No More Napsters

As they try to engineer a successful transition to paperless books, publishers are trying to learn from the mistakes made by the recording industry. Some years ago, the major recording companies reacted poorly to Napster, the pioneering music-sharing site. Instead of working with it as a powerful promotional tool, the recording companies fought back with aggressive legal action against both file sharing services and their customers.

This led to plenty of ill will between the major recording companies and the young people who had been their best customers. File sharing continued, CD sales continued to dwindle, and the recording industry is still searching for a sustainable business model.

So the book publishers are trying to walk the fine line between protecting copyrighted work and not alienating their readers, as this National Public Radio story reports.

Everyone's a Reporter

Our last Medianote of March will be from the truly excellent Mediashift blog. A recent post by a Canadian media theorist heralded an end to the "Tyranny of Reporters." By this, he meant that in the Internet Age consumers of news are increasingly empowered to not just question but alter news reports. Questions for the class...

•Is this really as good as it sounds?
•Do we see other mass media becoming more participatory, with the audience feeling empowered to contribute?
•Will this raise the standards of news and entertainment, or lower them?

Maybe All the World Really Is a Stage...

If you think you're constantly being watched, you're not as paronoid as you might think. We are on camera at the ATM, the gas station, the convenience store, and elsewhere. A Honolulu Star-Bulletin columnist wonders if this is the real Big Brother from George Orwell's 1984.

Let's Get Happy

Bad war news, grim financial tidings, and grisly crime stories got you down? National Public Radio interviewed a former TV newswoman who now runs a good news-only website. We discussed in class whether it is in the nature of most news to be negative, and whether that was a good thing, a bad thing, or just a necessary thing.

U R 2 Mean

Apparently, bullies have discovered how to send text messages.

"Textual Harassment" is the subject of a recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Apparently, increasing numbers of people are being stalked through text messages and emails sent direct to cellphones. The victims, often young, find it hard to respond because the stalker is frequently anonymous. And even when the stalker's identity is known, it is difficult to assess whether the stalker would carry out any threats.

Questions for the class were...

•Do you know anyone who has had to deal with textual harassment?
•Why do people act more aggressively in text messages than in person?
•What is the proper response to textual harassment?

***FIELD TRIP TWITTER To stay current on the latest updates about Mass Comm 101 field trips, follow MIKEEBERTS (one word) on Twitter. This should be an especially handy tool if any of our field trip plans change at the last minute.

Bookless College

At Northwest Missouri State College, all students are issued a laptop when they arrive on campus. There is no bookstore in the conventional sense because all the textbooks on this rural campus are e-books, National Public Radio reports.