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Some of the magazine industry’s biggest names are on the verge of forming a new company that would allow them to take the digital future into their own hands. The company would make up one of the biggest alliances among rival publishers ever formed in print media, with Time Inc., Condé Nast and Hearst all expected to join, houses that together publish more than 50 magazines, including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Esquire and O, The Oprah Magazine. The company will prepare magazines that can work across multiple digital platforms, whether the iPhone, the BlackBerry or countless other digital devices. The company will not develop an e-book, but create something that people familiar with the plans compare to iTunes—a store where you can buy new and distinct iterations of The New Yorker or Time. Print magazines will also be for sale. Read more.

On Nov 24, 1999--days before the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization--Matthew Arnison and Mansour Jacobi posted the first message to the brand-new Indymedia.org, launching a creative grassroots media project that would grow into an international movement. Read more.

When President Obama told university students in Shanghai last week that he’s a “big supporter of non-censorship,” it took 27 minutes for one major Chinese portal to delete that part of his speech. After two-and-a-half hours, almost all portals in the nation took out the comments from news coverage. Despite what appeared to be the Chinese government’s clampdown on the controversial issue of online censorship, an explosive exchange about Obama’s support for “open Internet use” surfaced on blogs and on Twitter. “That is the optimistic part of the story,” said Andrew McLaughlin, the nation’s deputy technology officer, recounting the event. In a telecom law conference last Thursday by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln law school, McLaughlin and Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, talked about how an open Internet, or so-called net neutrality, underlies free speech on the Web. Without it, censorship can occur. “If it bothers you that the China government does it, it should bother you when your cable company does it,” McLaughlin said. Read more.

For many of us, the diversity and abundance of information on the Internet has become part of our daily lives. We assume that we will always be able to view the websites of our choosing and even upload our own photos and videos onto the Internet. However, as teachers of radio journalism, we can't take net neutrality – the principle that prohibits discrimination of content and applications on the Internet – for granted. Our organization, People's Production House, includes lessons on net neutrality as part of our year-long courses in public schools because without it, our students could soon be making entertaining and informative radio pieces without the ability to share them online. With last week's introduction of Resolution 712, the New York City Council has taken up this important issue. While we don't hear much about it in the news, the current debate over net neutrality will determine the future of how we communicate. Two companies alone – Verizon and AT&T – have spent over $20 million on federal lobbying this year trying to thwart The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009, a bill in Congress that would enshrine net neutrality in law. Resolution 712, if the Council passes it, would endorse this bill. Read more.

Marnie Webb flew to Washington from San Francisco to spend this past week to try to make connections in the broadband community. As co-CEO of TechSoup, a non-profit that helps other organizations use technology more effectively, she's interested in helping the Commerce Department make broadband stimulus grants go farther. And she is interested in partnering with other groups, like the Sunlight Foundation, in goals of getting underserved populations into the civil discourse happening online. She also wants to share broadband adoption techniques she's learned with the the Federal Communications Commission for its national broadband plan. But Webb admits she is naive to the ways of Washington. As she meets with non-governmental organizations and agency officials, she has to stress that she is not looking for financial help. TechSoup did not apply for any money in the first round of stimulus grants. She's thought of talking to the staff of her district's representative, who happens to be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but she knows she'll have a hard time getting an audience. Read more.

Community activist Mike McGinn rode a wave of grassroots organizing energy to victory in Seattle's Mayoral race this month. The new mayor-elect's vision for affordable city-wide fiber broadband was not only a core concern for his campaign, but one of his clearest disagreements with challenger Joe Mallahan. Now that the campaign is won, what's the road ahead for McGinn's vision? Read more.

Washington Blade, Southern Voice and a handful of other gay publications natiowide have closed their doors after a long-time financial battle to stay afloat. The publishers closed the papers over the weekend, the newspaper's editor, Laura Douglas Brown, confirmed to the AJC on Monday.Employees arrived at the newspaper's offices off of Briarcliff Road early Monday to find a door locked and a sign posted on the front: "It is with great regret that we must inform you that effective immediately, the operations of Window Media LLC and Unite Media LLC have closed down." Br Read more.

The Obama administration has taken a lot of heat recently for declaring war on Fox News, including from Chronicle columnist Debra J. Saunders. And it's true that you can't have presidential staffers ducking press inquiries. But media lies and distortions are another ball game entirely. Let's look at the record: -- In October 2004, Carl Cameron, Fox News' chief political correspondent, posted on the Fox News Web site fabricated quotes from Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.: "Women should like me! I do manicures," and "I'm metrosexual, (Bush) is a cowboy." Kerry never made those statements. When the inaccuracies were exposed, Fox News took down the story. Sound like old news? It is, but it is indicative of a pattern of reporting as facts what is not true or never happened. People can have differing opinions about the meaning of what is said. There's a problem when we're debating what was said. Read more.

At the recent Harvard session on new business models for news, I offered an off-the-beaten-path idea to the question of who will pay for the news. One answer, I said, was non-news organizations: NGOs, trade associations, businesses, governments and labor unions.Yes, labor unions. There are indications of a back-to-the-future trend in labor funding for the news. Just in the last several months, two labor unions in southern California have provided six-figure funding for very different kinds of operations - Voice of Orange County, an independent news site working toward a January launch, and Accountable California, a direct arm of Local 721, Service Employees International Union.The idea that legitimate journalism might flow from "special-interest" labor money would have seemed a non-starter to many of us not long ago. How could journalists provide fair and unfettered accounts when their paychecks were the product of an organization with a clear political agenda? In fact, though, Voice of Orange County and Accountable California are simply a revival of a kind of journalism that permeated American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - labor-backed newspapers. Read more.

CNN commentator Lou Dobbs abruptly announced that he was quitting the news network last night, but not before he included misleading information about the United Church of Christ and its support for the interfaith media justice coalition, So We Might See. In October, through its website, the coalition asked individuals to sign onto a letter to the Federal Communications Commission calling for a public hearing into the effects of anti-immigrant hate speech in the media. On his final show, Dobbs whose anti-immigration diatribes had become commonplace interviewed the American Spectator's Jeffrey Lord, a UCC member, who has written lengthy unsubstantiated opinion pieces over the past five weeks critical of the involvement of the United Church of Christ's Office of Communication, Inc. (OC, Inc.) the church's historic and independently incorporated media justice organization in the So We Might See coalition. Read more.

In an interview with SkyNews last week, Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns Fox News, said Glenn Beck "was right" when he called President Obama "a racist" this summer. Some background: In August, after a white cop mistakenly arrested a black Harvard professor in his own home, touching off a nationwide debate about race, Obama said during a news conference that James Crowley, the police officer, "acted stupidly." Beck jumped on the comment, saying Obama has "a deep-seated hatred for white people." He later said, "I'm not saying he doesn't like white people. ... He has a, this guy is, I believe, a racist." Read more.

Rep. Ed Markey had a conference call with bloggers last Friday to talk about his legislation which would "establish overarching national broadband policy and ensures an open and consumer oriented Internet," or codify net neutrality. In addition: Read more.

If Comcast buys NBC Universal, public interest groups warn that there would be too much media concentration in the hands of the nation's largest cable service operator. The union could also shape the future of online video -- a migration of television and movie to the Web that cable and satellite operators are scrambling to control, they say. "Comcast/NBC will have an incentive to prioritize NBC shows over other local and independent voices and programs, making it even harder to find alternatives on the cable dial," Free Press wrote in a report last Friday. Read more.

Today, Vancouver hosts Media Democracy Day 2009 at the Vancouver Public Library, Saturday, Nov. 7, 11am to 6pm. The event is one of several public forums being held in cities across Canada, marking the tenth consecutive year of Media Democracy Day (MDD). The conversation in MDD's interactive workshops and panels can help provide a path to a reinvigorated independent media sector in Canada. According to SFU professor Robert Hackett, the initial drive of MDD was to "build a greater sense of community for those fighting for media democracy." In the past, these events have led to key collaborations between allied media projects. This year, we hope to see more collaboration and more pragmatic discussions focused on elevating, expanding and multiplying independent media in this country. There is a window of opportunity right now, and that window can and will close if we don't take this challenge seriously. Considering the current crisis in big media, now is the time to take independent media to the next level. Read more.

Thirteen public interest groups today said the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should not respond to the “whims of industry” and grant the motion picture lobby the ability to control how consumers use their television sets and set-top boxes. As many as 20 million TV sets could be affected. Groups signing the letter include Public Knowledge, Reclaim the Media, Media Alliance and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. According to the letter, the Commission’s Media Bureau is poised to grant a waiver requested by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for what is called “selectable output control” that would shut down the types of devices consumers could plug into their TV sets. The MPAA has asked for a special waiver to existing FCC rules so that it can offer movies to consumers, while shutting down the output ports at the back of set-top devices through which equipment like TiVo or Sling Boxes can be connected. Read more.

Back in March, Declan McCullagh reported that the Obama Administration cloaked its draft section of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) under “national security” wrappers — for the general public. At the same time, the document had supposedly already made the rounds of “corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S.” Today, someone has leaked information about the U.S.-authored draft chapter on internet “counterfeiting” — a document scheduled for discussion among participating nations in South Korea on Wednesday. According to PC World, under the treaty Internet Service Providers would become liable for copyright infringement. This is like saying that the telephone company is liable if criminals (or terrorists!) use the company’s assets to plot a crime. How absurd. But don’t be lulled into thinking that absurd means “won’t happen.” Read more.

From remarks of FCC Commissioner Michael Copps as the Commission launched its 4-year review of the media ownership rules: "There are many important issues pending before the FCC. In long-term importance, none exceeds—and I don’t think any matches—-the future of our media environment. If we can’t fix what’s broken, if we can’t rejuvenate broadcast journalism, reopen shuttered newsrooms, put the brakes on mind-numbing monoprogramming, stop the dumbing-down of our civic dialogue and take advantage of the great potential of local broadcasting, then maybe those who want that spectrum back have the better of the argument. Time will tell. Except we don’t have time. These issues have been pending before this Commission since I got here and we have done almost nothing to stem the tide of media consolidation and lax government oversight. The consolidation was momentarily slowed by the current economic downturn—itself largely the result of the kind of policies in finance and other businesses that I’ve been complaining about in media for years. But consolidation is coming back, and once the economic indices start heading north, you’ll see media properties galore—-all pining for those elusive 'economies of scale' whose chase doomed so many companies over the past few years..." Read more.

The World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) announced today on its active participation on the International mission of observation of press freedom in Honduras from 2-7 November 2009. The mission, organized by International Media Support (IMS), Article 19, Reporters without Borders, the International Federation of Journalists, Free-Voice and other international organizations will verify the conditions and difficulties being confronted by press freedom, journalists, the media and community radios, following the coup d’etat of June 28th, 2009. Read more.

The Obama administration and key Democrats have reached a tentative agreement on a proposed law to provide greater protections to reporters against being fined or imprisoned if they refuse to identify confidential sources. Under the proposed agreement, a so-called media shield law would allow federal judges to quash subpoenas against reporters if they determine that the public interest in the news outweighed the government’s need to uncover the leaker – including, in some circumstances, disclosures of classified national security information. The proposal would also extend coverage to unpaid bloggers engaged in gathering and disseminating news information. Read more.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission voted to move forward with regulations to preserve the open architecture of the Internet. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is trying to make our current system’s “net neutrality” official by ensuring that broadband providers “cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications” and are “transparent about their network management practices.” That same day, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) introduced legislation to block the FCC, inexplicably arguing that preserving net neutrality would be a “government takeover of the Internet.” Read more.