Victory: Charges Against Student Accused of ‘Disorderly Conduct’ for E-Mail

CLEMSON, South Carolina, May 26, 2010—Clemson University has withdrawn “disorderly conduct,” “harassment,” and two other charges against a student who e-mailed an administrator using “language and tone” that another administrator found “unacceptable.” After undergraduate William Kirwan was charged with a variety of offenses in violation of his First Amendment rights, he turned to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

“Public university administrators cannot punish students simply because they disapprove of their ‘language and tone,’” said FIRE Vice President Robert Shibley. “We commend Clemson’s leadership for putting an end to this violation as soon as FIRE brought it to their attention.”

Read The Rest At Orwell's Dreams

Canada’s Effort to Criminalize Criticism of Israel

Israel’s siege of Gaza has made it a “closed zone” – no access, no exit, cut off from the world. By attempting to shut down criticism of Israel’s practices, Canadian supporters of the government of Israel are creating another “closed zone” in Canada – in which criticism, open debate, and freedom of expression will not be allowed.

Read The Rest Here

Yale Putting Muhammad Above Free Speech

Sixteen organizations will accuse Yale today of failing to stand up for free speech with its decision not to print satirical images of the prophet Muhammad in a book published by Yale University Press last September.

The organizations, which include the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the International Publishers Association, appear as signatories on a statement that will be sent to Yale, chastising the University for not printing Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard’s controversial cartoons. The statement, written by National Coalition against Censorship Executive Director Joan Bertin, argues that by capitulating to threats of violence, Yale has fed a climate in which people will be afraid to speak and publish freely. Yale’s decision drew widespread criticism and debate from professors, students and alumni in the past three months.

“The situation is extremely disturbing because Yale is a very prominent university, and their doing something like this might justify other institutions doing so,” Bertin said. “This action compromised the book, the press and an important principle: not only should academics be able to discuss these things among themselves, but in this country we’re entitled to talk about and view the images.”

The statement is the latest development in a controversy that began last August, when the Press announced it would print Brandeis University professor Jytte Klausen’s book, “The Cartoons that Shook the World,” without the cartoons that incited violent riots when they were first published in a Danish newspaper in 2005.

“Yale and Yale University Press are deeply committed to freedom of speech and expression, so the issues raised here were difficult,” the Yale University Press said in a statement in August. “The decision rested solely on the experts’ assessments that there existed a substantial likelihood of violence that might take the lives of innocent victims.”

A representative of the Press declined to comment further on the issue earlier this month.

When Bertin sent a letter to University and Press officials earlier this month to notify them in advance about the statement released today, University administrators responded by posting a copy of the August statement on Bertin’s blog.

Although some of the signatories of Bertin’s statement have expressed skepticism that reprinting the cartoons in a scholarly book would actually cause bloodshed, Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer said two weeks ago that there is evidence the cartoons are still inflammatory. She pointed to an October incident in Chicago, in which two men were arrested for plotting to kill Flemming Rose, an editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which printed the cartoons in 2005.

Today’s statement, which Bertin co-authored with Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, appeared in print earlier this fall. Bertin and Nelson gave Duke University professor Gary Hull, another signatory, permission to use their statement in his book “Muhammad: The ‘Banned’ Images,” released two weeks ago. The book reprints the images stripped from Klausen’s.

“In my view and the view of the other signatories, what Yale did was really cowardly,” Hull said earlier this month. “There are a lot of smart people at Yale. They should know that for them to cave to what I regard as barbarian behavior leads to nothing but emboldening barbarism and a further erosion of free speech.”

The statement already had more than a dozen signatories — among them Rose, University of California, Los Angeles law professor and first amendment expert Eugene Volokh and Sarah Ruden, a professor at the Yale Divinity School — when Hull published it in his book. Bertin spent several months recruiting additional signatories before sending the statement to Yale.

Source: Yale Daily News

Free speech in a Democracy

By Noam Chomsky

Professor Howard Smokler, responding to a column by Nat Hentoff (June 30), writes that I have "hurt and offended" him by two actions concerning Robert Faurisson, who in 1980 published a book entitled Memoir in Defense Against Those Who Accuse Me of Falsifying History in which, according to Smokler, "he charged that 'the myth of the gas chambers' originated in certain American Zionist circles around 1942 ... "The two actions are: 1) that I "defended Faurisson's right to publish these falsehoods," and 2) that "in a letter to the historian Lucy Dawidowicz, (I) expressed complete agnosticism on the subject of whether Faurisson's views were 'horrendous." I will return to the first point. As for the second, it is not clear on what grounds Professor Smokler might be hurt or offended by a personal letter, which I presume he has never seen, written to a third party, but the question is academic, since he has grossly misinterpreted its contents.

The relevant facts are as follows. Faurisson was a professor of French literature at the University of Lyon. After he published some items in which he denied the existence of gas chambers, he was suspended from teaching on the grounds that the university could not protect him from violence. He was then brought to trial for "falsification of history," and condemned -- the first time in the West, to my knowledge, that the courts have affirmed the familiar Stalinist-fascist doctrine that the State has the right to determine historical truth and to punish deviation from it. I was one of 500 foreign signers of a petition urging that Faurisson's civil rights be respected. Shortly after, in a letter of Sept. 10, 1980, Ms. Dawidowicz wrote me asking whether I "had signed a statement defending Robert Faurisson's right to speak his views," and if so, "what reason compelled me to sign it." On Sept. 18, I wrote her that I had indeed signed a statement defending Faurisson's right to speak his views. As for my reasons, I wrote that "I signed the appeal because I believe that people have the right of freedom and expression whatever their views, that the importance of defending these rights is all the greater when the person expresses views that are abhorrent to virtually everyone (as in this case), and that this becomes particularly important when the person in question is thrown out of his academic position," and subjected to other ill-treatment. I did not know then about the "falsification of history" trial, and had never heard of Faurisson's book, which appeared three months later; this book, as the title indicates, was a defense against the scandalous charges for which he was later sentenced, dealing specifically with the charge that he had falsified the diaries of Nazi doctor Johann Paul Kremer.*

[*Faurisson was not convicted of falsifying history; the Paris Court of Appeals upheld a guilty verdict based on "personal damages" likely to arise from "passionately aggressive actions against all those ... implicitly accused of lying and deception" by the results of Faurisson's research. (Ed. note)]

I also wrote to Ms. Dawidowicz that I was shocked by her query as to why one should defend freedom of speech. I remain shocked today. I might add that no question has ever been raised on the innumerable occasions when I have signed similar petitions for people with all sorts of views, often views of which I know nothing or which I know to be horrendous, or when I have taken far stronger and more controversial stands in support of civil liberties, for example, when I supported the right of American war criminals not only to speak and teach but also to conduct their research, on grounds of academic freedom, at a time when their work was being used to murder and destroy (no one accuses Faurisson of being a war criminal or claims that his work is contributing to massive ongoing crimes). I might note that the utter hypocrisy of Smokler, Dawidowicz and their circles more generally is very clearly demonstrated by the fact that they are "hurt and offended" by my defense of the right of free expression in the Faurisson case, but not by far more controversial and extreme actions of mine in defense of the same rights for people they find more congenial.

I went on to inform Ms. Dawidowicz that I knew very little about Faurisson's work, so that while it may be "horrendous," as claimed by his critics, I obviously could not comment. This is what Smokler reports as an expression of "complete agnosticism." Apparently, he is willing to pass judgment on matters of which he knows nothing, but I am not, and the fact that a person is universally denounced does not suffice for me to join in the parade without at least looking at what he has to say, which I had not done in this case and had no particular interest in doing: I am willing to wager that Smokler has never read a word by Faurisson, nor is there any reason why he should. Furthermore, as I wrote to Ms. Dawidowicz, the nature of his views is, plainly, completely irrelevant to the issue of his right to express them, a truism among civil libertarians that those of a Stalinist-fascist persuasion find quite shocking.

I have discussed Smokler's second charge, based on his distortion of the personal letter to Dawidowicz to which he alludes. Let us consider the first charge. Here he is correct. I do defend the right of Faurisson to publish falsehoods, as I defend the right of anyone else to do so, including Professor Smokler. As I wrote to Ms. Dawidowicz in the letter that Smokler misrepresents, "I thought that all of this had been settled in the 18th century, but apparently others do not agree," including Professor Smokler. He states that my support for familiar Enlightenment principles and my rejection of the Stalinist-fascist doctrine that he advocates hurts and offends him. I am afraid I have no apologies to offer about that. Smokler goes on to deny at length a claim that was never made, either by me or by Nat Hentoff: namely, that my "political rights," including the right of freedom of speech, were denied in the three incidents mentioned by Hentoff: namely, 1) a request by students at Cornell Medical School that I withdraw as commencement speaker (as I did) because my views on Zionism so offended them that the occasion would be spoiled for them no matter what I spoke on; 2) the withdrawal of an invitation by the Middle East Center at the University of Michigan after pressure by faculty members who demanded that I not be permitted to speak on the Middle East at the Cleveland City Club, evidently under some form of pressure. Smokler is quite right to say that there is no issue of freedom of speech in these cases, nor has anyone so alleged.

The issue, as Hentoff clearly stated, is an entirely different one. It is as stated in my letter to the Cornell Medical students, which Hentoff quoted: "As you may know, Israeli doves have bitterly deplored the chauvinist fanaticism among sectors of the American Jewish community that they consider -- rightly in my view -- to be driving their country to disaster." I have taken many highly controversial positions on many matters, but incidents of the kind Hentoff describes have never occurred except on this issue, and then only in the United States; my only comparable experience is in the Soviet sphere, where not a word of mine on any political topic is allowed expression. Many others have had the same experience, including prominent Israelis: for example, (General) Mattityahu Peled, who bitterly denounced the American Jewish community, after a visit here when he was subjected to the kind of abuse familiar among those who do not toe the Party Line with sufficient precision, for their "state of near hysteria" and their "blindly chauvinistic and narrow-minded" support for the most reactionary policies within Israel, which poses "the danger of prodding Israel once more toward a posture of calloused intransigence." Other well-known Israeli doves have condemned what they correctly describe as the "Stalinist" practices in these circles. The issue is a serious one, but it is not one of freedom of speech in the technical sense that Smokler irrelevantly debates with no opponent.

Smokler states that it is my responsibility to "make publicly available the evidence which leads (me) to assert that (I am) systematically excluded from the expression of (my) ideas." The assertion is his, not mine, but apart from that, I do not accept such responsibility. The ridiculous antics of Smokler's friends and associates are not my concern. If Nat Hentoff or others ask me for information about these matters, I will provide it, but I recognize no duty beyond that. The Michigan affair was discussed extensively in the University and Ann Arbor press, and by Michigan historian Alan Wald in several articles. It was regarded as scandalous quite rightly, but I have never mentioned it except in response to queries. The same is true of the other two incidents, and of many others.

Suppression of critical comment on Israel of a sort that is easily expressed in Israel itself is readily demonstrable. To mention only one case, my book Fateful Triangle (1983) was reviewed in major (and minor) newspapers and news weeklies in Canada, Britain, Australia (even on national TV), and in exactly two local newspapers in the United States (and in the New York Review of Books, after a long review had appeared in its sister journal in London, which is widely read here), though its contents are far more relevant to U.S. concerns. This is quite typical, for others as well. While I am asked to write regularly on the Middle East in major journals in Israel, Europe and elsewhere, that is virtually inconceivable here. My experience is not all that unusual in this regard. It should be noted that the U.S. is a highly ideological society in which dissenting opinion is effectively marginalized as compared with other industrial democracies, but nevertheless, the case of the Middle East is unique. As has been observed in press commentary in Israel -- a more democratic society than ours, at least for its Jewish majority -- this is a serious danger for American democracy, for the Middle East, and indeed for world peace.

Again let me stress that no one is raising an issue of the "political rights" of critics of Israeli policies. To take another case, my "political rights" are not violated when the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith keeps a 150-page file on my activities, including surveillance of my talks and grossly falsified accounts of these talks and other matters, which the League then circulates to people with whom I am to have debates (e.g., Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz) or to groups in universities where I am to speak so that they can extract defamatory and slanderous lies from this material. The issues, rather, are quite different. I have agreed to provide these files (leaked to me from the ADL office) to the people who find the Stalinist-style mentality and behavior of the ADL scandalous, and who question whether a tax-exempt organization should devote itself to surveillance and defamation of critics of the state it serves, but I accept no further responsibility to concern myself with the matter, contrary to Smokler's absurd claim, any more than I waste time over the behavior of Communist Party hacks. For those who may be interested in the disreputable and dangerous activities of these groups, there is ample evidence in Paul Findley's recent book, They Dare to Speak Out, Naseer Aruri's "The Middle East on the U.S. Campus," (Link, published by Americans for Middle East Understanding), and other works.

Smokler also presents his private version of my views, claiming that I have given no evidence for them and that an unnamed Africanist interprets the facts differently. No comment appears necessary. Those who may be interested in what my views actually are and whether I have given evidence for them can easily consult available literature, for example, Fateful Triangle. To my knowledge, only one competent Zionist historian has reviewed this book, Dr. Noah Lucas, in the Jewish Quarterly, London, Nos. 3-4, 1984. I will simply quote his concluding words: "Good luck to the reader who may succeed in refuting any of the facts or assumptions or conclusions presented by Chomsky. It will not be accomplished by anyone who approaches the matter as an issue of propaganda or public relations for Israel, but only by the student who matches research with research." Not by Professor Smokler, plainly.

Hey, kids! Hate school? Don't tell Facebook!

MSNBC

High school sucks. Did you forget? Don't believe it? Check out Facebook.

Contrary to the evidence on Facebook student pages however, high schools aren't the only educational institutions capable of totally sucking.

Even schools you elect to attend, for example, the Salon Professional Academy of Elgin, Ill., can also act as an oxygen vortex. At least that's the opinion of a Nicholas Blacconiere, an academy student under legal fire for enshrining his negative opinions and those of others on a private page he posted on the world's most popular social networking site.

"Facebook 'suck sites' to be tested in court," proclaimed the Chicago Tribune in reporting the academy's $50,000 suit against Blacconiere for unauthorized use of the school's logo and for emotional damage caused by defamatory comments posted on his page, titled "Tspa RobinHood."

Other media followed suit, with headlines such as " ‘My School Sucks' pages under attack," and the like. Why it's as if just now, a couple of months short of 2010, the First Amendment rights of Internet-savvy students are under fire and not, in fact, an ongoing and troublesome issue.

While the medium of expression has changed over the years - from the cover of one's Mead Trapper Keeper to Facebook and other Internet-loitering spots - proclaiming the suckitude of one's school is an ancient rite of passage. It may even be a necessary for growing personalities to assert such independence, according to some experts. The change of venue, however, has led to myriad lawsuits involving disgruntled students and the schools that punish them.

"Forty years ago, the Supreme Court resoundingly affirmed that young people attending public schools do not ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,' " writes Frank D. LoMonte in "Reaching Through the School House Gate: Students' Eroding First Amendment Right," his February 2009 brief for the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

Recent developments in the law of online speech, however, are rattling the certainty of that assumption," the Student Press Law Center executive director continues. "In the view of at least some federal judges, students do not enjoy - anywhere, anytime -the same right to comment on school as ordinary citizens."

One of the more prominent cases still pending started two years ago, when Katherine "Katy" Evans, then a Pembroke Pines Charter junior in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., built a Facebook page titled "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met." It featured a photo of the teacher who disgruntled Evans so, as well as an invitation to others to "express your feelings of hatred." Evans created the page to blow off steam. Now it's the subject of an ACLU lawsuit.

It was hardly the first Facebook page posted by a disgruntled student. Even now, a Facebook search for "student organizations" with "high school" and "sucks" in the title returns hundreds of results augmented with the names of specific schools, pages that have been online for months, even years.

For Evans, however, this teenage indiscretion - which she removed after a few days - cost her a three-day suspension and removal from her college-critical "advanced placement" status in her senior year.

"It is ironic that high school is where students first learn about First Amendment rights, including the right to free speech, yet it is Katy's high school that unconstitutionally trampled those very rights," ACLU cooperating attorney Matthew D. Bavaro, said in a press release announcing the suit last December.

Unfortunately, interfering with an adequate education has served before as punishment for such online shenanigans. In 2007, the ACLU successfully defended Justin Layshock, a high school senior who received 10 days suspension for a MySpace parody of his principal. What's more, Layshock, a "gifted" student, was removed from his classes and placed in an "alternative learning environment" far below his capabilities.

"Significantly, the Layshock court took care to examine the basis for the punishment, and had no difficulty concluding that the suspension was imposed purely for the content of the student's speech, and not for any non-speech disruptive conduct on campus," LoMonte writes in "Students' Eroding First Amendment Right."

"Thus, the school could not justify its actions by claiming that the discipline was for on-campus misconduct," one of few reasons schools can legally interfere in a student's off-campus behavior.

Still, these cases are never so clear-cut. The precedent set 40 years ago that ensured First Amendment rights for public school students took place long before the Internet era, with its cyberbullying and the like.

Appeals are still pending for the case of Avery Doninger, who in 2007 was not permitted to run for senior class secretary after she referred to faculty at Lewis Mills High School in Burlington, Conn., as "douchebags" on her LiveJournal blog. Faculty called the student, who'd previously never been in trouble, a cyberbully.

The Internet "is bringing up things we used to say verbally, that's now searchable and online," says Robert L. Shibley, vice president at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). While FIRE advocates for university students, who have significantly more rights than high school students, Shibley notes the slippery slope between the two education levels.

It is not unusual, Shibely says, for a university to note a precedent set for high school students and First Amendment rights and attempt to apply that precedent to people old enough "to fight in a war, vote and drink."

"You have sort of an Orwellian atmosphere at universities, and especially at high schools, Shibley says. "Administrators feel they have to tamp down (online speech) or somebody going to sue the high school."

"It's a big mess, and it's just coming out everywhere."

The Folly of Hate-Crime Laws

James von Brunn, who is alleged to have opened fire and killed a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, is apparently a consummate bigot. His former wife said that his hatred of blacks and Jews "ate him alive like a cancer," so it might seem appropriate that in addition to having been indicted last week for murder and gun-law violations, he was also charged with hate crimes. At age 89, he proves that you are never too old to hate.

He also proves the stupidity of hate-crime laws. A prime justification for such laws is that some crimes really affect a class of people. The hate-crimes bill recently passed by the Senate puts it this way: "A prominent characteristic of a violent crime motivated by bias is that it devastates not just the actual victim . . . but frequently savages the community sharing the traits that caused the victim to be selected." No doubt. But how is this crime different from most other crimes?

First, let us consider the question of which "community" von Brunn was allegedly attempting to devastate. He rushed the Holocaust museum, which memorializes the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis and their enablers. There could be no more poignant symbol for the Jewish community. Yet von Brunn killed not a Jew but an African American -- security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns.

So which community was affected by this weird, virtually suicidal act? Was it the Jewish community or the black community? Since von Brunn hated both, you could argue that it does not matter. But since I would guess that neither community now gives the incident much thought, the answer might well be "neither one." So what is the point of piling on hate crimes to what von Brunn has allegedly done? Beats me. He already faces -- at age 89, remember -- a life sentence and, possibly, the death penalty.

The real purpose of hate-crime laws is to reassure politically significant groups -- blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays, etc. -- that someone cares about them and takes their fears seriously. That's nice. It does not change the fact, though, that what's being punished is thought or speech. Johns is dead no matter what von Brunn believes. The penalty for murder is severe, so it's not as if the crime is not being punished. The added "late hit" of a hate crime is without any real consequence, except as a precedent for the punishment of belief or speech. Slippery slopes are supposedly all around us, I know, but this one is the real McCoy.

Let us assume that the "community" is really affected by what we call a hate crime. I am Jewish. But even with von Brunn's attack, I am more affected by a mugging in my neighborhood that might keep me from taking a walk at night than I am by a shooting at the Holocaust museum. If there's a murder in a park, I'll stay out of it for months. If there's a rape, women will stay out of the park. If there's another and another, women will know that a real hater is loose. Rape, though, is not a hate crime. Why not?

I doubt that any group of drunken toughs is going to hesitate in their pummeling of a gay individual or an African American or a Jew on account of it being a hate crime. If they are not already deterred by the conventional penalties -- prison, etc. -- then why would additional penalties deter them? And if, in fact, they kept their mouths shut, refrained from the N-word or the F-word or the K-word, and simply made the beating or the killing seem one triggered by dissing or some other reason, then they would not be accused of hate -- merely of murder or some such trifle. If, though, they gave vent to their thoughts, they would be in for real trouble.

For the most part, hate-crime legislation is just a sop for politically influential interest groups -- yet another area in which liberals, traditionally sensitive to civil liberties issues, have chosen to mollify an entire population at the expense of the individual and endorse discredited reasoning about deterrence.

In von Brunn's case, the hate-crime counts are an obscenity. To suggest that the effects of this attack were felt only by the Jewish or the black communities -- and not, for instance, by your average Washington tourist -- ghettoizes both its real and purported victims. It's a consequence that von Brunn himself might applaud.

Source: The Washington Post

Beat Reporting, Fair Use, Twitter And Free Expression: Mashing Up Some Thoughts

There are a few stories that have been getting some buzz this week for separate reasons, that when combined, paint an interesting picture of our current media landscape. The first was that some baseball reporters picked up on the current debate over fair use when it comes to reporting, aggregating and sharing the news. I think the focus on "fair use" in these stories is a bit misleading. Most people view web-based communications as a part of a conversation. And if you're talking about an interesting story you see, you don't tell that person I can only read you some of it because more would be illegal. You discuss what you think is relevant. That's just a part of the conversation. Holding back the natural flow of dialogue by way of copyright law seems like a clear limit on free expression and free speech.

One of my favorite beat writers, Pete Abraham for the Journal News, picked up on this story and encapsulated what I believe is the love-hate notion that many newspaper journalists have in these situations:

I'm usually flattered if some other blog links to my work. I figure anything that brings more readers here has to be good. But for every responsible blogger out there, there are other who cut and paste the work of others and either pass it off as their own or barely credit the author.

If you know the solution, contact the newspaper industry because you will be a well-paid consultant. The problem will soon be this: If newspapers decide they can't afford beat writers, where will that information come from? Somebody has to get on the plane, go to Toronto and ask the questions.

There are two separate issues Pete raises here, and I'd like to address both. The first is the question of "bad actors" in the space. These are the so-called "parasites" that the Marburgers discuss. The problem is that there's really no problem at all here. No one seems able to point out any such real "parasite" site that actually gets any significant traffic. Most readers who actually follow these issues figure out pretty quickly to go straight to the source itself. In fact, that's how I first discovered Pete's own blog many years ago. I saw him quoted in three separate places within a week, and thought "hmm, this is someone I need to follow." And even though I grew up in NY, I'd never even heard of The Journal News (apparently it publishes north of NY City in Westchester). But these days, I trust Pete's reporting over anyone else's and go to his site first for any news about the Yankees -- because he's built up that reputation, works hard to increase value and (most important of all) has done an amazing job cultivating community, mostly via his amazing blog.

This is a point that we've tried to bring up multiple times before. Many old schoolers view the newspaper business as being in the business of delivering content to the masses. But that's never actually been true. The newspaper business has always been in the community building business. It would bring together a community around local news and then sell their attention to advertisers. The problem today is that there are so many different places to get a community, that the newspapers have competition.

And, in NY, when it comes to the Yankees, there's a lot of competition. But by really building a community and cultivating it, Pete stands out above everyone else. The NY Times beat writer for the Yankees is a guy named Tyler Kepner. He's great as well, and you can get much of the same information that Pete posts on Kepner's blog (or Twitter feeds), but for some reason, Pete's blog feels more comfortable. The NY Times' blog feels... sterile. You can see it as you start to dig into the comments on both blogs. Sure, there are some crazy folks and some classic trolls (and, you know, Red Sox fans), but there's real community building going on in the comments on Pete's blog posts (and Pete participates at times as well). Plus, they've held real world get-togethers (such as at the Yankee's AAA minor league games).

And while I'm obviously not privy to the traffic numbers, I would guess that from the comments alone, it's pretty clear that Pete's Yankee blog for The Journal News of Westchester gets a lot more traffic than Kepner's Yankee blog for the gold standard NY Times. The content is often frighteningly similar, but the community makes a huge difference. Building up a community is a skill that journalists (and newspapers) need to learn. Whether on purpose or not, Pete's been quite good at it.

And, from that we get to Pete's second point: questioning how newspapers, such as his own, can continue paying for the expense of beat writers. Here there are a few different potential answers. Pete has attracted a large enough community, that if the Journal News hasn't figured out how to profit from him and the "expense" of having him on payroll as a beat writer, then they're doing something wrong. But even if a newspaper couldn't afford him, with the community that Pete has built up, if the Yankees would allow him to be an independent beat writer, I'd bet he could bring in a fair amount of money that way. Team Pete up with a business guy and a tech guy, and go to town. Everyone would benefit. The Yankees would get more awesome coverage and a huge community of vocal, loyal Yankee fans. Pete would still have a job. And us fans would still have a great place to gather virtually.

But there's a separate issue as well. I've already mentioned some of the overlap between Pete and Tyler. But those are only two of the beat writers. There are also Yankee beat writers from the NY Post, the NY Daily News, Newsday, the New Jersey Record, WFAN, MLB.com and perhaps some others as well. I follow a bunch of their blogs and Twitter accounts, and there's a tremendous amount of overlap. I am not saying to just dump them all and have a single beat writer. But at some point you do have to wonder about why it makes sense to have so many reporters effectively reporting the exact same thing.

Also, there are other models that are coming out for paying for reporters. Mark Cuban has talked about actually having the sports teams pay the newspaper for coverage -- which certainly horrifies some reporters, but is yet another potential model, since the teams themselves benefit from the coverage. On top of that, we're seeing nationally focused publications -- such as ESPN and Sports Illustrated -- snap up lots of top reporters. Hell, just this week Sports Illusrated hired away another favorite of mine, Joe Posnanski. And while they don't do so yet, you could see national media like that add beat reporters as well.

Of course, if they're going to do that, they shouldn't do silly things like tell their reporters they have to limit their Twitter usage, as ESPN recently did.

Then, you have the fact that there are many impressive fan-driven blogs adding to the ecosystem as well. I'm certainly not suggesting that the fan-driven blogs replace the beat reporters, but it is an addition that fills in a lot more information and insight. I get a ton of insightful analysis about the Yankees via River Avenue Blues, a blog run by three fans, who are knowledgeable, thoughtful and insightful when it comes to the state of the Yankees. And, sometimes they get or break news as well. While these fanblogs and the beat reporters mostly have a pretty good relationship, you'd think that those could be leveraged even more, to enable the creation of more great content that drives more community. Teams should allow more access to the top fan blogs, and the news publications should be teaming up with some of the best fanblogs as well to leverage their insight and traffic for their own business models.

And, finally, let's not forget the fact that the athletes themselves suddenly have the ability to go direct as well. While the NFL is trying to crack down on players using Twitter, the fact is players have more direct channels to reach fans and provide information as well. Again, this is not a replacement for beat reporters, but does add to the ecosystem as well. And, at times, those players are breaking news themselves.

So you have a situation where there is more information than ever before out there about sports teams. There are more ways for fans to convene and converse with each other, with professional reporters and with the athletes themselves. Technology has made it cheaper and easier to do all of this -- and the ability to bring together a community of folks has not diminished even slightly. If you can't make money with all of that, then you've got bigger problems.

However, since Pete insists that anyone who has an answer to how to keep funding beat reporters employed can make a living as a well-paid consultant, he should tell his bosses at Gannett to contact us. We're more than happy to help put together a strategic plan for how to keep Pete and others gainfully employed.

Source: Tech Dirty