By NOAM COHEN
Published: February 25, 2008

Of the many landmarks along a journalist’s career, two are among those that stand out: winning an award and making the government back down. Last week, Joshua Micah Marshall achieved both.

On Tuesday, it was announced that he had won a George Polk Award for legal reporting for coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys, critics charged under political circumstances. The “tenacious investigative reporting sparked interest by the traditional news media and led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales,” the citation read.

Also last week, the Justice Department put him back on its mailing list for reporters with credentials after removing him last year.

Mr. Marshall does not belong to any traditional news organization. Instead, he is creating his own. His Web site, Talking Points Memo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com), is the first Internet-only news operation to receive the Polk (though in 2003, an award for Internet reporting was given to the Center for Public Integrity), and certainly one of the most influential political blogs in the country.

To scores of bloggers, it was a case of local boy makes good. Many took it as vindication of their enterprise — that anyone can assume the mantle of reporting on the pressing issues affecting the nation and the world, with the imprimatur of a mainstream media outlet or not. And most reassuringly, it showed that fair numbers of people out there were paying attention.

Mr. Marshall was recognized for a style of online reporting that greatly expands the definition of blogging. And he operates a long way from the clichéd pajama-wearing, coffee-sipping commentator on the news. He has a newsroom in Manhattan and seven reporters for his sites, including two in Washington.

Yet Mr. Marshall does not shy away from the notion of blogging. “I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging,” he said, something that can involve matters as varied as the tone of the writing or the display of articles in reverse chronological order. “We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead, there are an ongoing series of dispatches.”

Seven years ago, Mr. Marshall was a Ph.D candidate in early American history at Brown University; the Washington editor of a liberal magazine, The American Prospect; and a new blogger. He had started the blog as an outlet for his ideas and to track the recount fight in Florida — the name came from a term bandied about during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“If I had quickly happened into a staff position at The New Yorker, I probably wouldn’t have done this,” Mr. Marshall, 39, said of his migration to full-time online journalism.

In that time, he seems to have followed a business model unlike the founders of many of the dot-coms: Begin as a tiny operation. Manage to gain a following. As the audience grows, ask readers for donations and accept advertising. As the advertising and donations grow, add reporters and features. Repeat as often as needed.

Ads came in fall 2003, when politically conscious Internet users were starting to focus on the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and “I remember there being peak days of 60,000 page views, which was really incredible.”

“Ads started bringing in, in relative terms, a decent income for me relatively quickly,” he said

Soon after there was the first fund-raiser, to cover the cost of reporting on the New Hampshire primary of 2004. It brought in $6,000 in about 24 hours. There were fund-raisers in 2005 to create new projects: TPM Cafe (tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com), where readers and experts can debate political issues, and TPMMuckraker (tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo-.com), the site that was kept off the Justice Department’s mailing list. All are grouped under the parent TPM Media.

“The basic model is we are an ad-supported company,” he said. “Often when we want to do some major expansion, we go to readers.”

Traffic has continued to grow. Mr. Marshall said that on average over the last 18 months, the sites have had 400,000 page views a day. He put the number of unique visitors a month at 750,000 (about 60 percent of the traffic of The Nation, a long-established left-wing magazine).

Mr. Marshall, who has a young son he occasionally writes about on the sites, would not disclose the financial performance of the business. Asked about his salary, he said, “I make a better income than when I was freelancing,” then when pressed added, “I probably make in the neighborhood of what successful political journalists make.”

His work differs, though, from big newspaper or network political reporters. It often involves synthesizing the work of other news outlets with his staff’s original reporting and tips from a highly involved readership. In the case of the United States attorneys, Talking Points Memo linked to many local articles about federal prosecutors being forced from office and drew a national picture for readers.

The site “connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush administration’s bidding,” the Polk citation said.

In addition to pursuing the tips from its readers, Talking Points Memo has been known to give them assignments like wading through virtual piles of documents released by the administration. “There are thousands who have contributed some information over the last year,” Mr. Marshall said of the United States attorney coverage.

Dan Kennedy, a media critic who teaches at Northeastern University, has followed the site from its inception. What Talking Points Memo does, he said, “is a different kind of journalism, based on the idea that my readers know more than I do.”

Writing on a blog for his journalism students, Mr. Kennedy called the announcement of the Polk award “a landmark day for a certain kind of journalism.” Talking Points Memo, he said, “relentlessly kept a spotlight on what other news organizations were uncovering and watched patterns emerge that weren’t necessarily visible to those covering just a small piece of the story.”

He added, “This is crowd sourcing — reporting based on the work of many people, including your readers.”

Mr. Marshall has many admirers among critics of the Bush administration, online and off.

Nan Aron, president of the Alliance of Justice, a liberal legal affairs group in Washington, said, “There are certain stories like the U.S. attorneys that might never have seen the light of day had T.P.M. not pursued it in the way that they had.” She added, “We now count on T.P.M. and other blogs to do the investigative work that reporters used to do.”

Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey asking about the Justice Department’s treatment of the Web site.

Talking Points Memo “revealed that it has recently been removed from D.O.J.’s press release e-mail distribution list,” the letter said.

“Who made this decision and why, and was there a change in policy in press release distribution after you became attorney general?” The next section of the letter addressed “Waterboarding and Torture.”

In a hearing on Feb. 7, Mr. Mukasey said he “was not aware of” the removal of the site from the mailing list, and last week it was restored. In an e-mail message on Friday, the Justice Department said the issue was simply about whether Talking Points Memo was “credentialed.”

Despite this sort of thing, Mr. Marshall said he tried to keep a partisan tone out of the reporting, though his personal blogging on the site reflected a liberal viewpoint. “As a company there are strong ideological viewpoints that inform what we do,” he said. “When we are reporting the news, we make every effort to report it in as factual way as possible.”

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of an influential blog, the Daily Kos, and a big fan of Mr. Marshall, agreed.

“Josh isn’t necessarily partisan,” he said, “I see him as a progressive who is passionate about the news and approaches the news from that perspective.”

Mr. Moulitsas predicted, “It may take a decade, but Josh will win a Pulitzer some day.”

It won’t be this year. Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, said in an e-mail message that online articles are eligible for the awards, but they must have been published on a weekly or daily newspaper’s Web site.

“A freestanding Web site does not qualify,” he said.

Source: The New York Times

By Saul Hansell

Long before Microsoft sprung its hostile offer for Yahoo, Jerry Yang, the Internet company’s chief executive, agreed to address the annual meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Selling ads, particularly expensive branding campaigns, is essential to Yahoo’s future–whoever owns it.

Mr. Yang now may well have other things on his schedule besides making speeches. Oh, to pick one: figuring out how to respond to the looming threat of a Microsoft proxy fight. Yet Mr. Yang still plans to speak Monday at the I.A.B. gathering in Phoenix. And in a surprise move, he has told the I.A.B. he will bring Sue Decker, his No. 2, with him to speak.

Why the double team? Yahoo representatives wouldn’t say.

Maybe it is to convince the advertising world how much Yahoo loves them. Perhaps because Ms. Decker has been more involved in Yahoo’s advertising strategy than Mr. Yang. Or they could answer the questions everyone has about their response to Microsoft’s deal. (Probably not.)

The I.A.B., by the way, is a group that brings together Internet companies, advertising agencies, technology companies, and online marketing executives from advertisers. Randall Rothenberg, the group’s chief executive, said he expected 200 attendees. In fact, the meeting sold out with 400 tickets.

I’ll be manning the Bits laptop during Mr. Yang’s speech Monday morning, and I’ll have some other posts in the next two days about the state of online advertising amid the turmoil among the big Internet player and the uncertain state of the economy.

Source: The New York Times

Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service 2 hours, 49 minutes ago

Microsoft has introduced a reporting tool for its online advertising platform that it claims measures the impact of online ad campaigns rather than merely counting clicks.

The tool, called Engagement ROI, has been integrated into Microsoft's Atlas Media Console, which is software used for booking and managing online advertising campaigns. A senior Microsoft executive will officially announce the tool on Monday at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's annual meeting in Phoenix.

The Media Console was developed by Atlas, a company that was owned by aQuantive, which Microsoft bought for US$6 billion in May 2007. It marked Microsoft's biggest acquisition in the online advertising space, following Google's announcement in April 2007 of its intention to acquire a rival online advertising firm, DoubleClick.

Google has a huge lead over Microsoft in online advertising. To counter Google's dominance, Microsoft made an unsolicited offer earlier this month to buy Yahoo, but the acquisition has been so far resisted by Yahoo's board. Microsoft wants access to Yahoo's engineers as well as the company's online advertising technology.

Engagement ROI is in a beta release. Microsoft said the tool will undergo testing with national advertising agencies such as McKinney, Mindshare Interaction, World Vision and Neo@Ogilvy.

Engagement ROI looks at several aspects of an online ad, such as how recently it has been displayed, its size and its format, and then determines how successful the message is in influencing a purchase. Microsoft calls the concept "engagement mapping."

Microsoft said the most commonly used metric in the industry, counting clicks, is a poor way to measure the effectiveness of an ad campaign. Generally, the success of an ad is determined on how frequently it is viewed or clicked.

Microsoft expects to begin receiving results on how successful the tool is by the end of June.

Source: Yahoo News

CAMBRIDGE, Mass (Reuters) - The head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Monday he is "ready, willing and able" to stop broadband providers that unreasonably interfere with subscribers' access to Internet content.

The comment by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin came at the start of a day-long FCC hearing centering on allegations that some broadband providers such as telecommunications and cable companies have been improperly blocking or hindering some content.

"I think it's important to understand that the commission is ready, willing and able to step in if necessary to correct any (unreasonable) practices that are ongoing today," Martin said.

The dispute over so-called "network neutrality" pits open-Internet advocates against some service providers such as Comcast Corp, who say they need to take reasonable steps to manage traffic on their networks.

Martin acknowledged that broadband network operators have a legitimate need to manage the data flowing over their networks. But he said that "does not mean that they can arbitrarily block access to particular applications or services."

The hearing, which included testimony from officials with Comcast and Verizon, is aimed at determining what network management techniques are reasonable.

Martin called for "transparency" in the way the companies manage their networks, and in the prices and services they provide.

The network neutrality dispute has been spotlighted by a series of incidents in which operators were accused of hindering certain online data moving over their networks, such as file-sharing or text-messaging.

The issue also has attracted the attention of lawmakers in Congress, who are weighing a net-neutrality bill introduced last week.

In the most recent example, the FCC has been looking into complaints by consumer groups that Comcast has blocked some file-sharing services which are used to distribute large digital media files such as TV shows and movies.

In comments filed with the FCC, Comcast told regulators that it uses reasonable measures to manage traffic moving over its network, as some of its customers overwhelm the network by using file-sharing applications like BitTorrent.

Comcast, which is the second-largest U.S. Internet service provider with more than 13 million subscribers, said the use of network management was essential to avoid congestion and impairment of some applications. The company denied that it blocks content, applications or discriminates among providers.

Internet service providers are looking at different ways of managing the increasing amount of traffic moving across their networks both for cost management and for quality of service reasons.

Critics have argued that imposing network neutrality regulations on the Internet would hinder development of the Internet by creating uncertainty for investors and Internet service providers.

(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss in Cambridge and Peter Kaplan in Washington; editing by Tim Dobbyn)

Source: Yahoo News

The Poker Players Alliance spent $900,000 in 2007 to lobby the federal government on online- gambling legislation.

The group, which says it represents 800,000 poker enthusiasts nationwide, lobbied on a bill that would exempt poker from a law that restricts online gambling, and for legislation that would regulate the Internet gaming industry, according to a disclosure form posted online Feb. 15 by the Senate's public records office. The alliance spent $780,000 lobbying on those issues in the second half of 2007.

It's legal to play poker online, but the law made it illegal for domestic banks and credit-card companies to process payments to online gambling businesses. The act, passed in 2006, bars financial institutions from handling gambling transactions, with exceptions for lotteries, horse racing and fantasy sports.

The Poker Players Alliance is chaired by former New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato.

Lobbyists are required to disclose activities that could influence members of the executive and legislative branches, under a federal law enacted in 1995.

Source: Yahoo News

Online advertising revenues exceeded $21 billion for the first time in 2007, although preliminary data compiled by an industry trade group also suggest growth is slowing.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau said its estimates show ad revenues grew 25 percent last year from nearly $17 billion in 2006. In dollar amounts, the estimated gain was $4.2 billion — less than the 35 percent and $4.3 billion growth seen in 2006 over 2005.

Analysts have said the growth rate was bound to slow as the Internet commands a larger share of the advertising pie, taking dollars away from traditional media like newspapers. By most accounts, the Internet still represents less than 10 percent of all U.S. ad spending, meaning there's room for a lot more growth, even at a slower rate.

Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP, which conducts a quarterly survey for the advertising trade group using data from the 15 largest online ad sellers, said fourth-quarter revenues totaled about $5.9 billion, topping the previous record of $5.2 billion in the third quarter.

David Silverman of PricewaterhouseCoopers said the latest record numbers demonstrate that interactive media continue to be important to consumers and marketers.

The IAB said final data and breakdowns by ad types would be available in May. Typically, the most lucrative are keyword ads such as those displayed alongside search results at Google Inc. and other search engines.

Source: Yahoo News

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer

SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc. will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as it tests a long-awaited health service that's likely to raise more concerns about the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the Internet search leader.
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The pilot project announced Thursday will involve 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic who volunteered to an electronic transfer of their personal health records so they can be retrieved through Google's new service, which won't be open to the general public.

Each health profile, including information about prescriptions, allergies and medical histories, will be protected by a password that's also required to use other Google services such as e-mail and personalized search tools.

Google views its expansion into health records management as a logical extension because its search engine already processes millions of requests from people trying to find about more information about an injury, illness or recommended treatment.

But the health venture also will provide more fodder for privacy watchdogs who believe Google already knows too much about the interests and habits of its users as its computers log their search requests and store their e-mail discussions.

Prodded by the criticism, Google last year introduced a new system that purges people's search records after 18 months. In a show of its privacy commitment, Google also successfully rebuffed the U.S. Justice Department's demand to examine millions of its users' search requests in a court battle two years ago.

The Mountain View-based company hasn't specified a timetable for unveiling the health service, which has been the source of much speculation for the past two years. Marissa Mayer, the Google executive overseeing the health project, has previously said the service would debut in 2008.

A Google spokesman declined to elaborate on the company's plans. The Associated Press learned about the pilot project from the Cleveland Clinic, a not-for-profit medical center founded 87 years ago.

The clinic already keeps the personal health records of more than 120,000 patients on its own online service called MyChart. Patients who transfer the information to Google would still be able to get the data quickly even if they were no longer being treated by the Cleveland Clinic.

"We believe patients should be able to easily access and manage their own health information," Mayer said in a statement supplied by the Cleveland Clinic.

The Cleveland Clinic decided to work with Google "to create a more efficient and effective national health care system," said C. Martin Harris, the medical center's chief information officer.

Google isn't the first high-tech heavyweight to set up an online filing cabinet in an effort make it easier for people to get their medical records after they change doctors or health insurance plans.

Rival Microsoft Corp. last year introduced a similar service called HealthVault, and AOL co-founder Steve Case is backing Revolution Health, which also offers online tools for managing personal health histories.

The third-party services are troublesome because they aren't covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, which just issued a cautionary report on the topic.

Passed in 1996, HIPAA established strict standards governing the privacy and security of medical records. Among other things, the law requires a patient to be notified when their records are being subpoenaed. The notice must be made by the entity or person seeking the records so a patient has the opportunity to fight the request.

That means a patient who agrees to transfer medical records to an external health service run by Google or Microsoft could be unwittingly making it easier for the government or some other legal adversary to obtain the information, Dixon said.

If the medical records aren't protected by HIPAA, the information conceivably also could be used for marketing purposes.

Google, which runs the Internet's most lucrative ad network, typically bases its marketing messages on search requests and the content on Web pages and e-mail contained in its computers.

It's not clear how Google intends to make money from its health service. The company sometimes introduces new products without ads just to give people more reason to visit its Web site, betting the increased traffic will boost its profits in the long run.


Source: Yahoo News