MoJo Means Mobile Journalist – Part II

Chuck Myron, a Mobile Journalist working for news-press.com, the website of the Gannett-owned Fort Myers, Fla. News-Press, says, “Technology has made people more mobile, and journalism has to react. It’s a necessary step in the evolution of our craft, and it’s not up to us whether we want to go along. The readers have the power, and if they want to drag us from the comforts of the print world into the uncharted expanse of the Internet, they will, and it’s obvious they’re already doing it.”

Myron describes the frustrations of being on the cutting edge of much of this new technology. Chief among these is internet connectivity, which he accesses through his cell-phone’s Sprint wireless card. He says that using the wireless card allows for connectivity in a greater range of areas than a traditional WiFi connection, but that the transfer rate is still maddeningly slow.

“The connection is somewhere between dial-up and high speed, which means photos take about two or three minutes to upload.”

Obviously, this connection is still painfully slow, and the current state of technology would probably make it impractical to upload video using this method.

But technology is changing at an ever-increasing rate, and it is foreseeable that within a few years, this issue of wireless connectivity will have improved to the extent that mobile journalists posting video footage will be a real possibility.

What does this mean when considered in light of Bill Gates’ recent statement that within five years the internet, your computer, and your television will all be one and the same? (See "The Changing Face of Information Architecture in the 21st Century" below.)

In the coming weeks, I will address some of the implications for the current news media of this developing technology. If correct, my predictions are that the results will prove to be nothing short of Revolutionary.

The full text of part I of Myron’s article can be accessed here and part II here.

MoJo Means Mobile Journalist– Part I

In the 1960s when the Doors lead singer Jim Morrison wailed out “Mr Mojo Risin,” people wondered what these mysterious words meant until somebody figured out that he had created an anagram for his own name in one of his songs.

In the decades since, “Mojo” has meant a number of different things, including in some circles Motor Journalism as applied to writing about Ford and Chevy’s new model year offerings. I tend to think of that as Automotive Journalism, though, and as the kind of thing you’d see in Road & Track, for example.

More recently, Mojo as Mobile Journalism has come to apply to a new form of journalism enabled and empowered by new and often more portable technologies. These include everything from laptops with WiFi connections to cell phones to GPS receivers to internet applications such as Google Earth that allow you to bring up satellite photos of practically any square inch of the earth’s entire surface.

Of course, journalists have been using cars for almost as long as there have been cars. But the introduction of these new, portable technologies hold the promise of empowering journalists in ways that were previously so expensive that only those employed by corporate media behemoths could afford to do it.

In the second part of this entry, we’ll take a look at how some people are already beginning to apply some of these technologies, and raise the question of what kind of new possibilities are beginning to appear on Journalism’s near horizons.

a simple table

This is a really simple table

This is a simple table

Column Head 1	Column Head 2	Column Head 3
This should be in A1	This should be in A2	This should be in A3
This should be in B1	This should be in B2	This should be in B3
This should be in C1	This should be in C2	This should be in C3

New Methods in Journalism - Part II

Planespotters are people whose hobby is to stand around outside of airports, sometimes in cold or blustery weather, and write down the tail numbers of planes they see taking off and landing.

Not your idea of a good time? Well, mine either, to tell the truth. But these people with their – ahem – unusual hobby have been at the center of an international controversy they have helped uncover that involves kidnappings and disappearances, secret prisons, and torture.

Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson are two journalists who have followed the planespotting story, which they have related in their book Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights.

Despite the somewhat macabre title, the book provides a down-to-earth perspective on how planespotters helped break the story of the extraordinary rendition program.

While “spotting” planes and writing down their tail numbers is the basic idea behind this unusual hobby, not surprisingly it has in recent years acquired some high-tech twists.

Among these are the use of “virtual radar” systems, such as the Kinetic Avionics SBS-1 system that can be attached to a laptop with a USB cable. It can then “watch” air traffic within about a fifty mile radius by listening to call signs and other basic information about the planes. By scanning for something called ACARS, which stands for Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System, planespotters can download into their laptops the digital identification signal emitted by modern planes as they fly through the air.

But this is just the beginning of the story. From there, the hobbyists post their photos and other information to websites like Airliners.net or Planespotters.net, where the flight histories of specific planes can be pieced together.

The most enterprising of the hobbyists then begin to flesh out their understanding by comparing planespotting records against copies of the CALP, or Civil Air Landing Permits, a document that lists which civilian airline companies have clearances to land at military installations, and the names of the specific installations they’re cleared to land at.

Add to this further database and internet searches, perhaps some calls to journalists and public affairs officers at military bases and airports, and the beginnings of an outline of a secret program of substantial proportions begins to emerge.

One of the most interesting parts of the book relates how Paglen and Thompson follow a planespotter, whom they call “Ray,” as he practices his hobby out in the deserts of California and Nevada. There, Ray surveils a couple of remote desert airstrips called Base Camp and Desert Rock Airstrip that have hosted planes that have subsequently been seen in some of the most unsavory parts of the world, including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan that sits adjacent to one of the most notorious of the CIA’s secret prisons, infamously known as the Salt Pit.

But perhaps the most intriguing part of the book relates a theory that Paglen and Thompson propose that states that in order for the secret overseas network of CIA prisons, aircraft, and airstrips to be able to operate, there needs to be a corresponding support infrastructure here in the United States. While this relationship does not need to be one-to-one, there nonetheless needs to be a supporting bureaucratic infrastructure of front companies as well as physical facilities like the Nevada Base Camp and Desert Rock Airstrip in the US for the whole system to be able to function.

While this is an interesting theory, the authors do not really explain in detail how this infrastructure might work, what it might look like, or most importantly, what advantage might be gained from understanding some of its inner workings.

Nonetheless, this idea of a corresponding domestic infrastructure being necessary to support government facilities overseas is one we will return to in greater detail in this blog within the next several weeks.

Journalism occurs in many different ways. But if the revelation of the extraordinary rendition program by journalists and hobbyists (among others) all using high-tech and often networked means illustrates anything, it is that we are entering a brave, new world where information – and those who purvey it – will have within their grasp unprecedented abilities to influence events and reveal what had previously remained hidden.

Torture Taxi is available at amazon.com.

New Methods in Journalism - Part I

New revelations about the Bush Administration's extrordinary rendition program continue to emerge. In Italy, 26 CIA agents have been named - including Robert Seldon Lady, the reputed CIA station chief - in a case that continues to have wide-ranging implications both in Italy and in the U.S. In Germany, a similar case involving extrordinary renditions by CIA agents is also coming to fruition. And both Poland and Romania continue to deny having hosted secret CIA prisons despite overwhelming evidence that points to their active collusion in these illegal activities.

The extrordinary rendition program was designed to abduct suspected terrorists and then transfer, or render, them to third countries - like Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, and Thailand - whose police often have established reputations for employing torture on interrogation subjects. The problem - aside from moral considerations and questions about the reliability of information obtained under torture - is that transferring people to countries where there's a likelihood that they will be tortured is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. The U.S. Senate long ago ratified these treaties, meaning that those who participated in these renditions would be guilty of breaking international law.

While the outlines of this story are generally well-known, though, the story of how this information originally came to light is just as interesting but is itself far less well-known.

One source of this information came from investigative journalists like London-based Stephen Grey, who has recently written a book, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, that details the means by which this story was slowly uncovered.

In order to transport terrorism suspects, the CIA bought and operated a number of airplanes, including a Gulfstream V and a Boeing 737 Business jet, that could fly into small airports far more inconspicuously than a military plane could. The problem with using civilian-registered airplanes, however, is that each time these jets fly, they have to record their flight plan with the FAA in the U.S., or similar agencies in other countries around the world.

And, interestingly enough, all of these FAA records are publicly available, so that industrious journalists like Grey can follow the path of a particular plane over weeks, months, or even years. And much of this information, in one form or another, then becomes available on the internet to similarly interested individuals.

Grey's book provides a fascinating look at some of the methods he used to uncover the extrordinary rendition story. By checking with the FAA’s website, not only could flight logs be obtained, but information about the plane’s ownership could be found too. This information in turn could be used as another strand for investigating the names of owners, who were then discovered to be fictitious, their names having been brought into existence around the time of the incorporation of the front company.

Furthermore, Grey took the mountain of information he obtained for the most part from on-line sources and used a computer program called Analyst’s Notebook, a tool normally used by the police to solve complex financial crimes, to piece together the story of the extraordinary rendition program.


One of the most interesting aspects of these investigative methods, though, is that many are made possible - or at least significantly easier - as a result of new technologies that weren't available 30 years ago during the era of Air America.

As such, Grey's story of helping uncover the extrordinary rendition program can be seen as a harbinger of the types of journalistic stories that are at least facilitated, if not made possible, by new and emerging technologies. Beyond that, though, Grey's story in Ghost Plane can be seen as a blueprint for other types of stories that are now, or will soon be, available that had in the past remained quietly out of public sight.

In Part II of this entry, we'll take a look at how two other journalists, Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson, used very different but nonetheless similarly high-tech methods to write their own story about the extrordinary rendition program.

Ghost Plane is avaialble at amazon.com.

Creating a Viable Business Model for New Forms of Information and Journalism

One of the most important ways in which the Internet is already changing and will continue to change journalism is through interactivity.

Interactivity has already taken many different forms. All but a few of the most staid newspapers now have options for readers to post comments as well as to rate articles. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The blogosphere has become, at various times, extremely influential through fact-checking, analysis, and spirited debate.

Furthermore, the proliferation of digital cameras, including those on cell phones that can take still photos as well as short videos, have helped change regular citizens into “citizen journalists.” From videos of the London train bombings in July of 2005 to the 2006 incident of a police tasering of a student at the UCLA library, cell phone videos have provided additional context as well as commentary on important events. Some of this commentary, explicit or implicit, has also been directed at mainstream media coverage of those events.

But what motivation is there for regular people who happen to be “in the right place at the right time” to share their videos through the internet with the world? Certainly some people are motivated by notoriety, or having their “15 minutes of fame.” (Considering the speeded up pace of our 21st century world, perhaps Andy Warhol’s famous epithet could now more accurately be stated as “15 seconds of fame.”)

Beyond that, though, what motivation is there for someone to post their video on any particular site, and perhaps as importantly, what kind of business model could be adopted so that the various involved parties can actually make money off of this new form of information distribution?

Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube and already a thirty-something multi-millionaire, thinks he has come up with one solution. Hurley proposes attaching advertising to user-submitted videos and giving their creators a cut of the profits.

The details of exactly how to do this (more revenue based on more hits? paid into a PayPal account?) have yet to be ironed out, but the overall concept itself seems viable.

Will this be yet another nail in the coffin of the Old Media paradigm of you-give-me-money-for-a-news-product-in-which-I-tell-you-what-I-think-is-important-because-I’m-the-gatekeeper-and-you-can-take-it-or-leave-it?

Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all…

Click on the "YouTube to Share Revenue With Users" link on the right to see the full story.

The Changing Face of Information Architecture in the 21st Century

The Information Technology Revolution is upon us. This is hardly an original observation, but the question largely remains, what form is all of this going to take, how is it going to affect me, how is it going to affect my job, the economy, politics, society and the world in general?

While there are no absolute answers to this (we are looking at an unfolding of new technology after all), there are a number of signposts – or writing on the wall – already available.

The next version of the internet(s) is already beginning to arrive. One of the most profound developments in Web 2.0 is going to be how we receive – and interact with - information of all kinds, including news and entertainment. As Bill Gates, the Chairman of Microsoft and Richest Man in the World, said at a meeting of business leaders in Davos Switzerland in January of 2007, within five years your TV, your computer, and the internet are all going to become one and the same. (See the full article at the Reuters link to the right.)

So what does all this mean? This blog will attempt to take a look at a number of different aspects of the Information Superhighway Revolution, including interactivity, business models, the rise and ubiquity of video, portable computing devices, effects on old or traditional forms of (usually) corporate media, as well as economic and political implications.

A lot to bite off, but hopefully some of where all of this is leading us will at least begin to take shape…