The answer seems pretty obvious to me. The feds need to set up a Consumer Lending Authority that gives loans to people, yes, ordinary people, at rates close to what the Federal Reserve charges banks, which is practically zero. Okay, maybe charge a percent or two.

That way consumers could unwind the debt burdens too many of them carry themselves. The current approach is to give billions of taxpayer dollars to big banks, usually with few if any strings attached. That's like giving money to the mafia to combat illegal loansharking. Last month, when, for the first time ever, I missed my payment to a credit card company, First National Bank of Omaha, by just a few days, the bank responded by retroactively increasing my interest rate from 1.9 percent to nearly 30 percent. When I called to protest they said, essentially, "sorry, sucker, them's the breaks." Nearly 30 percent! I'm taking steps to close that account. But the experience reminded me that these big national banks are in many ways now worse, or at least as bad, as the Mafioso loansharks of old. Giving these big banks more money won't solve the problem. They are the problem. What's more, the credit card industry's often lowlife business practices make the sub-prime mortgage lenders seem like saints. In my direct experience, credit card companies routinely lie about the interest rates they charge, arbitrarily change the terms of loans, fail to disclose interest rates in online account summaries, and act in many other ways designed to lock consumers into a "debt-trap" from which they can never escape. One must constantly be on guard against the credit card industry's scams and ripoffs.

A Federal Consumer Lending Authority, by contrast, could lend money to folks at reasonable rates who can demonstrate that they are basically credit worthy based on their ability to pay their bills over some more lengthy period of time, say, the last five or ten years, rather than the "what happened last month" standard used by the credit reporting agencies.

The only way to resolve the credit crunch is to resolve the credit crunch. And the best way to do that is to make credit available to consumers at reasonable rates. If the FDIC-insured, government-coddled banks won't or can't do that, then the feds must. The length and depth of this next Great Depression may well depend on how long it takes our economic policy makers to understand that our economy can only be rebuilt from the bottom up.

What we need is inspiration, hope, a belief that yes "journalism will survive the death of its institutions." That a new media start-up can serve the same mission that traditional media has done for us in the past. Hope that many of the institutions we love can find a way to steer their large bureaucratic ships to safety before taking on too much debt.

I am writing this post physically exhausted but emotionally charged. I feel like a lion. As if I could talk down the curmudgeonist of curmudgeons. Not because I know the answer(s) - but because if we can't even talk those people down, then we might as well just crawl into a hole and give up. Fuck that! We are moving forward with or without them.

I'm thrilled to report that our new non-profit Center for Media Change, Inc. project, ReelChanges.org, has just won a generous grant of $10,000 a month of free advertising from Google, Inc. for use on Google's highly effective Adsense network. What a cool deal. I can't thank the good folks at Google enough.

Using the highly valuable ads, though, turns out to be more complicated than just spending the money. I set up this page, for example, to give me a better sense of how search inquires might map to what Google calls the "keywords" I need to purchase with their funds. I need to figure out how I can use these ads to attract people interested in supporting documentary films AND people who produce documentary films. That turns out to be a bit more difficult than one might imagine. As a result, it looks like my ReelChanges.org Google Adsense blitz will remain a work in progress until I get the hang of it. Nice, though, to be doing it on Google's dime...What a great company. The filmmakers using our site are deeply grateful for their support.

Meanwhile, here is a related link to a page of other documentary film funding resources, which will evolve over time.

From the Los Angeles Times

Free digital texts begin to challenge costly college textbooks in California

By Gale Holland
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 18, 2008

The annual college textbook rush starts this month, a time of reckoning for many students who will struggle to cover eye-popping costs of $128, $156, even $198 a volume.

Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee finds it annoying that students and faculty haven't looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices. McAfee wrote a well-regarded open-source economics textbook and gave it away -- online. But although the text, released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market.

"I was disappointed in the uptake," McAfee said recently at an outdoor campus cafe. "But I couldn't continue assigning idiotic books that are starting to break $200."

McAfee is one of a band of would-be reformers who are trying to beat the high cost -- and, they say, the dumbing down -- of college textbooks by writing or promoting open-source, no-cost digital texts.

Thus far, their quest has been largely quixotic, but that could be changing. Public colleges and universities in California this past year backed several initiatives to promote online course materials, and publishers and entrepreneurs are stepping up release of electronic textbooks, which typically sell at reduced prices....

Open educational resources is an amorphous category for publishers, but basically it includes e-textbooks, courses, videos, taped lectures, tests, software and other materials released online free to the public without restriction on use.

Universities for more than a decade have experimented with open-source educational sites and online libraries as a way to spread knowledge more equitably. Some seek to change the nature of the textbook by offering "chunks" of instruction that professors can mix and match to create their own content "collections."

One of the biggest pushes for open educational resources has come from California community colleges, where students devoted nearly 60% of their education spending in 2007-08 to textbooks, according to a California State Auditor's report released last week.

The Foothill-De Anza Community College District in the Silicon Valley has teamed with the state's other two-year colleges to encourage faculty to create, use and select digital textbooks. The California Community Colleges Board of Governors voted in May to back open educational resources.

"One of the most heartbreaking things you can see is a student in the bookstore with a course catalog in one hand looking at the book prices to see what courses he can afford to take," said Hal Plotkin, a Foothill-De Anza trustee who was instrumental in the drive.

Several experts said a strong shift by California's public universities to open-source textbooks could be the jolt that brings them into wider use.

August 24, 2008

Crowd Funding
A Different Way to Pay for the News You Want

By SARAH KERSHAW

You think your local water supply is polluted. But you're getting the runaround from local officials, and you can't get your local newspaper to look into your concerns. What do you do?

A group of journalists say they have an answer. You hire them to investigate and write about what they find.

The idea, which they are calling "community-funded journalism," is now being tested in the San Francisco Bay area, where a new nonprofit, Spot Us, is using its Web site, spot.us, to solicit ideas for investigative articles and the money to pay for the reporting. But the experiment has also raised concerns of journalism being bought by the highest bidder.

The idea is that anyone can propose a story, though the editors at Spot Us ultimately choose which stories to pursue. Then the burden is put on the citizenry, which is asked to contribute money to pay upfront all of the estimated reporting costs. If the money doesn't materialize, the idea goes unreported.

"Spot Us would give a new sense of editorial power to the public," said David Cohn, a 26-year-old Web journalist who received a $340,000, two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to test his idea. "I'm not Bill and Melinda Gates, but I can give $10. This is the Obama model. This is the Howard Dean model."

Those campaigns revolutionized politics by using the power of the Web to raise small sums from vast numbers of people, making average citizens feel a part of the process in a way they had not felt before. In the same way, Spot Us hopes to empower citizens to be part of a newsgathering enterprise that, polls show, many mistrust and regard as both biased and elitist.

Other enterprises have found success with this approach, which, in the Internet age, has become known as "crowdfunding." This financing model takes its name from crowdsourcing, a method for using the public, typically via the Internet, to supply what employees and experts once did: information, research and development, T-shirt designs, stock photos, advertising spots. In crowdsourcing, the people supply the content; in crowdfunding, they supply the cash.

Charities have used crowdfunding, not necessarily under that name, for years. And one Hollywood studio, Brave New Worlds, is financing its movies by soliciting people over the Internet to pay for them before they are made.

The Spot Us experiment comes, not coincidentally, as newspapers around the country lay off reporters and editors by the hundreds and scale back their coverage to cope with a financial crisis brought about, in no small measure, by the rise of the Internet. Another experimental venture, Pro Publica, a nonprofit group led by Paul Steiger, a former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, is being bankrolled by several major foundations to pursue investigative projects that it will then offer to newspapers and magazines.

Spot Us plans to post its articles on its Web site and give them to newspapers that want to publish them. If a newspaper wants exclusive rights to an article, the paper will have to pay for it.

Critics say the idea of using crowdfunding to finance journalism raises some troubling questions. For example, if a neighborhood with an agenda pays for an article, how is that different from a tobacco company backing an article about smoking? (Spot Us limits the amount any one contributor can give to no more than 20 percent of the cost of the story.)

But Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired Magazine whose book "Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business" is being published this month said: "It's not like the crowd is killing the newspaper. Lots of things are killing the newspaper. The crowd is at once a threat to newsrooms, but it's also one of several strategies that could help save the newspapers."

In an early test of its concept, Spot Us solicited ideas on its Web site and raised $250 for an article examining whether California can meet its ethanol demand. That might not pay the weekly phone bill for a lot of reporters. But for its newest project, Spot Us has raised nearly all of the $2,500 it says it will need to fact-check political ads in the coming local elections in San Francisco. "We need 12 more people to donate $25," the site said on Friday.

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University who is working with Mr. Cohn and who began his own experimental journalism site last year using the public's collaboration in news gathering, Assignment Zero (zero.newassignment.net), has been a leading critic of the traditional model of reporting. Now, with the industry's financial troubles, he may have a more receptive audience.

"The business model is broken," he said. "We're at a point now where nobody actually knows where the money is going to come from for editorial goods in the future. My own feeling is that we need to try lots of things. Most of them won't work. You'll have a lot of failure. But we need to launch a lot of boats."

By the way, the Center for Media Change, Inc. finally has its own modest little website, which you can find here.

The major news on the ReelChanges front, in addition to the growing number of high-quality projects on the site, revolves around promising new alliances and joint ventures. We're now working with Maryland Public Television (MPT) on a collaboration that will, I hope, make real inroads in using the Internet to strengthen the publics' link with public television. We've been fortunate to find a visionary public television pioneer to work with, MPT president Rob Shuman, whose credits include helping found the Learning Channel. Rob and his talented crew come to us by way of my old friend and mentor, Jim Russell, who has recently taken on a role as ReelChanges' Consulting Executive Producer. Jim was the first Executive Producer of All Things Considered and also created public radio's long running business news program, Marketplace, where I toiled for a time in the late 1980's. It's fun to be working with him again. Another key development: a growing alliance with new media visionary David Cohn, whose www.Spot.us project recently won major support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. David and I are close to a fiscal sponsorship agreement that will make www.Spot.us a project of the Center for Media Change, Inc., the 501c3 I run that also operates ReelChanges. Even better, David and I have started to talk about the ways ReelChanges and Spot.us can collaborate to build out the people powered media space. And finally, I'm also pleased to note that well-respected open source lawyer Larry Rosen has agreed to serve as general counsel for the Center for Media Change, Inc. and ReelChanges.org. As I mentioned, it's been a busy few weeks. And I've left more things out than I have time now to list. All very exciting.

Thanks again to J.D. Lasica, whose early blog posts and articles about ReelChanges led to many of the emails I mentioned above. Thanks also to Jonathan Shradar, FreePress, Leonard Witt, DocumentaryFilms.net, GreenScreenCinema, Media Giraffe, Wayne's Brain Dump, Global Mojo, Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media and too many others to mention here for all the help in spreading the word. Just do a "google" on ReelChanges and see what turns up. Weeks ago nothing, now it would take all day to follow all the links with positive mentions. Deep thanks to all. Oh, also, a special word of thanks to Arden Pennell, the terrific young journalist at the Palo Alto Weekly who did a very nice story about ReelChanges that I continue to circulate to great effect. Arden, who seems certain to emerge as her own Silicon Valley brand, has a new blog, ArdentNews, that you'll want to check out.

More when I next come up for air...

In the meantime, please visit ReelChanges and make a contribution to a project on the site or to the site itself. We need your support and you'll feel good when you do it. I promise. Or your money back.

I could not be more excited or more proud.

It's the project I've been dropping hints about in this space for months. Given the trailblazing nature of our venture, I never knew exactly how much I should say or write about what we were doing before we were actually ready to do it. My big fear, of course, was that someone else or some other group would get a jump start on us in organizing the community of users whose participation is critical to our early success.

But thanks to a high-profile launch at today's well-attended conference and blog posts by two of those present (here and here) ReelChanges site registrations are already taking off. In fact, we could not be off to a better start. I feel like ten thousand pounds have been lifted off my shoulders. I may even start returning social phone calls again soon.

The demo was well-attended. I could almost see the wheels turning in some of their heads as they were stimulated by what they saw and by what ReelChanges could mean for them and for journalism.

It was also an incredible relief to finally be able to "show our work" after so many months.

So, what have we created?

A unique new online non-profit-based business model that we believe has the power to help preserve and positively transform the business and practice of journalism by modernizing the profession for the digital interconnected age.

On a technical level, our basic goal, what I originally set out to do, was to figure out how we could use the exact same web-based, digital technologies that are destroying the old business model that financed the creation of high-quality journalism to construct a new business model capable of taking its place. So that is what our ReelChanges team has done. Version 1.00 anyway. And in the process, we also discovered something quite remarkable. We could get the job done, in fact the very best way to get the job done, would involve substantially reducing and redefining the role of traditional media industry gatekeepers such as publishers, network owners and advertisers. Put simply, what ReelChanges enables is shifting more of the power in the journalism industry where it rightfully belongs: into the hands of those who produce the journalism.

Several people deserve special thanks. ReelChanges board member Andy Hertzfeld continues to generously provide critical advice and leadership in the development of our user interface. Filmmaker Yoav Potash has helped guide our efforts from day one. My close friend Dick Alexander's support has been instrumental. And, of course, there is the entire dev team affiliated with the always remarkable Texity , Inc. in Pune, India, Chicago and Canada led by Swati Jalnapurkar, as well as the rest of our board and all our other volunteers and supporters, all of whom we'll eventually find a way to honor on the site. We have an incredibly diverse, talented and hard-working team that is full of creative, dedicated whip smart people who put in long, 12 and 15 hour days when needed. You know who you are. I could not be more deeply proud of every one of you or more grateful. The best things users find when they visit ReelChanges.org came from this wonderful team.

Two other heartfelt notes of thanks.

The first, to Tom Murphy, the founder and editor of Redwood Age, who graciously jumped to my assistance when my laptop lost its connection to the Internet right before my demo. Tom quickly installed the flash player needed for the demo and lent me his computer for the demo. I am not sure what I would have done without him. He also has a great, smartly targeted website and the same general focus and philosophy as mine, that quality always wins in the end.

And finally, a grateful word to a remarkably kind and generous new friend, J.D. Lasica. J.D. wrote one of the first blog posts about my demo. He has also been a key supporter of ReelChanges since the moment he first heard about our project. He even offered to provide free hosting services for us through his groundbreaking and highly-respected Ourmedia.org. J.D. is also one of the forces behind Bid4Vid, an innovative new venture with many of the same goals as ReelChanges, including helping create jobs for journalists and filmmakers, although with a different strategy. It was wonderful to meet J.D. in person at the demo. He's someone I have admired for a long time and, if you just look over his site, is clearly a lot more than just brilliant.

So please, help us spread the word: ReelChanges.org is open for business. Let's see if we can change the world one film at a time.

What an incredible talent. We won't see his likes again.

As I explained in a column some years ago, the federal government's current spectrum allocation policies, which were established decades ago, have long since become technologically obsolete and completely unnecessary for the purposes that were originally intended and that were narrowly permitted under the Constitution, namely, to prevent signal interference that would otherwise have made commercial broadcasting impossible. That was true at one time. But it has not been true for many years, perhaps decades now. If Google puts up its dukes and really fights this fight it is hard to see how the U.S. Supreme Court will have any rational choice other than to throw out the fed's current rule-making authority in the spectrum allocation business in favor of requiring the FCC to enact regulations that permit spread spectrum or spectrum sensing technologies that enable anyone to use the airwaves without hurting anyone else and, most importantly, without government permission. In the end, it's a free speech issue. If the federal government does not have to restrict the use of the airwaves to enable broadcasting then why on earth should it do so?

Up til now, the big money has all been behind allowing the federal government to allocate spectrum that just a few huge companies can then control. Google and its high-tech allies, including, in this case, Microsoft, have the financial resources to prevail against against the big telcos and media companies in the federal courts and, if needed, in Congress. So kudos to Google for taking the first step in what could be a long but very worthwhile legal battle. If Google pushes the spread spectrum/spectrum sharing issue in the courts the only way they and the American public can lose is if the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to shred constitutional protections for free speech and freedom of the press.

I just realized that my email address book was one of the items not saved after my hard drive crash on Thursday. I was able to resurrect about a dozen addresses from memory, but the rest, 15 years worth maybe, are gone. Lost little electrons on a now inoperable encrypted hard drive. What a strange feeling. Anyway, if you are a friend or contact, even if you have recently been in touch with me via email, please do me a favor and send me an email asap, empty is fine, so I can add you back to my address book. It's a drag, but considering the stuff I did save, it could have been much worse. I know many of you check in here from time to time, so please do help me keep in touch.

Anyway, I was blown away, really quite impressed, and totally surprised to end up buying a Hewlett Packard PC, my first ever HP-PC. If my experience is common, I suspect it means HP will continue to gain market share.

I've owned pretty much every brand of PC, starting with an IBM, then one called Leading Edge, a Compaq, some clones, and at least two Sony's, one of which was a pretty decent machine. But I never bought an HP which, for a variety of reasons, always seemed like an uncompelling alternative. In fact, back in 2001 I even panned the inept way HP merchandised their products.

This time around, I checked out all the usual suspects, DELL, Gateway, even ACER, both online and at the store. In both venues one thing was clear: HP's more diverse and versatile product line stood head and shoulders above the competition. I haven't paid much attention to this beat since around 2000-1 when I covered it pretty extensively for CNBC.com. But it seems pretty clear to me that in the time that has passed HP has leapfrogged the field.

I was dazzled by the choices and price points available at Fry's. HP had a computer for every niche. And when I visited HP's website it was much more user-friendly, intuitive and helpful than either Dell, Gateway or Acer's. Flat out, the HP site did a much better job of quickly matching my needs with the right product at a great price. When I got stuck at one point I pushed a "call me" button on the site and about a minute later my phone rang with an HP salesperson on the other end, smart, who was able to rapidly guide me through the rest of the transaction. Even better, she already had my partial order in front of her when she called so closing the deal was a breeze.

As I say, I don't cover tech stocks these days. And I have not looked all that closely at the company's detailed financials other than noticing what looks like a pretty reasonable current and forward P/E. But, for what it's worth, after I bought my new HP computer, I bought some of the company's stock, too. HP is definitely back.

Memo to bloggers everywhere, on both the Left and the Right:

Please, let's all drop the misleading and unhelpful acronym "MSM" from our shared vocabularies as bloggers and use the term "Corporate-Owned News Media" or "CONM" (pronounced "CON-UM") instead.

Here's why:

The term "mainstream media" carries a connotation that the views expressed within are part of some mainstream. I understand the history of the term. That it was meant to describe what "most" members of a particular professional group were doing. But as a term "MSM" has outlived its usefulness and is, in the context of current events, misleading and far too generous.

Rhetorically speaking, if the MSM represents some part of the "mainstream," then that would put its critics, again, rhetorically speaking, somewhere in the fringes, I would suppose.

But, in our cacophonous diversity, we bloggers are the mainstream.

And what we object to, in growing numbers, are media, the news media in particular, that pollutes the vital public information streams on which our democracy depends, or manipulates the electoral process with propagandistic Big Lie techniques that lead to the sort of ineffective, counterproductive social policies that have brought our great nation low. The term Corporate-Owned News Media, "CONM," is a far more apt descriptor of this increasingly apparent underlying socio-political-economic malignancy.

What's more, the term "CONM" also far more accurately focuses attention on the underlying source of the most problematic issues currently attributed to the MSM, including by more explicitly identifying the at least reasonable suspicion that hidden corporate agendas can play a role in advancing the public disinformation campaigns we so frequently see.

For these reasons and more henceforth I'm going to stop using the term "MSM" and instead use "CONM," with a short explanation the first time I use it in each post. I hope others will consider doing so as well.

Sample use:

After watching the CONM continue to repetitively rebroadcast excerpts of the speeches of Rev. Jeremiah Wright today, over, and over and over again, in an obvious effort to smear Senator Obama by association, calling FOX and CNN and the rest of their ilk part of the American "mainstream" is a kindness I can no longer stomach. Their corporate agendas are showing. The least we can do is call them on it.

"We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies. We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change. That is one option.

Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time."

This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election."