1. The Philadelphia Daily News
2. The Minneapolis Star Tribune
3. The Miami Herald
4. The Detroit News
5. The Boston Globe.
6. The San Francisco Chronicle.
7. The Chicago Sun Times
8. NY Daily News
9. The Fort Worth Star Telegram
10. The Cleveland Plain Dealer

They give their reasoning for each one in the linked article above. It could be they’re right, even about all of them.

But here’s something I notice…I read this list because of a link from one of my twitter community–somebody I don’t know in “real life” at all. He linked to this Time Magazine story. On Yahoo News (where that link above is going to). And Time is actually just taking it from 24/7wallst.com.

So if I’m counting right, this story reached me only after being re-purposed 4 times from its original source. And now it’s reaching anyone reading this after a 5th.

Content “producers” become content aggregators–and content “consumers” become content disseminators in the new media economy. And then those disseminators comment on the content, and re-purpose it, and make their own points. Like I’m doing here. So everybody’s role gets reshaped. Who’s the “real” producer?

Interesting times, that’s who.

(And by the way, I can’t think of a time in the past 10 years or more when I’ve actually bought a paper copy of Time Magazine–or even touched one except when stranded in a doctor’s office with nothing else available.)

At a press conference with Chief Bratton about 9 Tuesday night at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Park View, tensions between the informal press and the formal press bubbled over.

As the chief spoke, with Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger at his side, at least 40 people surrounded him, with six or seven squatting on the ground in front to hear better. About half of the group appeared not to be official members of the press corps, but rather, protesters and self-appointed journalists affiliated with the protesters. When it came time to call out questions — often a competitive moment among reporters from competing news agencies — the protesters held their own.

As questioners peppered Bratton with demands for answers, some seemed more intent on expressing their own views than hearing Bratton’s and there was confusion about whether those speaking were paid by an established news organization or were self-appointed.

A large man in front of the chief to his right, who had been heckling with words of skepticism throughout the event, repeatedly asked in a loud voice whether the chief planned to appoint a civilian panel to investigate the incident. He interrupted reporters. Tempers flared. Dave Clark, a well-known broadcast journalist with KCAL 9 and CBS 2, admonished him to be quiet. “We are trying to work here!” Clark said.

At one point, Bratton also asked this man to be quiet. The press conference was being held for the benefit of the official media, he said. The man responded by insisting he was a “citizen journalist,” but then backed down, professing his respect for the chief.

Increasingly, it seems, the “citizen journalists”–bloggers, amateurs, “protesters with cameras,” whatever you want to call them–are not just holding their own, but surpassing the “official journalists.” The coverage they provide is wider, more blatantly subjective, polemical, less professional, untrained…it’s a whole different kind of new medium.

I like this–I find it exciting, and I find the potential for a better-informed, more media-savvy public to be quite promising. But there are also drawbacks, of course. We need to learn a new vocabulary, and new critical standards for evaluating this new medium–it’s unfiltered, and while I would never say that it should be filtered, I definitely think that we need to develop and clarify our own filters.

But that’s something we should have been doing all along–the “official” journalism was really never any more trustworthy or objective (not at any time in history–rosy-colored nostalgia aside), and if the new journalism foregrounds that fact, it’s a very good thing.

Josh Wolf (the videographer/blogger who was jailed for six months for refusing to turn over his video of a demonstration) was asked (while he was in jail) “Are Bloggers Journalists?” His answer (in part):

The question has no simple answer, just as there is no easy way to respond to being asked, “Are Christians good people?” Most would respond that some are and some are not; certain zealots would proclaim that all Christians are good people by definition, and still others would argue that all people are good despite whatever bad things they may have done. A fourth group would claim that the very idea of “good” and “evil” is an entirely artificial construct and a completely irrelevant measure, and all of these arguments are a valid response to the question that is before us tonight.

The simplest answer is that some bloggers are journalists whereas others are not. After all, few would contend that the 16 year-old who writes about her daily exploits on her Myspace page is a journalist. But what happens when this very same girl manages to break a story on her principal’s scheme to embezzle from the school? Does she then become a journalist? When she returns to writing about the guy in chemistry, is this now journalism? In a recent essay, Bill Moyers cites Tom Rosentiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism who points out that “the proper question is not whether you call yourself a journalist but whether your work itself constitutes journalism.” Given the paradoxes inherent in tonight’s question, I’m inclined to think that Moyer and Rosentiel are onto something.

Can bloggers be journalists? Absolutely. A blog is nothing more than a medium. Sure, the cost of entry is cheaper than launching your own daily newspaper and the rules of engagement aren’t nearly as formalized, but when you think about it, how different is this than the development of any new medium? I imagine that when radio was invented there were plenty of newspapermen and a few newspaperwomen who were clamoring that radio-news was not real journalism. This same scenario likely played out again with the advent of television. Today it’s the internet, and like the journalists of yester-year many are quick to discount blogs as a viable medium for transmitting news and some probably feel threatened by the development as well.

Are bloggers journalists? Is it good for us to have “citizen journalists”? That’s probably not an important question. We have them. So the better questions might be how should we regard them? How should we use them?

But on yesterday’s Meet the Press, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas, surprise!) took even my breath away with her blatant, bald-faced, hypocritical lying.

SEN. HUTCHISON: I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. So they go to something that trips someone up because they said something in the first grand jury and then maybe they found new information or they forgot something and they tried to correct that in a second grand jury.

I think we should be very careful here, especially as we are dealing with something very public and people’s lives in the public arena. I do not think we should prejudge. I think it is unfair to drag people through the newspapers week after week after week, and let’s just see what the charges are. Let’s tone down the rhetoric and let’s make sure that if there are indictments that we don’t prejudge.

MR. RUSSERT: But the fact is perjury or obstruction of justice is a very serious crime and Republicans certainly thought so when charges were placed against Bill Clinton before the United States Senate. Senator Hutchison.

SEN. HUTCHISON: Well, there were charges against Bill Clinton besides perjury and obstruction of justice.

I’m not sure how she can look herself in the mirror–Bill Clinton was impeached on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. Only. Nothing else. He was charged with no other crime whatsoever. So when Bill Clinton does it, it’s a serious crime. When a Republican, any Republican, does the same thing, it’s just a technicality–some kind of fake, made-up prosecution. And she’s perfectly willing to make up some imaginary “other charges” to prove that a Democrat’s crime is serious, while a Republican’s is not.

Despicable.

As the father of a fifth grader, I’ve learned that when she goes to sixth grade next year, there is no guaranteed or automatic middle school for her. She has to apply, and be accepted, even at schools in our own neighborhood. And the middle school which is closest to our house, it turns out, is one that usually gets something like 4 or 5 kids applying for every one spot they have available. It’s our neighborhood school, but it’s absolutely not automatic that she’ll get to go there.

There are a few things, too, to add to this equation. Where we live in Brooklyn, the neighborhood is racially very diverse…but the schools are much less so. We saw this in the elementary school arena (where she does go to her automatic neighborhood school–but where most white parents reject that school). There are only a very few schools in the district which white parents see as “acceptable.” The kids from the “best” (whitest) elementary schools (not my daughter’s school) only consider these few schools. That’s why the school nearest to us (which is one of the “acceptable” ones) is so hard to get into.

But we learned something in my daughter’s elementary school experience. Her elementary school (which is completely unacceptable to most white parents, because the kids there are mostly not white), has been very good. Some problems, of course, and there was a change of principal after third grade, and that was not a change for the better, but overall we’re quite pleased.

So in a way the district rules about applying and being accepted have been a good thing. Here’s why. Because my daughter couldn’t be guaranteed that she could go to the school closest to us, we had to look around. And we took a tour yesterday morning of a truly excellent middle school, the Sunset Park Prep Academy, MS 821. Again, it’s a school that the white parents, even white parents who do accept my daughter’s elementary school, have never even heard of, and would never even consider.

But we could tell immediately from the tour that this was a small school with young, energetic teachers, an experienced, caring and dedicated principal, and motivated, involved, active kids. There was in every classroom (and we at least poked our heads into all of them) that happy buzz of attentive learning that all good teachers want, and any experienced teacher can recognize immediately.

We saw group work that was truly collaborative and productive (in a math class, students were measuring each other’s height and “wingspan” to compare and graph and find the correlation), writing assignments that were stimulating and personal (an early-semester personal narrative, and a cluster diagram to identify “our stresses” for an essay on managing them), a focus on integrative learning (in a language arts class, students were evaluating assigned reading from social studies and science classes, to determine subjectivity and authors’ agendas), experiments with new and old technology (both an overhead projector directed high on the wall above the chalkboard, and a brand-new Smart Board which they were still trying to figure out how to use), and multiple methods of engaging students (a debate in a science class, and a Jeopardy-style game in a special ed class).

It’s not clear what school my daughter will finally wind up at…but it’s definitely clear that there are some great choices out there. Automatic acceptance, like automatic rejection, is not a good thing at all, even though they’re both a lot more convenient and simple.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania is blogging the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in Pennsylvania. Some very good coverage, complete with transcripts. More complete (and opinionated) than the unsatisfying summaries we’re seeing in the news.

Of course, there’s nothing really “final” about this trial, as it’s almost certainly going to the Supreme Court, eventually, no matter which side wins. But the Intelligent Design Creationists are getting a very sound trouncing, so far, and every time that happens it’s a victory for everyone who cares about education, science, reason, and religion. Which of course includes me!