Leaders in the news field joined Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson for his “the Future of Journalism” panel at the Institute’s Ideas Festival in Colorado last week. Politico’s report on it is headlined, Save journalism? Beats us, panel says: As is usually the case with such discussions, the group didn’t break any serious ground in determining how to save a troubled journalism industry. In fact, many had to admit that they had no idea what to do. “We will look at...

Of the available choices… Scandal – public records revealed that SBS supplied the materials for her Wasilla house OR last week Alaska blogger Linda Kellen-Biegal successfully raised roughly $6,000 to pay the cost associated with a freedom of information request for email; Money & Fame – Anchorage Rep. Hawker noted that Palin’s decision to quit “gives her unfettered ability to pursue her economic interests” and Larry Persily, a former aide to Palin, observes...

Wired: A federal judge on Thursday overturned guilty verdicts against Lori Drew, issuing a directed acquittal on three misdemeanor charges. Drew, 50, was accused of participating in a cyberbullying scheme against 13-year-old Megan Meier who later committed suicide. The case against Drew hinged on the government’s novel argument that violating MySpace’s terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer hacking. But U.S. District Judge George Wu found the premise troubling. “It basically...

Some recent changes at YouTube… They’ve doubled the allowable size of uploads: We’re happy to announce that the size of standard uploads has doubled from 1GB to 2GB. The increase means you can upload longer videos at a higher resolution as well as large HD files directly from your camera. In addition, the team’s implemented some new features to make it easier for you to show these videos off to the world. The changes allow you to share links directly to the HD version of your...

Michael Masnick provides a link-filled road map to the star-studded fire touched off by Malcolm Gladwell’s critical review of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Masnick rolls in his own critique of the book and concludes: Gladwell’s review…does Anderson’s book a disservice. It criticizes it because it doesn’t answer questions the book didn’t set out to answer, and then attacks the picture today without acknowledging the trendlines and...

In America, commerce trumps speech: In a 37-page ruling, [Judge Deborah A. Batts, of the United States District Court in Manhattan] issued a preliminary injunction — indefinitely barring the publication, advertising or distribution of the book in this country — after considering the merits of the case. The book has been published in Britain. In a suit filed on June 1, lawyers for Mr. Salinger in the copyright infringement lawsuit contended that the new work was derivative of “Catcher” and...

Andrew Sullivan takes a break from the Vanity Fair fuss to point to Sarah “I’m a runner” Palin in Runner’s World. The photo above is from photographer Brian Adams’ slide show. Sullivan quotes a Dish reader: It’s not proper to display the flag to have it draped over a chair. Just imagine the outrage on Fox News if there was a photo of Obama and an improper display of the Stars and Stripes! He points to an online guide to flag etiquette “which Palin clearly...

From Woot: New mascot: a wide-eyed lemur voiced by Justin Timberlake DRM limitations require biometrically encoded MP3s audible only to the purchaser Each torrent will include a 4GB “bonus pack” with different versions of Solitaire and a playable demo of “Dinosaur Alphabet Learning” Seeders get points that can be redeemed for novelty pencil erasers or plastic whistles Before you can get any torrents, you have to scroll through several pages of idiotic quizzes taken by “friends”...

John Timmer at ArsTechnica raises good questions about the study I pointed to on Saturday. Says Timmer: The results need to be interpreted very cautiously, as they were based on only 69 contributors from a single nation [Israel], a tiny drop in the Wikipedian ocean. … Wikipedia’s own survey of its contributors racked up roughly 12,000 original contributors (and another 32,000 sporadic contributors). Given that there were responses from about 400 Israelis, that survey probably included...

The White House blog notes the event will be streamed live at 4:25 EDT at WhiteHouse.gov/live. In the accompanying post, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement Brian Bond writes: As a gay kid growing up in rural Missouri – I never thought I would end up helping to organize an LGBT Pride event in the White House.   Then again, I never thought I would ever realize my dream to work in the White House.  But thanks to the historic election of Barack Obama, today I am honored...

NYTimes: A federal judge sentenced Bernard L. Madoff to 150 years in prison on Monday for operating a huge Ponzi scheme that devastated thousands of people, calling his crimes “extraordinarily evil.” In pronouncing the sentence — the maximum he could have handed down — Judge Denny Chin turned aside Mr. Madoff’s own assertions of remorse and rejected the suggestion from Mr. Madoff’s lawyers that there was a sense of “mob vengeance” surrounding calls for a long prison term. “Objectively...

As expected: The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of white Connecticut firefighters in a 5-4 ruling that reverses an appeals court finding by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, the Associated Press report. The high court found that the firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge. The AP story. The full text of the ruling. Kennedy wrote it. The breakdown is Alito, Kennedy, Scalia,...

Slide 11 from Wagner’s presentation. In the face of three government antitrust investigations, Google’s “senior competition counsel,” Dana Wagner, is trying to persuade the world that its competition is just a click away: [T]he boyish, 33-year-old Mr. Wagner [is] a former antitrust lawyer at the Justice Department who drops words like “goofy” and “whacky” with an aw-shucks grin into discussions of complex legal and economic issues. In contrast to Microsoft a decade ago, whose...

When I read Political Shifts on Gay Rights Lag Behind Culture in the NYTimes yesterday, I didn’t notice it was by out gay reporter Adam Nagourney. That changes nothing, really. Except maybe that his experience makes him more attuned to the topic: The conflicting signals from the White House about its commitment to gay issues reflect a broader paradox: even as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases across the country, the politics of gay rights remains full of crosscurrents. It is...

LATER — Facing South tells us that at least two leaders of the coup were apparently trained at a controversial Department of Defense school based at Fort Benning, Georgia “infamous for producing graduates linked to torture, death squads and other human rights abuses.” NYTimes: The Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted by the army on Sunday after pressing ahead with plans for a referendum that opponents said could lay the groundwork for his eventual re-election, in the first...

GAY PRIDE SUNDAY UPDATE: All Things Considered interviews Harris. I am 54 years old. I lived in NYC for 30 years, through the AIDS years. I lost a life-partner to the disease. My experience could not be more different than Harris’s. =============== A friend forwarded Mark Harris’s NYMag Summer Issue feature on the Gay Generation Gap as much for the mention of The DataLounge, a site from the company I once worked for, as for the text. An interesting premise, it might have been insightful....

Recently I noted Twitter hype punctured by a study that found Twitter users to be self-obsessed. Today Nicholas Carr points to New Scientest and a report that finds Wikipedians are generally “grumpy,” “disagreeable,” and “closed to new ideas.” Forget altruism: [T]he scholars paint a picture of Wikipedians as social maladapts who “feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net than they do off-line” and who score poorly on measures of “agreeableness...

Tomorrow will be the 40th anniversary of the June 28, 1969 police raid of the Stonewall Inn bar in NYC’s Greenwich Village. On that day the drag queens, teenagers and street kids fought back in what is now generally considered to be the birth of the modern gay rights movement. Writing in Inside Higher Education, Scott McLemee asked scholars what they think (or hope) will have changed in LGBT scholarship by the 50th anniversary. His first scholar respondent, Doug Ireland (a journalist more than...

Narrowly: In a triumph for President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled House narrowly passed sweeping legislation Friday that calls for the nation’s first limits on pollution linked to global warming and aims to usher in a new era of cleaner, yet more costly energy. The vote was 219-212, capping months of negotiations and days of intense bargaining among Democrats. Republicans were overwhelmingly against the measure, arguing it would destroy jobs in the midst of a recession while burdening...

Today’s NYTimes has a piece on The Glory for Christ Football League, which came into being because Georgia is not one of the twenty-four states that allow homeshcoolers to join public- or private-school teams: By 2002, the sports-loving sons of Roger and Diana McDaniel had aged out of recreation league football. A school team was not an option. They had no school. The boys were educated at home, cracking open textbooks — English, math, Bible — about a first-down-marker’s length from...