio Activism and podcasting. I almost immediately said, “I don’t consider myself a journalist. I consider myself a media activist. I don’t uphold myself to journalistic ethics.”

This was half jokingly answered, “Oh so you don’t have any ethics.” I suppose in the context of this talk among young journalists there is no other set of ethics to consider but journalistic ethics. Thus by disavowing ethics in general did I cast aside the one true ethics for media making? Not really. Just like I’m making my own media I can MAKE MY OWN ETHICS.

Without succumbing to hubris I will say I have strong moral and ethical values. They’re just not the most popular values of our country right now. I refuse to use only one name for my ethics and values. I refuse to adopt only one. I reserve the right to make changes to my ethics when ever I like.

Categories for your personal philosophy or ethics are valuable. It’s hard to deny category. Our brains crave them. We identify culturally and personally with groups that have names. But because of our chaotic world, values with precise names can become corrupted and vague over time. Maybe I am a moral relativist…

So here I would like to recommend that all students and professional journalists question “Journalistic Ethics”. If anything this is precisely what blogs and podcasts are helping us do. Many of the ethics journalist hold dear are valuable and important. Do not throw all of them out. Just revaluate and recreate them. Then vow to be more diligent in upholding until serious events compel you to do otherwise. The power of twenty first century media making is one of those times.

This is stuff I heard and captured my attention enough to write down. Not a complete transcript.

MI = My Impression

Trust is estabilish differently umong blogers than it is umong the Main Stream Media.

You can’t take the “ten commandments” of ethics at the MSM and then try to use it to judge blogs on how they are doing.

Dave Winer says, “You sound so maternalistic like it’s your job to help us. Who are you to tell us how to edit our writting.”

(MI: I can’t get Dave’s exact question. This is a paraphrase…)

It’s a waste of my time to do interviews for 45 minutes where only tweleve words are going to be quoted. I don’t trust their editing. -Jay Rosen

Context: Dave Winer wants to know why we should trust a newspaper to edit our comments on their blog.

My Question:
The entire blogosphere is not journalistic in style or nature.
In the context of journalism, what do you think is the importance of these blogs?

(My question wasn’t formed well. Jay and Lex didn’t really understand it. It seems so by their answers.)

The first person to figure out how to use a blog to write true journalism news will be famous. – Jay Rosen

Where do you see blogs in the next 5-10 years? Will it hit the mainstream? -JOMC student

WKRN – broadcast journalist that get blogging.

Jay Rosen says, journalist exec. response to bloggers: “You don’t mean I have to put my name on what these blogers say!?!?!”

There are twenty five mp3s that are approximately thirty minutes long. Wow! Ed Cone and other Greensboro bloggers have been covering the recent events of this story well. A big thanks to the Greensboro newspaper the News and Record for hosting this audio. I agree with Ed this is good journalism.
Via: Ed Cone

Ed Cone links to a Atrios blog post with similar concerns. It is also the moral responsibility of the main stream media to keep a VERY close eye on this. The real story will be seriously obfuscated behind the bueracracy of planning boards, corrupt politics, and back room meetings. Bloggers, podcasters, and other citizen journalist can really help with this. We have the collective time to record all that goes on. Let’s keep the rebuilding process of New Orleans honest and fair for all!

From Lex Alexander:

Median salaries ranked as follows:
Online publishing: $32,000
Cable TV: $30,000
Consumer magazines: $27,000
Daily newspapers: $26,000
Weekly newspapers: $24,000
TV: $23,492
Radio: $23,000

You combine those print salary figures — “median,” remember, means half of those surveyed make more and half make even less…

Thanks for linking to AudioActivism Dennis! Much respect for all journalists skills, hard work, blood, and sweat.

Your friend in San Francisco is right. Many Americans, myself included, are sick and tired of our media. That’s one reason we are making it ourselves. But many of us don’t call ourselves journalist and never will. Complicated and paradigm changing I know.

On the issue of trust it boils down to knowing someone. No longer do I automatically trust those who make news just because they do it professionally. I trust my neighbors and fellow bloggers whom I have met. (physically and virtually) When they trust someone else they pass along that recommendation. It’s this honnest system of transference that is completely and so terribly broken down in the main stream media.

I dream of a day when my next door neighbor will be better informed about events thousands of miles away than any journalist.

I’ve now gotten three emails saying they recently let a blogger on their op-ed page, but that’s very very different from having a blogger on their op-ed page. Give a blogger a guest slot, great, if you don’t like the piece, you don’t have to run it. But if you have a blogger there regularly, then you have to run what they wrote, and that would change the character of their editorial, it would make their regular writers think twice about taking the inexcusable shortcuts they take.

# Read the rest

And then he wrote this:

And of course let’s not forget the big stuff — they [NY Times] went to war with George Bush without calling him on his bullshit. They need some strong medicine, they’ve acknowledged it, but they refuse to take it. The stupidity of it is that it would sell newspapers, it would make them money, because they’d become much more interesting. They’re just too scared to piss off their world famous reporters, who don’t want to be challenged. They could make their paper interesting, but they don’t want interesting, they want job security. That’s their real problem, that’s where they need to embrace the web, and that’s what they haven’t done.

I freaking LOVE IT! Bloggers and Podcasters are FRESH and make media intersting!

The fact is WUNC reaches a LARGE amount of North Carolinians, from the coast to way west of Chapel Hill. I would suspect if you looked at the demographic data about WUNC listeners the majority is Republican, white, and lives in rural or suburban community. (Is this wrong? Please correct me if so.) So with this information how do you think a station manager, who is concerned with revenue, would think? From one point of view to be more “diverse”, programing on WUNC would require more politically conservative content. The bottom line is people will only listen if you make content they think is true. Pandering to listeners values sells advertisement. But I ask, at what cost to the core base of liberal listeners in and around Chapel Hill? Not leftists mind you but proud Democrats who bristle at hearing ads, ok sponsorships, of WalMart on their local NPR station.

I mention all this to PRAISE WUNC. I increasingly don’t trust them as a station, but I do notice good programing content when I hear it. Today’s State of Things Show, hosted by Frank Stasio, was about NASCAR. I figured this was a tip of the hat to more politically conservative listeners who frequent NASCAR events more than the politically liberal listeners. (Could be somewhat of a generalization.) It seems that the producers of this particular State of Things did a balancing act between two crowds. A conservative topic with a moderate guest. To achieve this they invited the unique author Jeff MacGregor. His book Sunday Money: Speed! Lust! Madness! Death! a Hot Lap Around America with NASCAR topic at first seemed dull to me but I found his comments on the show were very intelligent. Mr. MacGregor was polite, remembered callers names, was extremely observant, and well spoken. Here is the part that struck me.

Mr. MacGregor claims that NASCAR drivers, and their fans, don’t talk about the drivers salaries publicly. Nor does the corporation NASCAR publish them. He also pointed out that the only clue as to how much drivers make was from a law suit with an insurance company over a payment the widow of Dale Earnhardt Sr. didn’t receive. It seems Dale Earnhardt made around seven million dollars a year. (Before endorsements) That may seem like a lot but in relationship to the tens of millions, heck hundreds, that NASCAR and sponsors make it’s paltry.

The polite southern thing to do is NOT to talk about how much money you make. Like money people can get crazy angry about religion, politics, THEIR kids, and race. They just don’t have experience discussing these issues publicly. I know by dad told me long ago not to talk about how much you make. Especially not with your fellow employees or any one else for that matter. It made sense to me at the time. Many an argument and uncomfortable work environment could be hatched if your started talking about money at work.

But isn’t this silence hurting employees and keeping their grossly over compensated bosses in control? What does a business, like NASCAR, have to gain if salary amounts aren’t public? For a clue look at other sports like baseball. (Here is where I became real impressed with the comments of Mr. Macgregor.) Fans talk a lot about how much baseball players make. They make A LOT! Tens of millions. So when they aren’t performing as well, as they have in the past, fans start questioning the athlete’s worth. People seem to become jealous and resentful of all that money “going down the toilet” because so and so athlete can’t steal more bases or hit more runs.

A context for the discussion of salaries in NASCAR was Mr. MacGreagor’s statement that the drivers aren’t unionized. He even thought they would NEVER ever be able to have this option. That NASCAR wouldn’t allow it. What’s a better way to prevent a public discussion by fans (customers with the money) about fair compensation than not to discuss salaries of drivers? This discussion would spur drivers to unionize and that’s precisely what NASCAR doesn’t want.

After hearing this I overlapped these concepts into my own life and the lives of others. Could it be that because workers – most all of us – don’t talk about “what they make” that we have no common ground to work together? Would we all be more proactive and improve our lives if we bargained collectively? I think the answer is yes. But unfortunately many of us live in states that have “Right to Work” laws. A double speak name that says one thing and does another. These laws by the states actively protect corporations from organized labor. It helps to criminalize and block people working together. (yeah, yeah I know about corrupt unions. Not all are.) Maybe as NASCAR tries to get more people of color and women drivers to mainstream their customers and widen their profit we can collectively bargain for more workers rights.

BTW…seven million dollars a year is MUCHO DINERO no matter what you do. Comparisons between NASCAR drivers and everyday workers who make bad hourly rates is completely unfair. In no way do I intend to compare the struggle of hard working people with multi millionaire athletes. There is little comparison between the two groups. I only use the analogies here to mention how corporate control of workers extends from high tax brackets to low tax brackets and to illustrate how people are pitted against each other in order to control them.

So much for more short blog posts.

Today my friend Luke sent the Feindz an article posted by Bob Harris on This Modern World called, The New Deep Throats: Collect ‘Em All!. Gawd! Harris is so freakn’ right! The world isn’t lacking in people, or evidence, to blow the whistle on tha Shrub (aka Bush tha second) and his ‘Sunshine Boys’. IT’S JUST THAT THE MEDIA ISN’T ALLOWED TO ACT ON REAL MUCK! Weither it’s not alowing themselves to be brave and risk their careers or by having no concious. I mean damn all of these high crimes against humanity being committed and the media does nothing. FACE IT spineless media execs… the media is the peoples’ politics. But in all fairness to the wonderful people working in the MSM (Main Stream Media) their asses are owned by big bidness. Isn’t this why all the big time TV news anchors left? Business is getting in the way of real reporting. Oh and that new US SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) chairman is going to give media companies a “Big Wet Kiss” in the dark days ahead.

From The New Deep Throats: Collect ‘Em All!:

But here at least are a few folks whose first-hand knowledge ought to have already led to at least a few resignations, perp walks, and orange jumpsuits, if America wasn’t so goddam broken already:

National Security Advisor Richard Clarke
FBI translator Sibel Edmonds
USAF Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski
Army Spc. Joseph Darby
Mining engineer Jack Spedaro
FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley
Medicare actuary Richard Foster
CIA Bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer
Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill
Ambassador Joe Wilson
U.S. Army General Eric Shinseki
Secretary of the Army Thomas White

“Our party has relied on two barrels, the barrel of the gun and the barrel of the pen. The old revolutionaries came to power with the barrel of the gun. Guns are still in the hands of the party, but public opinion is now much harder to control.”

There are many significant differences between China and the United States, but how is this quote any less relevant to the Bush government’s media hegemony?

THE FUTURE:
o Untethered lives: Mobile users in Japan
o Mobile and radio: How the next generation is evolving
o Mobile media: What’s new and next?
o Convergence of peer-to-peer services and free broadband environments (Skype, free WiFi, etc.)

THE BUSINESS CONCERNS:
o How will content and business models evolve for the mobile market?
o Wireless content: Companies and deals to watch
o Mobile and traditional newspapers
o The future of micro content and mobile devices: Applications and meaning for media
o Beyond carriers: Alternative pathways to Anywhere Media

THE POLICY ISSUES:
o FCC and Free Spectrum
o Community wireless: What it is, why it matters, the story in Boston
o Media, wireless and the greater good: Social capital and media

“Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States! Too long has your attention been waylaid by the bright baubles of extremist thought. Too long have fundamentalist yahoos of all religions (except Buddhism — 14-5 vote, no abstentions, fundamentalism subcommittee) made your head hurt. Too long have you been buffeted by angry people who think that God talks to them. You have a right to your moderation! You have the power to be calm! We will use the IED of truth to explode the SUV of dogmatic expression! ”

Man, if only this wasn’t a creative and well written joke.

I found this quote from the Charles Kuralt book ‘A life on the Road’. I’m reading it now and it’s amazing and quite funny. This bit of advice from Mr. Murrow seems very important for podcasters. (Like myself. I’m taking it to heart.) Kuralt in the same paragraph as he quoted Murrow said, “Overweening pride is a occupational hazzard.”

Podcasters are in the same “occupation” as early TV. Let’s learn from our media forefathers. Not all of them were government propaganda business dupes.

Quotes from ‘A Life on the Road‘, Chapter 14 – Celebrity, p.150, by Charles Kuralt.
The book ‘A life on the Road’ is Copyright © 1990 by Charles Kuralt.