In the past weeks, I have very unscientifically been asking friends who work in media and on the web, whether they ever consciously click on ads of the websites they like to read in order to help support them. So far everyone has said no. I don’t actually do it myself either.

Years ago, the Hunger Site (a website of GreaterGood) started getting people to click on ads, by promising to sponsor “a cup of rice” to the UN world food program. It was a runaway success, and they have since expanded to other issues like breast cancer, child health, literacy, the environment and animal rescue. The principle is simple, everybody gets it.

There is so much impetus on the side of the media companies and advertisers to lure people to click on their ads. Services like Revver (for profit sharing on online video) have built whole businesses around it. But so far, I haven’t heard of any reader’s movement to help fund their favorite websites by purposefully clicking on and looking at automatically generated ads. Why not? If people genuinely look at the ads it seems to work to everyone’s best interest.

Let the battle begin: Here’s the video.

Brave New Films invites you to meet: Rev. Rod Parsley, the televangelist megachurch pastor from Ohio who hates Islam. According to David Corn of Mother Jones, Parsley has called on Christians to wage war against Islam, which he considers to be a “false religion.” In the past, Parsley has also railed against the separation of church and state, homosexuals, and abortion rights, comparing Planned Parenthood to Nazis.

Wow. He sounds friendly.

On Beliefnet, David Gibson seems to regret that political leaders in the US are forced to create a distance between themselves and their religion to make themselves electable (he is talking about Obama not McCain).

Seems more to me like they are forced to align themselves with one crazy faith or another to even be considered for nomination. I wish America’s leaders wouldn’t lend credibility to all the nonsense that goes on in the name of faith.

I actually thought it was a pretty tame prediction, but I spent the rest of the day dodging journalists and editors who wanted to tell me I was wrong, naive, and even careless. Meanwhile younger colleagues were eager to tell me I was absolutely right. My friend Sameer Padania even rolled his eyes at me and said, “Have you even read the report I wrote? That’s exactly what I’ve been saying.” He’s not kidding. You can read it here. My favorite quote is attributed to Channel 4 reporter Sorious Samura, “When will foreign correspondents be foreign?”

I started with an anecdote, about a BBC World radio story broadcast to my California rental car radio. It was about a press tour organized by the Chinese authorities for foreign journalists to enter Tibet. The BBC was not invited, so the reporter interviewed a USA Today journalist about how the event had been interrupted by Tibetan monks protesting. Obviously what is happening between Tibet and China right now is very serious, but I still find this particular story silly. The journalist was reporting about a staged media event he hadn’t even been to, and his main source was another Western journalist.

I’m not targeting the BBC or this particular journalist in particular (he must have filed hundreds of different stories, and maybe even speaks Chinese). I just think the fact that a story like this is considered newsworthy is pretty depressing (especially since it must have been reported by a ton of other journalists already).

How many more years will we have to watch foreign correspondents parachute into a region and pretend they know what’s going on? How many more reports coming out of the Middle East from hotel rooftops will be delivered by people who do not speak Arabic, or know what “the Green zone” in Iraq was called before coalition forces arrived?

Not for long, is what I think. There are too many alternatives, and I’m not even referring to bloggers around the world. The type of thing we do at Global Voices is meant to be a service to professional journalists.

The founder of Alive in Baghdad, a fantastic video website that broadcasts weekly reports by Iraqi journalists, once told me in New York that he has a hell of a time getting news media organizations to recognize that his crew aren’t “citizen journalists” but actually, real, professional journalists who just happen to be Iraqi.

Sooner or later, qualified local perspectives will become what people prefer to hear, rather than what editors defer to when a situation becomes too dangerous for Western journalists to report from. It’s wrong not to have news from a faraway place, simply because there is no longer money to fly foreign correspondents there.

The internet has the effect of making international journalists even more accountable to global audiences that before. Just see Global Voices’ current China coverage. Yikes. Chinese bloggers are pouncing all over Western media inaccuracies. On openDemocracy, articles by authors from the region offer background on political history and media misunderstandings.

When the panel discussion in Los Angeles ended, the BBC’s wonderful Richard Sambrook graciously stood up and agreed with with some of what I said. In his own blog he wrote, “I agree the model of Foreign Correspondent is becoming rapidly outdated and needs re-inventing, not least to have authenticity with the subject which is lacking from many blow-dried parachute journalists.” Sambrook also noted that the BBC regularly uses over 400 “local stringers” around the world.

I think this just helps show that the end of what I consider old-fashioned foreign correspondence is coming closer. It’s not about where a journalist is born or not, it’s about listening and respecting people who are different, and trusting them to have the integrity to describe their own situation. I’m not saying it’s easier. But it could be better.

Here’s a brief report on American foreign media consumption. The part about Anna Nicole Smith is of course the most interesting… Robin from Snarkmarket sent it to me.

Lots of interesting people here, and halfway through the day. I’m sitting in a session with nine (?!) of people on the panel, and it’s developing more or less as a conversation. Jeez Berkman, your panels have almost no women on them.

Michael Smolens from DotSub gave an introductory presentation, about how his project is trying to break down language barriers. He told me yesterday that they are launching an update to the website soon, and that you will now be able to view DotSub videos with subtitles in any language on iPhones. This is what they are working on right now: Pangea Day.

Caramba, Global Voices is getting mentioned on every single panel today. And I haven’t said a single word.

Smolens used a Global Voices post as a key example of how subtitles can become a powerful vehicle for distribution. He showed a post written by Chris Salzberg in Japan a couple of months ago, about a video of a Japanese nuclear reactor leak. Chris added English subtitles to the video. It was picked up by whistle-blower site, Wikileaks, and from there it was Slashdotted, jamming DotSub’s servers for several hours.

In his presentation, Mark Jones from Reuters, is frank about the difficulty of convincing “old media” colleagues about the ability to trust Global Voices (for instance) as “authenticators of content”, and says he often brings up Global Voices’ Harvard origins to help persuade them (we, in turn, tend to mention our Reuters friendship). His point is that part of the challenge of getting “old media” to interact with “new media” is developing new mechanisms of trust and authentication. Ivan Sigal, who is also on the panel, suggests this might be helped along by “old media” being more honest and open about their own methods and limitations.

My favorite thing about these conferences is learning about new projects and seeing the people behind them. One brand new project I hadn’t seen before, is Vocalo. An idea to allow people to upload audio reports via telephone to the web, and have them broadcast on local public radio in Northwest Indiana and Chicago. Neat.

And now, lunch.

My colleague, Ethan Zuckerman is doing an incredible job (as usual) of live-blogging what people are talking about. He’s a much faster typer and thought-digester than I am. Oh, and if you want to hear what he sounds like, Ethan and I were interviewed together on Radio Open Source recently.

(I am sure he is happy now that Radio Open Source has put a much, much nicer picture of him to accompany the story.)

More than enough silliness coming out of Fox these days to keep this site busy: Fox Attacks. Barak Obama refused to go on Fox for months, but this morning (in spite of a petition for him and Edwards to refuse the network) he granted an interview to the show, Fox & Friends about the New Hampshire primary.

CNN just asked their correspondents around the world to report on the US, and they nearly all said people around the world were cheering for Obama (especially in Kenya). The only exception was in Ramallah, where the correspondent said people were not in the least optimistic about any of the candidates.

Global Voices has a couple of reports about Obama from Iranian and Caribbean bloggers, and we’ve got another global round up planned for later today. How depressing, that the fact that a candidate is popular abroad could actually work against him in the United States… When you think back to all the global negativity about Bush in 2004, it’s really startling that he still won.

Right now, in Israel, bloggers are upset that President Bush’s current visit to Israel is costing taxpayers an astonishing $25,000 an hour, among other things.

On openDemocracy, Kanish Tharoor, walks us through what they could have asked instead. CNN is so darn black-and-white. They present her as a hero of democracy with little mention of her actual record in office, the numerous corruption charges, back-room dealings with Musharraf, illusions of grandeur, or any number of criticisms that are tactfully outlined in this obituary in the New York Times. If you’re looking for any kind of depth of insight about what people in Pakistan may be thinking after this violent assassination, try Global Voices special coverage page, where we are linking to new posts from South Asian bloggers daily.

As a teenager I once picked up Bhutto’s autobiography at a library in Denmark. It was one of the first non-fiction books I ever read. I had traveled to Pakistan with my father when I was just nine years old, and I was impressed how a woman could become Prime minister of a country where female professors teach male students behind screens and need male escorts to walk around in public. The story was exciting from a female perspective, and I still remember details of her house arrest today. The circumstances of her death are tragic, but I hope her legacy may inspire more women to lead in the future.

I had this thought confirmed the other day, talking to someone who founded a major web company. He said he always avoided press releases, because it was the perfect way to kill the momentum of any project launch. Once press releases get written, several layers of management get involved – and if the company is big enough so do the lawyers.

I still have wistful memories of the first time I wrote a press release about an activism project in high school that was copied almost verbatim in a Danish newspaper. But it’s definitely time to sound the death knell of the press release. Cool, honest companies just write what they think in their blog, in the voice of the people who work for them. If it’s creative commons licensed, the journalists can still just go ahead and copy it.

It’s going to be held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC where I was disappointed to learn that wifi costs $12.95 for the day (live-bloggers bring your credit cards). The organizers advise casual business attire and comfortable shoes (ok) and emphasize that “Weapons are not allowed in the building”. I am glad. Because there is nothing worse than a boring Power Point presentation when there are weapons in the building.