CANWEST WANTS IT ALL

Good grief. Writers' associations across the country are up in arms about a clause that appears in some freelance contracts from Canwest:

CanWest shall have the right to exclusively use and exploit the Content in any manner and in any and all media, whether now known or hereafter devised, throughout the universe, in perpetuity.

Scary stuff. If you sign a contract with such a clause, you give up all rights to your story, including the moral rights that are granted creators under Canadian copyright law. (The perpetuity bit is puzzling: no copyright exists "in perpetuity.")

It appears Canwest is trying to lock up articles for use on a variety of platforms: print, broadcast, web, whatever comes along in the near future. That's all fine and dandy, but the heavy-handed language of the contract is a public relations disaster for a company that's already hardly a "media darling."

(I'm a little cynical, so the fact that these contracts appear mainly to be used for newspaper Driving sections -- those faux editorial sections that cover everything automotive as long as it fosters the sales of advertising -- means one of the potential uses for the "Content" is as advertising fodder.)

SOURCE: I Love Radio.
10:11:40 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

22 MEGAPIXELS

Okay, this'll cause serious equipment envy: Hasselblad has released a new medium format SLR digital that takes 22 megapixel images and writes them to an onboard 40GB hard-drive. Those of you with very deep pockets can get details here.

SOURCE: Neternity.
8:13:32 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

WHERE BLOGGING IS SERIOUS

We lose sight of the fact that the media landscape in North America isn't the media landscape for much of the world. While blogs are seen here are some sort of disputed amateur journalism, in other parts of the world they are much more.

Two stories:

In Nigeria:

Editor-in-chief of Nigerian Web site GleanerNews.com, Tony Iyare ... referred to online journalism as an "open guerilla press."  He also commented, "[Online publications] must have editors and reporters that are committed to giving their time and resources to doing a blow-by-blow account of the goings-on in their social place."

In the face of governments that don't like freedom of thought and expression, blogs have the capacity to work around the official channels and keep information flowing. But there are dangers out there that are hard for us comfortable Canadians to conceive of.

My friend Hossein Derakhshan, the pioneering Iranian blogger, reveals that he is under death threat:

U.S. election aside, hot topic of the last couple of weeks in Persian blogosphere has been a blog called "Islamic Army" in which its anonymous author has threaten a big list of Iranian blogger for their "insults" to Allah, Prophet Mohammad and other Shia Imams....

They now have picked particular posts from my Persian blog, in which they think I've insulted the God, and other sacred concepts of Islam and therefore, quoting from a Quranic verse, I deserve to be killed....

The power to subvert the dictators, the power-hungry and the thugs may be the biggest power of the web. Its ability to continue the drive for freedom may be its greatest contribution.
7:44:26 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

MORE BLOG 'ACCEPTANCE'

Need more evidence that blogs are a real part of the mix now? Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has been fined by the NBA for comments he made in his blog. His sin? Rapping the league for scheduling the 2004-'05 NBA season opening night the same night as the U.S. elections.

SOURCE: Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion.
2:33:32 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

OUCH

The National Post will no longer publish columns by Elizabeth Nickson after it discovered five unattributed sentences in one of her columns from 2002. (For some reason, the detailed explanation is in the Globe & Mail.)

David Akin has a quote from another Nickson piece that blasted those who use the words of others:

Before the controversies erupted, Ms. Nickson took a hard line on plagiarism. In a March 15, 2002, column in the Post headlined " 'Plagiarism' is 'stealing.' End of story," [Nickson] said: "The original voice is irreplaceable, and unmistakable, and should never be overrun in desperation. You deserve to get caught, because what you are selling is that perfect distillation of you up against raw material, and that drags us out of the cave, our narrow little tribes, into the light."

Nothing like having your own words come back to haunt you.
2:22:01 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

BLOG ON

What happens with blogs now that the U.S. election is over? The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy look at their futures, which shows how much a part of the mainstream blogs have become, at least on the U.S. political front.

For those with subscriptions to the WSJ, the article is here. For those without, here are some of the highlights of Carl Bialik's piece:

Now that Election Day has passed, bloggers are wondering if their Web writing will continue to sustain them, or if they'll have to redirect energy to other pursuits.

Mr. Moulitsas [Daily Kos], for one, is diversifying into the oldest of media, working on two books. Wonkette.com may see traffic fall by 50% or more, said owner Nick Denton. "I think pretty much all of them are going to fall off, particularly the partisan election blogs," said Mr. Denton, founder of blog network Gawker Media.

Henry Copeland, whose company Pressflex LLC sells ads for some of the most popular blogs -- on both political and other topics -- said that in recent months about 40% of ads have come from campaigns and other political-advocacy groups. "That 40% is going to disappear, more or less," he said. "The candidates are gone for a good, long while."

Copeland and a couple of others are quoted as saying advertiser demand for blogs, particularly political blogs, is likely to continue although not at the levels seen during the election. (The article reports that Daily Kos was drawing revenues in the tens of thousands a month.)

Mr. [Brian] Clark, who calls his company a "new media buzz consultancy," said readers of all blogs are an attractive audience: "A lot of these people are influencers. They are just as likely to have a blog of their own where they end up writing about something of interest to them."

LOOKING BACK

I was poking through the American's Library of Congress photo collection this morning, sent there by a report that a number of colour images from the FSA and Office of War Information photography projects have been digitized and made available.

The images are historically interesting for what they show of America's past but also for what they show of the history of photography. Photographs such as Marion Post Wolcott's (above) taken at the Bayou Bourbeau Plantation in Natchitoches, Louisiana in August of 1940 are clearly fixed in the documentary photography tradition.

And while I was at the site, I got a bonus: the Alan Lomax photo collection.

Huddie Ledbetter

The snapshots were taken between 1934 and 1950, as Lomax, his father, John, and mother, Ruby, travelled throughout the American south tracking down and recording musicians for what became the Archive of American Folk-song. As well as featuring musicians ranging from the obscure to the famous (Leadbelly, above), the snapshots show aspects of southern life during those years.

Anyone who wants to understand the history of documentary photography could do far worse than to spend some time wandering through these galleries.
10:37:14 AM  LINK TO THIS POST