The Boston Globe, a subsidiary of the New York Times, published a shameful article by Stephen Kurkjian about Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn failing to provide detailed estimates about trips he took to conferences in 2004. The smoking gun of the article was: “He provided the name of the conferences he was attending, but only the total amount of money that the trip cost on three of them . . .” Before publication, the Globe failed to contact Quinn’s supervisor at the time, former Secretary of Administration and Finance Eric Kriss.

Now, 14 days later, Kurkjian has published an article that starts, “[Peter Quinn] did not violate conflict-of-interest standards or other rules when he took 12 out-of-state trips to attend conferences during the past year without obtaining the written approval of his boss . . .”

This time, Kurkjian managed to get in touch with Eric Kriss: ‘’’I knew of every trip that Peter was taking, and I approved them all,’ Kriss said.”

All of this occurred as Quinn was (and still is) involved in a struggle to move Massachusetts toward the use of OpenDocument, a file format for electronic documents. When a journalist goes off looking for dirt on a politician and prints a pile of unsubstantiated allegations, that’s called a witchhunt. Stephen Kurkjian, what were you thinking?

That brings us to the difference between citizen journalists, like me or the writers for Wikinews, and professionals like Stephen Kurkjian. When I talk about blogging with people who read paper newspapers on a regular basis, the objection I hear most often is: “How do I know that I can trust them? They could be anyone!” With me and the amateurs at Wikinews, you can’t trust us beyond record that we’ve established on the web. However, bloggers (like me, or my friend Mike at The Unauthorized Participant) have no incentive to lie to you. If I don’t feel like writing about anything, then I don’t. I go downstairs and read a book, and that’s it. Mike has a little incentive, as he has ads on his blog, but I suspect he makes about $0.03 per year from them.

The same is true of Wikinews. Last spring, I was unemployed for about 2 months. I wrote a lot of stories for Wikinews, and it was satisfying. Now, I have a new job and less free time. The OpenDocument story has caught my attention. I live in Massachusetts, and I want people to know that the state is on the verge of adopting an open standard for office documents. That’s the entirety of my agenda. I don’t work for Sun or IBM or anyone else who stands to gain from the adoption of OpenDocument. I work doing IT support for an environmental foundation, and I would like to end the scheme of forced upgrades in which Microsoft makes us upgrade to new versions of Office when all we need are the features that were available in Word 97. I want the truth to be told because I think it will make the world a better place.

Stephen Kurkjian, a professional journalist, has a different structure of rewards. The New York Times Company pays him to research and report on local news. Lots of the stuff he’s written has been great (notably, his work in Boston’s Catholic church abuse scandal in 2002). Other stuff, like the recent article trying to taint Peter Quinn without sufficient evidence, is embarrassing. The crux is that Kurkjian can’t go downstairs and read a book. If he wants to continue in his job, he has to write engaging content for the people of Boston to read, even if there is no story to be told. That’s why I am at least as skeptical of professional journalists as the amateurs.

Alright, this is getting dull. I’m going to go read a book (Thomas P. M. Barnett’s Blueprint for Action, if you were wondering). (Look out! He’s a blogger!)

Ethan Zuckerman has an interesting post that suggests an explanation for the lack of news coverage of Africa in the Western press. His theory (recycled from Joi Ito) is that people care about news from nations to which they have some personal connection.

I spent two weeks at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania a few years ago, teaching a workshop on embedded systems for the International Atomic Energy Agency. While I don’t think that the workshop was particularly effective, it made me care about Africa, and East Africa in particular.

Last week, Kilinux released the first Swahili word processor ever. To me, this is big news, which is why I wrote most of the article for Wikinews. There are at least 1 million people who speak Swahili as a first language. The language is spoken by 55 million people worldwide. The well-educated people I met at the University of Dar es Salaam spoke Swahili, a local dialect, and English. When in groups, Swahili was the language they used. Access to a free common platform for creating text documents with commands in a language that’s easy for them to use is a huge step forward.

The Swahili word processor story has been up on Wikinews for a week or so. Ethan Zuckerman posted it to WorldChanging.org. Other than that, I haven’t been able to find coverage in any other media outlet. There are a couple of stories (ZDNet UK and the BBC) that covered a pre-release version before the translation was finished, back in December. Microsoft has said that they are working on a Swahili version of Windows, but the release date reported by the BBC (six months from June 2004) has passed without any news. I guess there aren’t so many shareholders in Dar es Salaam.

You heard it here first, folks.