PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release

Neil Budde, the head of news operations for internet portal Yahoo!, is the latest addition to the board of directors of the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC), the nonprofit, public interest organization announced today.

Budde, who joined Yahoo! In 2004, is Vice President, Editor in Chief for Yahoo! News, Finance and Sports.  He works in Yahoo!’s Santa Monica offices, where the company’s news operations are based.

“Neil brings to CFAC a range and depth of internet-based news and media expertise that are truly unexcelled,” said CFAC executive…

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Public officials’ love of secrecy is no match for the public’s love to watch government decision-making up close.  In California, democratic voyeurism prevails.

By Peter Scheer

One of California’s more remarkable political inventions is the requirement that lawmakers do their lawmaking in the open for all to see.  Call it the people’s entitlement to democratic voyeurism: Members of city councils, county supervisors and school boards (among other local legislative bodies) must not only vote in public, they must confine virtually all debate, horse-trading and other deliberations to a public proceeding where voters get to watch.…

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An open letter to judges in the BALCO appeal:
To learn the identity of the reporters’ confidential source, just ask their lawyer

By Peter Scheer

Honorable Judges of the US Court
of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

Dear Sirs/Madams:

A three-judge panel of this Court will soon consider appeals by the San Francisco Chronicle and two of its reporters from judgments of contempt for refusing to reveal their confidential source for stories about steroid use by professional athletes. Unless you reverse the decision of the District Court, the…

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Digital Fishwrap Reconsidered

By Peter Scheer

In a recent commentary published here and on the Op-Ed page of the San Francisco Chronicle ("What if online portals had nothing but ‘digital fish wrap’?”), I argued that large metropolitan newspapers, in order to enhance the value of their editorial content on the internet, should consider delaying the free release of their articles online. 

Collective action to deprive the internet, temporarily, of free and timely news—leaving Yahoo, Google, MSN and other portals with…

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An intriguing idea: Maintaining the value of a besieged commodity by shifting the time frame of its use.

Stephen Dubner:

Not long ago, we posted here about the supposedly desperate future of newspapers. Now here’s a S.F. Chronicle column by Peter Scheer saying the same thing I tried to say, but Scheer says it better: i.e., if the future of newspapers is so bleak, why are so many smart people rushing to buy them? (The list includes Jack Welch, David Geffen, and as of today, Hank Greenberg.)

But the most interesting point in…

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A cure worse than the disease

Dan Gillmor:

Peter Scheer . . .  asks, “What if online portals had nothing but ‘digital fish wrap’?” He writes:

“Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period — say, 24 hours — after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to remove content from the Internet, but to delay its free release in that venue.”

I wish newspapers…

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Scheer’s proposal a trap

Joe Wikert:

Dan Gillmor has it right.  The solution for the newspaper industry’s woes isn’t to “embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period – say 24 hours.”

. . . Even if the newspaper industry could band together and pull this off, what would it lead to?  It probably results in a boatload of online traffic shifting from the newspaper sites to other news-oriented sites.  If citizen journalism needs a spark or other event to propel it to the next level of success, this might…

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An utterly numbnutty idea

Jeff Jarvis:

. . .  [Scheer’s proposal is] an utterly numbnutty idea. . . Uh, counselor, you assume that you can still control the news. You can’t. That’s the whole point of the internet. Others can easily step into whatever void there is and report what you don’t report; you’re only opening the door for them. Oh, but they don’t have what the papers have? Look again: It’s worth cataloguing just how much in a paper is commodity news that is known elsewhere. So you would make papers staler in a world…

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A proposal that might save newspapers

Peninsula Press Club:

Peter Scheer . . . has come up with an idea that might save the newspaper business. In a commentary posted on the CFAC Web site, he suggests that newspapers keep news stories off of their free Web sites for 24 hours in order to make their print (and paid Web) editions more valuable.

A few years ago, newspaper executives who were trying to develop their Web sites might have scoffed at such an idea. But now that newspapers have discovered that they…

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Flabbergasted

Steve Fox:
Every now and then, you read a piece where you have to stop, take a breath and then go back and make sure you actually just read that.

Peter Scheer, billed as a lawyer, journalist and executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, columnizes in the San Francisco ?Chronicle that newspapers and wire services, to help protect their collective bottom lines, should embargo their news content from the “free Internet” for about 24 hours.

. . . Hmm, ok. So, let me get this straight. A First Amendment…

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