Nonprofit News and Comment

MEDIA

“KUSF sale completed, FCC probe ends.” By Vivian Ho. San Francisco Chronicle. June 8, 2012. The multimillion dollar sale of the University of San Francisco-owned classical music radio channel was finalized after more than a year of discussion when all parties in the transaction agreed to pay $50,000 each to end a Federal Communications Commission investigation, officials announced Thursday. KUSF can now transfer its broadcast license to the nonprofit Classical Public Radio Network, a classical music station operated by the University of Southern California. The sale was announced in January 2011, with KDFC, the Bay Area’s only classical music station, moving up the FM dial to 90.3 and booting out KUSF’s student radio programming. The student radio station retained use of the KUSF letters, but is now only accessible online. FCC officials said that the transaction violated the commission’s rules that forbid noncommercial educational radio stations from selling programming time for profit. FCC Media Bureau Chief William Lake said in a statement that this $3.75 million sale would allow Classical Public Radio Network to provide all of KDFC’s programming “in return for a monthly payment that exceeded the station’s expenses.” USF and CPRN’s $50,000 “voluntary contribution” to the U.S. Treasury ends the FCC probe. Though the station will be owned by Classical Public Radio Network, which is owned by the USC, the Bay Area will still have access to its programming at its 90.3 frequency, as well as to its relationship with the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Symphony. KDFC has been running programming at 90.3 since the sale announcement in January 2011. Many listeners were angered by the sale announcement and departure of KUSF from the airwaves, a move that ended 33 years of locally selected music and community programming. Some of those listeners issued a statement Thursday saying they would appeal the FCC’s approval of the sale.

“CNC Suspending Publication.” By James O’Shea. Chicago News Co-op (chicagonewscoop.org). June 10th, 2012 (February 21, 2012). To our readers: As you might have heard or read by now, the Chicago News Cooperative is suspending its contributions to the Midwest pages of the New York Times and its website effective February 26 so we can reassess our operations and determine if there is a more sustainable path to the future. Effective next Sunday, the Times pages produced by the CNC will no longer appear in the Friday and Sunday editions of the newspaper and its website. Obviously I’ve taken this step with much pride and regret – pride in the excellent journalism produced by the CNC staff over the past two and one-half years and regret that I could not raise the resources we needed to continue our current level of operations. As the CNC’s editor and CEO, I take full responsibility for this situation. Unlike similar start-up efforts like the Texas Tribune in Austin, the Bay Citizen inSan Francisco and ProPublica in New York, we never recruited the kind of seven figure donations from people of means concerned about the declining quality of news coverage around the country. As a result, CNC never raised the resources to make investments in the business side of our operation that would have generated the revenue we needed to achieve our original goal – a self-sustaining news operation within 5 years. CNC always has been an experiment in trying to figure out a way to finance accountability journalism, the kind of reporting that many news organizations are abandoning as they struggle with a deteriorating business model and financial problems. This is a very difficult problem especially in major cities and carries ominous implications for a democracy. An organization dedicated to public service journalism is an indispensible civic asset, and we remain committed to finding some possible answers. In the coming days and weeks, we will be examining our potential to see if we can identify an alternative path and preserve some of the journalistic assets we have developed. Continued support is welcome and would help us figure out the best path for CNC.

MEDIA

“Federal Arts Endowment Sharply Cuts PBS Grants.” By Elizabeth Jensen. New York Times. April 25, 2012. The National Endowment for the Arts made sweeping cuts in its support of established PBS shows on Wednesday, and for the first time awarded significant grants to an array of gaming, mobile and Web-based projects. Among the PBS programs receiving significantly less financing under the 2012 Arts in Media grants were “Live From Lincoln Center,” which was awarded $100,000 last year and nothing this year. The Metropolitan Opera received $50,000 for its national “Great Performances at the Met” telecasts, $100,000 less than in 2011. WNET in New York received $50,000 to support other “Great Performances” productions and the same amount for “American Masters,” compared to $400,000 for each last year. Paula Kerger, PBS’s president and chief executive, called the reduced grants “disappointing.” “The N.E.A. and PBS have been longtime partners,” she said in a telephone interview. “We do what is the mission of the N.E.A. We bring arts to every home across the country.” She said that while she understands the endowment’s problem of balancing traditional and innovative projects, “for us this is a huge impact, and we have to scramble and try to fill the gap,” adding that she is particularly concerned about “American Masters,” “Great Performances” and “Live From Lincoln Center,” which the endowment helped to create in 1976. Neal Shapiro, the president and chief executive of WNET, said that if “Great Performances” and “American Masters” could not make up the funds elsewhere “then obviously we cannot help as many regional arts organizations and independent filmmakers share their work with the nation.”

By Peter Dobkin Hall
March 11, 2012

A distressing news item in the March 5 edition of Wall Street Journal confirmed what I knew to be happening for the past eighteen months.

“As more newspapers close the door on free access to their websites,” the Journal’s Russell Adams reported, “publishers are still waiting for paying customers to pour in.”

Despite the evident failure of these monetizing efforts (the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, for example, has only been able to lure 5.7% of its print subscribers to sign up for its on-line edition), publishers, Adams reports “aren’t about to reverse publishers’ deteriorating finances. . . , the results aren’t discouraging industry executives, who say their efforts are succeeding in shoring up the core print business after years of declines.

Ironically, the Journal and other Murdoch-owned newspaper properties, including the Times of London, were among the first to erect paywalls — though, to its credit, the Journal extended to hardcopy subscribers a generous reduction in price. Less notable papers like the New York Times-owned Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and the business daily, Crain’s New York Business, provided no such courtesies.

Obviously, serious news junkies like myself, who already subscribe to hard copy editions of world-class papers like the Journal, the New York Times, and the Times of London, will, if we can afford it, spring for the additional cost of an on-line subscription.

But who — except perhaps rabid expat Red Sox fans — is going to be willing to pay four dollars a week (that’s $208 annually) for an on-line subscription to the Boston Globe when most of the papers world and national stories are reprints of wire service copy or of New York Times features? Is news of nonprofits in such a provincial city worth the investment — especially when stories on the city’s really significant institutions, like Harvard, are covered better in media like the Harvard Crimson?

What are the implications of monetizion for readers, the cities these media serve, and scholars?

For readers like you, who are trying to track and grasp changes in the world-wide nonprofit sector and the emergence of global civil society, its means a steady erosion of access to key information: an information utility which, until a few months ago, was an essential (and, indeed, perhaps the only) source for obtaining global information on nonprofits and civil society is no longer available.

The unraveling of the web also has significant implications for the cities and regions covered by media in provincial cities. Travelers, tourists, and businesspeople, wanting timely information on events, amenities, and trends in these cities (including, of course, on the activities of nonprofit arts and culture organizations), will no longer have easy access. The flow of information for cultural tourists will be cut off and these cities will effectively be severed from the national culture.

The most serious impact of media monetization is falling on scholars, who generally lack the financial resources for extensive on-line subscriptions. For many years, university libraries have made free on-line access available to major periodicals and journals for students and faculty. But, as far as I have been able to determine, no university — not even Harvard with its thirty-five billion dollar endowment — has yet been willing to make on-line newspaper subscriptions available. (And keep in mind that even wealthy institutions like Harvard are cutting back on library services).

But what about news data-bases like Nexis-Lexis? University and college libraries generally subscribe to these. Wouldn’t they fill the gap?

Unfortunately not. To begin with these data-bases are highly selective in what they carry, generally concentrating on material from major media, with coverage distorted by strong national and regional biases, and often barred from access to key sources like the Wall Street Journal and other Dow-Jones publications.

Finally, we need to be mindful of the fragmentary quality of information on civil society and nonprofits even before monetization. Perhaps two-thirds of global nonprofits stories were carried in three papers, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and The Guardian (UK).

Huge areas of the world — particularly Africa China, Japan,and South America — went completely uncovered, except for stories in specialty on-line news providers like Interpress Service (ipsnews.net) Asia Times (atimes.com), China’s Xinhua News Agency (xinhuanet.com/english/), and Japan’s Asahai Shimbun (asahi.com/english/ – Japan), all of which have strong political biases and variable commitments to civil society. (Progressive IPS features many items; the conservative Asia Times. The Chinese and Japanese governments have long sought to minimize the importance of civil society — and this is reflected in their paltry coverage).

Never have we more needed to be broadly informed about nonprofits and civil society; never has this goal been more difficult to realize.

And, closer to home, there’s the question of how monetization will affect the people who use this blog. Heretofore, we’ve been able to include with news items hyperlinks to its source, enabling readers to retrieve the full text of each story. For media that have been monetized, this will no longer be possible — unless users are willing to subscribe to the story’s source.

It will be interesting to see, in the coming year, how much access we lose to the world press — and whether university and other libraries will be able to afford to subsidize the access to the major media that they currently underwrite for scholarly journals.

MEDIA

“A New Question of Internet Freedom.” By David Jolly. New York Times. February 5, 2012. European activists who participated in American Internet protests last month learned that there was political power to be harnessed on the Web. Now they are putting that knowledge to use in an effort to defeat new global rules for intellectual property. In the U.S. protests , Web sites including Wikipedia went dark Jan. 18, and more than seven million people signed Google’s online petition opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Ultimately, even the bills’ sponsors in the U.S. Congress backed down under the onslaught of public criticism. The European activists are hoping to use similar pressure to stop the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement , or ACTA, which is meant to clamp down on illegal commerce in copyrighted and trademarked goods. Opponents say that it will erode Internet freedom and stifle innovation. About 1.5 million people have signed a Web petition calling for the European Parliament to reject ACTA, which some say is merely SOPA and PIPA on an international level. Thousands of people have turned out for demonstrations across Europe, with more scheduled for next Saturday. After more than three years of talks, which critics say were conducted without sufficient public input , the United States signed on to ACTA last October in Tokyo, along with Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand and South Korea. (The agreement is to come into force when six of those countries have ratified it.) But the issue moved into the mainstream in Europe after the European Union and representatives of 22 of 27 E.U. members — all except Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands and Slovakia — signed Jan. 26. On the same day, Kader Arif, a French Socialist member of the European Parliament, quit as the body’s special rapporteur for ACTA. He said the European Parliament and civil society organizations had been excluded from the negotiations, and he denounced the entire process as a “masquerade.” The issue, which had gotten little traction in the news media previously, began to move into the headlines, with calls for national legislatures and the European Parliament to reject the treaty.

“Social Media Acts As Catalyst For Policy Change.” All Things Considered/ National Public Radio. February 6, 2012. Websites like Facebook and Twitter played an integral role in last year’s Arab Spring uprisings. But they’ve also brought about change right here at home. Audie Cornish talks to Clay Shirky, a professor of New Media at New York University, about how social media has fueled policy changes from Bank of America to Verizon, and the most recent backlash with the breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

“Opinions: We are the media, and so are you.” By Jimmy Wales and Kat Walsh. Washington Post. February 9, 2012. It’s easy to frame the fight over SOPA and PIPA as Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley — two huge industries clashing over whose voice should dictate the future of Internet policy — but it’s absolutely wrong. The bills are dead, thanks to widespread protest. But the real architects of the bills’ defeat don’t have a catchy label or a recognized lobbying group. They don’t have the glamour or the deep pockets of the studios. Yet they are the largest, most powerful and most important voice in the debate — and, until recently, they’ve been all but invisible to Congress. They are you. And if not you personally, then your neighbors, your colleagues, your friends and even your children. The millions of people who called and wrote their congressional representatives in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act were “organized” only around the desire to protect the Web sites that have become central to their daily lives. Change like this needed a fresh set of voices. The established tech giants may have newfound political influence, but their fights are still the same closed-door tussles over minor details. They have been at the table, and they have too much invested in the process to change it. More important, they are constrained by obligations to their shareholders and investors, as well as by the need to maintain relationships with their advertisers, partners and customers. Wikipedia, its users and its contributors don’t have the same constraints. We don’t rely on advertising dollars or content partnerships. The billions of words and millions of images in our projects come from the same place as our financial support: the voluntary contribution of millions of individuals. The result is free knowledge, available for anyone to read and reuse. Wikipedia is not opposed to the rights of creators — we have the largest collection of creators in human history. The effort that went into building Wikipedia could have created shelves full of albums or near-endless nights of movies. Instead it’s providing unrestricted access to the world’s knowledge. Protecting our rights as creators means ensuring that we can build our encyclopedias, photographs, videos, Web sites, charities and businesses without the fear that they all will be taken away from us without due process. It means protecting our ability to speak freely, without being vulnerable to poorly drafted laws that leave our fate to a law enforcement body that has no oversight and no appeal process. It means protecting the legal infrastructure that allowed our sharing of knowledge and creativity to flourish, and protecting our ability to do so on technical infrastructure that allows for security and privacy for all Internet users.

“Project Funded Online Hits $1 Million Milestone.” All Things Considered/National Public Radio. February 11, 2012. Kickstarter, a website designed to fund creative projects through the support of small online donations, crowned its first millionaire this week: Casey Hopkins, an engineer based in Portland, Ore. It all started when Hopkins got fed up with the iPhone docks he kept buying in stores. “They’re these little plastic pucks and they don’t work if you have a case on your phone,” he tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. “And they’re so lightweight that when you go to grab it, the whole thing comes with it.” So he designed his own — one made of aircraft-grade aluminum that wouldn’t move around when you took your iPhone out of it. He called it the Elevation Dock. He shot a video of some prototypes, put it on Kickstarter, and asked for help raising $75,000 to get his project off the ground. “Then it just exploded across the Internet,” he says. “We hit that $75,000 goal in eight hours.” Twenty-four hours later, Hopkins, who made less than $40,000 last year, had racked up $168,000 in pre-orders. Today he has more than $1.4 million in venture capital for his new business. He’s gotten orders from retailers all over the world — Taiwan, South Korea, Australia — anywhere iPhones are. The Evelation Dock will retail for about $90 later this year on his website, Hopkins says, but not until he ships the first round out to supporters who backed his project. The next few months, he says, will be “nose to the grindstone.”

MEDIA

“Zuckerberg: The World’s Richest Primatologist; People want to know about this town and that other town too. It’s their nature.” By Lionel Tiger. Op-ed. Wall Street Journal. February 6, 2012. One of the most successful magazine launches of the last decades was People, carefully and endlessly just about that, week in and week out, year after year. Europe boasts a strange menagerie of similar publications that ceaselessly chronicle the libidinous events in the lives of minor Scandinavian royalty and the housing buys and sells of soccer stars before and after their divorces. Magazines pay the price of a used fighter plane for the first photo of the baby of certified stars. Primates always want to know what is going on. If it’s over the hill where you can’t see for sure what’s up, that’s even more stimulating and important to secure long-range survival. Primates are intensely interested in each other and other groups. It was pointed out in the 1960s that in some ground-living species, members of the group glanced at the lead primate every 20 or 30 seconds. Think Louis Quatorze or Mick Jagger. Look, look, look—people are always on the lookout. The human who has most adroitly—if at first innocently, and in the next weeks most profitably—capitalized on this is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. “Facebook.” Get it? Not FootBook or ElbowBook. The face. It gets you a driver’s license and stars send it out to fans. We know that many users’ first and classical impulse was acquiring convivial acquaintance with young women. Facebook married that ancient Darwinian urgency to a cheap, brilliantly lucid, and endlessly replicable technology. The result has been virtually incalculable and not only for Mr. Zuckerberg’s lunch money. Nearly one-sixth of homo sapiens are on Facebook. Half of Americans over age 12 are on it. It is world-wide and has been joined by other tools of conviviality such as Twitter. Nearly 15% of Americans already belong to that new tribe. There are others.

“Nonprofit News Groups Considering a Merger.” By Peter H. Lewis. New York Times. February 3, 2012. In early 2009, San Franciscans faced the very real prospect that theirs could be the first major American city without a daily newspaper. The city’s only remaining broadsheet, the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle, was in financial trouble and was slashing its reporting staff. Rumors spread that Hearst was considering letting the 145-year-old newspaper die. Warren Hellman, a San Francisco investor and philanthropist, told friends he was alarmed by the potential loss of quality news coverage in the Bay Area, and he commissioned McKinsey & Company to evaluate a purchase of The Chronicle. He rejected that plan and decided instead to create a new experiment in nonprofit civic journalism. The Bay Citizen was launched in 2010 with grand ambitions, $5 million in seed money, and a performance by Mr. Hellman’s bluegrass band, The Wronglers, with Mr. Hellman twanging his banjo. Then Mr. Hellman died unexpectedly, on Dec. 18, at age 77, of complications arising from treatments for leukemia. Now, The Bay Citizen is considering a potential merger, according to people involved in the discussions, a move that could see the publication absorbed by an older but similar nonprofit news organization in Berkeley, and raising questions about whether the founding patron’s vision for a revitalization of Bay Area news reporting can survive him.

“‘Social Mission’ Vision Meets Wall Street.” By Somini Sengupta and Claire Cain Miller. New York Times. February 1, 2012. It’s not about the money. Really.That’s what the billionaire Mark Zuckerberg says. As investors scramble to get a piece of Facebook ahead of its initial offering, Mr. Zuckerberg wants to paint a portrait of a company with goals far loftier than the moneymakers on Wall Street — and certainly loftier than most mere businesses. “Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” he wrote in a letter to potential investors that was part of Facebook’s filing on Wednesday. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.” Mr. Zuckerberg goes on to compare his invention to the printing press and television. “Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.” And there is this: “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.” To many, the letter brought to mind a similarly high-minded document from the founders of Google, a company that Facebook has come to rival on the Web. When Google filed for its public offering in 2004, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, said they intended to all but ignore Wall Street’s financial expectations in favor of shoot-for-the-moon, long-term products and projects. Last month, Google’s share price was battered when it failed to meet analysts’ quarterly sales predictions. Of course, those who invest in the stock market want results, not just rosy ambitions. And when they don’t get results, they move on to the next big thing. “I would suspect that Mark Zuckerberg could say whatever he wants, but he’s probably still going to find that Wall Street is going to influence how he runs his company,” said Danny Sullivan, an expert on the industry and editor of the Web site Search Engine Land.

MEDIA

“FBI releases plans to monitor social networks.” No by-line. Huffington Post/New Scientist. January 25, 2012. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly released details of plans to continuously monitor the global output of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, offering a rare glimpse into an activity that the FBI and other government agencies are reluctant to discuss publicly. The plans show that the bureau believes it can use information pulled from social media sites to better respond to crises, and maybe even to foresee them. The information comes from a document released on 19 January looking for companies who might want to build a monitoring system for the FBI. It spells out what the bureau wants from such a system and invites potential contractors to reply by 10 February. The bureau’s wish list calls for the system to be able to automatically search “publicly available” material from Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for keywords relating to terrorism, surveillance operations, online crime and other FBI missions. Agents would be alerted if the searches produce evidence of “breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats”. Agents will have the option of displaying the tweets and other material captured by the system on a map, to which they can add layers of other data, including the locations of US embassies and military installations, details of previous terrorist attacks and the output from local traffic cameras. The document suggests that the bureau wants to use social media to target specific users or groups of users. It notes that agents need to “locate bad actors…and analyze their movements, vulnerabilities, limitations, and possible adverse actions”. It also states that the bureau will use social media to create “pattern-of-life matrices” — presumably logs of targets’ daily routines — that will aid law enforcement in planning operations. The use of the term “publicly available” suggests that Facebook and Twitter may be able to exempt themselves from the monitoring by making their posts private. But the desire of the US government to watch everyone may still have an unwelcome impact, warns Jennifer Lynch at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based advocacy group.

“Retaliation Fears Spur Anonymity in Internet Case.” By Devlin Barrett. Wall Street Journal. January 28, 2012. Federal law-enforcement officials say they are concerned about cyber-retaliation against agents and prosecutors, in light of suspicions that people linked to the hacker collective Anonymous targeted the private life of a government official investigating WikiLeaks. The concern prompted the government to take the rare step of keeping officials’ names out of news releases and public statements when the government shut down the website Megaupload.com last week, charging company officials with violations of copyright law. Those people have denied the accusations. Such materials routinely identify prosecutors and investigators, even in case involving terrorism, violence and organized crime. Officials said the move to keep officials’ names out of the public eye wouldn’t affect the prosecution of the Megaupload.com case, where prosecutors and agents will be identified as needed in court. Since the arrests, though, authorities have noticed an uptick in hacking activity linked to Anonymous. Cybersecurity officials at the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning this week that Anonymous has been credited with a string of attacks against U.S. and European government websites. The decision to keep names out of public statements “shows deference to the sophistication and resolve” of the hacker subculture, said Tom Kellermann, chief technology officer of AirPatrol Corp., a mobile-technology company. “The Internet is a lawless place, and we’ve seen a turning point where governments and regimes no longer have a monopoly on technology.” Anonymous is a loose affiliation of hackers and activists who are self-proclaimed protectors of Internet freedom. To the Justice Department, the group is something more sinister. More than a dozen alleged members have been charged with computer crimes; they have pleaded not guilty. Anonymous has no formal structure or membership, and in some ways is more of a banner under which hackers and others choose to operate than an actual organization. Though it has existed in one form or another since 2003, Anonymous raised its profile in 2010 after the website WikiLeaks released a large cache of secret U.S. documents. Anonymous-linked hackers attacked credit-card companies that froze WikiLeaks accounts, law-enforcement officials have alleged.

MEDIA

“Wikipedia to Go Dark on Wednesday to Protest Bills on Web Piracy.” By Jenna Wortham. New York Times. January 16, 2012. The wave of online protests against two Congressional bills that aim to curtail copyright violations on the Internet is gathering momentum. Wikipedia is the latest Web site to decide to shut on Wednesday in protest against the two Congressional bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act, often called SOPA, and the Protect IP Act, which is often called PIPA. The bills have attracted fierce opposition from many corners of the technology industry. Opponents say several of the provisions in the legislation, including those that may force search engines and Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that offer or link to copyrighted material, would stifle innovation, enable censorship and tamper with the livelihood of businesses on the Internet. Nearly 800 members of Wikipedia have been debating and voting whether the site should participate in a blackout since December. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, confirmed the site’s decision on Monday on Twitter, writing: “Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!” In a phone interview late Monday, Mr. Wales said that the Wikipedia community hoped to send a clear message to lawmakers and regulators in Washington that people who worked on the Internet and used it daily were not happy about the potential effects of the bills.
Related stories:
“Wikipedia, Google Go Black to Protest SOPA.” Wall Street Journal. January 18, 2012.
“Why I want to bring down the internet – for a day; Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder, hopes sites from Google to Twitter will join his protest against a legal crackdown.” Independent (UK). January 17, 2012.
“Wikipedia and other websites shut down to protest online piracy bill.” San Jose Mercury-News. January 17, 2012.
“Wikipedia Blackout: Jimmy Wales Announces Protest Of SOPA, PIPA On.” Huffington Post. January 18, 2012.
“‘SOPA Blackout’ is Web’s political coming of age.” San Francisco Chronicle. January 19, 2012.
“Websites Black Out over “SOPA Censorship’.” Interpress Service (ipsnews.net). January 19, 2012.

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“DOJ subpoenas Twitter records of several WikiLeaks volunteers.” By Glenn Greenwald. Salon.com. January 7, 2011. Last night, Birgitta Jónsdóttir — a former WikiLeaks volunteer and current member of the Icelandic Parliament — announced (on Twitter) that she had been notified by Twitter that the DOJ had served a Subpoena demanding information “about all my tweets and more since November 1st 2009.” Several news outlets, including The Guardian, wrote about Jónsdóttir’s announcement. What hasn’t been reported is that the Subpoena served on Twitter — which is actually an Order from a federal court that the DOJ requested — seeks the same information for numerous other individuals currently or formerly associated with WikiLeaks, including Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp, and Julian Assange. It also seeks the same information for Bradley Manning and for WikiLeaks’ Twitter account. The information demanded by the DOJ is sweeping in scope. It includes all mailing addresses and billing information known for the user, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, all known email accounts, as well as the ”means and source of payment,” including banking records and credit cards. It seeks all of that information for the period beginning November 1, 2009, through the present. A copy of the Order served on Twitter, obtained exclusively by Salon, is here. The Order was signed by a federal Magistrate Judge in the Eastern District of Virginia, Theresa Buchanan, and served on Twitter by the DOJ division for that district. It states that there is “reasonable ground to believe that the records or other information sought are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation,” the language required by the relevant statute. It was issued on December 14 and ordered sealed — i.e., kept secret from the targets of the Order. It gave Twitter three days to respond and barred the company from notifying anyone, including the users, of the existence of the Order. On January 5, the same judge directed that the Order be unsealed at Twitter’s request in order to inform the users and give them 10 days to object; had Twitter not so requested, it would have been compelled to turn over this information without the knowledge of its users.

MEDIA

“New NPR Chief Faces Tough Landscape.” By Elizabeth Jensen. New York Times. December 4, 2011. On Thursday, his first day as president and chief executive of NPR, Gary E. Knell took questions on Twitter and NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” — and he got an earful. Listeners asked him to increase programs for diverse audiences, expand online availability of NPR shows, wean the programmer off federal funds, accept donations via mobile texts, add Spanish-language pledge drives, address charges of liberal bias and increase coverage of Occupy Wall Street, secular Arab violence and “nuclear winter.” And that is just a partial list. The last 14 months were bruising for NPR, starting with the politically controversial decision to fire the commentator Juan Williams and continuing with the departure of NPR’s top news and fund-raising executives and the chief executive, Vivian Schiller, who resigned under pressure in March. The extended search that ended with the appointment of Mr. Knell, 57, formerly chief executive at Sesame Workshop, the producer of “Sesame Street,” also took its toll. NPR’s executive editor for news quit for another job last week, and the development executive overseeing individual giving is also leaving, NPR confirmed. Big donors are getting antsy.

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“Wiki-world targets India.” By Raja Murthy. Asia Times (http://www.atimes.com). November 19, 2011. Wikipedia, the world’s leading free reference site, is hosting a first of its kind WikiConference India 2011 in Mumbai starting November 18. Over 600 regular contributors are expected to participate in a country the San Francisco-based Wikipedia Foundation (WMF) says is crucial to its global growth strategy. The three-day meeting earns clout given the Indian government’s hopes of India having the world’s largest Internet population of 600 million by 2016 and Wikipedia being the world’s biggest collaborative information project ever in history. The known downside is it also being the largest collection of anonymous and therefore often credibility-challenging content. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has said India would be the focus this year for the multilingual reference site. A decade old since Wales, Larry Sanger and others started Wikipedia in January 2001, it has hosted articles in 268 languages, has 450 million readers, with nearly three billion monthly page views from the United States alone [1]. In comparison, the great Library of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, had accumulated about 400,000 scrolls in approximately 300 years before it was burnt down circa 48 BC. Wikipedia has accumulated 20 million articles in 10 years. Such is the marvel of our Internet-enriched times. Though unlike with Wikipedia, where anyone can contribute articles, it is unlikely anyone could have walked in and unloaded their manuscripts in the Library of Alexandria.