“We feel that we have recreated the mass media,” said Kim Malone Scott, director of sales and operations for AdSense.

Apparently replacing the mass media is no longer a goal.

Frontline is currently running a four-part series called News War: An Investigation into the Future of News, and they’re putting it all online as it airs. Part I (the only part that has aired so far) was fantastic, and I was happy to be able to see it in high-quality video with no stuttering. The accompanying site looks pretty, and is fairly easy to navigate, but the way the accompanying material presented is a wasted opportunity. The web content for Part I consists of some extra interview transcripts, an FAQ on the freedom of the press, some supplementary documents, and a really great curated set of links. All of these are of interest, but after watching the (gripping) documentary, going through this material feels a little like homework. Why not present this material at the appropriate times as I’m watching the video, so that I can not only go deeper or get some more context for what I’m seeing, but that I can make the decision to do so at the moment of seeing, instead of relying on my recall of what I finished seeing? It might be objected that doing so would interrupt the flow of the video, but the video is already split into segments. The relevant material for each segment could be presented after a segment, and linked to the appropriate shots from that segment to allow easy navigation back to what was just seen.

OK, enough about the architecture of the News War site. What about the Future of News? I’m going to withhold detailed commentary until I’ve seen the whole series, but Part I did a good job of explaining a facet of the Valerie Plame case that I didn’t understand all that well: how it represents the overturning of 30 years of de facto recognition of journalists’ right to not reveal the identity of confidential sources. Though this right was explicitly ruled not to exist by the Supreme Court, activist lawyers had succeeded in persuading states to adopt an interpretation of this ruling which did weakly recognize this right, and journalists were rarely subpoenaed. That has changed in the wake of the Plame case, since Richard Posner, and then a circuit court, stated that the activist interpretation was unsupported by the law.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series, particularly Part III, which will look at “citizen journalism” and new media news. But I suspect that Frontline will drop the ball by looking to elites like Eric Schmidt for insights into this stuff. Schmidt basically shrugs his shoulders and says (I am paraphrasing here), “the Internet has determined that the power formerly concentrated in the press shall be concentrated here at the GOOG. It’s perhaps not ideal, but what can be done? We’ll try to send some traffic your way, though, ’cause hey, we have a kind of nostalgic regard for editors and all that manual processing of information stuff. Good luck with that making a living thing.” This kind of arrogant technical determinism is what keeps getting Google sued. Talking to chiefs of staff when you’re reporting on the government or the NYT is a good strategy; when you’re reporting on a loosely interconnected set of networked forums it may not be. Neither Schmidt, nor network architecture, nor Google’s algorithms will determine the future of news, and we needn’t sit back and accept the dissolution of institutions of news gathering and dissemination as inevitable.

Vh1 is compulsively watchable these days. Usually in a “car accident” sort of way (Daniel Baldwin and Biz Markie on Celebrity Fit Club) or a “watch Rome burn” sort of way (money porn like The Fabulous Life). But tonight it was in a “whoa, they’re marketing to my demographic” sort of way: ego trip’s Race-O-Rama.

Edgy stuff, for Vh1. Trash Viacom-owned “mass media” all you want, but their model of creating dozens and dozens of sometimes one-off shows, in a constantly mutating and recombining schedule, seems sort of well-suited for a converged media future–I can imagine it being delivered in a feed, easily consumed in bite-size chunks, with no narrative thread to worry about picking up, and an ironic hipster narrator, like Boing Boing or Fleshbot. I think this is a pretty good thing, especially if folks like Jon Stewart or ego trip can slip in some more subversive material on the way.

(And is that really Brother J doing voiceovers?)

Ramesh Jain believes that the convergence of PC-TV is finally here:

Comcast has the pipes both for TV and internet, owns content, and has resources and presence to finally bring this convergence. I hope this happens because the real winner will be the society. …[A]ll the talk is about video content that is produced by professionals. But if this infrastructure gets ready two things will happen – amateur content will also come to these portals and many exciting new technologies, like Multiple Perspective Interactive Video and its variants, will appear that will change the nature of entertainment.

From TechCentral:

China’s first novel delivered through SMS (short message service) is being made into a film that will also be delivered to cellphones and on the Internet, state media said Sunday.

The Taiwan-based company Bestis Technologies has bought the film rights to Outside the Fortress Besieged, a 4,200-character, 60-chapter novel that has been sent out to mobile subscribers in short installments, Xinhua news agency said.

Watching TV on your phone seems to be a hit in Korea:

The leading company in movie services is KTF Co., Ltd., Korea’s second largest service provider. The company commenced its service called “Fimm” (First in Mobile Multimedia) in May 2002 and attracted 3.405 million users as of May 2004. Its rival, SK Telecom, the top service provider in Korea, developed “June,” its movie contents service developed exclusively for 1xEV-DO, and obtained more than 2.645 million users.

The firms say that particularly popular contents are terrestrial TV programs encoded for mobile phones. “Such contents account for 40% of our total movie contents sales,” according to KTF media contents team senior Sohn Chang Hwa.