AP Phone Records Seizure Roundup
What journalists need to know about the Justice Department’s seizure of AP phone records | Poynter
Media coalition letter of protest to Attorney General Eric Holder | Washington Post
Digital First Media is one of the signers
Guild demands Justice Dept. return telephone records taken of AP reporters’ phone calls | Newspaper Guild
Exciting Times
This is the best moment to be in journalism | Columbia Journalism Review
The sub-hed says it all: “The old stuff isn’t coming back, but that’s okay”
And why is this the best moment to be in journalism? Well, according to the article:
- You have access to a world of sources
- Consumers have access to a world of media
- And you have direct access to news consumers
- Chaos is good for creativity
And of course the requisite “disruption” quote:
The sooner journalists start seeing disruption and technology as opportunity, the better off we’ll all be.
Life and Code | A learn-to-program blog written with journalists in mind
And if you want to be really disruptive, learn to code — this blog is a great place to start. I’ll shortly add this to the Toolbox page.
Labor Rethinks Its Future
Labor’s Plan B | The American Prospect
Labor conditions have gotten dramatically worse as unions have lost power—real wages have stagnated, wealth is increasingly concentrated—but no one seems to know how to connect the old-style of collective bargaining with the new economy.
Labor Wrestles With Its Future | Talking Union
Unions face an existential problem: If they can’t represent more than a sliver of American workers on the job, what is their mission? Are there other ways they can advance workers’ interests even if those workers aren’t their members?
Random Links
The Downtoning of America | United Steelworkers Blog
Income inequality in America is wide and widening. Just get this: while income stagnated for the middle class, the average annual income of the top .01 percent of U.S. households from 2002 to 2007 rose by 123 percent – a gain of $20 million each.
While making those huge profits, corporations aren’t creating jobs. For those who do have jobs but aren’t in the top 10 percent income bracket, wages fell 7 percent from 2007 to 2008. Unlike the rich, workers didn’t recover after the crash, with median household income declining 1.5 percent in 2011.
A New Era for Worker Ownership, 5 Years in the Making | Talking Union
And this is just a cool story about a group of workers at a window company who bought out the company and are running it as a co-op.
Today, in a revamped Campbell’s Soup building in an industrial and residential section of southwest Chicago, the New Era Windows Cooperative will celebrate the grand opening of its new factory.
Becoming a worker-owned cooperative is the latest chapter in the saga of the workers of Republic Windows and Doors, who gained the nation’s attention by occupying their factory—twice—and became a symbol of resistance in the face of corporate corruption and the economic crisis.
Image credit: Leo Reynolds via photopin cc
