Nuclear power, biofuels, clean coal: These are the Obama administration’s answers to climate change. The 2011 budget, released this week, promised new loans for the construction of nuclear power plants, and on Wednesday the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), White House, and other departments detailed steps to encourage ethanol and clean coal production.

These initiatives may garner support from conservatives, but their ascendancy comes at a price. Support for renewable fuel sources, like wind and solar, has dwindled. President Barack Obama did encourage Senate Democrats to pass a climate change bill, but some moderates are bucking the cap-and-trade provisions that could tamp down carbon emissions. Those moderates are pushing for legislation that leaves carbon caps out entirely.

It hasn’t been a good week for climate advocates. On top of the Obama administration’s overtures to crusty, old energy industries, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has had to fend off pressure to resign. The IPCC published a report with a badly sourced fact about the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting, and when scientists pointed out the error, Pachauri would not cop to the mistake. (If you missed the beginning of this to-do, Mother Jones‘ Kate Sheppard covered the controversy back in January.)

Given this country’s weak efforts to tamp down carbon emissions, though, perhaps the IPCC’s prediction that those glaciers likely will disappeared by 2035 will turn out to be accurate.

New nuclear plants—but at what cost?

Obama’s budget, as Sheppard reports at Mother Jones, is upping funding for nuclear plant development, even though previous nuclear projects have run wildly over budget. The president has always supported increased nuclear production. As an Illinois Senator, Obama had Exelon Corporation, the country’s largest nuclear operator, in his constituency. The company continued to support him as a presidential candidate. The proposed funding runs in the neighborhood of $54.5 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear projects. That’s good news for an industry that’s in need of cash. As Sheppard explains, without governmental backing, these plants would have little chance of being built.

“Even as public opinion toward nuclear power has warmed, projected construction costs for new plants have soared, with a single reactor now estimated to cost as much as $12 billion,” she writes. “In fact, the outlook for nuclear plants looks so dire that even Wall Street banks have balked at financing them unless the government underwrites the deal.”

The Obama administration is also backing research into nuclear waste disposal, a prerequisite for nuclear expansion. No matter how “green” nuclear energy production might be, so far there’s no safe, sustainable way to deal with its by-products. Finding a long-term solution for nuclear waste disposal will not come cheaply.

Biofuels move us backwards

The administration’s support for biofuels was bigger slap in the face to environmentalists, though. Just a few years ago, ethanol made from corn or switchgrass ranked high on the list of renewable fuels that could spring America from its Middle East oil addiction. In practice, however, biofuels have proven more environmentally destructive and less efficient than advocates had hoped. With farmers in the Midwest knee-deep in corn marked for ethanol production, though, backing away from biofuels is politically dicey.

The consequences are more than political, however. At Grist, Tom Philpott argues that support for biofuels will ultimately drive global carbon emission up, rather than down.

“As ethanol factories continue sucking in more and more corn, plantation owners in places like Brazil and Argentina will put more grassland and even rainforest under the plow to make up for the shortfall, resulting in huge carbon emissions,” Philpott writes. “That dire effect of our ethanol program, known as indirect land-use change, likely nullifies any scant climate benefits from ethanol.”

It’s not just corn and switchgrass that pose a problem, either. As Gina Marie Cheeseman reports at Care2, algae farms, another potential source of biofuel, face their own challenges. Algae demands high energy input and could release more carbon dioxide emissions that it would save, according to a new report from the University of Virginia.

There’s more research to be done before writing algae energy production off, however. In January, the Department of Energy said it would sink $44 million into work on algae pools. Industry players like ExxonMobile are also underwriting research on the subject, Cheeseman writes.

No room for innovation

Moving towards energy sources like nuclear power and ethanol does take the country a step closer to responsible energy production. But right now, the Obama administration is not leaving room for new or ambitious ideas that could do more. Wind and solar, which would form the best foundation for a sustainable energy future, have few advocates in Congress. They also seem to have no role in the near-term energy plan.

Ethanol was the Midwest’s first green industry, for instance, but there are other possibilities for juicing up the region’s clean energy production. In The Nation, Lisa Margonelli lays out the case for “gray power,” which is recycled energy produced by the old, dirty smokestacks that ring cities like Cleveland.

In this vision, twentieth century industry can produce twenty-first century energy. Waste energy, Margonelli argues,  “can be profitably “recycled” onto the grid to create power as clean as that from solar and wind but far cheaper.”

“In fact, energy now lost as steam and gases by the region’s manufacturing plants, as well as municipal and agricultural waste, could create as much energy as sixty-nine nuclear power plants, according to figures commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency,” she says. “This power could strengthen the region’s electrical grid and preserve jobs by making local manufacturing plants more economically stable, while making the region a leader in greener technology.”

A project like Margonelli imagines, however, would require significant commitment and vision from the federal government, both of which are lacking right now.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

The four young men arrested last week for allegedly attempting to tamper with the phones at the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) have ties to Republican politicians, conservative think tanks, radical campus activists, and even the intelligence community.

It appears that Landrieu was targeted, at least indirectly, because of her stance on health care reform. Two of the men posed as telephone repairmen while a third taped them with his cell phone. A fourth alleged accomplice was arrested in a car a few blocks away.

Right wing operative James O’Keefe, famous for posing as a pimp to “expose” unethical behavior at the anti-poverty group ACORN, claimed that he and his crew were trying to expose a problem with the phones at Landrieu’s office which were keeping constituents from reaching her.

Constituents getting a busy signal?

O’Keefe says they wanted to embarrass Landrieu by exposing whatever was wonky about her phones, but that justification strains credulity. Defenders of the four implied that Landrieu’s people might have somehow disabled their own phones to avoid angry constituents. Supposedly, these citizens wanted to express their outrage at Landrieu’s decision to vote for the Senate health reform bill in exchange for a line item to give Louisiana an additional $300 million federal health care dollars.

Some callers have reported trouble getting through to their representatives. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones reports that members of the Tea Party movement have complained to her about not being able to get through to their members of congress. She tried calling some senators and also had a hard time getting through to a real person.

Now that he’s out of jail, O’Keefe is furiously spinning his activities as investigative journalism gone awry, according to Justin Elliott of TPM Muckraker. O’Keefe told Sean Hannity in an interview that these tactics were standard journalistic tools. But let’s be realistic, here. Impersonating a repairman to covertly access a Senator’s phones is more Watergate burglar than Woodward and Bernstein.

O’Keefe’s activist theater

O’Keefe and his buddies are political operatives who come out of the world of right wing campus organizing, as Dave Weigel reports for the Washington Independent. Over the years, they’ve earned notoriety by using various forms of political theater and media to advance their issues. O’Keefe and Ben Wetmore, a fellow activist who let the alleged tamperers crash at his house before the Landrieu operation, even got married to each other to illustrate that shady people can marry each other for benefits, just like with straight marriage. On his now-defunct blog, Countermedia, Wetmore urged conservative activists to target seniors with a health care robocall featuring a Barack Obama impersonator.

The Landrieu crew is no stranger to more traditional forms of conservative politics, either. O’Keefe and Wetmore both formerly worked for the conservative Leadership Institute, a group that funds political training for right wing activists. Fake repairman Robert Flanagan interned for Republican Senator Lamar Alexander and a GOP congresswoman. O’Keefe was revealed to be on the payroll of the right wing news site Big Government at the time of his arrest.

The Landrieu incident is a continuation of their campaign to use guerrilla video for political dirty tricks. O’Keefe became famous last year for videos that appear to show him dressing up as a pimp and soliciting questionable advice from ACORN staffers. The video touched off a panic that led to ACORN’s federal funding being yanked.

Links to the intelligence community

Maybe they hoped to make the news rather than break it. The men are charged with attempting to tamper with Landrieu’s phones, not just observe them. As I reported for AlterNet last week, one of the alleged tamperers has longstanding ties to the intelligence community.

In 2008, Stan Dai was the deputy director of a recruiting program for aspiring spies at Trinity Washington University. As Sahil Kapur reported in Raw Story, this program was funded by a $250,000 grant from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Yesterday, Laura Flanders interviewed Dr. David Price and me on GRITtv about the links between O’Keefe’s crew and the intelligence community. Dr. Price is an anthropologist who studies the relationship between the intelligence community and academia. He has been keeping a close eye so-called “centers of academic excellence” funded by the intelligence community on college campuses.

Right now, most of what we know about the incident comes from a single affidavit from an FBI officer and leaks from law enforcement. We’ll probably learn a lot more about the men and their motives if they go on trial.

‘Very, very close’ to passing reform

In other health care news, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told participants on a conference call yesterday that Democrats are “very, very close” to passing health care reform. According to Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly, who was on the call, Pelosi signaled that the House will not pass a bill until the Senate passes a list of modifications to be reinserted during budget reconciliation. Brian Beutler of TPM DC reports that progressives shouldn’t get their hopes up for reviving the public option: Pelosi conceded that a public option lacks the necessary support in the Senate.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

In a landmark decision last week, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited funds to influence American elections, overturning a century of legal precedent. The Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC undermines the integrity of the U.S. government, as President Barack Obama emphasized at his State of the Union address. But the decision also deals a damaging blow to the U.S. economy by encouraging lawmakers to write economic rules that benefit specific companies at the expense of everyone else.

The editors of The Nation lay out the High Court’s hubris in no uncertain terms:

The Citizens United campaign finance decision by Chief Justice John Roberts and a Supreme Court majority of conservative judicial activists is a dramatic assault on American democracy, overturning more than a century of precedent in order to give corporations the ultimate authority over elections and governing. This decision tips the balance against active citizenship and the rule of law by making it possible for the nation’s most powerful economic interests to manipulate not just individual politicians and electoral contests but political discourse itself.

Citizens United and the financial crisis

How does this ruling have any bearing on the economy? Markets are not simply the product of random interactions between consumers and producers. Even under the most radical, laissez-faire economic theories, markets are defined, coordinated and policed by the government. For the economy to function at all, we need the government to define what constitutes fair play.

But over the past few decades, we’ve watched Congress and the executive branch rewrite those rules of the game under heavy corporate influence, creating artificial profits for a set of favored companies with very bad consequences for the broader economy.

The U.S. banking industry serves as a prime example. Since the 1980s, banks have been spending like crazy in all kinds of elections, and getting just about anything they want in return. I interviewed Harvard University Law Professor and TARP Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren for AlterNet, and she presented a concise but unsettling economic history of consumer protection law:

Thirty years ago we had laws that put some basic fairness into the consumer credit market. Over time, the large financial institutions captured the regulators who were supposed to be the cops on the beat to enforce those laws. They also pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Washington to make sure that no new cops were put on the beat. Without good laws, the industry started selling ever-more-deceptive products, and their friendly regulators looked the other way.

The bank lobby and the AIG bailout

In Mother Jones, Corbin Hiar reveals how even a bank that engineered a massive tax fraud scheme was able to benefit from the AIG bailout. Major financial institutions convinced Congress to block any regulation of credit default swaps (CDS) all the way back in 2000. CDS contracts were essentially insurance on the value of financial assets—if the assets lost value, banks would still get paid as if they were highly profitable.

CDS insurance encouraged banks to engage in risky mortgage lending, and allowed them to book huge profits on those risky mortgages during the housing boom, even though many of those mortgages were doomed from the get-go. AIG binged so heavily on CDS that the company was on the brink of bankruptcy in the fall of 2008. But an AIG bankruptcy would have hammered the major banks who served as AIG’s betting partners, most notably Goldman Sachs. Those banks would have received just pennies on the dollar from a bankrupt AIG. But under the bailout, the New York Federal Reserve paid the banks off at full value, without demanding any concessions whatsoever.

“The credit crunch was an existential threat to every over-leveraged big bank. What’s most shocking about the AIG bailout … is that these endangered banks were able to extract such a sweet deal from the government,” Hiar writes. “The banks were paid the full value of all the CDS contracts they had made with AIG—including those mortgage-backed securities they had bought when it was clear the subprime market was collapsing.”

The only AIG counterparty to even consider taking CDS losses was Swiss banking giant UBS, which was negotiating a separate settlement with the U.S. government over a massive tax evasion scheme. But even the tax fraudsters at UBS ultimately received full payment on their CDS exposure, and it now appears that the Swiss bank will be able to protect its wealthy tax-evading clients.

With the AIG bailout, the corporate takeover came full-circle. The banks purchased radical deregulation in Congress, and when the deregulated banks destroyed themselves, the government paid out billions to save them. The rest of the economy was ravaged by predatory lending, and taxpayers, not bankers, footed the bill for bank losses.

Redefining corruption

So the Citizens United decision will not introduce corporate influence in elections. Instead, it takes an uneven playing field and tilts it further in the favor of corporate executives. The Roberts court didn’t just open the floodgates for corporate cash in U.S. elections and call it a day. It also explicitly redefined “corruption” to give corporations—and anyone else—greater leeway to financially curry favor with politicians. Heather K. Gerken details the new definition for The American Prospect:

The most important line in the decision … was this one: “ingratiation and access … are not corruption.” For many years, the Court had gradually expanded the corruption rationale to extend beyond quid pro quo corruption (donor dollars for legislative votes). It had licensed Congress to regulate even when the threat was simply that large donors had better access to politicians or that politicians had become “too compliant with the[ir] wishes.” Indeed, at times the Court went so far as to say that even the mere appearance of “undue influence” or the public’s “cynical assumption that large donors call the tune” was enough to justify regulation. “Ingratiation and access,” in other words, were corruption as far as the Court was concerned.

Most of us would consider the key lawmakers ensnared in the Jack Abramoff scandal as fundamentally corrupt—Abramoff flew former Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas to Scotland for golfing vacations in an effort to win greater leverage over DeLay’s legislative agenda. The court’s ruling claims that this kind of activity is not corrupt, and bars Congress from passing any laws to counteract it. As filmmaker Alex Gibney emphasizes in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, the court has essentially taken Tom DeLay’s corporatist philosophy and made it a piece of constitutional law.

“Tom DeLay’s view is, we spend more money on potato chips than we do on political campaigns. His view would be, let the money rush down like great waters,,” Gibney says. “I think the court was channeling Tom DeLay when they issued their recent decision.”

Why citizens need to speak out now

So what can we do about this? As GRITtv’s Laura Flanders discusses in a roundtable discussion with several progressive leaders, there will be a long fight for a Constitutional Amendment to ban corporate influence in politics. Until then, as progressive strategist Mike Lux explains, citizens will have to take an aggressive stance against Corporate America as shareholders. Corporate power is exercised by a handful of executives, but the resources that support that power come from ordinary Americans who own stock in those companies, primarily through retirement plans. By demanding that the giant firms we own do not highjack our democracy with lobbying, we can limit some of the damage from the court’s recent decision.

If you liked the bank bailouts, then there’s plenty for you to love about the Citizens United decision. If you didn’t, then it’s time to speak up.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Welcome to The Big Thaw
An introduction to The Big Thaw from Media Consortium project director Tracy Van Slyke.

Vol. 1: Dissonance & Opportunity (includes Executive Summary)

This volume summarizes journalism’s old paradigm and outlines a strategic framework for independent media to build a shared vision for the future.

Charting a New Future: An Executive Summary
Journalists and independent media makers have always been society’s most valuable truthtellers. As the old system shuts down, how can media organizations use this crisis as an opportunity rather than a meltdown?

Building an Adaptive Strategy
To make sense of the new realities of journalism, we must identify strategic responses to a game that has already changed considerably. This post explains the Strategic Dissonance Model, which demonstrates what happens when industries change.

Two Causes of Dissonance
To turn strategic dissonance into action, we must identify its causes. This post analyzes the changing dynamics across the two overlapping axes of what we call the “Adaptive Strategy Matrix.”

Journalism’s Old Paradigm: Resistance and Denial
One of the biggest barriers to changing an organization or field is leaders’ inability to shed the paradigm from which it arose, which is a deeply held set of shared beliefs and practices about how the world works. Why journalism leaders have resisted—or denied—the paradigm shift.

Journalism’s Old Paradigm: Are We Facing a Glacier or a Flood?
While changes to the news industry advanced at a glacial pace for many years, transition often comes as quickly as the levees that broke in New Orleans. Media organizations must answer two questions in order to survive the paradigm shift.

Vol. 2: New & Emerging Realities

This volume analyzes in-depth the media industry’s current realities and compares them to journalism’s old paradigm. It also examines how independent media organizations can adapt to the changes around them.

Journalism’s New and Emerging Realities
The new competitive landscape requires media organizations to develop new competencies to succeed. Finding new ways to meet users’ needs and desires will be the sources of value that drive new business models. This post details the four questions about new industry realities that reveal opportunities for change.

New Abundances and Their Effects
New abundances have turned the economics of distribution on its head. This post explains the effects of abundances of information and independent voices.

New Scarcities and Their Effects
The new scarcities include time, money, attention and reputation. Publishers must find other ways to maintain users’ attention online, and for journalism organizations, building a stronger reputation could be particularly valuable.

Device Proliferation, Convergence & Their Effects
The challenge today comes from the tremendous number of devices that people use. Convergence is not only about creating different content for different platforms, but also about enabling people to easily consume and share any type of content using any platform.

Dawn of a Demographic Revolution
Shifting demographics create both challenges and opportunities for content producers: Different groups use media in different ways. This post explains the effects of diversity and the millennial generation on how media organizations engage audiences.

Declining Institutional Control and Affiliations
Many people today do not depend on institutions in the same way. This has forced media organizations to compete in a more decentralized, open environment.

Mirage of the Long Tail
The concept of the “Long Tail,” popularized by Chris Anderson at Wired, has become the basis for countless business models. This post explains the power of “power law” and the value of the Long Tail.

Cyber-cascades and Superdistribution
If independent media can strategically innovate, the sector can leverage its existing audience to become first movers of new technologies and platforms that will inevitably emerge. This post defines what cyber-cascades and superdistribution mean for independent media.

New Competencies: What New Capabilities are Needed to Succeed?
The new competitive landscape requires media organizations to develop new competencies as they shift from the old to the new paradigm.

Getting Serious About Community
Community building could become a new competitive advantage that would require journalists to adapt in various ways.

Strategic Technology
This post is a highlight of Vol. 2’s analysis on strategic technology, including being multiplatform, merging roles of journalist and technologist, low-cost innovations, and tightly integrated functions.

Counterintuitive Ways of Working
Counterintuitive ways of doing business and producing content may seem even more risky, but they can also be the biggest game changers.

Shifting Roles
The new competencies will help media organizations succeed in the new competitive environment. As a result, traditional roles will shift and overlap. These changes threaten many people’s jobs, pensions and familiar ways of working. Yet, organizations that can successfully make the transition will succeed.

New Sources of Value
An introduction to Chapter 3, Vol.2, this post outlines the emerging sources of value that media organizations can capture.

Progressive Ideas Vs. “My Ideas”
The new political and media environment has caused progressive media organizations to reevaluate their identity and tactics. Content’s value is is increasingly determined by how it relates to “my ideas” or progressive ideas.

Now is the Time for Immediacy
For journalism organizations to stay afloat, they will need to design faster ways to report news and emotionally engage users while maintaining quality.

Solving Filter Failure
Publishers are increasingly concerned about “information overload,” and some believe that technology has made this worse. This post explains how to use metadata to find content, for content to find users, and to solve “filter failure.”

From Using Users to a Conversation Economy
With the proliferation of inexpensive production and publishing tools and do-it-yourself movements, everyone can consider themselves an expert.

From Audiences to Communities
Insight on how to best build communities and capture enough value from them to run a media organization.

New Business Models
As the sources of value and the competitive landscape have changed, so have the business models that are mostly likely to succeed. An introduction to Chapter 4, Vol. 2, this post introduces the new business models.

Emerging Operation Models and Cost Structures
As large journalistic institutions shrink, salaries will inevitably decline and journalists will also have to produce more and take on more than reporting multifaceted. Media organizations that figure out how to do more with less will likely win.

Micropayment and Micro-fundraising from Users
A discussion of the idea of news as a “loss leader,” a product sold below costs to create other sales.

Getting More From Advertising
Advertising still has great potential to generate the resources that independent media-makers need to have a much greater impact, as well as reach new audiences. Three opportunities stand out as ways to get more from online advertising.

Vol. 3: The Future?

This volume surfaces key uncertainties to consider and future possibilities that may further change the game in coming years.

Will Philanthropy Adjust its Role?
As philanthropists use their capital in smart ways to improve social capital markets, they can build a stronger ecosystem to grow independent media. A big question is “How can they integrate these funding areas more strategically?”

What Will Commercial Media and Technology Companies Do?
Big companies will continue to support many new independent voices if they find profitable business models in doing so. If they pull back, it could ultimately hurt independent media.

What Role Will Government Play?
If government officials had the will, they could support the public value of media in many ways besides loosening up anti-trust regulations for failing newspapers. How far they will go remains to be seen.

Future Possibilities
An introduction to the next series of posts in Vol.3, this post poses important questions for independent media to consider as it shapes the future and nine possible trends that could further change the game.

Location Aware Mobile
Mobile devices’ ability to detect a user’s exact location will revolutionize how we find, discover, create and interact with information.

Human-Centered Design
As mobile and multisensory devices proliferate and alternative economies grow, media organizations will find the best path forward by following its users.

Multisensory Web
Video is quickly overtaking the web. Although people are consuming more information than ever before, they are reading less. The impact of text will decline further because of an emerging multisensory web.

Mass Mobile Media
The use of mobile phones has reached unprecedented levels worldwide, but this is only the beginning. As mobile devices become faster, cheaper, and more user-friendly, mobility will increasingly become a factor in everything on the web.

Social Reading
In the future, journalists will not simply report news for news’ sake; they will call readers to be problem solvers who think critically and iteratively with each other.

Radical New Ways of Meaning-Making and Filtering
The next phase of filtering will center on the evolution of the “Semantic Web,”  an interactivity evolution a step beyond aggregation that aims to makes information more meaningful and useful. Metadata is only the beginning.

Will there be a new demand for quality journalism?
Information becomes expensive when it is based on scarcities. One emerging scarcity may be the quality of investigative reporting. A consortium can help break “conceptual scoops.” Perhaps with standardized measure of influence and reach, money will flow back to the media organizations that did the hard work of unearthing the stories.

New Value Chain of Journalism
Journalism’s old value chain was delineated with clear roles and exchanges of value. The new value chain reflects more roles.

Creating a greater distribution of value
As more reliable and commonly accepted metrics emerge to measure content performance, the more that organizations can estimate the value they create. This post discusses metrics for engagement and social impact.

Conclusion

The American Way
If Americans believe that the strength of our democracy depends on a diverse and free press, we need a new paradigm for journalism to thrive.

Additional Articles

Slideshow: The Big Thaw
The slide show is a compendium to The Big Thaw. We pulled out the most thought-provoking information and implications for independent media.

Journalism’s Main Priorities in 2010 (And 10 Resolutions)
A compilation of the five most important areas that journalism organizations (and those invested in the future of journalism) must tackle in 2010—and some initial steps to begin moving forward.

This blog is an index of posts from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.

“We’re watching hundred of billions of [bailout] dollars being spent unaccountably to support supposedly our ‘American way.’ I think at some point we have to ask whether or not the ‘American way’ includes journalism.” – John Battelle

Do Americans view journalism as a public good that is critical to our country’s intellectual infrastructure and American exceptionalism? Do they believe that the strength of our democracy depends on a diverse and free press?

The “big thaw” of media’s old paradigm is drowning many traditional journalism outlets. If everyone—in the public, private and non-profit sectors alike—believe that journalism is part of the ‘American way,’ we need a new paradigm for it to thrive. “So how do you change paradigms?” asked Donella Meadows in Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. For an answer, she pointed to Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions about science’s great paradigm shifts. “In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep speaking louder and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in place of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.”

In order to succeed, The Media Consortium must speak with assurance about its strategic vision, work with those who are advocates for a new paradigm and not waste time with reactionaries who want to save media’s old paradigm. Journalism is evolving despite journalists and often without their years of experience. If journalists do not find new ground—even if it means dramatically changing their professional roles—they may drown.

By bringing together technologists, entrepreneurs and media-makers to increase experimentation, leverage their collective power and build audiences as communities, independent media can not only rise with technological tide, but also achieve the goals of inclusivity and fairness they espouse.

This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.

In his first State of the Union address, President Barack Obama touched on climate issues only briefly. He called on the Senate to pass a climate bill, but did not give Congress a deadline or promise to veto weak legislation. Nor did he mention the Copenhagen climate conference, where international negotiators struggled to produce an agreement on limiting global carbon emissions.

The Obama administration’s attitude towards climate change still represents a remarkable shift from the Bush years, when global warming was treated as little more than a fairy tale. But in the past year, Congressional squabbling has stalled climate legislation, and international negotiators nearly gridlocked in talks over carbon admissions at the multinational Copenhagen conference. Without strong leadership from the president, work to prevent this looming environmental crisis will stall.

Obama did address global warming skeptics, saying that they should support investment in clean energy, “because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy.”

“And America must be that nation,” Obama said.

No push for climate bill

Despite his combative language,  the president did not challenge Congress to push for real solutions to ballooning carbon emissions and energy consumption. As Forrest Wilder of The Texas Observer notes, Obama “uttered the phrase ‘climate change’ precisely once.”

The Senate has already wait-listed the climate bill: Health care came first. With health care reform now in line behind work on jobs and bank regulation, climate legislation has little chance of passing the Senate in the coming months, let alone making it to the president’s desk.

If Congress lets this work wait until after the midterm elections, the United States will show up at international negotiations in December 2010 as a leader in carbon emissions yet again, but with little in hand to show a way forward.

Clean energy, not renewable energy

When the president did bring up climate issues, he focused on their connection between climate reform and potential job creation. Obama highlighted areas for growth, not in renewable energy fields like wind or solar power, but in nuclear power, natural gas, and clean coal.

Yes, these fuel sources could decrease the country’s carbon emissions. But they are not solutions that will revolutionize energy production. Grist’s David Roberts was floored that the speech omitted renewable energy entirely and kowtowed to a more conservative litany of energy projects. “I suppose it was done to flatter conservative Senators that will have to vote for the bill Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham are working on,” he writes. (The three Senators are working on a version of the climate bill designed to appeal to Republicans.)

“But the SOTU is not a policy negotiation,” Roberts says. “It’s a bully pulpit, a chance to shape rather than respond to existing narratives.”

Roberts argues that progressive supporters would benefit from a stronger message. If activists knew that the White House stands behind a real shift in America’s energy policy, they could use that prompt to drive action on climate change.

What was missing

While touting the virtues of off-shore drilling, Obama overlooked other policies that could broker real change. Although he admonished Congress to pass a climate bill, he did not pressure the legislature on what he’d like that bill to include. He did not mention cap-and-trade, the mechanism the House bill relies on to tamp down emissions and dirty energy use.

President Obama did touch on transportation reforms that could decrease the country’s use of fossil fuels.

“There’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains,”  Obama said. He cited a high-speed rail project that broke ground on Tuesday in Tampa, FL, as evidence that America could best the rest of the world in creating new energy-efficient technology.

But one or two high-profile projects won’t be enough to challenge Europe’s network of high-speed trains or China’s investments in solar power. The White House could put the country at the forefront of sustainable technologies, but it’ll take more money than the president has committed. In AlterNet’s ideal state of the union, projects like the railway would merit sustained attention and funding. Funding for the high-speed train came from this year’s stimulus bill, and there’s no guarantee that similar projects will find federal funding in the future.

“Continued support is still needed” for green jobs and clean energy, Alternet’s editorial staff argues. “It’s unclear yet how Obama’s new proposal for a three-year spending freeze will apply to this sector, but a boost is what is needed, not cuts.”

Green jobs

Michelle Chen argues for In These Times that the president is right to subordinate climate issues to economic policy. “The jobs angle is more than sugar-coating,” she says. A recent Pew Research Center poll put climate change at the end of Americans’ long list of cares, and a Brookings Institution study found that they’re no longer willing to pay as much for greener products.

Jobless workers need green in their pockets most of all, and so far politicians’ promises haven’t made up for the slack economy.

“No matter how slick the marketing, confidence in green jobs may wilt even further absent real investments in the beleaguered blue-collar workforce,” Chen writes.

Copenhagen accord losing momentum

The small role that climate change played in the state of the union address only emphasized the downward momentum of the issue since the United Nations conference on global warming in Copenhagen. Grist’s Jonathan Hiskes talked to six leaders in climate change activism, and none of them offered a different strategy than they had last year.

That same stasis is showing up in Europe, as well. Spain, which currently leads the European Union, proposed that the European Union’s negotiating position should remain the same as its position before the Copenhagen conference, according to Inter Press Service.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), who’s working on climate change legislation in the Senate, offered advice to climate activists at a clean energy forum in Washington, DC on Wednesday. Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard reports that Sen. Kerry encouraged his audience to get angrier, louder, and more active, in the mode of the conservative Tea Partiers, who have earned plenty of attention. After his speech, he also recalled the tactics that pushed landmark legislation like the Clean Air Act through Congress.

If climate change is going to play a larger role in the next state of the union, the citizens and groups concerned about this issue need to do something to put it on the agenda. Otherwise, next year, the president may find it just as easy to skim over it again.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

As more reliable and commonly accepted metrics emerge to measure content performance, the more that organizations can estimate the value they create. And, others can estimate how much they would be willing to pay for it. Money will flow to where there is value in the chain. Marketing analytics are based on this sort of reliable measurement, and deals are done based on it. As metrics become better, publishers may be able to use new incentives for writers and producers. Also, a publisher could potentially convince aggregators to pay based on content’s performance. Aggregators could sign up freely or cheaply and pay if content spreads past a targeted threshold. If the price is low enough, and the aggregator can accurately measure the performance, it would be in their interest to share earnings in exchange for reliable content.

In particular, better ways to measure engagement and impact online will likely hold the greatest potential for independent publishers in the future.

Metrics for Engagement

For many independent publishers and aggregators, 60-70% of their online visits are for less than 10 seconds, and 50-60% of all visitors only come to the site one time. With such ratings, traffic number can often be a misleading sign of engagement.

Some people say that “page views” are becoming an irrelevant metric. In fact, many companies such as Nielson/NetRatings, Compete and Facebook are moving to “attention-based” web metrics based on time spent on site. Last July, Microsoft introduced “engagement mapping,” a way of measuring the return on investment based on how all interactions with marketing efforts lead users to take action. There is still disagreement, however, on the best way to measure engagement. Managers of projects such as Yahoo’s Buzz believe that comments, ratings, frequency of sharing and clicks are better metrics for engagement.

If measuring attention is the future of advertising, then why is there still so much emphasis on measuring page views? Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and contributor to open-source journalism project Newassignment.net, said the problem is a disconnection between the advertising and publishing industries. “The reason why there is an eternal quest for traffic, not only in terms of unique visitors, but also maximizing page views per visitor, is because advertising networks let you in on the basis of how much traffic you’re generating, and your eventual income is based on the number of impressions (and clicks).”

New metrics for engagement will profoundly affect all publishers, particularly smaller independent publishers who do not generate as many page views, but serve a niche that can deliver great value. Furthermore, if independent media organizations start viewing news as a “loss leader” and sell other products, engagement measures could become critical to their business.

For example, measuring the “average revenue per visit” (ARPV) based on advertising revenue is a common practice. However, people such as Benjamin Joffe, Managing Director at Asia Internet consultancy +8* and Co-Founder of MobileMonday Beijing, have called for new measures such as “average revenue from user” (ARFU). ARFU is based on non-advertising revenue directly from users such as digital goods (e.g. background music, avatars or casual games) or real-world products, which may be a better measure of a user’s engagement from a financial perspective. For independent publishers, it could include users’ donations. Joffe said that advertising has caused media companies to focus too much on generating page views, not making their services better. “Users are mere ‘eyeballs,’ while the real clients are advertisers. The revenue mix defines the service DNA.”

With stronger engagement measures a publisher can better estimate the lifetime value of a customer to make marketing and customer acquisition investments.

While advertising is making progress in measuring engagement, nonprofits also need to find better ways to measure how engagement leads to social impact in order to attract philanthropy.

Metrics of Social Impact

Most independent media organizations are driven by their social purpose more than business. However, measuring social impact is difficult, especially when it comes to goals that include influencing political dialogue, promoting progressive values, or launching a new meme. The complexity of factors contributing to impact online makes it harder for organizations to pinpoint their value. Independent media organizations must simply bear witness about their ultimate social impact through anecdotes. Nevertheless, the more reliably they demonstrate impact, the more philanthropic funding they can attract.

Imagine the value for social change that independent publishers could derive from tools that reveal exactly what online activity leads to social action.

This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.

Journalism’s old value chain was delineated with clear roles and exchanges of value. The new value chain reflects more roles. One organization often plays multiple roles. In the old model, advertising also had clearly defined roles. It mostly concentrated on publishing and broadcasting. In the new model, advertising is spread across more players.

Since the market is still forming the new value chain, independent media can work together to experiment with new models, promote new relationships among players and advance new standards in measuring and valuing content. Individual organizations can use the value chain to explore strategic questions for themselves, such as:

• What role do we play in the value chain now?
• Where do our strengths fit best? And where could our role become most valuable?
• Is it best to focus primarily on one role or integrate many roles at once?

Here’s a graphic representation of the new/emerging value chain:

There are many possible ways the value in the chain could crystallize:

• The value of simplicity could lead some media organizations to focus on creating quality investigative journalism and leave chasing eyeballs to other media organizations that are willing to share revenue with them.

• Content could become even more differentiated. For example, stories with viral potential live free online, while more specialized premium content is used to build deeper, more loyal communities willing to pay subscriptions, donate, or make other payments. However, this move may rub against an aim to make news broadly available to the public.

• Publishers could use metadata to make information they produce more useful and valuable (further defined in Vol. 2, p26).

• Non-profit media companies may win greater foundation support if quality reporting declines, especially if they can more reliably measure that they preach beyond the choir.

• A “new social contract” between the press and the public could lead to more public support for journalism, if not also a shift in consumers’ expectations of free news.

There will inevitably be different places on the value chain to capture value. If smaller players do not proactively figure out their roles, the big players will likely determine them.

The answers to two questions will affect the value chain in coming years: “Will there be a new demand for quality journalism?” and “Will more reliable and consistent measures create greater distribution of value?”

This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.

The conservative videographer who donned a pimp suit to embarrass the anti-poverty group ACORN was arrested in New Orleans, LA for allegedly conspiring to bug the office of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.

It’s not clear why Landrieu was targeted, but many suspect that she was singled out because she played a pivotal role in advancing health care reform.

Filmmaker James O’Keefe and three other men have been charged with been charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony, according to Justin Elliott of TPM Muckraker. At RH Reality Check, Rachel Larris notes that, if convicted, the four could face up to 10 years in prison.

Like chum in the conservative shark tank

Landrieu, a conservative Democrat, negotiated an extra $100 million in Medicaid funds for Louisiana in exchange for allowing the health care bill to come to the senate floor. Accepting health care for the poor in the interest of health reform was like chum in the conservative shark tank.

Rush Limbaugh called her the most expensive prostitute of all time. “She may be easy, but she’s not cheap,” crowed Glenn Beck. It got so bad that Democrats call on Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) was called upon to denounce the chorus of conservatives attacking his fellow Louisiana senator as a prostitute. (Correction: Vitter did not call Landrieu a prostitute.)

O’Keefe must have realized that an exposé of Mary Landrieu would be a hot commodity.

“This is Watergate meets YouTube,” said Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief David Corn said on MSNBC’s Hardball last night.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Health care reform in limbo

The arrests could not have come at a better time for the Democrats. Health care reform is in limbo as congressional leaders plan their next move after losing their filibuster-proof majority. The bugging scandal is deflecting attention from tense internal negotiations.

Brian Beutler of TPMDC reports that the House Democrats are converging on a strategy to get reform done: The House will pass the Senate bill and the Senate will fix it through budget reconciliation.

The Republican counter-strategy

While the Democrats agonize over what to do next, that senate Republicans are honing strategies to thwart any Democratic attempt to pass health care reform through budget reconciliation, as Dave Weigel reports in the Washington Independent. The reconciliation process allows both sides to vote on unlimited number of amendments. GOP leadership is hinting that if Dems take the reconciliation route, they will be forced to vote on every politically embarrassing amendment the opposition can dream up.

The stakes are high. In the American Prospect, Paul Starr reminds progressives that there’s till a lot worth fighting for, even without a public option. For all its faults, the Senate bill would still cover 30 million uninsured Americans, expand Medicaid, end discrimination based on preexisting conditions, and set up exchanges designed to keep rising insurance premiums in check.

A memo for reform

Finally, our sources tell us that Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly is making quite a stir on Capitol Hill with his memo advising the House Democratic caucus on the need to forge ahead with health care reform. In 1994, conservative commentator William Kristol wrote a health care memo to Republicans that became the backbone of their anti-reform strategy, even up to the present day. Benen hopes his memo will be a useful counterweight for Democrats. Benen warns the Democrats that it’s far riskier to fail than to pass reform that doesn’t please everyone.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Progressives have waited a year for President Barack Obama to roll up his sleeves and fight for serious financial reform. Last week, he finally jumped in the ring, telling weak-kneed Senators to stand up to Wall Street and endorsing a critical ban on risky securities trading.

But while it was good to see Obama start throwing financial punches against the banks, this week he also started throwing them at workers. His recent rhetoric on implementing a spending freeze to reduce the deficit is an economic catastrophe in the making. It indicates that Obama is willing to sacrifice jobs to try and win over Republicans.

A spending freeze would kill jobs

A three-year spending freeze is crazy talk. It’s a right-wing ideologue’s dream that accomplishes nothing and drives millions of people out of work. John McCain campaigned on it during his 2008 presidential run. Our long-term deficit problems are tied to the rising cost of health care. If you want to fix the deficit, fix health care. In the short-term, there is no deficit problem. In fact, the U.S. fiscal position looks very good compared to many European nations.

As Matthew Rothschild notes for The Progressive, a spending freeze would kill any legislation to create jobs. With unemployment at 10%, the economy desperately needs another round of government spending to put people back to work. While the abrupt policy reversal is clearly a political ploy, voters care much more about results than they care about ideology. If Obama actively sabotages the job market to win over conservative deficit-hawks, he’ll be putting his political future in serious jeopardy.

And yet, as Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, Obama’s recent, ramped-up rhetoric against banks still marks a significant change in tone. For most of the year, Obama hasn’t been involved in the financial reform debate at all, letting Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner capitulate to Wall Street and the politicians it owns. Benen highlights the end of Obama’s speech announcing his new banking rules on Jan. 21. Obama says:

So if these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have. And my resolve is only strengthened when I see a return to old practices at some of the very firms fighting reform; and when I see soaring profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms claiming that they can’t lend more to small business, they can’t keep credit card rates low, they can’t pay a fee to refund taxpayers for the bailout without passing on the cost to shareholders or customers — that’s the claims they’re making. It’s exactly this kind of irresponsibility that makes clear reform is necessary.

Saving the CFPA

Katrina vanden Huevel lays out Obama’s new financial reform agenda in a column for The Nation, praising a new $117 billion tax on the nation’s largest banks, a plan to cap overall bank size, and a proposal to ban high-risk trading by economically essential commercial banks (more on that later).

But vanden Huevel also rightfully denounces recent indications that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) may cave to lobbyist pressure and drop the measure to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) from the Senate’s financial reform bill.

The death of the CFPA would be a devastating blow to reform. Existing bank regulatory agencies see their primary job as protecting bank profits, meaning that any time the interests of the U.S. consumer conflict with those of bank balance sheets, the regulators have shafted consumers. Current federal banking regulators not only failed to enforce consumer protection laws, they went so far as to join the bank lobby in suing state regulators who were trying to protect households from predatory lending.

Fortunately, Obama isn’t taking Dodd’s bank lobby-induced cowardice sitting down. At Talking Points Memo, Rachel Slajda highlights a New York Times report that claims Obama met with Dodd and told him that the CFPA is a “non-negotiable.”

Commercial banks are important

There’s a lot to like in Obama’s plan to bar commercial banks from participating in risky securities trading. As I emphasize in a piece for AlterNet, commercial banks form the backbone of the U.S. economy. They’re the institutions that accept your paychecks as deposits and keep businesses moving with loans. They also form the core of the economy’s payments system. Without commercial banks, nobody can pay anybody else for goods and services—the economy literally shuts down.

Nevertheless, in the late 1990s, regulators and lawmakers tore down the walls between commercial banking and riskier, complex securities trading, allowing these critical economic utilities to gamble in the capital markets like high-flying hedge funds. That kind of behavior puts the entire economy in jeopardy, and Obama’s proposal to end such behavior is very urgently needed.

But, as vanden Huevel and I both note, Obama’s cap on bank size is a little too timid. Obama indicated that he wants to prevent big banks from getting bigger going forward. That misses the point.

Bustin’ up “too big to fail”

Financial giants like Citigroup and Bank of America are already much too big and pose an economic threat. That’s why we refer to them as “too big to fail,” and why the government had to devote over $17 trillion to saving them. Obama must cap bank size and break up our behemoth banks into companies that are small enough to fail without wreaking havoc on the economy. A good rule of thumb: 1% of gross domestic product.

Shouting down the bank lobbyists

In Mother Jones, David Corn emphasizes that Obama’s credentials as a serious reformer depend more on his policy maneuvering than on his rhetoric. While it has been extremely promising see Obama finally demanding something serious from the financial giants that taxpayers saved, he’ll have to shout down the bank lobbyists to secure meaningful economic—or political—gains. Corn writes:

If Obama aims to be widely regarded as a warrior for the middle class, he will have to take some mighty swings that cut through the clutter. Proclaiming ‘I am a fighter’ will not be enough. He will have to name his foes (financial institutions, insurance companies, Republicans, and perhaps recalcitrant Democrats) and truly exchange blows.

Obama’s stance on the CFPA alone should be enough to get the lobbyists into a lather, but he’ll have to keep up the fight on multiple fronts if he wants to protect our economy from the Wall Street recklessness that spurred millions of foreclosures and sent the unemployment rate soaring into double digits.

Last week, Obama finally told us he was willing to fight for economic change. Now it looks like he’s going to attack anyone who is looking for a job. Let’s hope he turns it around before it’s too late.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.