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They're ripping desks and phones out of my end of the newsroom this morning to make room for the new, adjustable, designed-for-computers desks. Meanwhile, I'm homeless from a desk point of view, squatting at the desk of another editor who doesn't work Mondays. My voicemail works, and I'll be checking it, but actually trying to catch me on my office phone might not work so well for a few days.

My thanks to community editor Betsi Robinson; tech gurus Stephen Paschall, Charlie Stafford and Kevin Lockamy; and the people of Summerfield for their contributions to the successful launch of Hometown Hubs: Summerfield. We're going to do a quick post-mortem, and possibly some tweaking of the site design, before we start working on the next Hometown Hub. As always, feedback is welcome.

Audio files from the third round of hearings of the Greensboro Truth & Reconciliation Commission have arrived, courtesy of Ed Whitfield, and they've been turned over to Kevin Lockamy and Bruce Webb of our crack online tech staff for posting. I'll shout when they're up.

One of the reasons we launched the Town Square initiative was because many advertisers are devoting increasing percentages of their ad budget to the Web. Now comes a report that that strategy is paying off:

Brian Clark, the CEO of GMD Studios, recounted a campaign that his agency ran for [auto maker] Audi, titled "The Art of the Heist." Just one-half of one percent of the media buy budget, Clark said, was spent on BlogAds -- a firm run by panel moderator Henry Copeland, which sells ad space on some of the highest-trafficked blogs. Those ads, Clark said, ended up accounting for 29 percent of the traffic sent to the campaign's landing page.

If that's the case, I'm guessing those blogs could justifiably charge a lot more than they're getting right now ... which, in turn, has encouraging ramifications for what we're up to. But I hasten to add that the business end of this experiment isn't my specialty, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Via my colleague Eric Townsend comes news of a court ruling that should gladden the hearts of those who choose to, or feel they must, blog anonymously:

... the Delaware Supreme Court sided with free-speech advocates Wednesday and rejected a Smyrna Town councilman's quest to unmask an anonymous Internet critic.

The state's high court reversed a Superior Court order requiring Internet service provider Comcast Cable Communications to release the identity of "John Doe No. 1" to Councilman Patrick Cahill so Cahill could pursue a libel suit for allegedly defamatory comments Doe posted on a weblog, or "blog."

And the justices set a high standard for future cases, making it difficult for people like Cahill to force disclosure of an anonymous poster's identity simply by filing lawsuits that have little chance of success.

"We are concerned that setting the standard too low will chill potential posters from exercising their First Amendment right to speak anonymously," Chief Justice Myron T. Steele wrote in a 33-page opinion.

"The possibility of losing anonymity in a future lawsuit could intimidate anonymous posters into self-censoring their comments or simply not commenting at all," the opinion states. ...

The high court's ruling was hailed by free-speech advocates who, like the Supreme Court, likened anonymous political speech on the Internet to the anonymous political pamphlets handed out during the Revolutionary War era. ...

"This is an important decision by an important Supreme Court," [attorney Paul Alan] Levy said, noting that this is the first such case addressed by a state's highest court. [Levy filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Doe No. 1.] That makes courts in other states likely to look to this decision for guidance.

"The court's determination to require sufficient evidence before a critic is outed will go a long way toward reassuring citizens that they remain free to anonymously criticize public officials," he said.

David L. Finger, who represented Doe No. 1, said he was "pleased that the court agreed that the statements that John Doe No. 1 made, in the context of this blog, could not reasonably be interpreted as statements of fact. They were basically his opinion."

I'm not a big fan of anonymous/pseudonymous blogging, just as I am not a big fan of anonymous sources in journalism. But, also as with anonymous sources, I realize that some people -- because of fears of losing their job, or alienating loved ones, or some other legitimate concern -- have to blog anonymously or can't blog at all. Calling someone names anonymously, or opining anonymously that someone is a jerk, is pretty cheesy behavior, but allowing it is the price we pay for freedom of expression -- if you don't believe me, look at the comments to some of my previous posts :-)

I'm not a lawyer, but I think the court did a good job of balancing some important competing interests. It protected anonymous/pseudonymous expression of opinion while leaving the door open to libel suits against the purveyors of anonymous/pseudonymous, but false and damaging, factual assertions. You can't just use any old lawsuit to destroy anonymity, it said, but if you have a legitimate legal gripe, the courts will help you draw aside that veil. That's a perfectly reasonable standard, and when, not if, this case or one like it makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court, I hope and trust that the justices will rely heavily on this ruling in crafting their own.

How did Greensboro become Bloggsboro, the home of ConvergeSouth? A lot of people asked me that yesterday at We Media 2005 in New York, and I didn't really have a good answer. But Tom Lassiter, who walked out of the N&R 18 years ago about 30 seconds before I walked in, does, in a 6-minute QuickTime video.

I spent this past Wednesday up in New York at the We Media '05 conference, sponsored by the American Press Institute's Media Center and The Associated Press. It was held at AP's new digs on West 33rd, which, I must say, look like a Hollywood set designer's idea of what a global wire service's world headquarters should look like ... and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

The speakers ranged from former Vice President Al Gore and the heads of some of the country's biggest news-media organizations to, well, me. The crowd was overwhelmingly white and wealthy, largely male and middle-aged or older, and pretty sure that the universe of citizen journalism, blogging and other forms of participatory media, in some form, is where we are, and need to be, heading.

As you might expect with such a crowd, the most urgent questions could be boiled down to: How can we make money off of this? That came up even in my session, about which more anon. It might or might not comfort you to know that you probably know as much about the answer to that question as any of the suits in the room did, or were admitting to.

In the first session (audio here), one of the speakers either was or was quoting (I'm not sure which) Chris Willis, co-author of the 2003 report "We Media" (*.pdf file here, HTML version here). His point was that although some of us might have utopian visions of "citizen journalism" in which lay people burst forth with well-documented, well-written pieces to contribute to the Web sites of traditional media, the typical person wants to participate in some way in the public conversation but doesn't necessarily want to be, or be thought of as, a "citizen journalist." I don't have any indication in my notes that the speaker discussed the ramifications of that fact. I do have a note to myself to determine whether our Hometown Hubs approach is the correct way to serve such readers. Now that we have our second weekend of Hometown Hubs: Summerfield under our belts, I'm pretty sure that is, if not the correct way, at least one correct way to do so. I'm open to suggestions on others.

The speakers briefly discussed the geek tools that are not only making contributing to the conversation easier but also making it easier to find contributions by subject. I'll spare you the gory technical details, but photo-hosting sites such as Flickr, "tagging" code from Technorati and Web syndication figure heavily into the mix. They noted that after the South Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, people in the affected areas found their voices through blogs and "exhibited the instinct to be storytellers."

Are we moving from a media-consumption culture to a "contribution culture"? I sure hope so, because we've got our chips placed on that particular part of the roulette table.

UPDATE: (10/12/05): Per Mike Orren, the speaker was indeed Willis; passage above that mentioned him has been edited to reflect that fact.

For one thing, Sen. Richard Lugar's proposal wouldn't protect bloggers. And maybe it's just me, but I think having the federal government decide who's a journalist and who isn't is not a great idea. And that's effectively what would be going on.

My definition: journalism is something you do. If you gather information with the intent to distribute it publicly for the benefit of that public, you're committing journalism, pure and simple. And if anyone is entitled to the benefits of a shield law, then everyone who commits journalism is entitled to the same benefits, at least insofar as their acts of journalism are concerned.

One of my co-panelists was Susan DeFife, president and CEO of Backfence.com, which is setting up hyperlocal community-journalism sites in the Washington area. I just got an e-mail from her announcing that the company has gotten a $3 million investment from SAS Investors and the Omidyar Network. With that money, Backfence will create additional sites around Washington as well as expand into at least two other metro areas (which the company isn't naming yet).

No one knows whether there's money to be made off citizen journalism, but if the venture capitalists are getting involved, they must be fairly sure there's a way.

I pass on without comment this Online Journalism Review article that reviews various citizen-journalism sites around the country, including Greensboro101.com (but not us). Note, particularly, the discussion going on in the comments.

Try to tell that to David Wharton.

I don't need this at the moment, but you might.

That's what we hope, and expect, citizen journalism will be someday soon.

Allen is up to something cool. But I'm going to wait and let him tell you about it when he's good and ready.

We've been kicking around the idea of posting reader-submitted photos pretty much since Day 1. The question was never whether to do it. The question was how, from a technical standpoint, to administer it.

Long story short, we're using TextAmerica and launching a photo site now. You can see the photos at http://triadphotos.textamerica.com/ on a computer browser (our staff already has put up a few) or http://triadphotos.tamw.com on your mobile device.

To contribute a photo:

Take a picture or video with your camera phone or digital camera and e-mail it (one at a time) to triadphotos.nr@tamw.com. Your subject line becomes the title of the photo and the body of your message becomes the caption. Files must be JPEGs and less than 700K in size.

We will be looking at photos as they come in, but we'll be posting them as soon as possible.

So get clickin'.

One of my former employers, Freedom Communications, found itself in a tad of hot water earlier today after several bloggers noticed that an editorial in at least four different Freedom newspapers, two of them here in North Carolina, and was presented unsigned and uncredited at each, meaning the reader likely would infer that the piece had been written by someone on the staffs of the respective newspapers. (In fact, it originated at the Colorado Springs paper and was republished at the other three.)

Some of the bloggers (mostly liberal) who raised a stink about the deceptive republication did so in part because they disagreed with its substance, but its substance is not relevant to my point.

I don't know how common the practice of republishing editorials in that manner at Freedom papers is. I seem to recall its happening during the time I worked for the Freedom papers in New Bern and Gastonia (the papers implicated in today's kerfuffle are in Kinston and Jacksonville, N.C.), from late 1985 to early 1987, but I don't recall its happening often.

In a way, there's a certain logic to the practice, inasmuch as Freedom dictates a strongly libertarian editorial viewpoint and expects all its newspapers' editorial pages to do the same. So, from a philosophical standpoint, the editorials are almost literally interchangeable: If one Freedom newspaper thinks, as in this case, suspending the wage requirements of the Davis-Bacon Act in areas recovering from Katrina is a good idea, the others are likely to think pretty much the same thing, differing, if at all, on only minor points.

Moreover, once you get past the Orange County Register, the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Mesa, Ariz., paper, Freedom papers get pretty small pretty quickly. If you figure that most editorial pages run, say, two or three unsigned staff editorials a day, that means you'd have to come up with roughly 14 to 20 pieces a week, and almost no Freedom paper has enough staff to generate that many pieces consistently. So, if your duties include coming up with content for the editorial page of a Freedom newspaper, you almost inevitably are going to have to look outside your building for some, perhaps much, of your editorial content, and that's even before you cross the gutter to the op-ed page.

But the issue here is not one of resources or editorial philosophy, but of honesty, of being straight with the reader. Absent some internal corporate ban on the practice, there is absolutely nothing wrong with one Freedom paper's republishing an editorial written by the staff of another Freedom newspaper ... as long as the source of that editorial is identified. The republishing papers didn't do it, and that's where they erred.

My friend David Allen, who rages against the dying of the light over at the Institute for Creative Thoughtcrime, e-mailed the Kinston paper earlier today, asking why the source of the editorial hadn't been properly identified. He shared the response he got with me:

About the editorial "Mandated wage levels would raise recovery costs" that appears in The Free Press today, it originated in the Colorado Springs Gazette, a newspaper that is part of the Freedom Communications group, as is The Free Press. Due to the fact that we have one editorial writer here -- me -- and that I have many other responsibilities, I sometimes fall back on editorials generated by other Freedom newspapers. They express the libertarian point of view that is consistent in The Free Press and that runs through all newspapers in the group. Besides, an editorial is the opinion of the newspaper, not necessarily of the writer. In that respect, its [sic] something like debating. If any of you have a different opinion of Davis-Bacon -- and I suspect that may be the reason I'm hearing from you rather than your concern for diminished ethics in journalism -- you're welcome to spell it out in a letter to the editor. Patrick Holmes Associate Publisher/Executive Editor The Free Press Kinston, NC

I don't know Mr. Holmes, but I understand that he probably got a ton of hostile e-mail after some of the most-read liberal blogs in the country reported on this. But here in the age of blogs and media transparency, his answer isn't going to cut it. You address the issue raised, not whatever you think the motive behind raising the issue might be. In this case, the issue is being honest with your readers. With all due respect to Mr. Holmes, The Free Press was not honest with its readers on this issue and needs to change its policy ... and the mindset that led to it.

I would blog about the fact that today is Take Back Your Time Day in the U.S. and Canada, but ... I don't have time.

First, you can download the *.mp3 here.

This session, "We News," was intended to enlighten us as to how Big Media is adopting to/co-opting/exploiting/what-have-you citizen journalism. My thoughts are below the fold, in thoroughly disjointed shorthand fashion.

Having a job and a life and all, I have no time to do this, but I hope that when/if special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announces his decision on indictments, some intrepid journalist/blogger/interested citizen can go back and check up on all the predictions made by various pundit to see who was right, who was sort of right and who was just dead flat wrong. I think a scorecard of that type might be enlightening. One of the many problems with modern media is that speculation rushes in where facts are too few to tread.

Dan Gillmor offers tips on interviewing for citizen journalists.

A Halloween tale for your enjoyment, courtesy of Froz Gobo of The Apostropher.

While Jay Rosen finishes a book, guest blogger Ron Brynaert uses Jay's Pressthink blog to ask, and answer, a darned good question: "Does The New York Times have a learning disability?"