Valleywag editor Ryan Tate, irked by an iPad ad, drunkmailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs just after 9:30 last night. To Tate’s shock and delight, Jobs argued back and forth with him until 2:20 AM in four rounds of messages, reproduced below.
Hit the link to read the emails. They’re pretty great. Once again, a Gawker employee looks like a total ass.
Bob Sellers for the Huffington Post:
Yes, terrorism is a threat. But nobody died with the bomb that didn’t go off in Times Square. Twenty-three people lost their lives in the flood, and roughly twenty-thousand individuals so far have applied for federal aid to get them back on their feet. And while the oil leak in the gulf allowed cable networks to fill hours of programming by calling upon their usual political guests inside the Beltway to talk about the blessings and curses of drilling offshore, the reality is that the debate over drilling will not end with this spill — or the next.
We know from experience that when it rains in New York, the whole country gets wet. When it snows there, the Ice Age is upon us. But news goes on outside of New York and Washington. There’s a whole country out there. And stories worth telling.
I couldn’t agree more, and not just because I love Tennessee. In a world of 24-hour news, there is more than enough time to cover news from across the country. Especially when that news is about life and death situations.
If we keep monkeying with the way we treat content (blurring lines between advertising and news, cutting newshole way down, burying important yet unsexy stories, etc.) because we think the content is responsible for the lack of money made in our industry, we are dooming ourselves. I am not saying that the way we do content is perfect or doesn’t need work. I am saying that it’s possible — nay, likely — that in a better economy (that didn’t also hit at the same time as a total paradigm shift in information transmission), we would not appear to be in the throes of death. Because people would be advertising as robustly as ever, people would have extra cash to spend on internet experimentation, our space wouldn’t be shrinking and therefore making it look like we don’t have things to put into the paper, etc. etc. etc.
Looking to social media and its cheerleaders to make up for and fix what we have lost AND take us forward to a better place? Absolute madness. And, mind you, this is coming from a person who is all over the social web and has actively campaigned for greater newsroom attention to and interaction with the useful parts of social media. But let’s keep some perspective and not treat social media or its mavens as the publishing panacea, okay?
She’s right. Journalists need to focus on journalism. And that can’t happen in a measly 140 characters. Newspapers need to figure out how to survive in a world with iPads and email news alerts. Whatever they put in place, in-depth content has to be at the heart of it — not a flimsy social media plan.
Content and social media don’t have to mutually exclusive, but sadly they often are at newspapers where budgets — and staff — are shrinking rapidly. And content isn’t winning.
The Tennessean has posted over 100 photos taken around the Nashville area of record-setting floodwater. Memphis really dodged the bullet this weekend.
Brian J. Hogan, a 21-year-old resident of Redwood City, California, says although he was paid by tech site Gizmodo, he believed the payment was for allowing the site exclusive access to review the phone. Gizmodo emphasized to him “that there was nothing wrong in sharing the phone with the tech press,” according to his attorney Jeffrey Bornstein.
He seems to be throwing Gizmodo under the bus, unsurprisingly.
This part is interesting:
According to the statement from his lawyer, Hogan was in the bar with friends when another patron handed him the phone after finding it on a nearby stool. The patron asked Hogan if the phone belonged to him, and then left the bar. Hogan asked others sitting nearby if the phone belonged to them, and when no one claimed it, he and his friends left the bar with the device.
If that’s true, then I would expect whoever that person’s identity to come out at some point as well.
“He regrets his mistake in not doing more to return the phone,” says Bornstein’s statement. “Even though he did obtain some compensation from Gizmodo, Brian thought that it was so that they could review the phone.”
I call bullshit on that last bit.
Apple CEO and Co-founder Steve Jobs will appear at the eighth D: All Things Digital, in an interview on the opening night, kicking off our tech and media conference that will also include famed Hollywood director James Cameron, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, among others.
Too bad I want to stab my computer every time I see Kara Swisher on the screen.
In place since 1972’s Branzburg v. Hayes Supreme Court case, shield laws are in place to keep journalists from being legally obligated to expose their sources in court. This is from the court’s finding in the case:
The First Amendment does not relieve a newspaper reporter of the obligation that all citizens have to respond to a grand jury subpoena and answer questions relevant to a criminal investigation, and therefore the Amendment does not afford him a constitutional testimonial privilege for an agreement he makes to conceal facts relevant to a grand jury’s investigation of a crime or to conceal the criminal conduct of his source or evidence thereof
Note that there is no federal shield law — even though Congress attempted to put one in place as recently as 2008 — because the Supreme Court doesn’t believe the First Amendment guarantee a news reporter’s privilege.
Avram Piltch of Laptop Magazine:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet’s leading digital rights advocacy group, has also taken a public position on the search, telling us that California’s search warrant is illegal and should never have been issued. In a phone interview this afternoon, EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick told us: “There are both federal and state laws here in California that protect reporters and journalists from search and seizure for their news gathering activities. The federal law is the Privacy Protection Act and the state law is a provision of the penal code and evidence code. It appears that both of those laws may be being violated by this search and seizure.”
Granick said that, even if Jason Chen is under investigation for receipt of stolen property, the government has no right to issue a search warrant, because California law includes exceptions for journalists who are in receipt of information from sources.
Section 1070 of the Evidence Code in California states:
A publisher, editor, reporter, or other person connected with or employed upon a newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication, or by a press association or wire service, or any person who has been so connected or employed, cannot be adjudged in contempt by a judicial, legislative, administrative body, or any other body having the power to issue subpoenas, for refusing to disclose, in any proceeding as defined in Section 901, the source of any information procured while so connected or employed for publication in a newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication, or for refusing to disclose any unpublished information obtained or prepared in gathering, receiving or processing of information for communication to the public.
The biggest debate here is if a prototype device that is clearly the property of a corporation is considered information — as Granick says — or property.
The search of Jason Chen’s home may be more about the source of the device, not the device itself — and my bet is that the police will charge that individual with theft and Gizmodo with purchasing stolen property. As such, the information about who the phone was purchased from may not be protected by shield laws.
If Gizmodo had paid $5,000 for photos and documentation of the device, I believe that the shield laws would protect them. But they didn’t buy photos and documentation. They bought a physical device.
This is perhaps the biggest question facing the journalism community today. Ask any group of journalism professors and you will get a wide variety of answers.
While some people are hoping this whole Gizmodo thing answers this question. I’m not sure it will. This is more about what Gizmodo paid for. The only way the blogger/journalist debate will be answered through this is if California decides that what Jason Chen had in his possession was information. I don’t think they will see it that way.
My personal thought is that there is no correct blanket statement that is correct. Some bloggers are journalists. Others are not. From what Gizmodo has done over the last week, I’d put them in the 2nd camp. It will be interesting to see what the courts say when this inevitably ends up there.
Gawker CEO Nick Denton has chimed in on Twitter about the police raid on Jason Chen’s house:
Do bloggers count as journalists? I guess we’ll find out.
The bigger question is “Did Gawker break the law?” If the answer is yes, then it doesn’t matter if bloggers have the same rights as butchers, really. Stolen property is stolen property, no matter whose hands end up on it. Denton’s question is a straw man, nothing more.
The purpose of a chart is to illuminate; if it’s harder to read than a raw-data table or a paragraph of text saying the same, then don’t use a chart. And if your goal is simply to create a pretty graphic, then don’t try beefing up your science cred with this “information” stuff.
Arranging data in an aesthetically pleasing way with no regard for how the arrangement affects the viewer’s understanding is simply dishonest.
Bingo.
Last Friday night, California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team entered editor Jason Chen’s home without him present, seizing four computers and two servers. They did so using a warrant by Judge of Superior Court of San Mateo. According to Gaby Darbyshire, COO of Gawker Media LLC, the search warrant to remove these computers was invalid under section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code.
I would go with the judge’s interpretation of the law over that of the COO of Gawker’s.
Chairmen Gruber weighs in:
So, Gray Powell’s personal details get plastered all over Gizmodo. Jason Chen’s get pixelated.
Technology, of course, can’t save publishing unless publishing gets on board and saves itself. The industry, however, has not been up to the task. Their heads are so far up their old approaches that they can’t (yet) see a way out.
First, I’m fascinated by their apparently cavalier attitude regarding the legal implications of their actions. I’m not offended by their decision to obtain this unit and publish everything they were able to ascertain regarding it. It simply boggles my mind the stakes they have effectively wagered that Apple will not pursue this legally.
Second, publishing the name, photographs, and personal information of the Apple engineer who lost the phone is irrelevant to the story. It was the dick move to end all dick moves. Gizmodo is, ostensibly, a gadget site. The interest of their readers in this saga regards the phone. Publishing his name did not clarify in the least bit how they obtained the phone. The people whose identities I’d like to know are those who obtained and then sold the phone, not the guy from Apple who lost it. There is no interest served by outing him other than taking sociopathic glee in making a public spectacle of someone who made a very serious but honest mistake.
I think he’s exactly right. It’s almost as if Gawker is trying to piss Apple off. I wonder if they were surprised by the backlash from their readers and the wider public. My guess is that they are. Even though they shouldn’t be. But then again, common sense seems to run thin at Gizmodo HQ.