The New York Times has a good essay by Richard Posner on the effects of choice on the traditional media and journalism. He looks specifically at blogging and its self-correcting nature.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/books/review/31POSNER.html

He echoes many of my concerns about the echo effect. It is a myth that people read the news to become better informed. The audience dictates the news more than people realize. No audience, no advertisers, no station or newspaper, as Posner documents. (Even a political publication needs financial support from someone.)

Blogs do not face the same need for a larger audience.

Great Washington Post article, which plucks a liberal blogger and a conservative blogger out of the midwest and follows them on a tour of Washington, D.C. Along the way, the author makes some wonderful observations about journalism and the American psyche. The link will expire soon, so I recommend you download a copy to save for later -- this article goes far beyond painting bloggers as pajama-clad slackers. (And both the bloggers profiled are women.)

Journalists worry like mad about the fate of our own particular jobs. For more than 20 years, roughly since the dawn of the desktop computer, people have been telling us that micro-chips are going to put us in the soup kitchens. For a while, we could console ourselves with the fact that computers were heavy and had to be plugged into a wall. But now people get video on their portable phones, and . . . well, that's worrisome, if you're in the business of producing neatly folded stacks of dried wood pulp printed with columns of readable ink stains.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a legal guide for bloggers. Of interest to Kairosnews readers might be the FAQ on intellectual property and the FAQ on privacy (that one might be especially helpful for teachers who are using weblogs in their courses).

Via Copyfight.

You've probably already seen this disturbing bit of news at Slashdot, but I posted it nonetheless here for your interest (and perhaps discussion). I'd like to think that any of us could talk to our students all we wanted to about legitimate purposes for P2P without being fired (or whatever you want to call it), but I'm really not sure. On the plus side, this guy has obviously generated enough publicity over this to probably land a great lecturing position at an Ivy League.