Much is being made about Richard Blumenthal’s Senate race because of a New York Times article published last Monday which accuses Blumenthal of lying about his military record: claiming on camera that he had served in Vietnam when in fact he had not. Blumenthal was a member of the Marine Corp ...

Not being able to find a demo of Google TV online, I am still at a loss as to why I would want Google TV. It was perhaps telling that at Google’s I/O developer conference the following “interesting facts” were used to introduce Google TV: 1. The average American watches five hours of TV a day ...

The argument that "we take the internet for granted" may seem like a tired straw man. But perhaps the ideology of the internet could stand a second look. Maybe we don't actually understand the extent to which all the hardware and software that allows us to access the web shapes the ways in ...

Nestle has been forced to change its environmentally-destructive business practices after a social media coup; what can netroots activists learn from the victory? After it was revealed that the Swiss food giant sourced its palm oil through Sinar Mas—a company whose operations contribute to ...

A New York Times piece by Andrew Rice about the economics of Internet startups gives a seemingly accurate and sad account of the state of information, which was once known as knowledge. Irony abounds: the NYT piece was longish and informative enough that, according to its own reporting, it isn’t ...

So we all know that institutions are conservative by their nature as are the old people who typically occupy their venerable posts. The American Presidency is no exception and Obama, though he runs a comparatively tech savvy White House, alas, does not Twitter. The Economist has come out against ...

Sick of hearing about a slow-moving sheet of oil floating about in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico? You may not be alone. According to The New Republic's Bradford Plumer, the network coverage of the ongoing oil spill  by doesn't really stack up to past spills in either the amount of stories ...

Since the murder of a middle school principal in the suburbs of DC last month, the Washington Post has grappled with the complexities of how much to disclose about a victim's personal life. Brian Betts, an innovative educator at the forefront of the district's efforts to turn around its ...

Nobody likes a showoff, China, and now that you’re rising like the sea level during a tsunami, the world’s nations are trying to put you down. Will the world ever understand you? Take, for example, the recent release of a secret recording made during the final hours of the Copenhagen Climate ...

After taking tens of millions of dollars in losses over the past two years, The Washington Post Company has put Newsweek up for sale which, along with Time, once defined the nation’s conversation about events foreign and domestic.  The attempt to sell the magazine confirms many trends of our ...

The Web and cloud computing have made the work of archivists and record keepers faster than ever before, but is information lost in the internet's labyrinth any more accessible than the physical objects we've been misplacing for centuries? Two years ago a film archivist unearthed an original ...

"If a regime is hellbent on turning a journalist into a spy," Paul Martin writes, "it can simply put him on trial in a closed court, announce a verdict, list the now 'proven' allegations, and lock the journalist up—or worse." This reality, which Martin learned firsthand, confronts journalists ...

While people wonder daily about the future of the newspaper, music and publishing industries, the television business seems to be surviving on its own terms. Sure it has lost revenue to the crisis and to the Internet, but its fundamental qualities combined with some late innovation have given the ...

Today I respond to Francis’ most recent post: an objection to the L.A. Times’ use of e-commerce links in its online edition to generate ad revenue. In this case, I think the ends justify the means: The L.A. Times still performs a good public service, but since it’s not making enough money, the e ...

The Los Angeles Times began placing ads within its editorial stories this week; they couldn't have come up with a more misguided or damaging effort to bring in revenue if they had tried. The blog LA Observed got their hands on an internal memo that outlined the new policy. The links—to sites such ...