Anchorage Daily News Photo Policy Appears to Be One-Way

[Note: As I was writing this it came to my attention that McClatchy has announced a 10% employee reduction. (McClatchy owns the Anchorage Daily News.) I was already working on a post on a speech McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt gave in Anchorage in April, but it's not quite ready.]

On May 21, Phil Munger posted on Progressive Alaska this comment to a post from the Anchorage Daily News.

Hi Mr. Munger-
My name is Katherine Gill and I work at the Daily News. It was brought to my attention that you posted a photo of Bill Roth's on your blog. We have a copyright fee of $100 to post photos on a website. Please contact me at kgill@adn.com if you would like to proceed with paying the fee, or please remove the photo from your website.

Thank you,
Katherine Gill

Phil went on to mention that Theresa at My Fairbanks Life had gotten a similar order from the ADN about a photo she'd used. Phil did some huffing and puffing about free speech, and a bunch of us told Phil to calm down, that the ADN had copyrights and he had to respect that.

So it is very curious to find that the ADN doesn't seem to respect other people's copyrights. The Alaska Ear published this story in yesterday's paper.


This is also on the ADN Website.

Dennis tells me that he was not asked nor did he give permission for the ADN to use the picture. Furthermore, the ADN has his link wrong - AlaskaReportS.com instead of Alaskareport.com.

Dennis has this posted at the bottom of his blog:

Dennis Zaki Blog - AlaskaReport © 2008 All Rights Reserved.

Now, I understand that people can make mistakes now and then. I mistype often, but Dennis says this is not the first time.

ADN consistantly uses my cartoons yet always manages to foul up the link to my website. And they NEVER put a hotlink up there, unlike to other websites. I've written to them, but it keeps happening... Sean references my site a lot by saying, 'a website'.

So ADN, can you please explain what appears to be a double standard where you feel it's ok for you to use Dennis' copyrighted material, but you don't want other people to use yours? Perhaps there is more to this story that you can share with us.

In the same column, the Ear writes about the Baranof Hotel offering sure reservations and discounted rates in contradiction to what Representatives said in the ADN story about some Representatives sleeping in their offices. Readers of this blog know that I had that story last Monday and on Tuesday I posted the emails the Ear refers to.

I want to make it clear that the Ear got the information independently. When I asked the Baranof manager why he didn't have room for the legislators, he told me about the offer. He hadn't seen the story, but after I brought it to his attention, he called the ADN to fill them in on the other side of the story. They sent him to Sheila Toomey who writes the Ear.

Father's Day, Zen, Juneteenth Part 4

I mentioned Ollen Hunt in the previous post. He fought in Italy in WW II as part of the Buffalo Soldiers. He's been an Anchorage resident since three weeks before the 1964 earthquake.





2wenty (John) is another local boy. He was giving away cd's of his rap album Cold Summer, a title most Alaskans can relate to this year. I believe in free speech. I think there is good rap. At its best, rap expresses the frustrations and/or the hopes of the singers. At its worst, it merely copies the themes of misogyny, alcohol, and drugs, and a macho male power trip. I'm afraid this CD falls into that category. The vicious treatment of women as sex objects in the CD disturbs me greatly.

The contrast between John's very polite and respectful way of talking to me and the meanness of the lyrics is striking. I'd guess this Bartlett High school graduate and athlete is simply doing what he thinks he needs to do to make it in the rap world. What a shame. One could say, "hey, he'll grow out of this." Or "He's not like that in his real life." One could say that, except for the damage these types of lyrics do to women. Since I didn't hear the CD until I got home, (and I suspect he wouldn't have been allowed to play this at the celebration) I couldn't ask John about the lyrics and why he felt the need to rap them.


A toast to serendipity. The next person we talked to was dealing with the victims of sexual assault. Barbara Bachmeier who is in charge of Women Serving Women Veterans, an organization for the victims of the worst rap lyrics is the subject of the next video. But, women were being assaulted long before rap came out, so my intent is NOT to blame all sexual violence on rap. Barbara works to get the military and the VA to take women's sexual assault claims seriously and to provide women in the military with the medical care they need following sexual harassment and assault. You can reach her at

WSWV
PO Box 100723
Anchorage, AK 99508
[added August 9, 2008: http://www.wswv.blogspot.com/]

Father's Day, Zen, Juneteenth Part 3

Things were still a little quiet when we got back to the Parkstrip about 1pm.




But that gave us lots of opportunity to talk to people. This man fought as a Buffalo Soldier in Italy during WW II and he was out here selling his book about this adventures. Check for the video in the next post.







I guess their sign says it all. But no one to talk to yet.









There was a breeze lifting the flag at the Veteran's Memorial flag pole.












So, this is a Juneteenth Celebration. I'm glad the APD have figured out this is a good place to recruit non-white police officers. But maybe it would be nice to have at least one African-American officer along. Now, I wasn't there long, so maybe there were other officers at other times whom I didn't get to see.











Things were still quiet. At this point the only music came from stereos.












































I found the woman working this booth a little later and I'll post a short video in the next post. She's working to help women veterans to get benefits to assist them with sexual assault related problems. Right now, she said, neither the military nor the VA take these issues seriously - "they don't want to hurt the excellent careers of the men accused" - and thus women aren't getting treatment for the resulting physical and mental problems.

Father's Day, Zen, Juneteenth Part 2

There's lots of building going on in Anchorage, and I hope to post on some of the new structures that began or were finished while we were gone. Here are a couple of the old houses still surviving in downtown Anchorage. Some of these still have people living in them. Others have been turned into offices.



It's nice to see the Municipality letting people know they don't have to pay on weekends. I've often noticed meters on the weekend with money in them. It does say except weekends on the signs, but it never said it on the meters before. Probably the businesses downtown pushed for this one.







As we walked around downtown, there were lots of things to notice. Like this shop window.











Since we didn't feel like waiting around at Snow City for breakfast, we ended up having lunch at the Brewpub. As we walked around afterward, we saw some other places we could have breakfast, like Sacks. But my halibut was good.











We poked in at the PAC and found three of this year's artsy salmon. Here's one with a hatbox.












And this silver. (I couldn't find any official names of the fish.)







There were some Thai tourists enjoying Anchorage.










And lots of other tourists getting what they needed, I hope, at the visitor's center.













One suggestion someone made about all the orphan bike locks - people leave them there rather than take them home. Anyone know why these all get left behind?









Then we headed back to the Parkstrip to see if there was more action at the Juneteenth Celebration. Passing Skinny Raven's (can you guess what this store sells?) flower pots.

Father's Day, Zen, Juneteenth Part 1

Fortunately, no one bought me one of these. (I took the picture later in the day at Costco) But I did get a card with an Alaska State Parks sticker for the car (yes we do still have two) We didn't get passes earlier because we were gone.


The other pass is a National Parks Golden Pass that they had wanted to get me, but I had to do that in person. We stopped by the Lands Office downtown later and got it there. What a great deal! If your 62 or older, for $10 you get a lifetime pass for all US National Parks, including the people in the car with you. And a call from my daughter. A phone message from J in Singapore was there when we got home. Thanks both of you



I'd been wanting to go to hear Koun Franz again since we'd seen him at the reading of Mark Twain's The War Prayer. I've been seeing notices that the public was welcome to come to the Anchorage Zen Community Sunday mornings. The paper said 10:25 am, so we went. As we walked up, a moose went by in the next door yard - the center is in a house in midtown.

We walked into a room with about a dozen people sitting on cushions on the floor listening to someone - not Koun Franz - talking about the life of a Chinese monk who was an important link to Zen Buddhism. It was quiet, calm, and took me to another place. We learned later that Koun Franz is in Japan for six weeks or so. There are so many worlds in Anchorage!



We drove downtown and parked near the Parkstrip. (I didn't post about J's bike pedal falling off while she was riding and her falling. Lots of people came to see if she was ok. She couldn't get the pedal back on and walked the bike home a couple miles. Then rode it (I got the pedal back in enough, but the threads weren't right) to REI where they fixed it for free (it is just barely a year old) and she rode back home. But the next day she got a pain in her side.



She can walk, she can sit, she can lie. But moving from one of those positions to the other hurts. And the bike is on hold till she feels better.) We were hoping to take in the Juneteenth Celebrations. We passed the Veteran's memorial.



But things weren't really happening yet. It was about 11am.



So we wandered on into downtown past the Martin Luther King Memorial headed for the Snow City Cafe for breakfast. But it was packed with lots of people waiting.

Maybe It Made Sense to Them When They Put it There

Suppose you're visiting Anchorage. People suggested you rent a bike and try the bike trails. But there are side trails here and there, many unmarked. Finally, you get to this map.

Below is a closer look.

The "You Are Here" sign is part of the map. I added the numbers. Suppose you want to go:

to #1 which way do you go? a. Left __ b. Right__ c. Back___ d. Forward____

to #2 which way do you go? a. Left __ b. Right__ c. Back___ d. Forward____

to #3 which way do you go? a. Left __ b. Right__ c. Back___ d. Forward____

to #4 which way do you go? a. Left __ b. Right__ c. Back___ d. Forward____


I've added the big W and big E to the sign. Why can't they put the signs facing north, so when you look at them, the right side is east and the left side is west, like in a normal map? I couldn't find anything that said where north was on the map.

About a year ago, I came across a woman studying another south facing map on the bike trail. She was going totally in the wrong direction because she assumed that left on the map corresponded with left in real life. How foolish of her.




On the other (north) side of the path from where the map is, there is plenty of space to put this sign. There, left would match real left and right would match real right.


For people who work with bike trails I have a few suggestions:

• Maps should be oriented to match the geography they represent. General custom is to put N on top, E to the right, S at the bottom, and W on the left of maps. Thus maps generally should be facing north so that what is left on the map corresponds with what is left of the person reading the map.

• Take a regular bike rider along with you so she can point out problems bikers might have, such as:
• walk buttons on street lights are off the trail and/or facing away from the trail, so a person on the trail (walker, runner, biker) can't reach them from the trail
  
• make signs as carefully as you make them for cars
  
• take down temporary "trail closed" signs when you stop working and generally keep the trails open as much as possible so cyclists can still use the trail.
• Not everyone processes information the same way. Take a couple people with different ways of processing visual cues and ask them to follow the directions, the map, etc. See if they all can. If they can't, ask them why. Try to find another way of showing things that everyone can understand.
  
• Give bicyclists the same attention and respect you give car and truck drivers.
  

Answers:
#1 - You have to go right. (The arrow doesn't really match where you are. It should be where the black trail ends at the red trail. If you look at the first picture, you can see there is NO trail behind the sign.)
#2 - You have to turn around and go back away from the sign.
#3 - You have to go left.
#4 - You have to go right.

Greening Up

Forget-me-nots brighten this chilly summer in the front yard.











And the sweet peas are coming up. Last year only a few bloomed. Maybe we'll have better luck this year.

















I did my run today around Goose Lake. Here the dogwood carpet the ground adding a bright green on an otherwise grey day.









And here I'm approaching the lake.




























Some sort of larvae on one of the reeds. It rained earlier and the reeds still had drops clinging.

Poll's Totally Inconclusive Results

My first online poll has essentially thrown the ball back to me to make my own decision. I asked if I should say yes to the blogger at "Thoughts on Sex" that we exchange links on our blogrolls.

Could the results be more divided?

I think I'm going to tell him "Thanks, but no thanks." I don't need a bunch of horny surfers coming here expecting who knows what and getting pissed off because there are no naked people. Just mentioning sex as I did in the post on Eliot Spitzer gets me hits from strange google searches like "turning wife over to sexual demonic powers" which I got today from someone in Columbus, Georgia.

So, thanks to all of you who took the poll. At least I know my viewers have totally diverse views on this topic (not that I'm sure what the topic was - sex? links? experiments?). And I'll take it down today.

Now I'm going out to enjoy the sunshine and blue sky.

Guidelines for Dealing with Promo Emails - Begich Online Interview today at 3pm

The good news, I suppose, is that somebody thinks my blog is worth paying attention to. But now I have to figure out how to deal with emails that want me to publicize something for them. Here are my first draft guidelines:

If you pass something on:

1. let the readers know how you got the story (this really goes for any post)
2. there should be something that might be of interest to your readers (both of them) that they might not know about otherwise
3. there should be something unique about the opportunity

I'll have to come up with some more, but this will do for now.

Let's try them out:
1.
I got an email from a website that describes itself as "a progressive blog started by former edwards supporters and dedicated to promoting a progressive agenda and "more and BETTER" downticket candidates." Is 'downticket' like coach?
They say they got my email from Begich's online guy Matt Browner-Hamlin.

2.
They want me to let my readers know about an onliine interview with Mark Begich, Alaska's downticket candidate for Senator. (No they didn't say it like that.) It's happening this afternoon at 3pm Alaska time at www.EENRblog.com. You have to register if you want to ask questions, and they want you to keep them respectful. It's pretty short notice and I suspect 'my readers' aren't likely to see this anywhere else, except maybe one of the other Alaska blogs that got a similar email.

3.
Is it unique? Well, I've never participated in an online candidate interview. There's curiosity factor. Maybe I'll want to do a live interview here one day. My readers can be on the blog frontier. Mom - you can impress your grandson's friends with your hipness.

Of course this site may think they are offering Alaskan's a great opportunity to talk with one of our Senate candidates. They probably don't realize how accessible they are here where we have so few people. But for people outside of Anchorage, bumping into Mark Begich at the Thai Kitchen isn't so easy. What might be more interesting to Alaskans, though, is the chance to find out about candidates from other states.



And I did find this video on "Why I'm Voting Republican" on their site.

Is there any hope for the Anchorage Daily News?

[I didn't hit the post button when I finished this last night. Is this even worth writing about? Well, yes, I think McCoy's (see NAMES at the bottom if they get confusing) comments are significant, but I'm not really sure what the significance is. My instant gut reaction when she said them was "oh geez, the ADN is doomed." My logical side says, "You need to have a totally tech savvy person doing this, not some nice, smart, tech 'immigrant' [in her words]" But something kept me from hitting the post button. She's so nice, she's so enthusiastic, and she has gotten a bunch of blogs up onto the ADN website. Is her personality and their obligation to have a position for her after her fellowship year blinding them from doing what they really need to do? Or maybe they can't find (translation: won't pay what it takes to get) a real tech guru with journalism smarts too.

I've posted on this topic and Kathleen before when she made a brief announcement at a previous AAUG meeting about starting to post community blogs and inviting bloggers to sign up. This was then followed up by an in-depth analysis of the contract the ADN wanted bloggers to sign - a contract I felt was totally out of touch with the reality of the blogosphere. I did try to say hello Wednesday night, but there were lots of other people around her. I did want to know how the contract issue got resolved though.

And I think there is one more big reason I'm hesitant to click on the post button. I think Kathleen's candor is fantastic. I applaud her honesty about herself and about her newspaper and the industry. But I can just see her being called into the office, "YOU SAID WHAT? IN PUBLIC? ARE YOU CRAZY?" I don't really want to be responsible for that. The media often are beat up by politicians for what they report. Their response is we are only reporting the news, don't attack the messenger. To the ADN and McClatchy big shots, remember those words. Kathleen McCoy isn't the problem, she's just the messenger.

OK, now that I've said this and you have no idea what I'm talking about yet, I feel a little more comfortable hitting the post button]

I went to the Alaska Apple User Group (AAUG) last night[Wednesday]. There were two longish presentations. The first was by Kathleen McCoy and her husband Peter Porco on her fellowship year for journalists at Stanford. It was depressing. [I like reading my hard copy newspaper in the morning and I want the ADN to find a way to survive in both the print and web worlds.] I wasn't going to post about it.

But then I got home and got Brendan's [see NAMES at bottom]email with the links to this week's Anchorage Press and a story about Howard Weaver on the future of newspapers. Weaver was the editor of the ADN and has moved up the McClatchy corporate ladder and is now Vice President for News and he's upbeat about his papers doing just fine on the web. The Weaver piece the Press covers takes on the doomsday arguments made against newspapers and offers his reasons for believing the McClatchy newspapers will adjust and thrive. I like people who take on the prevailing opinion, but he's hardly an objective observer and what I heard from Kathleen certainly contradicts the image he was painting of McClatchy doing this right.

So why was the first presentation depressing? In a nutshell, because Kathleen McCoy is billed as the person at the ADN in charge of community blogging [I stopped writing at this point and looked at the ADN website newsroom contacts page to get her exact title, but I couldn't find Kathleen McCoy on it at all. Nor could I find her on the contacts page which listed the eight men and one woman (Jane Lee) on the "Senior Management Team."]

In any case, Kathleen McCoy's talk was interesting, but depressing. She and her husband were both very enthusiastic about having the year off at Stanford and enjoying the chance to do whatever she wanted - sit in, or take, or not, any class at Stanford. And she got a week of tech training for journalists at UC Berkeley. Here are things that she said that really struck me:

A Talking about the newspaper field, she said:
So you have print journalists who are saying, "what do you mean I have to take a video camera" or "this blogging stuff ..." and then you have other people who are jumping in whole hog, and just training themselves. The truth is we're getting no training in the field. I was lucky to get this Berkeley thing that gave me some training.

B
When I was at Stanford I saw all these kids making movies and blogging and having Wikis and doing all kinds of stuff and I realized no one was training them either. They were just doing it. I do believe that it is in their DNA and I do believe that they are the digital natives and I'm the digital immigrant.

C
I came back to the Daily News and I was put on the Web, with no training about the Web and I'd learn one little thing I could do on the web, eventually I learned that if you could get into the back door of the web, our website, you can just see all the things and how they are built and I could learn how to build them myself so eventually I've become more useful...

McCoy sounds like a bright person who genuinely wants to make all this work. She has jumped in and gotten the community blogging page full of blogs on different topics. She has some tech training and brings to that the values and ethics of MSM journalism. Maybe she knows just enough and can keep the techies straight on those parts of traditional journalism that are important to keep.

And the ADN has an impressive web presence. Matt Browner Hamlin,, the national blogger brought to Alaska to be the Begich campaign’s Online Communications Director, told me he thought it was one of the best newspaper websites - particularly because it has good web presence in all areas, not just one or two.

But if the web is the future - or at least a major part of the future - of the newspaper industry, why would you put someone with no web experience on the web? If her DNA comment (I'm assuming she's talking metaphorically here) is accurate, why not get a tech native to work on this job? After years of paying some of the lowest professional salaries of all industries, is it that the newspapers just can't mentally cross the salary bridge to pay what good techies get paid?

Why are staff getting no web training? (Did Kathleen exaggerate here or overlook some training opportunities the paper offers?)

I could be wrong on this. Kathleen's total candor is refreshing. Her ego is barely visible. And she brings to this web endeavor (there are other web people at the newspaper) traditional journalistic values and ethics, that perhaps you can't find in the tech natives. But if I owned an airplane, I'd hire a natural pilot who feels totally comfortable flying, not someone who's going to learn on the job.

Do McCoy's comments from the trenches belie Weaver's optimistic view from headquarters?

I hope he's right that the ADN will adapt and succeed in the new digital age. I hope I'm wrong.


Oh yeah, the second big presentation of the evening was by Scott Slone and Kevin Kastner of HDTV Alaska. They make and post Alaska adventure videos. They're the tech natives making up this new world as they go. They too are struggling with the issue of how to earn a profit online.


NAMES
I'm not happy with how I'm using names here and on other posts. Some people I feel like I'm on a first name basis with, others not. And so sometimes I use a first name in one place and a last name in another. But I know that is confusing to the reader, but I haven't resolved how I want to do this. In here:
Kathleen McCoy - ADN community blogging person and speaker at AAUG meeting
Brendan Joel Kelley - writer and editor at Anchorage Press
Howard Weaver - former ADN editor and now McClatchy VP for News
MSM - main stream media