NPR Retracts Mike Daise...

At over a million digital listens, “Mr. Daisey Goes To The Apple Factory” is This American Life’s most popular episode in history. That’s no small feat for one of the world’s most well-known radio shows. When it aired, it set off yet another firestorm of controversy regarding the ethics of Apple (and other large tech companies) using cheap Chinese labor through major manufacturers like Foxconn. Mr Daisey, who has been touring for years with a monologue about his visit to the factories there and the moral implications thereof, provided details to This American Life to put together what was really a powerful and attention-grabbing piece. Unfortunately, in the words of This American Life host and producer Ira Glass , “We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth.” This week’s This American Life will take a full hour to detail the errors and fabrications in Daisey’s report. Without duplicating too much of NPR’s blog post, press release, and forthcoming broadcast, it seems that another NPR radio staffer, Marketplace China correspondent Rob Schmitz, thought that some of Daisey’s claims didn’t add up. The fact checking team at NPR had already cleared the story despite some small discrepancies, but some things Schmitz was personally acquainted with stuck out — for instance, the idea that Daisey had met in Shenzhen with workers who had been poisoned by n-hexane. The poisoning occurred, no doubt, but it occurred a thousand miles away in Suzhou, a place Daisey never visited. He also contacted Daisey’s interpreter, whom Daisey claimed to be unable to reach, and apparently for good reason. She contradicted much of what Daisey claimed in his monologue and on NPR. In the investigative episode shortly to air, Schmitz confronts Daisey with this information. His response: I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it’s not journalism. It’s theater. A few weeks ago, a book called The Lifespan of a Fact was released, a peculiar volume detailing a battle between a writer, whose essay had been embellished with inaccuracies and fabrications, and his fact-checker at The Believer, who was attempting to undo those embellishments. The question of which was more valuable, the point being made in an essay that didn’t strictly cast itself as a factual one, or the truth of the matter that it in many ways obscured, is an interesting one. But in this case things seem a little more clear-cut. Mr. Daisey represented as facts and his own experience things that were not true and which he had not done. TechCrunch interviewed Daisey as well early in 2011. His statements to us must be questioned, now factually as well as conceptually . Fortunately, all of our reporting on China and Foxconn does not rely on his experience. Our own John Biggs has been to China to report on the state of manufacturing there twice, the first time to Shenzhen proper to see how smaller factories and shops are run , and the second time to “Foxconn City,” where he received a tour of the mega-campus where your devices are made and assembled . These reports, needless to say, are factual.

Defunct LimeWire Buries...

Another hefty payout for the now-defunct file-sharing P2P service LimeWire , and, perhaps more importantly, another nail in the coffin for P2p services: Merlin , a rights agency representing independent labels, says that it has reached an out-of-court settlement with LimeWire over copyright infringement — a settlement its characterizing as its first big win against a P2P company. Merlin — which represents labels that feature artists like Adele, Grizzly Bear, The National, Arcade Fire and The National — did not disclose the value of the deal, except to say that it was “commensurate” with the settlement reached by major music labels with LimeWire in May 2011, which totaled $105 million. The suit had originally been filed in July 2011, in the wake of that settlement, with Merlin seeking at least $5 million in damages. At the time, the major music labels controlled 70 percent of the market in the U.S. while Merlin accounts for 10 percent. Billboard has done some back-of-the-napkin math and worked out that this could mean that Merlin’s settlement is worth about $15 million. LimeWire ceased operations in 2010 after a court injunction prohibited it from distributing its software. The directors of the company say that it is taking all necessary steps to comply with that, including asking those who have it to uninstall the software, and for others to stop trading on its name. Merlin has pointed out that this is the first time that it has managed to eke out a major settlement over copyright infringement with a P2P service. One of the last big P2P settlements before the cases with LimeWire was with KaZaa, the P2P service originally founded by Skype/Rdio entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. At the time, a landmark settlement of $115 million was reached. But apparently, with that action led by major labels like EMI and Warner Music via organisations like the RIAA , smaller players saw little returns. Hence, the formation of Merlin and the independent action this time around. “It is deeply satisfying to announce this settlement today. The exclusion of independents from past major settlements such as Kazaa was a key factor in the formation of Merlin, and I am proud to say that this time, via the actions of Merlin, our members’ rights have been properly protected,” said Charles Caldas, Merlin CEO. “We will continue to do everything we can to ensure that the labels we represent are never again left out in the cold.” But it’s important, too, to note that this is not the first payout Merlin has had: it has deals in place with Spotify, YouTube, Google Music, Rdio (the irony!) and Simfy; and it has also reached other copyright infringement settlements with XM Sirius and Grooveshark, among others — although these may not have been on the scale of its LimeWire action. The labels that are part of the Merlin rights association include some of the most popular names in independent music such as Epitaph, Merge, Warp, Yep Roc/Red Eye, Naïve, Naxos, Tommy Boy, One Little Indian, Kontor, Secretly Canadian, Beggars Group, [PIAS] Group,!K7, Sub Pop, Domino and Koch/E1. With the number of P2P and other potentially-illicit content sharing sites closing in by the month — the very fact that LimeWire is no longer attests to this, as does the disappearance of Megaupload and others — there will be fewer targets for Merlin and its bigger cousins to aim their actions. But this news will at least encourage them to know that when they do, it won’t be in vain. We’ll be trying to contact LimeWire to get their position on this story. If you are on the other, P2P side of this story and have a different take, let us know. (photo: Chealion, Flickr )

The Daily Stands By The...

Suite anticipation, said The Daily. The News Corp iPad mag broke the news this morning that Microsoft was about to submit its productivity suite to Apple for review. They even had a photo of the app running on an iPad to back up their claim — which they triple watermarked for some reason. The outlet specluated that the app could launch in the “coming weeks.” But then Microsoft responded, telling ZDNet that “The Daily’s story is not a picture of a real Microsoft software product.” I reached out to The Daily’s Apps & Tech Editor Peter Ha for confirmation. Having personally worked with him for a couple of years here at TechCrunch, I knew he was not one to run a story of this magnitude without plenty of fact checking. Sure enough, they did their homework and Ha stands by the story and pic. We’ve been chasing this story down for weeks. We did not fabricate the image and Microsoft isn’t denying the existence of Office for iPad. All this fuss over a photo is nonsense. The story is real. We also got confirmation from local sources in Seattle, who assure us that the software is real and being developed in-house. However, as the build in the picture is far from final, Microsoft can deny (in its overly specific way) that it’s not a real product.

False Alarm: Why The Ap...

I was walking home last week and the entire street – and some of the sidewalk – was blocked by large fire trucks and a gaggle of firemen in full regalia. The ladder truck was already planted firmly on the asphalt, ready to send a stream of water soaring over nearby apartment buildings and more trucks were coming, clogging the one-way street further. Convinced I was about to see an inferno, I tentatively crossed the street. I assumed I’d be stopped and turned away. Instead, the firemen joked and jostled on the sidewalk and I saw a contractor arguing with someone I assumed to be a building resident. The contractor must have been welding – you could still smell the flux and the smoke – and the resident was clearly concerned. “I was working,” yelled the contractor. “I was worried,” said the resident. I bring this story up because that block is now faced with a dilemma. It’s good that the fire was averted by beagle-nosed residents and it’s bad in that it tied up an entire fire department for an hour while a miscommunication was sorted out. The next time the resident won’t be so quick to phone the fire brigade and the contractor will do a better job of hiding the smoke. That’s what’s about to happen at Foxconn. Tim Cook just announced that a blue ribbon panel of fair labor experts will tour the grounds at Foxconn City where they will see all the horrors I saw a few months ago: a huge rice cooker big enough to feed 400,000 people, cramped but not squalid dorms, a handsome cybercafe with couples’ booths, and pools where exhausted line workers can enjoy a few laps before slumping into their loft beds. What they won’t see are disfigured workers toiling in Dickensian sweatshops, infants crawling through metal stamping machines, and workers chained to their stations until the millionth widget is shipped or they die of exhaustion. Why? Because Foxconn has been working with major manufacturers for long enough to know what they expect and they’ve seen enough European and American plants to know that squalid conditions beget squalid paychecks. The FLA, without a doubt, will return with a report citing a few underage workers, the recommendation to build bigger dorms, and an overall rating of, say B- in terms of safety and worker quality-of-life. It’s not perfect, they’ll say, but it’s not horrible, especially when compared to garment shops. What will happen next? Apple will announce an all clear, the FLA will be less likely to attack Apple on rights violations, and Foxconn (and, more importantly, its competitors) will go back to business as usual. And we’ll forget about this whole thing, our fingers worrying our Foxconn-made iPhones like a set of prayer beads. Then, quietly, the factories that are really running under horrible conditions, hiring workers without checking the particulars, and offering conditions that I wouldn’t wish on any man, woman, or child, will go back to churning out smoke, albeit with a bit more secrecy. By focusing on the biggest Chinese (actually Taiwanese) manufacturer, we inspect the canopy of the tree while ignoring the disease-infested trunk. If you want to know what is happening in China, listen to this . It tells the story of a mill town South Carolina, Greenville, that has evolved, just as Foxconn is evolving. Back in its heyday the bars were buckets of blood, youngsters quit school at sixteen and clocked in for a great paycheck, and many lived far more comfortably than their agrarian fore-bearers. Now that mill town is shutting down, the last bar housing a pair of jokers who used to travel the world on a factory paycheck, and the real industry is down the road in clean, high-tech buildings where there are a hundred robots per human making widgets no 16-year-old drop-out could piece together, let alone understand. In the end, Greenville died and was reborn. So, too, will Shenzhen. The good companies in China, for years, supplied a better life for countless post-agrarian workers. They were not drafted into service. Instead, they walked up to the gates and applied for a job. Children were not pulled from their cribs to work in the darkness and noise, they were told they’d have a better life if they sat in chairs and assembled cellphones for fat Americans. This hand-waving by Apple won’t make the bad factories go away and it will encourage the good factories to automate much more. Why hire 400,000 complainers when you can hire 1,000 Chinese PhDs to run the line? Follow the arc of manufacturing in the US and you’ll see the same arc repeated in Shenzhen. I’m not here to defend Apple or Foxconn nor am I about to sing folksongs about the exploited, migrant electronics assemblers. This is about economics. China’s economy is booming, their unemployment rate was near 4.1% in 2010 (ours is 8.3% now and 9.1% in 2010), and what Shenzhen makes, the world takes. Apple doesn’t like negative publicity, so they’re sending a third party to pick up some talking points and when that third party comes back, all smiles, we’ll forget about real sweatshops in real places. Focusing on two huge companies in the pantheon of Asian manufacturing is like sending the entire firehouse after a little smoke. The real fires go right on blazing while the contractor gesticulates on the sidewalk, yelling “I was working. I was working.” [Image: Inga Nielsen / Shutterstock ]

The New Techmeme Design...

In a world of personalized, distributed information sharing, Techmeme and its sister sites have successfully gone the opposite direction. They’re machine-powered, human-controlled news aggregators that have readers — especially media types — following like drug addicts jonesing for another hit. The flagship site, Techmeme.com , has just gotten a big redesign that modernizes the look and feel of the interface, and emphasizes new social features. Here’s one junkie’s reaction. The main aspects are the same as before. It still analyzes the web for popular articles, using factors like which article has the most inbound links, to provide an ever-shifting flow of top news. The stories are ranked according to popularity from top to bottom, with the input of its human editor team . Almost everything else is different. It’s is the biggest change-up since the site  looked like this  back in 2006. First off, links no longer have underlines, as founder Gabe Rivera says in his official post on the changes. This reflects a design preference seen on most of the web these days — except, as he notes on that old-school political news aggregator called the Drudge Report . Perhaps more obviously for the casual user, the main feed of stories has had its width reduced by roughly 100 pixels by my count. Sponsored posts have been moved into a center column, which will appear above the fold on most computer screens. The feed of the newest stories has been moved to the far right. “Sponsors weren’t complaining [about where they appeared on the site],” he tells me, “but I imagine some of them will like the new layout. One reason for three columns is it will make more room for other things near the top of the page. There’s space for ‘future expansion’. And yes, we’re not done filling that white space.” Conversations, the collection of other stories under each main one, also has a convenient new dropdown feature — a downward arrow button that you can click on to see the extended list of articles. In the previous design, you could also do this, but you had to mouse over the story to get a small “+” button to appear for you to click on. On the social side of things, the site is making sharing even easier by adding Twitter retweet and Facebook Like buttons at the top right of each main story. Mouse over any one of them and the buttons will appear, as well as an additional one that lets you quickly grab a unique URL for the story. The previous design had packaged all of the sharing options into a window you opened via clicking on the story icon. “In most cases readers don’t want to bother editing the headline of the story they’re sharing,” Rivera says about the choice of the Retweet button in his post, “so we opted for the more natural retweet option.” I followed up by asking what sort of sharing stats he had available. “Now that you asked,” he replied, “I realize I haven’t done any testing or research at all to support going with a RT button. It just seemed like a cool idea. I suspect you don’t see these buttons much because, unless I’m missing something, it’s a little harder to implement (because your site needs to grab the tweet ID after you post to make the button work).” I asked him about the lack of Google’s +1 button. “Well, we’re open to it, but just want to begin with a simple trio of buttons.” A few other changes include a toggle button at the top to open all links as new tabs, a new About section, and new locations for links to sister sites, the archives, etc. Most of the reactions so far have been positive, but some readers are wondering about the new Optima font. Rivera has a good explanation. “Optima (the font people see on Macs and iOS) is very good at allowing the eye to see the different pub names in “More” (formerly “Discussion”) as distinct. Also, it’s the font most people I spoke to preferred when presented with a few alternatives before launch. But indeed, I noticed some people dislike it. Maybe it’s a divisive font. But don’t assume the haters are the majority. See also .” The new interface will eventually roll out to  Mediagazer  and other Techmeme sister sites, like gossip aggregator WeSmirch and my secret favorite, Drudge-replacing political aggregator Memorandum . But the refresh isn’t as urgent, Rivera says in his post. “Mediagazer in particular isn’t as afflicted with the uglies in the first place, given that its area of coverage leads to less link-heavy story clusters. But it will nonetheless benefit from a refresh. Techmeme’s redesign will not, however, extend into its past. One curious yet fun practice we’ve upheld here is that old archives maintain their  old look .” Rivera’s response when I asked about what to expect from the privately-held, boostrapped company in the future? “We’re going to do more stuff.” Prepare yourselves, addicts. [H/t to Miguel Rios for the headline.]