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In The New Yorker by Eric Alterman

The death and life of the American newspaper

The American newspaper has been around for approximately three hundred years. Benjamin Harris’s spirited Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick managed just one issue, in 1690, before the Massachusetts authorities closed it down. Harris had suggested a politically incorrect hard line on Indian removal and shocked local sensibilities by reporting that the King of France had been taking liberties with the Prince’s wife.

It really was not until 1721, when the printer James Franklin launched the New England Courant, that any of Britain’s North American colonies saw what we might recognize today as a real newspaper. Franklin, Benjamin’s older brother, refused to adhere to customary licensing arrangements and constantly attacked the ruling powers of New England, thereby achieving both editorial independence and commercial success. He filled his paper with crusades (on everything from pirates to the power of Cotton and Increase Mather), literary essays by Addison and Steele, character sketches, and assorted philosophical ruminations.Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin’s Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America’s last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.” Keller’s speech appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the headline “NOT DEAD YET.”

Perhaps not, but trends in circulation and advertising––the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising––have created a palpable sense of doom. Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter. Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newspaper business have. The McClatchy Company, which was the only company to bid on the Knight Ridder chain when, in 2005, it was put on the auction block, has surrendered more than eighty per cent of its stock value since making the $6.5-billion purchase. Lee Enterprises’ stock is down by three-quarters since it bought out the Pulitzer chain, the same year. America’s most prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones. Rather than compete in an era of merciless transformation, the families that owned the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal sold off the majority of their holdings. The New York Times Company has seen its stock decline by fifty-four per cent since the end of 2004, with much of the loss coming in the past year; in late February, an analyst at Deutsche Bank recommended that clients sell off their Times stock. The Washington Post Company has avoided a similar fate only by rebranding itself an “education and media company”; its testing and prep company, Kaplan, now brings in at least half the company’s revenue.

Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies. To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad. Newspapers have created Web sites that benefit from the growth of online advertising, but the sums are not nearly enough to replace the loss in revenue from circulation and print ads.

Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies’ solution to their problem was to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.” That may help explain why the dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month. Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

Philip Meyer, in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper” (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody’s doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the $450-million Newseum, in Washington, D.C., but, more and more, what Bill Keller calls “that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose” is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under glass.

Taking its place, of course, is the Internet, which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.

Among the most significant aspects of the transition from “dead tree” newspapers to a world of digital information lies in the nature of “news” itself. The American newspaper (and the nightly newscast) is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity. Many newspapers, in their eagerness to demonstrate a sense of balance and impartiality, do not allow reporters to voice their opinions publicly, march in demonstrations, volunteer in political campaigns, wear political buttons, or attach bumper stickers to their cars.

In private conversation, reporters and editors concede that objectivity is an ideal, an unreachable horizon, but journalists belong to a remarkably thin-skinned fraternity, and few of them will publicly admit to betraying in print even a trace of bias. They discount the notion that their beliefs could interfere with their ability to report a story with perfect balance. As the venerable “dean” of the Washington press corps, David Broder, of the Post, puts it, “There just isn’t enough ideology in the average reporter to fill a thimble.”

Meanwhile, public trust in newspapers has been slipping at least as quickly as the bottom line. A recent study published by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans said they could believe “all or most” media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven per cent just five years ago. “Less than one in five believe what they read in print,” the 2007 “State of the News Media” report, issued by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, concluded. “CNN is not really more trusted than Fox, or ABC than NBC. The local paper is not viewed much differently than the New York Times.” Vastly more Americans believe in flying saucers and 9/11 conspiracy theories than believe in the notion of balanced—much less “objective”—mainstream news media. Nearly nine in ten Americans, according to the Sacred Heart study, say that the media consciously seek to influence public policies, though they disagree about whether the bias is liberal or conservative.

No less challenging is the rapid transformation that has taken place in the public’s understanding of, and demand for, “news” itself. Rupert Murdoch, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in April, 2005—two years before his five-billion-dollar takeover of Dow Jones & Co. and the Wall Street Journal—warned the industry’s top editors and publishers that the days when “news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deigned to tell us what we could and should know,” were over. No longer would people accept “a godlike figure from above” presenting the news as “gospel.” Today’s consumers “want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened. . . . And finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger community—to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet people who think about the world in similar or different ways.”

One month after Murdoch’s speech, a thirty-one-year-old computer whiz, Jonah Peretti, and a former A.O.L. executive, Kenneth Lerer, joined the ubiquitous commentator-candidate-activist Arianna Huffington to launch a new Web site, which they called the Huffington Post. First envisaged as a liberal alternative to the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post started out by aggregating political news and gossip; it also organized a group blog, with writers drawn largely from Huffington’s alarmingly vast array of friends and connections. Huffington had accumulated that network during years as a writer on topics from Greek philosophy to the life of Picasso, as the spouse of a wealthy Republican congressman in California, and now, after a divorce and an ideological conversion, as a Los Angeles-based liberal commentator and failed gubernatorial candidate.

Almost by accident, however, the owners of the Huffington Post had discovered a formula that capitalized on the problems confronting newspapers in the Internet era, and they are convinced that they are ready to reinvent the American newspaper. “Early on, we saw that the key to this enterprise was not aping Drudge,” Lerer recalls. “It was taking advantage of our community. And the key was to think of what we were doing through the community’s eyes.”

On the Huffington Post, Peretti explains, news is not something handed down from above but “a shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer.” Echoing Murdoch, he says that the Internet offers editors “immediate information” about which stories interest readers, provoke comments, are shared with friends, and generate the greatest number of Web searches. An Internet-based news site, Peretti contends, is therefore “alive in a way that is impossible for paper and ink.”

Though Huffington has a news staff (it is tiny, but the hope is to expand in the future), the vast majority of the stories that it features originate elsewhere, whether in print, on television, or on someone’s video camera or cell phone. The editors link to whatever they believe to be the best story on a given topic. Then they repurpose it with a catchy, often liberal-leaning headline and provide a comment section beneath it, where readers can chime in. Surrounding the news articles are the highly opinionated posts of an apparently endless army of both celebrity (Nora Ephron, Larry David) and non-celebrity bloggers—more than eighteen hundred so far. The bloggers are not paid. The over-all effect may appear chaotic and confusing, but, Lerer argues, “this new way of thinking about, and presenting, the news, is transforming news as much as CNN did thirty years ago.” Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. “People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,” she says. “Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”

It’s an almost comically audacious ambition for an operation with only forty-six full-time employees—many of whom are barely old enough to rent a car. But, with about eleven million dollars at its disposal, the site is poised to break even on advertising revenue of somewhere between six and ten million dollars annually. What most impresses advertisers—and depresses newspaper-company executives—is the site’s growth numbers. In the past thirty days, thanks in large measure to the excitement of the Democratic primaries, the site’s “unique visitors”—that is, individual computers that clicked on one of its pages––jumped to more than eleven million, according to the company. And, according to estimates from Nielsen NetRatings and comScore, the Huffington Post is more popular than all but eight newspaper sites, rising from sixteenth place in December.

Arthur Miller once described a good newspaper as “a nation talking to itself.” If only in this respect, the Huffington Post is a great newspaper. It is not unusual for a short blog post to inspire a thousand posts from readers—posts that go off in their own directions and lead to arguments and conversations unrelated to the topic that inspired them. Occasionally, these comments present original perspectives and arguments, but many resemble the graffiti on a bathroom wall.

The notion that the Huffington Post is somehow going to compete with, much less displace, the best traditional newspapers is arguable on other grounds as well. The site’s original-reporting resources are minuscule. The site has no regular sports or book coverage, and its entertainment section is a trashy grab bag of unverified Internet gossip. And, while the Huffington Post has successfully positioned itself as the place where progressive politicians and Hollywood liberal luminaries post their anti-Bush Administration sentiments, many of the original blog posts that it publishes do not merit the effort of even a mouse click.

Additional oddities abound. Whereas a newspaper tends to stand by its story on the basis of an editorial process in which professional reporters and editors attempt to vet their sources and check their accuracy before publishing, the blogosphere relies on its readership—its community—for quality control. At the Huffington Post, Jonah Peretti explains, the editors “stand behind our front page” and do their best to insure that only trusted bloggers and reliable news sources are posted there. Most posts inside the site, however, go up before an editor sees them. Only if a post is deemed by a reader to be false, defamatory, or offensive does an editor get involved.

The Huffington Post’s editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the “mullet strategy.” (“Business up front, party in the back” is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) “User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,” Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to “argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.”

This policy is hardly without its pitfalls. During the Hurricane Katrina crisis, the activist Randall Robinson referred, in a post, to reports from New Orleans that some people there were “eating corpses to survive.” When Arianna Huffington heard about the post, she got in touch with Robinson and found that he could not support his musings; she asked Robinson to post a retraction. The alacrity with which the correction took place was admirable, but it was not fast enough to prevent the false information from being repeated elsewhere.

The tensions between the leaders of the mainstream media and the challengers from the Web were presaged by one of the most instructive and heated intellectual debates of the American twentieth century.

Between 1920 and 1925, the young Walter Lippmann published three books investigating the theoretical relationship between democracy and the press, including “Public Opinion” (1922), which is credited with inspiring both the public-relations profession and the academic field of media studies. Lippmann identified a fundamental gap between what we naturally expect from democracy and what we know to be true about people. Democratic theory demands that citizens be knowledgeable about issues and familiar with the individuals put forward to lead them. And, while these assumptions may have been reasonable for the white, male, property-owning classes of James Franklin’s Colonial Boston, contemporary capitalist society had, in Lippmann’s view, grown too big and complex for crucial events to be mastered by the average citizen.

Journalism works well, Lippmann wrote, when “it can report the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch.” But where the situation is more complicated, “as for example, in the matter of the success of a policy, or the social conditions among a foreign people—that is to say, where the real answer is neither yes or no, but subtle, and a matter of balanced evidence,” journalism “causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation.”

Lippmann likened the average American—or “outsider,” as he tellingly named him—to a “deaf spectator in the back row” at a sporting event: “He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen,” and “he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.” In a description that may strike a familiar chord with anyone who watches cable news or listens to talk radio today, Lippmann assumed a public that “is slow to be aroused and quickly diverted . . . and is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict.” A committed élitist, Lippmann did not see why anyone should find these conclusions shocking. Average citizens are hardly expected to master particle physics or post-structuralism. Why should we expect them to understand the politics of Congress, much less that of the Middle East?

Lippmann’s preferred solution was, in essence, to junk democracy entirely. He justified this by arguing that the results were what mattered. Even “if there were a prospect” that people could become sufficiently well-informed to govern themselves wisely, he wrote, “it is extremely doubtful whether many of us would wish to be bothered.” In his first attempt to consider the issue, in “Liberty and the News” (1920), Lippmann suggested addressing the problem by raising the status of journalism to that of more respected professions. Two years later, in “Public Opinion,” he concluded that journalism could never solve the problem merely by “acting upon everybody for thirty minutes in twenty-four hours.” Instead, in one of the oddest formulations of his long career, Lippmann proposed the creation of “intelligence bureaus,” which would be given access to all the information they needed to judge the government’s actions without concerning themselves much with democratic preferences or public debate. Just what, if any, role the public would play in this process Lippmann never explained.

John Dewey termed “Public Opinion” “perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned,” and he spent much of the next five years countering it. The result, published in 1927, was an extremely tendentious, dense, yet important book, titled “The Public and Its Problems.” Dewey did not dispute Lippmann’s contention regarding journalism’s flaws or the public’s vulnerability to manipulation. But Dewey thought that Lippmann’s cure was worse than the disease. While Lippmann viewed public opinion as little more than the sum of the views of each individual, much like a poll, Dewey saw it more like a focus group. The foundation of democracy to Dewey was less information than conversation. Members of a democratic society needed to cultivate what the journalism scholar James W. Carey, in describing the debate, called “certain vital habits” of democracy—the ability to discuss, deliberate on, and debate various perspectives in a manner that would move it toward consensus.

Dewey also criticized Lippmann’s trust in knowledge-based élites. “A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge,” he argued. “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.”

Lippmann and Dewey devoted much of the rest of their lives to addressing the problems they had diagnosed, Lippmann as the archetypal insider pundit and Dewey as the prophet of democratic education. To the degree that posterity can be said to have declared a winner in this argument, the future turned out much closer to Lippmann’s ideal. Dewey’s confidence in democracy rested in significant measure on his “faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished.” But nothing in his voluminous writings gives the impression that he believed these conditions—which he defined expansively to include democratic schools, factories, voluntary associations, and, particularly, newspapers—were ever met in his lifetime. (Dewey died in 1952, at the age of ninety-two.)

The history of the American press demonstrates a tendency toward exactly the kind of professionalization for which Lippmann initially argued. When Lippmann was writing, many newspapers remained committed to the partisan model of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American press, in which editors and publishers viewed themselves as appendages of one or another political power or patronage machine and slanted their news offerings accordingly. (Think of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton battling each other through their competing newspapers while serving in George Washington’s Cabinet.) The twentieth-century model, in which newspapers strive for political independence and attempt to act as referees between competing parties on behalf of what they perceive to be the public interest, was, in Lippmann’s time, in its infancy.

As the profession grew more sophisticated and respected, in part owing to Lippmann’s example, top reporters, anchors, and editors naturally rose in status to the point where some came to be considered the social equals of the senators, Cabinet secretaries, and C.E.O.s they reported on. Just as naturally, these same reporters and editors sometimes came to identify with their subjects, rather than with their readers, as Dewey had predicted. Aside from biennial elections featuring smaller and smaller portions of the electorate, politics increasingly became a business for professionals and a spectator sport for the great unwashed—much as Lippmann had hoped and Dewey had feared. Beyond the publication of the occasional letter to the editor, the role of the reader was defined as purely passive.

The Lippmann model received its initial challenge from the political right. Many conservatives regarded the major networks, newspapers, and newsweeklies—the mainstream media—as liberal arbiters, incapable of covering without bias the civil-rights movement in the South or Barry Goldwater’s Presidential campaign. They responded by building think tanks and media outlets designed both to challenge and to bypass the mainstream media. The Reagan revolution, which brought conservatives to power in Washington, had its roots not only in the candidate’s personal appeal as a “great communicator” but in a decades-long campaign of ideological spadework undertaken in magazines such as William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s National Review and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary and in the pugnacious editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, edited for three decades by Robert Bartley. The rise of what has come to be known as the conservative “counter-establishment” and, later, of media phenomena such as Rush Limbaugh, on talk radio, and Bill O’Reilly, on cable television, can be viewed in terms of a Deweyan community attempting to seize the reins of democratic authority and information from a Lippmann-like élite.

A liberal version of the Deweyan community took longer to form, in part because it took liberals longer to find fault with the media. Until the late nineteen-seventies, many in the mainstream media did, in fact, exhibit the “liberal bias” with which conservatives continue to charge them, regarding their unquestioned belief both in a strong, activist government and in its moral responsibility to insure the expansion of rights to women and to ethnic and racial minorities. But a concerted effort to recruit pundits from the new conservative counter-establishment, coupled with investment by wealthy right-wing activists and businessmen in an interlocking web of counter-establishment think tanks, pressure groups, periodicals, radio stations, and television networks, operated as a kind of rightward gravitational pull on the mainstream’s reporting and helped to create a far more sympathetic context for conservative candidates than Goldwater supporters could have imagined.

Duncan Black, a former economics professor who writes a popular progressive blog under the name Atrios, explains that he, too, believed in what he calls “the myth of the liberal media.” He goes on, “But watching the press’s collective behavior during the Clinton impeachment saga, the Gore campaign, the post-9/11 era, the run-up to the Iraq war, and the Bush Administration’s absurd and dangerous claims of executive power rendered such a belief absurd. Sixty-five per cent of the American public disapproves of the Bush Administration, but that perspective, even now, has very little representation anywhere in the mainstream media.”

The birth of the liberal blogosphere, with its ability to bypass the big media institutions and conduct conversations within a like-minded community, represents a revival of the Deweyan challenge to our Lippmann-like understanding of what constitutes “news” and, in doing so, might seem to revive the philosopher’s notion of a genuinely democratic discourse. The Web provides a powerful platform that enables the creation of communities; distribution is frictionless, swift, and cheap. The old democratic model was a nation of New England towns filled with well-meaning, well-informed yeoman farmers. Thanks to the Web, we can all join in a Deweyan debate on Presidents, policies, and proposals. All that’s necessary is a decent Internet connection.

What put the Huffington Post on the map was a series of pieces during the summer and autumn of 2005, in which Arianna Huffington relentlessly attacked the military and foreign-affairs reporting of the Times’ Judith Miller. Huffington was fed by a steady stream of leaks and suggestions from Times editors and reporters, even though much of the newspaper world considered her journalistic credentials highly questionable.

The Huffington Post was hardly the first Web site to stumble on the technique of leveraging the knowledge of its readers to challenge the mainstream media narrative. For example, conservative bloggers at sites like Little Green Footballs took pleasure in helping to bring down Dan Rather after he broadcast dubious documents allegedly showing that George W. Bush had received special treatment during his service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Long before the conservatives forced out Dan Rather, a liberal freelance journalist named Joshua Micah Marshall had begun a site, called Talking Points Memo, intended to take stories well beyond where mainstream newspapers had taken them, often by relying on the voluntary research and well-timed leaks of an avid readership. His site, begun during the 2000 Florida-recount controversy, ultimately spawned several related sites, which are collectively known as TPM Media, and which are financed through a combination of reader donations and advertising. In the admiring judgment of the Columbia Journalism Review, Talking Points Memo “was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the story of the fired U.S. Attorneys to a boil,” a scandal that ultimately ended with the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and a George Polk Award for Marshall, the first ever for a blogger. Talking Points Memo also played a lead role in defeating the Bush Social Security plan and in highlighting Trent Lott’s praise for Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist Presidential campaign. Lott was eventually forced to step down as Senate Majority Leader.

According to Marshall, “the collaborative aspect” of his site “came about entirely by accident.” His original intention was merely to offer his readers “transparency,” so that his “strong viewpoint” would be distinguishable from the facts that he presented. Over time, however, he found that the enormous response that his work engendered offered access to “a huge amount of valuable information”––information that was not always available to mainstream reporters, who tended to deal largely with what Marshall terms “professional sources.” During the Katrina crisis, for example, Marshall discovered that some of his readers worked in the federal government’s climate-and-weather-tracking infrastructure. They provided him and the site with reliable reporting available nowhere else.

Marshall’s undeniable achievement notwithstanding, traditional newspaper men and women tend to be unimpressed by the style of journalism practiced at the political Web sites. Operating on the basis of a Lippmann-like reverence for inside knowledge and contempt for those who lack it, many view these sites the way serious fiction authors might view the “novels” tapped out by Japanese commuters on their cell phones. Real reporting, especially the investigative kind, is expensive, they remind us. Aggregation and opinion are cheap.

And it is true: no Web site spends anything remotely like what the best newspapers do on reporting. Even after the latest round of new cutbacks and buyouts are carried out, the Times will retain a core of more than twelve hundred newsroom employees, or approximately fifty times as many as the Huffington Post. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times maintain between eight hundred and nine hundred editorial employees each. The Times’ Baghdad bureau alone costs around three million dollars a year to maintain. And while the Huffington Post shares the benefit of these investments, it shoulders none of the costs.

Despite the many failures at newspapers, the vast majority of reporters and editors have devoted years, even decades, to understanding the subjects of their stories. It is hard to name any bloggers who can match the professional expertise, and the reporting, of, for example, the Post ’s Barton Gellman and Dana Priest, or the Times’ Dexter Filkins and Alissa Rubin.

In October, 2005, at an advertisers’ conference in Phoenix, Bill Keller complained that bloggers merely “recycle and chew on the news,” contrasting that with the Times’ emphasis on what he called “a ‘journalism of verification,’ ” rather than mere “assertion.”

“Bloggers are not chewing on the news. They are spitting it out,” Arianna Huffington protested in a Huffington Post blog. Like most liberal bloggers, she takes exception to the assumption by so many traditional journalists that their work is superior to that of bloggers when it comes to ferreting out the truth. The ability of bloggers to find the flaws in the mainstream media’s reporting of the Iraq war “highlighted the absurdity of the knee jerk comparison of the relative credibility of the so-called MSM and the blogosphere,” she said, and went on, “In the run-up to the Iraq war, many in the mainstream media, including the New York Times, lost their veneer of unassailable trustworthiness for many readers and viewers, and it became clear that new media sources could be trusted—and indeed are often much quicker at correcting mistakes than old media sources.”

But Huffington fails to address the parasitical relationship that virtually all Internet news sites and blog commentators enjoy with newspapers. The Huffington Post made a gesture in the direction of original reporting and professionalism last year when it hired Thomas Edsall, a forty-year veteran of the Washington Post and other papers, as its political editor. At the time he was approached by the Huffington Post, Edsall said, he felt that the Post had become “increasingly driven by fear—the fear of declining readership, the fear of losing advertisers, the fear of diminishing revenues, the fear of being swamped by the Internet, the fear of irrelevance. Fear drove the paper, from top to bottom, to corrupt the entire news operation.” Joining the Huffington Post, Edsall said, was akin to “getting out of jail,” and he has written, ever since, with a sense of liberation. But such examples are rare.

And so even if one agrees with all of Huffington’s jabs at the Times, and Edsall’s critique of the Washington Post, it is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know.

In a recent episode of “The Simpsons,” a cartoon version of Dan Rather introduced a debate panel featuring “Ron Lehar, a print journalist from the Washington Post.” This inspired Bart’s nemesis Nelson to shout, “Haw haw! Your medium is dying!”

“Nelson!” Principal Skinner admonished the boy.

“But it is!” was the young man’s reply.

Nelson is right. Newspapers are dying; the evidence of diminishment in economic vitality, editorial quality, depth, personnel, and the over-all number of papers is everywhere. What this portends for the future is complicated. Three years ago, Rupert Murdoch warned newspaper editors, “Many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent . . . quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along.” Today, almost all serious newspapers are scrambling to adapt themselves to the technological and community-building opportunities offered by digital news delivery, including individual blogs, video reports, and “chat” opportunities for readers. Some, like the Times and the Post, will likely survive this moment of technological transformation in different form, cutting staff while increasing their depth and presence online. Others will seek to focus themselves locally. Newspaper editors now say that they “get it.” Yet traditional journalists are blinkered by their emotional investment in their Lippmann-like status as insiders. They tend to dismiss not only most blogosphere-based criticisms but also the messy democratic ferment from which these criticisms emanate. The Chicago Tribune recently felt compelled to shut down comment boards on its Web site for all political news stories. Its public editor, Timothy J. McNulty, complained, not without reason, that “the boards were beginning to read like a community of foul-mouthed bigots.”

Arianna Huffington, for her part, believes that the online and the print newspaper model are beginning to converge: “As advertising dollars continue to move online—as they slowly but certainly are—HuffPost will be adding more and more reporting and the Times and Post model will continue with the kinds of reporting they do, but they’ll do more of it originally online.” She predicts “more vigorous reporting in the future that will include distributed journalism—wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting of the kind that was responsible for the exposing of the Attorneys General firing scandal.” As for what may be lost in this transition, she is untroubled: “A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom—with important stories dying on the front page of the New York Times.”

The survivors among the big newspapers will not be without support from the nonprofit sector. ProPublica, funded by the liberal billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler and headed by the former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger, hopes to provide the mainstream media with the investigative reporting that so many have chosen to forgo. The Center for Independent Media, headed by David Bennahum, a former writer at Wired, recently hired Jefferson Morley, from the Washington Post, and Allison Silver, a former editor at both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, to oversee a Web site called the Washington Independent. It’s one of a family of news-blogging sites meant to pick up some of the slack left by declining staffs in local and Washington reporting, with the hope of expanding everywhere. But to imagine that philanthropy can fill all the gaps arising from journalistic cutbacks is wishful thinking.

And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news”––and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion––will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.” This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

The transformation will also engender serious losses. By providing what Bill Keller, of the Times, calls the “serendipitous encounters that are hard to replicate in the quicker, reader-driven format of a Web site”—a difference that he compares to that “between a clock and a calendar”—newspapers have helped to define the meaning of America to its citizens. To choose one date at random, on the morning of Monday, February 11th, I picked up the paper-and-ink New York Times on my doorstep, and, in addition to the stories one could have found anywhere—Obama defeating Clinton again and the Bush Administration’s decision to seek the death penalty for six Guantánamo detainees—the front page featured a unique combination of articles, stories that might disappear from our collective consciousness were there no longer any institution to generate and publish them. These included a report from Nairobi, by Jeffrey Gettleman, on the effect of Kenya’s ethnic violence on the country’s middle class; a dispatch from Doha, by Tamar Lewin, on the growth of American university campuses in Qatar; and, in a scoop that was featured on the Huffington Post’s politics page and excited much of the blogosphere that day, a story, by Michael R. Gordon, about the existence of a study by the RAND Corporation which offered a harsh critique of the Bush Administration’s performance in Iraq. The juxtaposition of these disparate topics forms both a baseline of knowledge for the paper’s readers and a picture of the world they inhabit. In “Imagined Communities” (1983), an influential book on the origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson recalls Hegel’s comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of morning prayer: “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” It is at least partially through the “imagined community” of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that nations are forged.

Finally, we need to consider what will become of those people, both at home and abroad, who depend on such journalistic enterprises to keep them safe from various forms of torture, oppression, and injustice. “People do awful things to each other,” the veteran war photographer George Guthrie says in “Night and Day,” Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play about foreign correspondents. “But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.” Ever since James Franklin’s New England Courant started coming off the presses, the daily newspaper, more than any other medium, has provided the information that the nation needed if it was to be kept out of “the dark.” Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of “light” that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat in John Dewey’s tradition may not wish to see answered. ♦

Press Release from PNG Sustainable Energy Ltd (a subsidiary of PNG Sustainable Development Programme (PNGSDP)

Between Monday 17 and Wednesday 19 March, the National Fisheries College (NFC) in Kavieng, New Ireland, hosted the inaugural Coconut Oil Biofuel Symposium. The symposium brought together key stakeholders from the public and private sector to share experiences with using coconut oil fuel and to develop strategies to promote the sustainable development of associated technologies in Papua New Guinea.

In recent years the rising price of diesel fuel has acted as a major barrier to the access to rural power and affordable transport, both on land and at sea. In response a number of private practitioners have successfully begun using locally produced coconut oil as a diesel substitute. These innovators have encouraged Government, development organizations, business and private operators to investigate and adopt the technology as a development mechanism.

The symposium was co-sponsored by the National Fisheries Authority (NFA) and PNG Sustainable Energy Limited (PNG SEL). Both organisations are actively involved in developing coconut oil biofuel projects within the country and believe these technologies can improve rural livelihoods by reducing dependence on imported and increasingly more expensive diesel fuel.

The symposium was initiated at the direction of NFA Managing Director, Sylvester Pokajam, to encourage collaboration of key stakeholders and share information between groups involved in coconut oil biofuel development and production. “We are all working towards a common goal of developing these technologies to improve the livelihoods of rural Papua New Guineans. If we all work together we can work more effectively,” said Mr Pokajam.

The keynote speaker at the event was Steven Hobbs, a biofuel expert from Australia, who provided a wealth of technical advice and practical instruction. Mr Hobbs was sponsored to attend the symposium by the regional EU DEVFISH project, which has also supported trials of engine conversion kits supplied from Australia.

Other key participants included: Project Support Services from Lae, who supply a range of coconut oil processing equipment and appropriate technology machinery; Buka Metal Fabricators, who have been operating gensets and vehicles on coconut oil for more than four years; Copra Cocoa Institute (CCI), Madang; University of Technology (Unitech), Lae; Maritime Safety Authority, and; representatives from NFA and PNG SEL.

The symposium also provided a forum to review strategies for participating in the Sustainable Energy Financing Project (SEFP). The SEFP is a World Bank initiative comprising a US$9.48 million GEF grant that aims to significantly increase the adoption and use of renewable energy technologies within PNG and other Pacific island countries.

The SEFP will provide affordable financing options for users that wish to purchase renewable energy technologies. PNG SEL is the implementing agency for the SEFP in PNG and is preparing the product catalogue for individuals to select the most appropriate technology. For businesses, a satisfactory business plan will be required before the business can participate.

PNG SEL is currently operating a small coconut oil biofuel project on the Aroma Coast of Central Province and has more biofuel projects in design phase. Peter Martin, the CEO of PNG SEL, was highly encouraged by the outcomes of the symposium and the future direction the biofuel network. “The symposium was a fantastic initiative and PNG SEL will continue to work with local partners to develop commercial biofuel projects and to support the SEFP as the implementing agency,” said Mr Martin.

The first two days of the symposium primarily consisted of presentations by the various event participants, generally covering the technical aspects of coconut oil production, processing and utilisation in diesel engines. This was complimented with a site visit to the NFA’s coconut oil biofuel processing facility in Kavieng, which has been processing approximately 800 litres per day, most of which has been used to fuel marine vessels. The third day consisted of group discussions and workshops to develop strategies to increase availability of coconut oil fuel.

The NFA coconut oil facility was initiated over a year ago to explore fuel alternative opportunities for fishing vessel operation and to stimulate coastal community copra production as an alternative cash income to over fishing the beche de mer fishery. “I’m often asked why the NFA is involved in coconut oil biofuel,” said Mr Pokajam. “It is primarily due to the spiralling cost of diesel and its impact on commercial fisheries economic viability. At the same time, we can see real value for rural communities from revitalising the copra industry.”

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Disclosure: NFA website was developed by Masalai Communications

By Emmanuel Narokobi

In light of the governments revised ICT Policy which you can read in detail here and here. Digicel PNG have come out with their press release on the revised policy.

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A monopoly on International Communications will mean poorer service and less competition

Wednesday, 26 March, 2008 – Port Moresby: Digicel, the fastest-growing mobile operator in the Pacific, has expressed concern about the impact on mobile consumers and the business community following the approval by the National Executive Commission (NEC) of the revised ICT policy which states that Telikom should have a monopoly to operate a single international gateway.

According to Kevin O’Sullivan, CEO of Digicel Papua New Guinea: “With only one gateway operating, people will experience higher calling rates, lower quality of calls due to network congestion as well as limited international roaming services. “

“a single failure at the Telikom International Gateway would isolate Papua New Guinean businesses from the global economy and the population from their family and friends abroad.” added O’Sullivan.

Digicel should be able to continue to operate its own International Gateway and continue to compete with the service that Telikom operates. Digicel, through the existing open competition in international telecommunication services, currently provides consumers with enhanced quality telecommunication services at affordable prices.

“To remove Digicel’s international gateway would be a step backward from the current open market approach. The people have tasted the benefits of competition and have the right to continue to enjoy those benefits. These benefits speak for themselves, lower prices, better quality, increased coverage and introduction of new services such as the ability to travel to 87 countries and use your Digicel PNG mobile number.”

Digicel points to the recent example in the Middle East when submarine cables in the Mediterranean were severed last month, resulting in a breakdown of internet access for people in Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and other areas of the region.  

A similar situation occurred in the Caribbean in May 2007 when an undersea cable was cut in the Caribbean Sea affecting Guyana, Trinidad and the French West Indies. As the incumbent telecommunications company in Guyana, GT&T, has a monopoly through that single cable on international calls, Guyana was completely shut off from the rest of the world with local business experiencing significant financial losses.

The revised ICT policy, as approved by the National Executive Commission (NEC) on February 13, effectively grants Telikom a monopoly on the international gateway. Digicel advocates an ICT policy that is pro-competition and which places the interests of customers first. Competition in the mobile communications market delivers state-of-the-art networks with innovative services at affordable prices to the people. The transformation of Telikom must be driven by competition and customer choice not protectionism and monopolies.

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Disclosure: Digicel PNG is a website client of Masalai Communications

By Emmanuel Narokobi

Oli Wilson, a young man from the land of the long white clouds has been in PNG for a couple of months doing his PHD on the recording industry in Port Moresby. So if you’re into music and the business side of it come along to the UPNG Main Lecture Theatre on Thursday, 27th March at 3pm to hear his seminar.

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“Research Perspectives on Commercial Music Production in Port Moresby”

By Oli Wilson (PhD Candidate, Otago University, New Zealand)

Abstract:

Popular music, brought about by urbanization and the development of third world cities, has previously been considered unworthy of scholarly attention, as it appeared not to connote important rituals or significant cultural performance. However, recent trends in ethnomusicology acknowledge that popular music has important cultural functions among the majority of the world’s cultures. Of particular interest has been its capacity to reflect and stimulate cultural change. Ethnomusicological studies of popular music from different cultures have challenged disciplinary concepts of authenticity and tradition, and have questioned how these concepts relate to the construction and representation of identity. This paper outlines how investigation into the commercial music industry in Port Moresby provides a relevant case study of the impact music industry technology has on musical culture, and how music industry and technological developments influences the construction and representation of cultural identity.

By Emmanuel Narokobi

Thanks to some great investigative journalism from Dionisia of the Islands Business magazine, she brought to light for us the financing relationship between Digicel and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). There are concerns that such an access to finance will kill local telecoms in the Pacific and yes that is a very high probability. There is the equal concern as well as to whether local ICT companies can have access to such financing as well.

Digicel is not a new client to the IFC for loans. In our case for PNG, Digicel will be getting a US$40million loan to use for it’s investment in PNG. As the IFC website states, Digicel PNG is conducting what they call a ‘greenfield project’ which ‘…will introduce competition in a low penetration market, where the incumbent, Telikom PNG, currently exercises a monopoly.’

I imagine that since all this information is on the IFC website for anyone to access it is not such a secret. So I think at this juncture I’d like to say ‘Hello and Welcome to the Brave New World of Global Competition!’ With financing like this available to Digicel are they unfairly advantaged? I think that’s debatable, but for starters it isn’t illegal. Is it unethical?, possibly, maybe from IFC. But this is business in the real world. I ultimately don’t think it would make a difference to the mobile war here whether Digicel is getting US$40 milllion from IFC or from any other commercial source.

If Telikom wants to compete, it’s plain and simple..hire and fire who you have to to get the job done right. There is no more time for bullshit. We all know we have the expertise to compete and if Telikom wants ‘to be there’ for us then roll those sleeves up and lets get our hands dirty. Peter Loko is doing a great job, but the individual departments he heads seem to be doing their own thing, and I’m saying this from personal experience.

Telikom is not short of money, nor is it short of manpower. To be honest whether Telikom knew this or not doesn’t make any difference to their efforts. I see this as a great opportunity for Telikom to challenge themselves and to raise the bar of their service offerings. Sure it may take a while or we may have hiccups but as long as you keep communicating with us by telling is what is happening and what you are doing about it to solve the problem. (Which I must say they have been doing).

On the issue of IFC financing, if we have effectively run companies in PNG and we do not have issues with mismanagement then IFC must allow local Telecoms the same opportunity to that financing. I know it will be a hard task considering how state run enterprises have always suffered from political interference. But therein lies the answer and the challenge.

Telikom, take on the challenge and show us what PNG can do!

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Disclosure: Digicel PNG is a website client of Masalai Communications

By Emmanuel Narokobi

I came across an excerpt from a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt on one of my favourite blogs. The speech was given in Paris in 1910, but it seems just as relevant today for someone running a small business like mine. I found it inspiring, so I thought I’d share it with you all.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

So if you believe enough in yourself and you work hard enough, and if things still fail at least you failed while daring greatly. But then you go again, pick yourself up and try again. Are you the Man in the Arena?

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The full speech can be read here, http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/research/speech%20arena.htm

By Emmanuel Narokobi

I get a bucketload of spam every day, I mean without fail nearly 100 spam mails a day. So trying to do some ‘Munging’ of my email address on my company website. (Weird name huh??!). Hope this helps and here’s an article I found that explains.

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Munge has often been defined as “Mash Until No Good”. This may be the common definition of the word, but it’s not what we are talking about in this article.

What we are talking about is spam. One of the most insidious and pervasive foulnesses on the internet. There are thousands of scumbag spammers working day and night attempting to figure out your email address so they can send you silly emails about products that no person in their right mind would purchase.

How do these sleazeballs find your email address? Well, generally, they get it from you in one way or another. You see, spammers look everywhere for email addresses. They are like cockroaches - they are always waiting in the dark corners of the internet, feeding off of the trash and refuse that falls onto the floor, so to speak.

There are an incredible number of ways that a spammer can get your email address. Here is a short list of a few.

• Spammers have automatic robots which scan newsgroup messages, looking for all of the email addresses that they can find.

• They have additional automatic programs which spider web sites, pulling email addresses off web pages. They especially like to scan through guestbooks, as these tend to be full of juicy email addresses and web site URLs.

• Another common method is to use automatic programs to scan message boards. There are tons of email addresses stored on many of these places.

So what do you do?

You can simply become a lurker and not post to anything. Personally, I don’t like this solution as it is tantamount to surrendering to the scumbags.

Another common method is to get one of those free email accounts and use it as your return address. This is very simple, but since those email accounts can fill up with spam very fast, they can become unusable almost overnight.

One easy and straightforward technique is to munge your email address. This means you change your email address in some obvious manner to make it impossible for the automatic spam robots to get the correct name.

Most people will simply add a word like “nospam” or “removetoreply” to their email name. Thus, if your email address is “tom@anywhere.com”, you could post under the email address of “tom_nospam@anywhere.com”. Spam spiders are not smart enough to remove the “nospam” portion of the address, but most humans see what’s going on right away.

This is NOT the correct way to munge your email address.

Instead, change your email address as follows:

• tom(at)anywhere.com

• tom(at)anywhere(dot)com

• tom@anywhere.invalid

• tom@anywhere-removetoreply-.com

Do not ever change the name to the left of the @ sign, as this puts a burden on your ISP or email provider. You see, when the spammer sends an email message to that address (and that’s what he will do when he harvests it off a newsgroup or web site) it will “bounce” at your email provider. This requires that your provider use their resources to handle the invalid email address.

By placing it after the @ sign as shown in the example above, you ensure that the email does not ever get to your email provider.

It’s usually a good idea to include a short sentence in your posting which explains what you are doing. Something like “If you reply, be sure and remove the ‘-removetoreply-’ from the email address.” A good place for this line is in the signature of your email or newsgroup posting.

DO NOT include your actual email address in text form in your signature or the message, as most spam robots look at the text to find email addresses. So your signature might read “to reply send email to tom(at)anywhere(dot)com.” Most people are smart enough to figure this out.

This is very common on posts to newsgroups, so don’t worry. If people need to respond directly to you they will figure it out. However, in general, newsgroup responses should go to the newsgroup anyway, so it’s not critical that your email address be correct.

It’s not as useful in email clients and not a very common technique. Very few people will go to the trouble to correct your email address when they are replying to a message from you. Because of this, you may not want to munge the email reply-to address, unless, of course, you are sending an email to a large group or a message board.

Most email and newsgroup clients allow you to specify the reply-to address in the setup or account definition screen. Just put your munged email address in that location instead of your real address. Then set up your signature with the appropriate instructions.

If you are including a munged email address on your web site, be sure and include specific instructions right next to the place where the email address is shown. This is NOT a very common practice on web sites, so you might want to try other methods of hiding your email address first.

Is this effective? Yes, in general it will help cut down on spam from newsgroups, message board postings and web sites. However, it is not perfect and will not stop everything. It’s just one more tool in the arsenal we all need to keep in our war against unethical spammers.

By Emmanuel Narokobi

With the healthy discussions going on about the soon to come, National TV Station (NTS) and VB’s suggestions for user created content for the TV station (like http://current.com), I stumbled upon a new site this morning. This is an interesting move for an established media company, but looks like CNN has taken the plunge as well, with their introduction of the currently beta stage, http://www.ireport.com/ website.

As described on their website, iReport is for uncensored, user-powered news. CNN built the tools, you take it from there. All the stories here are user-generated and instant: CNN does not vet or verify their authenticity or accuracy before they post. The ones with the “On CNN” stamp have been vetted and used in CNN news coverage.

They explain more as follows:

“The views and content on this site are solely those of the iReport.com contributors. CNN makes no guarantees about the content or the coverage on iReport.com!

Lots of people argue about what constitutes news. But, really, it’s just something that happens someplace to someone. Whether that something is newsworthy mostly depends on who it affects — and who’s making the decision. On iReport.com, that is you! So we’ve this site and equipped it with some nifty tools for posting, discovering and talking about what you think makes the cut.Use the tools you find here to share and talk about the news of your world, whether that’s video and photos of the events of your life, or your own take on what’s making international headlines. Or, even better, a little bit of both.With this site, we want to share our passion about the news in a way that invites you — and everyone else — to share your passion about the news. At CNN we live for news. We love talking about it. And we know that there’s a whole lot more to it than what you see on TV or read on your favorite Web site. So we’ve launched an independent world where you, the iReport.com community, tell the stories we’re not used to seeing. And the most compelling, important, and urgent ones may get seen on CNN.So head on over the homepage and jump in. Tell your story and see how it connects to someone on the other side of the world — and build a new kind of news site, one made from communities of shared interests, impassioned discussions and great storytelling.”

 

 The National Newspaper By FRANK ASAELI
THE West New Britain provincial (WNBP) government, in its first step in delivering services to the people, paid K200,000 last Tuesday to Telikom PNG Ltd for the installation of VSAT satellite services within the province.
WNBP Governor Harry Humphreys and Telikom sealed the deal to have Telikom set up five VSAT (very small aperture terminals) terminals in selected areas of the province, opening up telephone and data services to areas which had previously been isolated. Mr Humphreys said this was a very significant day for his provincial government. “This is the first step we are taking towards enabling service delivery to our people in remote areas,” he said “To understand the significance, you need to understand the geography of this province: we have a small developed area on the north coast and a vast undeveloped area on the south coast and parts of the north coast of New Ireland,” he said.

Mr Humphreys said it is the WNBP policy as a government to address that imbalance as a priority, and obviously telecommunications is one to be addressed. He said with K3.2 million allocated for WNBP’s development programme, especially for offices and housing for public servants and local level government infrastructure, K1.6 million had been released already and on top of that, K250,000 for the VSAT terminals that would be installed in the more remote areas.

Telikom board director Clark Kuluniasi said for them, rural telecommunication is very important and they have a programme currently funded by government with K30 million. “But it really depends on the Finance Department,” he said.

By Emmanuel Narokobi

Just a tok save to everyone out there that on 20 February 2008 the Government notified the Commission of a revised Government Policy on the National Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) Policy, which the Commission is required by law to carry out. The Government Policy which is detailed in the attached Gazettal Notice, should be read in conjunction with the refinements (Revising Government Policy for ICT Sector Reform) that the Government has made to the ICT Policy, dated February 2008.

The above and more information on ICT competition can be seen at the ICCC website, http://www.iccc.gov.pg/ Also want to say how impressed I am at the efforts of ICCC in maintaining one of the most up-to-date government websites.

By MALUM NALU
A QUITE revolution is taking place in Papua New Guinea which promises to bring about massive development to our beloved country.
This is the development of what is known as PNGARNet, short for Papua New Guinea Academic and Research Network, which is being spearheaded by our universities, in particular the Divine Word University in Madang.
PNGARNET, set to be launched next month, is a company wholly-owned by the PNG Vice-Chancellors Committee.
PNGARNET was formed with the express purpose of facilitating the efficient cost-effective delivery of Internet services to Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) and research in PNG so that PNG tertiary students can receive a world-class education.
Potentially, all those organisations, which are part of the Office of Higher Education (OHE) in PNG, can become involved in PNGARNET.
In its initial and start-up phase, the original formation group of the PNG universities is spearheading the development.
The Universities of PNG are either state-funded or non state-funded.
The state-funded universities are University of Goroka, University of Papua New Guinea, University of Technology and Vudal University.
The non state-funded universities are Divine Word University and Pacific Adventist University.
These six universities are the founding institutions of PNGARNET along with National Research Institute (NRI) and National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI).
PNGARNET is providing efficient Internet resources to its members through a satellite Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN).
The typology of PNGARNET attempts to provide each member institution with complete institutional integrity as well a provide potentials for intercommunications.
At Divine Word University in Madang last weekend, I was able to see for myself initial work on this exciting project, which promises to bring about untold development
PNGARNET was formed three years ago by the OHE and its stakeholders, the six universities, with DWU’s visionary president Father Jan Czuba appointed as chairman to commence dialogue with Telikom and PANGTEL.
“The benefits will be tremendous,” Fr Czuba said in an interview.
“The whole approach to teaching and learning in PNG will change.
“Having access to information will significantly reduce the cost of higher education.
“Instead of flying in professors, they can teach using video conferencing.
“To improve our quality of higher education, we need to have resources, which are very expensive.
“The PNGARNET will allow have student to have access (to these resources).
“That’s a huge advantage.
“It will open up new opportunities for PNG students, with unlimited access to universities in US, Australia and New Zealand.”
Fr Czuba said ARNET had the full backing of Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare and his Ministers.
The PNGARNET system is designed around a VLAN implemented through satellite technology.
It is designed to help answer the challenge that the universities of PNG offer a quality education to PNG citizens.
The third PNG National Educational Plan offers the challenge that the universities provide a world class education to its citizens.
This plan presumes that PNG tertiary students will be able to access the learning resources that are commonly provided via Internet connections, thus, PNG students must become world learners.
PNGARNET will employ satellite technology to link the universities of PNG to each other and to the World Wide Web.
To achieve this linkage, PNGARNET provides the infrastructure to coordinate the satellite system.
PNGARNET enables the satellite dishes to coordinate with central servers, which happen to be installed at this point in time, in Hong Kong.
The company, PNGARNET, also provides the central skill base in order to train staff for each institution.
PNGARNET is designed to not limit the independence of any university and to maximise the skill sharing for all universities.
The vision of PNGARNET is that this satellite link will connect all the institutions of higher education in PNG.
This linking will take time, and in the first stages, the major partners are all the universities of PNG, NRI and NARI.
It is hoped that other institutions of higher education will join the scheme as funding becomes available, as they grow in confidence in the scheme, and as the scheme matures into benefits for PNG tertiary students.
It is also anticipated that other schemes will evolve, similar to PNGARNET, for higher education.
It is hoped that hospitals and secondary schools might also develop similar projects to enhance their provision of services and to better attain their goals.
PNGARNET has the mission to provide efficient, cost-effective Internet to institutions of higher education in PNG.
The objectives of PNGARNET are simple ones.
These objectives are to offer PNG higher education institutions increased bandwidth that is reliable, cost effective and of a bandwidth suitable to be educationally advantageous.
At the same time, PNGARNET seeks to maintain and promote institutional independence and encourage collaboration.
Further, PNGARNET seeks to develop skills and ICT capacities in all its institutions by enabling skill-sharing, inter-institution training, and bringing new skills sets into play.
As these possibilities are exploited and used in daily teaching and administration tasks, then the goals of PNGARNET are being achieved.
Chandana Silva, ICT manager of DWU, and his team have collated the equipment needs of the major initial PNGARNET partners.
The equipment including satellite dishes, antennae and Block Up Converters (BUCs) - a device used in the transmission of satellite signals - for the sites of the PNGARNET partners has been sourced mainly from China.
The coordination of this equipment has been a large undertaking.
Mr Silva is in Hong Kong this week to commission the PNGARNet set-up there in time for the launch next month.
All over this increasingly-globalised world, a massive Information Revolution is taking place as economies use ICT as a passport to what economists call the “New Economy”.
Papua New Guinea will continue to remain light years behind the rest of the world if we do not jump on the ICT bandwagon in this globalised world.
Access to Internet, adequate infrastructure, human capacity building and appropriate policies on ICT are central issues in addressing the digital divide.
Success in this globalised world is predicated on ICT knowledge and successful knowledge-based economies will be based on the efficient and widespread use of ICT by all sectors within any given country.
ARNET is indeed a giant step in the right direction for Papua New Guinea.

By Emmanuel Narokobi

After several postings on biofuels here, here, here, here and here. This email I got from my sister this morning is probably a good point in having a balanced view on the move towards biofuels. Read below:

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Each day, 820 million people in the developing world do not have enough food to eat¹. Food prices around the world are shooting up, sparking food riots from Mexico² to Morocco³. And the World Food Program warned last week that rapidly rising costs are endangering emergency food supplies for the world’s worst-off⁴.

How are the wealthiest countries responding? They’re burning food.

Specifically, they’re using more and more biofuels–alcohol made from plant products, used in place of petrol to fuel cars. Biofuels are billed as a way to slow down climate change. But in reality, because so much land is being cleared to grow them, most biofuels today are causing more global warming emissions than they prevent⁵, even as they push the price of corn, wheat, and other foods out of reach for millions of people⁶.

Not all biofuels are bad–but without tough global standards, the biofuels boom will further undermine food security and worsen global warming. Click here to use our simple tool to send a message to your head of state before this weekend’s global summit on climate change in Chiba, Japan, and help build a global call for biofuels regulation:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/biofuel_standards_now/10.php?cl=61199994

Sometimes the trade-off is stark: filling the tank of an SUV with ethanol requires enough corn to feed a person for a year⁷. But not all biofuels are bad; making ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane is vastly more efficient than US-grown corn, for example, and green technology for making fuel from waste is improving rapidly.

The problem is that the EU and the US have set targets for increasing the use of biofuels without sorting the good from the bad. As a result, rainforests are being cleared in Indonesia to grow palm oil for European biodiesel refineries, and global grain reserves are running dangerously low. Meanwhile, rich-country politicians can look “green” without asking their citizens to conserve energy, and agribusiness giants are cashing in. And if nothing changes, the situation will only get worse.

What’s needed are strong global standards that encourage better biofuels and shut down the trade in bad ones. Such standards are under development by a number of coalitions⁸, but they will only become mandatory if there’s a big enough public outcry. It’s time to move: this Friday through Saturday, the twenty countries with the biggest economies, responsible for more than 75% of the world’s carbon emissions⁹, will meet in Chiba, Japan to begin the G8’s climate change discussions. Before the summit, let’s raise a global cry for change on biofuels:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/biofuel_standards_now/10.php?cl=61199994

A call for change before this week’s summit won’t end the food crisis, or stop global warming. But it’s a critical first step. By confronting false solutions and demanding real ones, we can show our leaders that we want to do the right thing, not the easy thing.

As Kate, an Avaaz member in Colorado, wrote about biofuels, “Turning food into oil when people are already starving? My car isn’t more important than someone’s hungry child.”

It’s time to put the life of our fellow people, and our planet, above the politics and profits that too often drive international decision-making. This will be a long fight. But it’s one that we join eagerly–because the stakes are too high to do anything else.

With hope,

Ben, Ricken, Iain, Galit, Paul, Graziela, Pascal, Esra’a, Milena — the Avaaz.org team

SOURCES:

By Emmanuel Narokobi

I had the honour this morning of having breakfast with Australian actor Ernie Dingo. Masalai was a minor sponsor at the event organised by Leadership PNG (LPNG) and the Australian High Commission so I found myself sitting at the main table right in front of the podium with the likes of Syd Yates of the Kina Group, His Excellency, Mr. Chris Moraitis, the Australian High Commissioner to PNG, Founders of LPNG and of course Australia’s living national treasure, Ernie Dingo himself.

To be honest I was quite nervous when I was told that I could sit at table 16. I knew that I was a minor sponsor of the event but I felt extremely awkward sitting next to the Australian High Commissioner and then having Ernie Dingo calling me from across the table for the ‘Susu’ (yeah he knew what the word meant).

So what did I think of him? Well as he said it himself when he got up to speak, he loves himself and he’s a terrible showoff. But don’t think I mean it in a negative way, you see Ernie came from Western Australia from pretty much a country lifestyle and from the lack of mention of his father I am assuming that he was brought up predominantly by his mother. But it was the people who believed in him and gave him the love and respect to realise his dreams that allowed him to express himself without fear. He recalls a sports teacher by the name of Mr. Jennings who realising that Ernie could be a basketball player encouraged him to get into that sport. From what I gathered his early success at playing basketball as an 11 year oldamong adults at the time gave him a great confidence in himself and his abilities. Because for himself he truly believes that you have to honestly love yourself and honour yourself before you can take that on to the rest of the world. So Ernie continued on in his young basketball career to play all around Western Australia. But as you would have it, his basketball team mates also loved to sing and dance on the side. This lead to people paying for them to perform and for Ernie that then lead him into the show-biz star that he is today.

My first impression of him since I first discovered him as a child watching the film Storm Boy and up to now with his antics on the ‘Great Outdoors’ travel show was that he was always something of a ‘larakin’. A funny man if you will, but I can see that under all that acting, smiling and belly gripping humour is a man who has a serious message which comes across through him being a symbol of success against all the social and economic odds that may have stood in his way. The symbol he stands for is simply that all you need to get anywhere in life is to really look within yourself and to the role models around you. His mother has instilled allot of self pride in himself but he listed many great people who he had met briefly and who have influenced him. He put it this way, that we all have a bit of others in ourself. He says Kevin Rudd did a wonderful thing recently and he feels like he has a bit of Kevin in him now, because we all learn and are inspired by people around us.

Ernie went on to develop this idea of inspiration by saying that we are all able to extend the good that others begin and sometimes even take that to levels we never dreamed would be possible. But coming full circle now he pointed out that he was the only black Australian on TV and has been for a long time now. So he asked when should he give it a rest? And if he did, who would be there to take on the mantel? Who will take on his legacy or more appropriately put, who will take on the responsibility of continuing to educate and bring together the other half of Australia. He knows that he is not the only one obviously, but he fully understands that he is the most obvious one on show to the rest of the world.

Ernie’s talk about his people and his language made me realise how little I know about our ‘other’ Australian brothers. Music and Art are things we both share and use to express ourselves and Ernie suggested that it could be one way for us to learn from each other. I am obviously biased when I think of these things because my thoughts always turn from identifying art and talent and then looking at how it can be shared. So as Ernie continued to list a number of Aboriginal artists, my thoughts drifted away with ideas of Imparja TV showing PNG musical trips and tours to Australia and organising tours in PNG of cultural and art exhibitions. I do think that we can learn allot from each other in dealing with the pressures of globalisation. Not just economic globalisation but on a cultural level as well and I don’t mean just for Aboriginals and PNG’eans alone but the whole of the Pacific as well.

I have been to Australia many times in my life and I have lived there as well and Ernie has only made me ponder more about a vast part of his country which seems alien to me and is waiting to be discovered. And all because Ernie bothered to love himself a little more than the next bloke with RM Williams in Western Australia.

A versatile new process for making biofuels could slash their cost. By Kevin Bullis

As he leads a tour of the labs at Coskata, a startup based in Warrenville, IL, Richard Tobey, the company’s vice president of research and development, pauses in front of a pair of clear plastic tubes packed with bundles of white fibers. The tubes are the core of a bioreactor, which is itself the heart of a new tech­nology that Coskata claims can make etha­nol out of wood chips, household garbage, grass, and old tires–indeed, just about any organic material. The bioreactor, Tobey explains, allows the company to combine thermochemical and biological approaches to synthesizing ethanol. Taking advantage of both, he says, makes Coskata’s process cheaper and more versatile than either the technologies widely used today to make ethanol from corn or the experimental processes designed to work with sources other than corn.

Tobey’s tour begins at the far end of the laboratory in two small rooms full of pipes, throbbing pumps, and pressurized tanks–all used to process synthesis gas (also known as syngas), a mixture of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen. This is the thermo­chemical part of Coskata’s process: in a well-known technique called gasi­­fication, a series of chemical reactions carried out at high temperatures can produce syngas from almost any organic material. Ordi­narily, chemical catalysts are then used to convert the syngas into a mixture of alcohols that includes ethanol. But making such a mixture is intrinsically inefficient: the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen that go into the other alcohols could, in principle, have gone into ethanol instead. So this is where Coskata turns from chemistry to biology, using microbes to convert the syngas to ethanol more efficiently.

Down the hall from the syngas-­processing equipment, Tobey shows off the petri dishes, flasks, and sealed hoods used to develop species of bacteria that eat syngas. The bioreactors sit at the far end of the room. Inside the bioreactors’ tubes, syngas is fed directly to the bacteria, which produce a steady stream of ethanol.

Coskata’s technology could be a big deal. Today, almost all ethanol made in the United States comes from corn grain; because cultivating corn requires a lot of land, water, and energy, corn-derived ethanol does little to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and can actually cause other environmental damage, such as water pollution. Alternative etha­nol sources, such as switchgrass, wood chips, and municipal waste, would require far fewer resources. But so far, technology for processing such materials has proved very expensive. That’s why Coskata’s low-cost technique has caught the attention of major investors, including General Motors, which earlier this year announced a partnership with the startup to help deploy its technology on the commercial scale worldwide.

Sipping Ethanol
Combining thermochemical and biological approaches in a hybrid system can make ethanol processing cheaper by increasing yields and allowing the use of inexpensive feedstocks. But Coskata’s process has another advantage, too: it’s fast. Though others have also developed syngas-fed bioreactors, Tobey says, they have been too slow. That’s because the bacteria are suspended in an aqueous culture, and syngas doesn’t dissolve easily in water. Coskata’s new bioreactor, however, delivers the syngas to the bacteria directly.

The thin fibers packed into the bioreactor serve two functions. First, they act as scaffolding: the bacteria grow in biofilms on the outside of the fibers. Second, they serve as a delivery mechanism for the syngas. Even though each fiber is not much bigger than a human hair, Tobey says, it acts like a tiny plastic straw. The researchers pump syngas down the bores of the hollow fibers, and it diffuses through the fiber walls to reach the bacteria. Water flows around the outside of the fibers, delivering vitamins and amino acids to the bacteria and carrying away the ethanol the bacteria produce. But the water and the syngas, Tobey says, never meet.