AUDIO: Four editors discuss future of newspapers; danger of controlling pipes and content

A-Podcasting & Audio
AUDIO: Four editors discuss future of newspapers; danger of controlling pipes and content
By MGP Project
May 20, 2005, 09:04

In December, four editors spent a half hour on a San Francisco public radio station discussing the future of newspapers and how they are economically challenged by the Internet. DOWNLOAD MP3 HERE.

FOUND AT:

http://parmedia.org/feature/display/227/index.php

The program was broadcast Dec. 13, 2004 on KALW in San Francisco, 91.7 on the program, "City Visions Radio," hosted weekly by Rose Levon.

The session covered citizen media, blogging, self-publishing, and how these will affect traditional newspaper publishing. With Dan Gillmor, former business and echnology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News (now founder of Grass Roots Media Inc.; Kevin Keane, vice president and executive editor of ANG Newspapers (including the Oakland Tribune); Robert Rosenthal, managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle; and John McManus, director, Grade the News.
In an explicit warning, Gillmor warns that cable companies should be forbidden by law to change the quality of service their provide to information providers based on their content. Here is what Gillmor said:
"... The providers of broadband, which will be, in effect, over time the way that a lot of people if not most get most of the information that they use. It is utterly dangerous that the broadband providers are being permitted to control not just the pipes but the information that flows on the pipes. We are in real trouble, if that goes on and if they start discriminating on the basis of content, as they would be able to do . . . they say they are not going to do that and we have to trust them.
". . . They policy is quite vague, and it doesn't say that they must have what amounts to open architecture where the user can have control over what's coming down. If they decided for example to deliver information or entertainment from one source at a faster rate than from another and slow up someone else's that may be completely legal. There certainly gonna' be regulatory if they tried. But what I am saying is the current consolidation of mass media will look tame compared to what these guys can do if they are not utterly prevented from doing it. Or if, what is the one outside hope, if wireless doesn't come along and save us from this. but this is a very big deal and one which people should be up at arms about."

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