Back in the glory days of TV news getting an exclusive usually meant an entire day’s advantage over the competition; what with just the one daily evening newscast. If teased appropriately a good scoop would add viewership to that evening’s newscast but mostly it was a prestige moment that helped build the network’s news brand. So, a good scoop (or more rightly consistently being able to get scoops and exclusives) had a positive business impact, but much less immediate and tangible than newspaper scoops.

But what is a scoop/exclusive worth in the Internet age? At best a media outlet will have the story to itself for a few hours before it is cited, cross-linked, and tweeted all over the world by other outlets. Granted, an exclusive will drive some traffic to the website and might, might, MIGHT drive some advertising click-throughs. But people who are looking for a quick read on breaking news are highly unlikely to take the time for a diversion into web advertising.

No, the only real business driver for working a scoop in 2010 has to be for the prestige of it. It is purely a brand-building exercise.

If that is the case then the aim should be to get the story right AND first, or to be in-depth AND first. And if being first is not possible (say for an afternoon newspaper with a 9 a.m. deadline) then it seems the business case would say that being right and/or in-depth would trump the now very ephemeral advantages of being first.

Being first with a bullshit story is probably worse than not covering it at all. It ruins the news brand. Unless your “brand” is focused on whipping up a particular market segment and reinforcing their existing belief structures. Then it’s fine. But it’s not really news, its commentary and opinion

It seems to me that the business aim for entities in the actual news business — especially for web-only outlets — should be quality and depth of reporting that will create stickyness and build the brand. Stickyness is web-speak for having viewers stay on your site for more than a few minutes and view more than just the one page that you might have entered by via an external link. Better yet, to be compelling enough to entice people to come back and be regular readers or god-forbid, actual subscribers to an actual newspaper.

I guess none of this is really earth shattering. Unless you run the Clinton Herald, our local newspaper. In which case your local beat is consistently scooped by the Gannett outlet, The Quad City Times forty miles downriver. The Times also does a better job of driving traffic to the website with a full twitter stream of breaking news (the Herald tweets maybe once a day) but more importantly the Times has all of its news archived on the web site unlike the Herald which still seems to think that if it’s not ink on paper delivered to the door then it doesn’t count.

The Herald consistently embargoes content on the website to drive people to the paper edition. If I miss a local story in the dead-tree edition and it doesn’t make the cut to the web page three or four days after publication? I have to physically go to the friggin Library. Which I’ve done. Once.

What I’m getting at is that it just doesn’t make a lot of sense that if you have a near-monopoly on the local newspaper business and are, in the claims of the publisher, “consistently one of the most profitable papers in the company,” to be consistently lagging your competition from down-river. Gannett, like all major publishers has a huge debt-load (unlike the privately-held CNHI, the Herald’s parent) and is always cutting budgets to the bone. Considering the minor marginal costs of placing additional, non-print content to the website and driving traffic and adding value with Twitter feeds, it would seem like a no-brainer.

In re: McCrystal. A couple of things that should pop right out as the nut graphs of this whole affair but that (typically) have been totally buried by the media in the whole scandaliciousness frenzy surrounding the Rolling Stone article by , Michael Hastings. One, Rolling Stone still does some awesome journalism. Two, mainstream media=total failure.

The sense of wonderment that pervaded on most of the TV puditocracy, e.g. “How is this guy ever going to get access again?”

Access isn’t the point because he’s now got the story of his life. Fuck access. See John Stewart.

And it was an outstanding bit of journalism. The “scandalous” stuff was really in the first 500 words. The rest of the article is a very illuminating piece on Gen. McCrystal — a soldier’s soldier if ever there was one — and our strategy in Afghanistan. For those of you who can’t be arsed to read 1,200 words of the most important journalism of 2010 here are the nut graphs of the Hasting’s piece:

The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended – they’ve been distorted as they passed through the chain of command – but knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. “Fuck, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our fucking gun on,” says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. “I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they’re all fucked up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don’t understand it themselves. But we’re fucking losing this thing.”

Later on:

When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal’s side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn’t hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France’s nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. “Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan,” he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. “It’s all very cynical, politically,” says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. “Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there’s nothing for us there.”

Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. “Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem,” says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. “A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we’re picking winners and losers” – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word “victory” when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.

Of course, Stanley McChrystal is not in charge any more is he? And what we are not getting right now is any kind of rational debate on exactly what the fuck we are planning on with regards to an exit strategy for a war that has drug on for one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-NINE years and shows no sign of being over inside of a decade.

It seems to me that in our hate and fear of Al Quaida is holding hands with with a whole series of national neuroses that we can bundle up under the label, Vietnam Syndrome, e.g. support the troops at all costs, keep the faith, the illusion that winning only requires enough will power and the right strategy, etc. ( Read the article for why all of this is relevant in regard to Gen. McCrystal in particular but for the current generation of military upper brass in general.)

Looking at Vietn… sorry, Afghanistan through those lenses we have totally overlooked the really important thing about war in general; it is supposed to further the national interest.

A U.S. Marine, from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, has a close call after Taliban fighters opened fire near Garmser in Helmand Province of Afghanistan May 18, 2008. The Marine was not injured. (REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic)

Outside of finding and killing some murderous douchebags hiding out (mostly in Pakistan) in caves and mud huts — a job that can be done by a few handfuls of drones, spies and special operators — where is the national interest in spending hundreds (if not thousands) of billions of dollars and thousands of lives here?

Hundreds of billions of dollars. Do you have any idea what we could have done with that (borrowed) money? For the war in Afghanistan we could have built a coast-to-coast high speed railway. We could have sent every graduating senior in America to four years of college for the past nine years. We could have had free freakin’ healthcare for everyone.

Yes, we have been notified that our forums no longer will be Hey Martha forums as of Sept. 1. We currently are looking at our options concerning the hosting of the site. We know our readers like the forums and we are doing our best to make sure that continues. I’ll let you know more as those decisions are made.
Charlene Bielema
Herald Editor

The Herald is owned by Community Newspapers Holdings Inc. a Birmingham, Alabama-based concern that owns a metric buttload of small market newspapers. As of now, it looks like they have moved to a new content-management and/or hosting service.

The original posting in the thread was cross-posted from the Norman, OK Norman Transcript. It appears that the Transcript will be moving to a more community-based blogging and aggregation model. Something that has been talked about as a new business model for newspapers. See Jeff Jarvis’ blog buzzfeed. Mr. Jarvis just gave a rather compelling presentation of a very similar business model at an Aspen Institute forum.

Regardless of the fate of the Hey, Martha! forums, I’ve been wanting to get some serious hands-on time with the really cool-looking website development and management tools from squarespace.com for a month or so now. We’ll this is a good chance. I’ve set up a community site called Aww, Martha!. If the Herald pulls the plug, there will be a place for people to gather. It is a $50 a month hit, so its permanence depends on a couple of factors: a) whether it gets used at all and b) whether it is needed.

In the meantime, feel free to play around and post some stuff. Membership is required but totally free and privacy will be respected. Aww, Martha!

Per Gawker’s post:

But while cable news is niche, politics is mass. The chart above shows GOP party approval in as reported by New York Times/CBS in national polls going back to 2006 and Fox News’ total primetime audience, in millions, over the same time period. Fox News can and does thrive with a primetime audience of 2.5 million, many of which are the aforementioned zealots. The Republican Party needs more than that to function electorally. And the aforementioned angry zealotry that’s in vogue on Fox News is distasteful to the independent voters that the GOP needs to court.

In case you missed it, Iran had a presidential election on Friday. In Iran’s quasi-theocratic regieme the office of Presidnent is secondary to that of the Supreme (Religious) Leader, Ali Khameni, but does wield a lot of influence in economic and foreign policy. This is why Holocaust-denying, populist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been such a pain the ass. Not just anyone can run in Iran. All candidates have to be approved by the religious council. So, this year’s four-way race was between Ahmadinajad, and three other candidates all approved by the establishment. One candidate however, emerged as a “reform” candidate. Mir Hossein Mousavi promised more engagement with the West, more progressive economic policies and improvements for the lot of women in Iranian society.

Long story short: Mousavi’s movement gained momentum in the last days of the campaign. Come election day turnous was a massive 80%. People either in the Khameni camp or in the Republican Guard started to anticipate the massive defeat they were about to be handed. They got nervous. Instead of massaging the numbers, arranging for a runoff — In Iran, if one candidate does not get 50%+1 in the first round there is a runoff between the top two — or otherwise stealing the election with a modicum of subtlety and believability, they panicked and apparently just started making up huge landslide numbers for Ahmadinajad all over the country.

Just two hours after the polls closed late Friday night (after being held open extra hours to accommodate the insane turnout) the government declared Ahmadinajad the winner with 69 percent to Mousavi’s 29 percent. Such a naked fraud as this was over the line, even in Iran and predictably the streets of Tehran filled.

All day yesterday there was a steady dribble of news out of Iran. Mousavi under house arrest. Mousavi supporter, former president and member of the Supreme Expediency Council, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani resigned. Bloody protests in the streets. Web sites and phone texting blocked, but Twitter unacountably not. All through the day and into the night as one twitterer spoke:
ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout ALAHO AKBAR in protest #IranElection.

And at 3:30 in the morning, Tehran rang to the cries of, “God is Great.”

Great stuff. This is the kind of thing that makes journalism careers.

Mainstream media coverage, especially the so-called 24 hour news networks — this story is tailor made for them — has been almost nonexistent. The old stalwarts are there of course. The NYT has excellent coverage on its blog, The Lede, along with the BBC and The Guardian.

But the real, up-to-the-minute stuff has been provided by native, Farsi-speaking blogs like that of the National Iranian-American Council and their blog as well as that of Andrew Sullivan and Juan Cole.

Above:A pro-Mousavi protester gives aid to a beleaguered Iranian riot policeman. Source: Getty Images, via The Atlantic Monthly.

Iran’s “Green Revolution” may well fizzle. The country has a seemingly endless capacity to eat its young. It ruthlessly put down student protests in 2003 and in 1995 and fed an entire generation into the meat grinder in its war with Iraq. But considering the huge strategic implications of these events, and the compelling visuals and overall storyline I am stunned that the TV and traditional media isn’t more all over this. But hey, its the weekend.

So, if things in Iran get really wierd and all of a sudden on Wednesday its all over the news and you are all like, “Where did that come from?” Just remember that the Internet has been working overtime while the rest of the media was sleeping.

Update:I originally wrote this up about 3 p.m Saturday afternoon. Since then, the regular news people have been trickling back into their offices and catching up. By Sunday morning, things are more what one would think the coverage levels would be like. Still, here’s your post of links to ongoing coeverage. The blogs listed above are probably still going to be the place to go to follow events in Iran.

The relentless drumbeat from the music and movie industries for the last ten years can be summarized thusly: “Help! Illegal downloads are killing us. We need Big Brother to squash our customers for us!”

Wrong!! There are two things killing (at least) the music industry. The first is the rise of legal downloads. The profit margins for the labels on a $ .99 song at Apple or Amazon are literally pennies as opposed to the old system of several dollars per CD purchased. So, even though more actual music purchase transactions are being rung up in vrtual cash registers the world over, it literally takes hundreds of the new transactions to equal even one physical CD purchase as far as the record labels are concerned. Hence, falling revenues and profits.

The second problem is one that has not been discussed much at all as far as I can tell. If in the aggregate, the consuming public has about as much disposable income today as in 1999 (which is the dawn of the Napster Era), then total music sales should have stayed the same, albeit in higher volumes of $ .99 each. But total music sales have been falling. Hence, “Piracy is killing the music industry.”

But a new study by the Guardian in the UK posits a different theory: downloading isn’t killing the music industry, the gaming industry is.

If we assume that there’s roughly the same amount of discretionary spending available (which, even allowing for the credit bubble, should be roughly true; most of the credit went into houses), then it’s clear who the culprit is: the games industry. By 2009, the amount spent in games and music is almost exactly the same as 1999 (though note that the music industry changed its methods from 2004).

Yes, downloaders aren’t spending money on the music industry, and in that way they are hurting it. But I’d argue that the true volume of “lost” sales is nowhere near the claims made. Assume that music couldn’t be copied (as many games can’t). I don’t think that the volume of music sales would equate to all those downloads. At best, it would be £600m larger.

But the reality is that nowadays, one can choose between a game costing £40 that will last weeks, or a £10 CD with two great tracks and eight dud ones. I think a lot of people are choosing the game – and downloading the two tracks. That’s real discretion in spending. It’s hurting the music industry, sure. But let’s not cloud the argument with false claims about downloads.

Have a good weekend.

It is true that many states and municipalities have made their citizen’s lives easier by putting so much information on the web. But, in too may areas there is still a fundamental misunderstanding of exactly the type of sea-change that the Internet is bringing to society and governance.

Here is an excerpt of a teriffic post by Tom Steinberg of the UK-based mysociety.org, which builds community organizing and open government websites, called What The Government Doesn’t Understand About The Internet And What To Do About It:

Current government policy in relation to the Internet can broadly be summarised as occupying three areas:

1. Getting people online (broadband access, and lessons for people who don’t have the skills or interest)
2. Protecting people from bad things done using the Internet (terrorism, child abuse, fraud, hacking, intellectual property infringement)
3. Building websites for departments and agencies.

The government does all these things primarily because it believes that the Internet boosts the economy of the UK, and that IT can reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality. Together, these outweigh the dangers, meaning it doesn’t get banned. Gordon Brown’s recent speech at Google was an exemplar of this mainly economically driven celebration of the Internet’s virtues, telling audience members that your industry is driving the next stage of globalisation”.

The first challenge for the government is to understand that whilst these beliefs are true, they are only a minor part of the picture. Tellingly, Browns’ speech contained almost no language that couldn’t have been used to explain the positive impact of electrification or shipping containers.

What is different is the way in which the Internet changes social and economic practices – the vector of attack. In the 20th century, advancement of human welfare went hand in hand with the rise of companies that used economies of scale to deliver better goods and services for customers. Technology effectively made it possible and much easier to be a big, highly productive company, to gather expertise and capital together and to target markets for maximum yields.

Now take a look for a moment at Wikipedia, MoneySavingExpert, Blogger or Match.com – all big websites, all doing different things. Each one, however, is in its own way is reducing the ability of large, previously well functioning institutions to function as easily.

These services are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business.

Disruption like this is scary for any institution, which will tend to mean that as a public entity which interfaces with other institutions the temptation will be to hold back the sea, not swim with it. Government must swim with the tide, though, not just to help citizens more but to avoid the often ruinous tension of a citizenry going one way and a government going another. There are various things government can do to be on the right side.

1. Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.”

2. Seize the opportunity to bring people together. Millions of people visit public sector websites every day, often trying to achieve similar or identical ends. It is time to start building systems to allow them to contact people in a similar situation, just as they’d be able to if queuing together in a job centre, but with far more reach and power. This does open the scary possibility that citizens might club together to protest about poor service or bad policies, but given recent news, if you were a minister would you rather know about what was wrong as soon as possible, or really late in the day (cf MPs‘ expenses, festering for years)?

The killer app of the Internet as it relates to human politics and governance is not any sorf of enabling of direct democacy, which is simply too unwieldy for a handful of people let alone hundreds of millions. Instead it is the ability to maintain honesty in government through distributing the load of watchdogging it among millions.

Take the groundbreaking recovery.gov: “The site will include information about Federal grant awards and contracts as well as formula grant allocations. Federal agencies will provide data on how they are using the money, and eventually, prime recipients of Federal funding will provide information on how they are using their Federal funds. On our end, we will use interactive graphics to illustrate where the money is going, as well as estimates of how many jobs are being created, and where they are located. And there will be search capability to make it easier for you to track the funds.”

This is groundbreaking in the sense that this is the first time an administration has seriously attempted to embrace the Internet not as an extension of existing media but as a new medium in its own right. But it is still not up to snuff, it still shows an attitude that the primary role of the Internet is to reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality — in this case making it faster and cheaper and more efficient to maintain a (albeit well-intentioned) veil of accountability for the massive spending being undertaken.

The recovery.gov site is kind of clunky. It also doesn’t go very deep. Mousing over the map of Iowa for example shows that $1,08 billion has been announced for Iowa. Clicking on Iowa takes you to a list of spending programs (of which the state budget stabilization fund is at the top at $472 million) for which money has been allocated. And… that’s pretty much it.

On the other hand, recovery.org is far more in depth. At their website, I can see that there are 291 active projects valued at $250.4 milion. I can drill down by county to see that Clinton has 2 active projects valued at $1.6 million and by drilling down further I can see that those two projects are for replacement buses for the Transit Authority.

Now, recovery.org is the product of onvia.com, a for-profit organizaiton that helps companies find state and fedral contract opportunities. They have a large research staff that combs federal, state and local media to glean this detailed information and post it not only for the benefit of their customers but free for everyone. Onvia’s information is not complete, just showing what projects are currently open for bid, instead of all projects planned, let and in progress or complete. But that’s okay, that’s not what Onvia is about.

What it does show is the power of community production and how the creative collective production that creates something like Wikipedia can be harnessed to keep our government accountable. And while things like recovery.org can scale up to the national level, they can also be scaled down to the state and local level.

His latest project is a collaboration with alternative dalrings, Sparklehorse, and featuredsa Who’s Who of guest artists: The Flaming Lips, Iggy Pop The Shins, and the Pixies’ Frank Black. The album is entitled Dark Night of the Soul,. It ships in a delixue case with a 50 page booklet of photos by filmmaker, David Lynch, of Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and my personal favorite, Wild At Heart.

The record is amazing. It’s not really my cup of tea style-wise. A bit too broody and slow for my taste. I’m mostly an up-tempo kind of guy. Despite that though I can recognize great songwriting and producing when I hear it. And “Dark Night of the Soul” brings the goods.

So here is the technology transformation bit: An as-yet unspecified “contractual dispute” with his label, EMI has led to the label refusing to release the album commercially.

Danger Mouse’s solution? Set up a site where fans can purchase the David Lynch booklet, CD cover and a blank, recordable CD for $50. Then tell fans to go find the music on the Internet any way they can. Hint: Bit Torrent and Pirate Bay.

There are two epigrams that date from the Early Days of the Internet (say, 1998). One is: Information wants to be free. The other is: The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. You don’t hear people talk like that anymore. but that doesn’t mean that those things aren’t true.

The Recording Industry As We Know It™, and its twin sister Commercial Radio™ have about three to five years left to live. As soon as broadband wireless service (e.g. WiFi, 3G/4G cellular, WiMAX) becomes more or less ubiquitous, their customers are going to scatter like a school of fish chased by dolphins.

Why would anyone listen to the latest dreck from Christina Aguilera or to Boston for the billionth time when they could just listen to whatever they wanted streamed from their own music collection, or to a niche Internet based “radio” station that serves up the kind of music they like, or to Internet stations recommended by a friend on Facebook?

The large record labels are becoming increasingly irrelevant to many musicians as their reason for being amounts to a way to ship lots of bit of shiny, silver plastic. But digital downloads are steadily eating the market for CDs. Sales of CD’s have been down for years. Purchased digital downloads are largely replacing them. The problem is, you can’t mark up a digital download 80% like you can a bit of shiny, silver plastic. The margins on downloads are minuscule, like 2 percent. Two percent times several million is still money. It’s just not hot-and-cold running cocaine and hookers kind of money, if you know what I mean.

More and more band make their money on the road, doing the hard work of touring. This fact is seen in the increasingly consolidated ownership of large music venues and the possible merger between the world’s largest ticket broker, TicketMaster and the world’s largest venue and tour management company, Live Nation. Can you say anti-trust?

But, as Danger Mouse shows, there are a million ways to skin a buck from a market in fragments. None of them have anything to do with the Recording Industry As We Know It™.

This sign reads: I WILL NOT BE AFRAID TO GO OUT INTO THE STREETS, DEFEND MY LIBERTY, UPHOLD THE LAW, DEMAND JUSTICE, I WILL NOT BE AFRAID TO LIVE IN MY HOMELAND AND CHANGE ITS FUTURE…. GUATEMALA, I WILL NOT ABANDON YOU.

How does mass collaboration and open, instantaneous communication change the political rules? Well, there’s the case of the so-called Twitter Revolution in Moldova where Twitter was — or maybe not — central in organizing protests against the allegedly stolen parliamentary election of April 5.

And Twitter as a way to organize flashmobs and quickly disseminate information is ideal for the type of role it may or may not have played in Moldova. However, when we take in social media in all of its totality — blogs, Twtter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. — the lesson is all about radical, enforced transparency; the hard fact — that many people are going tol have to learn the hard way – that there is almost no way to keep anything a secret any more.

A very interesting example is happening right now in Guatemala. Follow this one if you can. Xeni Xardin of Boing Boingis all over this.

The Guatemalan bank Banrural is at the center of the country’s current political crisis: the recently assassinated attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg represented a finance expert, Khalil Musa, who was said to have refused to participate in corrupt transactions involving that bank. Musa was assassinated in March. After continuing to make statements about alleged government complicity in that murder, and in the financial crimes Musa protested, Rosenberg was himself shot to death this past Sunday. Days before his murder, Rosenberg recorded a video saying he believed he would soon be assassinated by forces acting at the orders of Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom. After his death, the video spread virally on YouTube (link to video in Spanish), sparking widespread protests on and offline.

[May 14], Twitter user “Jeanfer” was arrested for suggesting in a tweet that people who had money deposited in Banrural should remove those funds, and by doing so, break the control that “corrupt people” have over the state-controlled financial institution.

That was yesterday. By today, Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández, aka “jeanfer” had been arraigned, tried and sentenced. Now that is some efficient justice right there. Fernandez was ordered to jail until he can pay a fine of $6,500 (more than the average Guatemalan’s annual income) and then to be under house arrest indefinitely.

As of now, there are massive street protests. More Twitterers are being sought by the police while twitter traffic on the matter explodes. The government has issued a list of persons who must not be allowed to leave the country. And the FBI is getting involved.

All in all this is shaping up into what looks like a social media driven revolution that was set off by revelations exposed to the entire world through that media. Ten years ago, this would have been a conspiracy known only to a few human rights lawyers and would have meant business as usual in Guatemala. Not anymore.