Good news about the news

With lively news and thoughtful commentary from south of the 49th parallel, The Atlantic is always worth a stop on a curious Canadian's online odyssey.

My current favourite Atlantic item is How to Save the News by James Fallows, also in the June 2010 edition of The Atlantic magazine.

His thesis: Google knows that people will use its search engine only if it brings them interesting or useful information. Since the source of much of this stuff -- "the news" -- is traditional news media, it is in Google's interest to support and develop those media.

Google's goal, Fallows writes, is "a reinvented business model to sustain professional newsgathering." Well, lots of people are trying to create one.

But here's a change.

Rather than ignoring or trying to destroy traditional news media, Google's model would incorporate old-fashioned, high-cost news gathering such as (in Canada, which Fallows ignores, since being American means never having to say you're sorry) knowledgeable, long-term coverage of the Supreme Court of Canada.

It would also include, on the same site, immediate, exciting, unedited amateur-created video from hot spots such as Bangkok during the Thai military attacks on Red Shirt protesters.

Who would pay for this? Subscribers in some cases, advertisers in others, or some shifting blend of the two. Let a thousand business models bloom.

Today's media-rich but often wisdom-depleted online world faces a central problem. In Fallows's words, "The internet is a great way to get news but often a poor way to read it."

There's a device for that, of course: a Google device (coming soon ... really) that would re-create the serendipity of leafing through a magazine, discovering the beautiful colour ads and surrendering to the other content that you did not know you would be interested in.

Sounds like Google propaganda? Maybe. You need to keep your bullshit detector cranked up.

But what I love about this piece is its unusual and optimistic view of the news business -- a business, after all, that has adapted to every new technology since smoke-blackened sticks on cave walls.

Spoiler! How to Save the News contains more than 140 characters. You'll have to spend a bit of time reading it.

But your investment of time and thinking will pay off. You can tweet about it.

Crawl out from under your rock

I usually don't agree with judges who order news media to reveal their sources.

But I do support a ruling that Internet anonymity is not absolute, made by a judge of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia on April 14, 2010.

The judge ordered Google and The Coast, a weekly newspaper, to reveal to Halifax firefighters the identities and IP addresses of seven people who allegedly defamed them in anonymous comments on The Coast's website.

Whether or not a court finds that any comment in this case was defamatory, the ruling highlights the unfairness of anonymous comments.

Why should I be able to publish online any opinion of you that I feel like, and then hide under my rock of anonymity?

In a broadcast or print format I would have to identify myself, and rightly so.

And no, I still don't think news media should be forced to reveal their anonymous sources.

There is a clear distinction. Battles over anonymous sources involve facts that the sources provide, which are then checked by journalists before broadcast or publication.

Most anonymous web comments are notably fact-free. They are opinions, often breathtakingly ignorant ones.

Unlike mine, of course.