Pentagon Takes Fire Over Blog Briefings
Last fall, the liberal blog Think Progress took the Pentagon to task for giving only Defense Department-friendly bloggers access to regular blog briefings. The Pentagon responded by agreeing to let Think Progress, and presumably other bloggers likely to be critical of defense policies, to future roundtables.
Al Kamen of The Washington Post apparently doesn't read Think Progress, though, because today he ridiculed the Pentagon's new media chief for how the blog briefings are organized. Rob Bluey of the Heritage Foundation didn't take Kamen's outburst lightly.
Kamen suggests that the Pentagon is limiting these calls to the "right bloggers." That's absolutely untrue. When I saw Holt speak at Blog World in Las Vegas last year, he made a point of stating that he reached out to bloggers of all political persuasions as well as those who cover military issues exclusively. Anyone is welcome to take part on the calls, but liberal bloggers have never expressed any interest. (And why would they when it's so easy pontificate rather than report what’s actually happening.)In my opinion, Kamen's piece is yet another example of an elite, mainstream journalist expressing jealously about the emerging role of bloggers in the information age. His cushy job at the Post could soon be at risk with the more Americans turning to blogs for their news and information rather than page A17 of the newspaper.
Posted by Danny at 01:06 PM | Comments (0)
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A couple of weeks ago, I took a potshot at bloggers for their presentation of "news" in Campaign 2008 that is obviously contrary to the video evidence. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the media are guilty of the same hysteria, as they try to make their campaign coverage as sensational as possible. Watch "The Daily Show's" take on the coverage (via Ann Althouse)
Posted by Danny at 12:39 PM | Comments (0)
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Last Call For GOP Convention Blog Credentials
I just received an e-mail update about blog credentials for the Republican convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul from Sept. 1 to Sept. 4. The e-mail is from Liz Mair, who founded the libertarian-leaning blog GOP Progress and recently became the online communications director of the Republican National Committee
Here's the key point:
If you are not affiliated with a traditional media outlet, and if you have not done so already, I would strongly urge you to visit the blogger page, and complete the form, within the next two weeks should you wish to obtain credentials for the convention.I want to be sure that everyone who is at this stage planning to attend has the best possible opportunity to do so, and it will be much simpler to guarantee a high level of blogger credentialing if all initial paperwork has been completed before the end of the first week of February.
Posted by Danny at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)
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The Press Price Of Raking Muck
Alberto Gonzales arguably left his job as attorney general last year after being hounded over the alleged political firings of multiple U.S. attorneys. TPMMuckraker was the driving force behind that story.
Now the Justice Department that Gonzales led has taken TPMMuckraker off of its press list and won't add the blog back. TPMMuckraker smells a rat: "For the record, this is the first time that any congressional office or government agency has told us this."
Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media agreed and offered "a suggestion for a non-shunned journalist covering the Justice Department: Kindly set up an automatic relay in your e-mail to forward all department press releases to [Josh] Marshall and his team. And let your department contacts know how idiotic the public-affairs people -- under orders from their bosses? -- are being."
I'm not on the Justice Department's press list, but I'll happily send the message because I know some folks at the department occassionally read Beltway Blogroll: You're being idiotic. Put TPMMuckraker back on the e-mail list. You're not going to keep the site from getting any information, and you just end up looking childish.
Posted by Danny at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)
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Grow Up, Gizmodo Goofballs
If bloggers want to be treated like the working press, they had better learn to act like professionals. This is an example of how not to behave:
The Gizmodo kids pulled a good stunt at [Consumer Electronics Show]: They fired TV-B-Gone remotes at walls of shiny new monitors on display and during press conferences, much to the displeasure of booth staffers. ... The video is funny. The ramifications of prank will not be. ... This prank will not endear the blogging class to either the [Consumer Electronics Association], which produces CES, or the companies that paid dearly for the right to occupy CES floorspace and show off their products.
Childish pranks like the one the Gizmodo goofballs pulled in Las Vegas this week make it tougher for blog-friendly folks like me to argue that citizen journalists deserve the same credentialing respect as "professional" journalists. I'm all for having fun, but this stunt showed an utter lack of respect for people trying to do their jobs.
"For journalists (in my mind, all bloggers are journalists), legal and constitutional protection does not extend to mischief or sabotage," Rafe Needleman wrote at NewsBlog. "Publishing news reports, opinion and satire are protected acts. Physical interference is not."
I hope the "funny video" was worth it to the Gizmodo gang, and I hope, as News.com suggests, that CEA does ban Gizmodo from next year's show. It's too bad Gizmodo's head honcho, Nick Denton, doesn't have the sense to fire the troublemakers because that is the better solution.
By not firing them, he is sending the message that their behavior is acceptable. That will encourage more bloggers to be juvenile -- and more adults who are in charge of granting press credentials, including those in political and policy circles, to think twice about giving them to bloggers. I couldn't blame them.
UPDATE: Gizmodo and its parent company, Gawker Media, have been banned from future CEA events, and more action may be forthcoming as a result of the prank. Good. I hope other bloggers who want the privileges of the press -- that's different from constitutional rights -- get the message.
Posted by Danny at 10:07 AM | Comments (2)
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We're only two primaries into the presidential-nominating process and bloggers already are starting to reluctantly pick their candidates.
Kingpin Kos confessed this week that Christopher Dodd was his top choice, but he has decided to vote for Barack Obama in California's Democratic primary just to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House again. Today, John Hawkins of Right Wing News cast a similar vote of no confidence in multiple Republican candidates.
Fred Thompson is Hawkins' preferred candidate. But he said Mike Huckabee is his default pick as the candidate with better conservative credentials than Rudy Giuliani or John McCain and a better chance of electability in the fall than Mitt Romney.
It's too early to know whether such blog endorsments will carry any more weight than tired newspaper endorsements, but it's worth keeping track to try and make sense of it later. if you're a blogger and you've publicly picked a candidate, shoot an e-mail to me at dglover@nationaljournal.com and I'll make note of it.
UPDATE: Jason Pye e-mailed last week to say he cast an absentee vote for Ron Paul in Georgia. "Had I known about the newsletter scandal at the time, I would have voted for Fred Thompson. I wish I could do that one over."
John Hawkins of Right Wing News, meanwhile, did a "temperature check" of conservative bloggers' current views about the candidates and how they match up against each other as the field narrows.
Posted by Danny at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)
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Blogging That Makes Me Wanna Cry
What is wrong with bloggers today? Every click I take leads me to some rant that is so loaded with hyperbole and at odds with reality that it is embarrassingly laughable -- and there's video evidence to prove it every time.
First, the big news of the day: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton cried like a baby on the campaign trail -- only she so obviously didn't. As far as I can tell, Clinton shed nary a tear in the episode hyped by the Drudge Report and psychoanalyzed around the blogosphere.
Yes, it was an emotional moment, but I have to wonder if my fellow bloggers (and journalists) are watching the same scene as me. They are desperately trying to manufacture a Howard Dean "scream" or an Edmund Muskie meltdown.
The same sort of thing is happening all over blogdom to start the week:
-- A blogger at RedState accused Republican presidential candidate Duncan Hunter of "angrily proclaiming that 'I got a delegate in Wyoming!' several times" when he interrupted the taping of a Fox talk show. Never happened. Hunter wasn't close to angry. He didn't even emphatically proclaim his victory, and he didn't say it several times.
The video is on RedState for everyone to see, so I'm baffled as to why Leon Wolf so blatantly described it with such inaccuracy. The attack is ironic coming so soon after RedState rightly bashed The Politico for reports on campaign events that are inconsistent with the video evidence.
-- Crooks & Liars jumped all over a report about Fox talker Bill O'Reilly being mean to a staffer for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. But it was at best a he-said, she-said story that hasn't been independently corroborated.
Ann Althouse thinks John Amato of Crooks & LIars, rather than O'Reilly, is the one who is unhinged for overblowing a non-incident. "I am so sick of the way any display of emotional intensity is characterized as a mental disorder."
-- The breathless headline at Americablog, meanwhile, had me convinced that supporters of Republican candidate Ron Paul "chased" another Fox talker, Sean Hannity, all across New York City. "Hannity must have been wetting himself," John Aravosis chortled.
Another ridiculous exaggeration. Yes, Paul's supporters were obnoxious and they badgered Hannity because his network had banned Paul from a debate last night. But their pursuit of and chanting at Hannity was nothing more than a harmless exercise in free speech -- and I seriously doubt that Hannity was anything but annoyed. He just might have been amused by the democracy of it all. I'm pretty sure I saw a smile the only time his face was visible.
After reading all of those posts and comparing the written accounts with the videos, I can't help but conclude that turning to the blogosphere in the heat of the primaries is an utter waste of time. Watching the network news and reading much of the mainstream press isn't much better because reporters are the ones who feed the blogs.
All of the fussing is as pointless, petty and misleading as the nonsense last month over the imagined "floating cross" that Republican Mike Huckabee purportedly inserted into a campaign advertisement. Blogger Joe Carter, a former Huckabee staffer, put that story in the most telling context with this sarcastic jab: "Apparently, a Christmas ad in which the governor mentions 'the birth of Christ' was too subtle. We needed to use a bookcase that looked like a cross so that people would get the point that he was secretly sending a message to Christians."
A year ago, I was right there with everyone else who whined about this year's compressed primary season. Now I'm just glad it will be over soon because the blogging I've seen today is enough to make me cry.
Posted by Danny at 07:46 PM | Comments (0)
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The Co-Opting Of Daily Kos?
News that the readership of Daily Kos is declining prompted this explanation from Instapundit Glenn Reynolds: "Kos has been pretty thoroughly co-opted and become part of the Democratic establishment himself, which no doubt makes the site seem less fresh and interesting."
I don't entirely agree. It's hard to argue that Kingpin Kos is part of the establishment when he regularly ridicules the leaders of the Democratic Party for a lack of backbone in fighting President Bush and the Republican congressional minority. Instead, he has helped create a new establishment, one whose leaders fashion themselves as outsiders bucking the system but who have gained influence within the system.
That said, Daily Kos is less fresh and interesting than in the past. But that's because Kos hasn't been as active there. He has stretched himself thin by taking on columns for establishment media outlets like Newsweek and The Hill. He's also the father of two children as of April.
My take on the declining numbers at Daily Kos: The Kos brand is languishing because the blogger is the brand and the blogger has more than his blog to feed these days.
UPDATE: Kos has responded to all of the chatter about declining readership by posting monthly page views from July 2002 through this December. Unique visitors usually are the more telling statistic about Web traffic, however.
"Let me be the first to declare -- once again -- that yes, this site has jumped the shark, and did so years ago," Kos added snarkily. "In fact, Bill O'Reilly put the final nail in the coffin this past August. So move along, there's nothing left to see but rubble."
Posted by Danny at 12:55 PM | Comments (1)
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Oil Industry Gives Love (And Freebies) To Bloggers
Presidential candidates like Republicans Mike Huckabee and John McCain have scored lots of points in the political blogosphere by holding fairly regular conference calls with bloggers, but politicians aren't the only ones who have embraced the new media format.
Bisnow on Business reports in its e-mail newsletter about trade associations that Red Cavaney, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, has been having regular chats with energy bloggers since spring.
The Edelman public relations firm, which has blog innovator Mike Krempasky of RedState on its executive staff, arranged the first event in the spring. "It was such a hit," Bisnow reports, "that Red has been holding bi-weekly conferences with bloggers ever since."
"He finds the blog sessions a relief from ordinary press conferences, which he likens to a 'tennis match of sound bites' between reporters and their subjects," according to Bisnow. "The bloggers, according to Red, tend to be more interested in facts than zingers."
The institute has reached more than 100 blogs via sessions that typically include 10 to 12 bloggers. API even gave two groups of bloggers tours of Gulf Coast oil rigs. Reuters had a report on those industry-funded trips in November, which came as Congress was debating an energy bill.
The rules imposed on bloggers, including Bruce McQuain of QandO and Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters, were similar to those for free blogger trips to cover presidential forums hosted by the MySpace online social network, which Edelman also arranged. The end result was the same, too.
"The postings about Chevron and its facility were largely favorable," Reuters noted, "although some commenters took the bloggers to task for accepting airfare and hotel from API, a fact they were required to disclose."
Posted by Danny at 08:39 AM | Comments (0)
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They also blog about politics -- and they're doing a lot more of it, and getting a lot more attention for the work, in the final days before next week's Iowa caucuses.
Sarah Lai Stirland, a former reporter of ours at Technology Daily, reports that one blog in particular garnered national coverage for its Republican "power rankings" that predicted early this month that Mike Huckabee will win the GOP nod in Iowa. The blog in question, the Iowa Independent, is part of the emerging liberal blog nework I've mentioned here lately.
From Sarah's piece:
The bulk of the political commentariat's attention on local media still revolves around state newspapers like The Des Moines Register. But local blogs have now risen to play a pivotal role in the squeaky-close 2008 primary season -- courted by the presidential campaigns, and taking the pole position as vehicles for new negative stories or previously unvoiced viewpoints that can quickly grow into controversial national discussions.They include sites like the group blog Bleeding Heartland and Political Forecast, the personal blog of college student Chris Woods, a Democrat. And even veteran old-guard journalists say local blogs are having a national impact.
Ari Melber of The Huffington Post sees such developments as essential to the growth of the netroots. "Top national bloggers are increasingly reaching that critical mass -- like Kos appearing on Sunday talk shows and writing a column for Newsweek. But to advance meaningful, decentralized 'people power' across the country, local blogs written by regular activists are equally vital, so this is an encouraging development."
Posted by Danny at 08:19 AM | Comments (0)
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Forget Good Will For The Online 'Kook-A-Boos'
Nothing gets the curmudgeons of old media stirring like the holiday spirit. Without fail at this time every year, someone in the green-eyeshade gang decides to attack the blogs -- and expose himself as a hypocrite in the process.
Add Stephen Trosley, the publisher of The Journal-Standard in Freeport, Ill., to Santa's naughty list this year. He just penned a diatribe about the lack of "peace on earth, good will to mankind and all of that" in the newspaper's piece of the blogosphere, and in the next breath showed his lack of good will toward the online world by talking about the "lunatic fringe," verbal "snipers" and "kook-a-boos."
It's always mildly amusing to hear journalists chastise bloggers for name-calling even as they engage in the practice themselves. Here are some excerpts:
The users of the blog ... were said to be so empowered by the freedom and power of this communications tool that they would naturally be accountable and responsible. Yeah, right. ...Unfortunately, blogs not only attract the legitimate, well-intentioned citizen with an opinion or atypical knowledge to share. They also attract the lunatic fringe, like bees to honey.
Funny thing, Mr. Trosley, that holds true for journalism, too. Every profession, just like the citizenry at large, has its lunatic fringe -- but I'm sure you know that already.
If your newspaper's blog isn't working out exactly as you had hoped, if you think you can implement better tools to make the conversation more civil, by all means give it a try. But cut the kook-a-boo chatter. It puts you in the same camp as the very people you malign.
Posted by Danny at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)
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Dirty Political Tricks On The Web
Cross-posted at Tech Daily Dose
Micah Sifry at techPresident calls attention to one that has garnered some attention this week, including from Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic.
The tactic: Register an unflattering Internet address and point it to a Web site you don't own in order to make a candidate you don't like look bad. The specific episode currently being discussed involves domain names like BarackOsama2008.org being pointed to the same Internet protocol address that hosts HillaryClinton.com.
The take-away from the controversy is this, according to Sifry: "Thanks to the Internet, there are all kinds of new games campaigns can play on each other now, and given the pressure to be first with a story, all kinds of new dangers that a misunderstanding about how the Web works will turn into a serious political story."
Political reporters (and bloggers) beware; don't be fooled by stories that sound too sensational to be true.
Posted by Danny at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
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What's 'The Ruckus' At Newsweek?
It's a new political blog, and The Ruckus is its name. The establishment magazine teamed with the Media Bloggers Association (of which I am a member) to pool the voices of nine MBA members onto one group blog at Newsweek.com.
The Ruckus doesn't replace any Newsweek.com content, which now includes blogs like The Gaggle and Stumper. It supplements Newsweek's "professional" content with fresh philosophical and regional insights from outside the political mainstream.
It's a great idea, one driven by the same kind of thinking that prompted me to create AirCongress -- namely, build a portal to the best new media content so readers can get it all in one place. This is the future for smart old-media companies, and more of them would do well to imitate Newsweek's model.
The contributors to The Ruckus are:
-- John Amato of Crooks & Liars
-- Faye Anderson of Anderson@Large
-- Dean Barker of Blue Hampshire
-- Adam Fogle of The Palmetto Scoop
-- Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice
-- James Joyner of Outside The Beltway
-- Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters
-- Oliver Willis
-- And Chris Woods of Bleeding Heartland
In the grand tradition of American political conversation, The Ruckus will offer a spectrum of the political argument and analysis taking place in the blogosphere," Deidre Depke, the editor of Newsweek.com, said in a release. "A healthy democracy requires debate and a lively conversation, which is exactly what The Ruckus will offer."
MBA President Robert Cox added, "The Ruckus places Newsweek on the cutting edge of this campaign season's online political dialogue."
Posted by Danny at 02:09 PM | Comments (0)
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Yesterday's entry about The Washington Independent touched a nerve with Jefferson Morley, the national editorial director of the Center for Independent Media that funds the publication.
Morley responded to my entry today, wrongly accusing me of recoiling "in chaste disdain" at the ideas of both partisanship and political principles. I don't have a problem with either, and I'm perfectly fine with both existing within the new media order -- so long as people are transparent and honest with readers about their partisan leanings and their principles.
I don't believe that's entirely the case here.
The folks behind the center clearly understand "independent" to mean something different than most politically informed Americans, and Morley was transparent about defining the term as he understands it. But casting as independent a Washington-oriented publication that admittedly is not politically independent, of both party and philosophy, is still misleading. It doesn't square with this statement by Morley, one that I agree with:
In our work, truth-telling is the primary goal. That means being candid about our reporters' beliefs and up front about editorial perspectives.
By his own barometer of good journalism, calling the new publication The Washington Progressive and its parent the Center For Progressive Media would be far more truthful. Why run from the political terminology the operation embraces?
The Center for Independent Media has a worthwhile mission, and people with competing worldviews should consider organizing similar efforts to train the next generation of journalists. Anyone who reports the news with what Morley calls a "moral perspective," regardless of what that perspective is, needs to pursue "rigorous adherence to the highest standards of journalism."
Unfortunately, the center's word choice, something endemic to sound journalism, does not rise to those standards.
Morley and I aren't as far apart on media philosophy as he seems to think. I just think the center needs to do a bit better at achieving this ideal of Morley's, in both word and deed: "We will have beliefs, transparently held, and a commitment to journalism that informs the public on the issues that matter."
Posted by Danny at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)
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The Return Of The Partisan Press?
The Washington Independent went online a week ago yesterday (the official launch is next month), but don't let the citizen journalism outfit's name fool you. Politically speaking, it is no more "independent" than sister blogs funded by the Center for Independent Media.
The Washington branch, led by high-profile journalists like former washingtonpost.com editor and writer Jefferson Morley and former New York Times editor Allison Silver, joins a rebranded Independent News Network that includes the Colorado Confidential, Iowa Independent, Michigan Messenger and Minnesota Monitor. The Washington Independent gets funding from the Better World Fund, Arca Foundation, Open Society Institute, Park Foundation, Quixote Foundation, Rockefeller Family Foundation, Sunlight Foundation and Surdna Foundation.
All five publications in the network are independent only in the sense that they involve bloggers who work independently of mainstream media outlets. According to Wikipedia, the center's mission is to fund sites "that report news from a progressive perspective." In other words, the goal is to train an army of liberal bloggers who can infuse their opinions with actual reporting.
"We agree with CIM's vision of citizen-driven journalism serving as a critical principle of our democracy," Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation wrote at SunSpots. "We have a hunch that the new enterprise might just shake up the media establishment."
It's a novel idea whose concept hearkens back to the colonial days of the American press, when journalism was a partisan pursuit. The question now is whether the right, always behind when it comes to political and media innovation on the Internet, will try to organize a similar operation or cede this new media battlefield to the left.
UPDATE: I just read Morley's introductory post more closely, and it includes this commentary: "Independence means freedom from corporate and partisan agendas." The center's mission strikes me as having a partisan edge to it, but in light of Morley's viewpoint on what independence means, I have added a question mark to the headline.
Posted by Danny at 12:41 PM | Comments (12)
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The Anti-Huckabee Blog Swarm
This is a truism of American politics: When a dark horse starts looking like a white knight, commentators who think in red and blue figuratively spill barrels of black ink. In the information age, that is as true of bloggers as it is of journalists, and you can see it in the online treatment of Mike Huckabee in recent weeks.
Huckabee has been an also-ran in the Republican presidential race for most of the year, and as such, he has been the subject of relatively friendly media coverage. His Chuck Norris ad generated the kind of free press and viral attention online that every longshot loves, and Huckabee received raves for his performance in the GOP debate co-hosted by CNN and YouTube late last month.
But over the past several days, he has been the subject of a series of critical stories -- about his ignorance of the latest national intelligence estimate on nuclear weapons in Iran, about his role in the release from prison of a rapist who went on to kill a woman, and about his long-ago opinion that AIDS patients should be quarantined and that homosexuality is "sinful," among other things. The journalists who arguably helped propel Huckabee to a first-place lead in Iowa are quickly becoming his worst enemies.
The same evolution can be seen in the blogosphere. The recent entries on two top liberal blogs illustrate the point nicely.
Take a look at Talking Points Memo first. Josh Marshall acknowledged in late November that Huckabee is "no longer a surging second-tier player" and is "for real." A day later, he heaped praise on Huckabee for his YouTube debate performance.
Not long after Marshall realized that the former Arkansas governor is a legitimate presidential contender, he joined the Huckabee press pile-on, making note of the candidate's every misstep -- especially his involvement in the release of rapist Wayne DuMond. Marshall called it "Huckabee's Willie Horton Problem" and emphasized that it "doesn't put Huckabee in a very good light." He also suggested that Huckabee released DuMond because he bought into the right-wing "craziness" aimed at former President Bill Clinton.
A similar progression occurred at Daily Kos. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga noted the "amazing" rise Huckabee achieved despite a poorly funded campaign, and then he quickly started attacking the man perceived as a new GOP threat. He crowed that the DuMond story is finally getting the attention it deserves, ridiculed Huckabee for crediting God with his newfound political popularity, and then blasted Huckabee for pandering.
"Huckabee is the new [John] McCain -- someone who was gaining traction with voters because he wasn't pandering to the worst segments of his party. He was being himself," Kos wrote. "As with McCain, that brief moment in time has passed. He's no longer different than the rest of his colleagues on that stage."
The flood of attention that Huckabee has received at liberal blogs is evidence that negative blogging has joined negative advertising as a mainstay of American politics. It is sure to be a staple of online grassroots strategy in 2008, and the establishment likely will try to capitalize on the propensity of bloggers to swarm against candidates who begin to emerge as frontrunners.
The anti-Huckabee blog swarm isn't limited to the left, though. Jim Geraghty at The Campaign Spot, a blog at National Review Online, has been spreading the negative news about Huckabee and taking subtle jabs of his own. And The Club For Growth uses its blog, in addition to television ads, to deride Huckabee as "Tax Hike Mike."
The message that campaigns should take away from it all is that effective blog gurus like Huckabee research director Joe Carter are worth the investment.
Posted by Danny at 12:52 PM | Comments (12)
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Hillbillies Rule The Internets!
I'm a West Virginia hillbilly by birth, so I should know. But this post isn't about me. It's about Don Surber of the Charleston Daily Mail. He loves the Internets and the power he has gained from it.
My point is blogging rocks. It levels the playing field (to use a cliche) a little. I came in thinking I was all that, but once I got over myself and actually learned how to blog, I have had some fun. It is a great experience. It changes journalism.Internet technology is 21st century, but its content is Old School. Newspapers have been forced to go back to writing what people want to read. That means headlines that fit the story rather than headlines that fit the space. No more Tonto speak. Now me get to use big words. And verbs. That means more crime stories, instead of filling the pages with award-seeking series.
Financially, the Internet may be the ruin of all newspapers, but the Internet has been a journalistic shot in the tush -- one that was long overdue.
I knew Don in passing back in the summer of '89, when I was an intern at the newspaper and he worked on the opposite end of the same newsroom. Over the past year or so, I've gotten to know him a bit better even though we live hundreds of miles apart. Why? Because we blog.
We e-mail each other occassionally; we comment on each other's blog entries; and we give each other (and the whole world) glimpses into who we are and the way we think through the words we write.
What astounds me is that hillbillies like Don and me (no offense, Don) get the Internet, but so many important people in Washington remain virtually clueless about the power of this medium. That includes smart journalists like Helen Thomas, who resent the reality that evil "amateurs" now have a voice.
One day the media world will be ruled by Don Surber and other tech-savvy "hillbillies," and the Helen Thomases will be relics of a glorious but backward journalistic past. I look forward to that day.
(Hat tip to Instapundit)
Posted by Danny at 07:45 PM | Comments (0)
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The Hill Hires Kos As Weekly Columnist
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga has crashed the gates of establishment Washington journalism for the second time in less than a month.
In mid-November, the founder of Daily Kos was hired as a Newsweek commentator to balance another newcomer to the magazine, former White House adviser Karl Rove. And today, The Hill announced that Kos will be a weekly columnist for the Capitol Hill newspaper come January.
"In recent years, probably no commentator has had a bigger impact than Markos Moulitsas in shaping political debate," Editor-In-Chief Hugo Gurdon said in a release. "His weekly columns in The Hill will be a must read."
Posted by Danny at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)
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Planners of next year's Republican presidential convention met with a few hundred media representatives in Minnesota yesterday to show them the site for the convention and discuss logistics. One thing the convention officials emphasized, according to the CBS station WCCO and The Uptake, is that they want bloggers at the convention.
WCCO said "hundreds of bloggers" are invited to cover the convention and will be in the audience. That doesn't square with what Matt Burns, the spokesman for the GOP convention, told me last month when Democrats detailed credentialing plans for bloggers at their convention, but perhaps the process has moved along more quickly than Burns anticipated.
UPDATE: Minnesota Monitor has more details, and Mary Katharine Ham at Townhall.com is on the story, too.
Posted by Danny at 02:08 PM | Comments (0)
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In The Blog's-Eye: The 'Clinton News Network'
I didn't have time yesterday to do a roundup of blog entries about Wednesday's CNN/YouTube-hosted debate with Republican candidates. But the controversy is still going strong today, so here are excerpts from some critical posts about how CNN, derided as the "Clinton News Network" by many GOp bloggers, handled the debate:
-- Ankle Biting Pundits: "By my recollection, there were no questions on health care, the economy, trade, the S-CHIP children’s healthcare issue, the 'surge' in Iraq, the spending showdown between President Bush and Congress, terrorist surveillance, or the performance of the Democratic Congress."
-- Bluey Blog: "Today conservatives are left with yet another example of bias at the highest level of the media establishment. It’s another sad example of how liberals deliberately portray conservatives as gun-toting, Bible-thumping, and gay-bashing bigots."
-- The Campaign Spot: "Last night I had a terrible dream, where the Republican candidates were berated by a cartoon Dick Cheney, and some scary nut who was waving around the Bible, and some shadowy Bond villain asking about immigrants, and a gay soldier who was working for Hillary [Clinton]. ... Wait a minute, that was real!"
-- Captain's Quarters: "Memo to CNN: quit trying to excuse this away. No one tried "extremely hard" to vet these questions. Obviously, no one tried vetting them at all. The continuation of the pretense only damages your credibility even further than the debate did."
(Ed Morrissey, by the way, is one of several Republicans who has defended the right of Democratic voters to ask questions of Republican candidates. Their gripe is with CNN not doing its homework and disclosing the Democratic ties of the chosen questioners.)
-- Instapundit: "If Fox hosted a Democratic debate and many of the most pointed questions turned out to come from Republican activists, but Fox didn't disclose that, do you think it would pass unremarked?" (Glenn Reynolds also took major media-focused publications to task for ignoring the controversy. Journalism, cover thyself!" he said, and then added, "Well, actually I think they are covering.")
-- Michelle Malkin: "The best thing about Republicans agreeing to do the CNN/YouTube debate is that it created yet another invaluable opportunity to expose CNN’s abject incompetence.:
-- Outside The Beltway: "If lone bloggers can vet these people in less than half an hour, surely CNN’s crack journalistic team should have been able to do so between the time they selected the pool of questions and the airing of the debate?"
-- Personal Democracy Forum: CNN's David Bohrman "seems far more enamored of his glitzy mobile newsroom with its "terabytes" of video storage capacity than he is in offering us any insight into the process."
-- Right Wing News: "CNN allowed someone connected to Hillary Clinton's campaign to ask a question to the GOP candidates and then comment on their answers without ever revealing his Clinton affiliation."
-- TechRepublican: "The quick-and-short from those of us on the ground was that the CNN editorial process unfairly influenced the debate using its liberal, narrow perspective of what the GOP 'represents' to only choose those questions which focused primarily on: God, guns, gays and immigration."
-- Think Progress: "Out of almost 5,000 video submissions, CNN chose to pose 34 to the candidates tonight. Instead of alloting all slots to ordinary citizens -- who don't normally have access to politicians -- CNN gave airtime to a question from Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist."
-- Townhall.com: "This is utterly ridiculous. CNN should be incredibly ashamed and people should be fired over this. As it is, there's no mention of it on their front page."
Posted by Danny at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)
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Earlier this summer, a group of Republican bloggers spearheaded an effort to convince their party's presidential candidates to participate in a debate hosted by CNN and YouTube. After having watched the debate last night, the Save the Debate Coalition has changed its tune somewhat.
The bloggers -- David All, Robert Bluey, Soren Dayton and Patrick Ruffini -- still believe in the democratic nature of the medium YouTube has built and believe the candidates should embrace it. But they no longer think CNN can be trusted as a partner in the debates.
Here's an excerpt from a statement the group issued today:
A YouTube debate should strive to minimize the media filter rather than highlight it. Instead the selection of questions for the Republican CNN/YouTube debate highlighted CNN's selection bias. We strongly encourage YouTube and other new media platforms to refrain from working with CNN on future debates.
The directors of RedState went even further, calling for firings at CNN and for a GOP boycott of all future debates hosted by the network.
Mary Katharine Ham echoed that sentiment at Townhall.com but also emphasized that the problem was CNN's implementation, not the technology it only half-heartedly embraced.
"When you’re doing user-generated questions," she wrote, "there’s always a possibility that motives will be suspect and operatives involved, but it’s incumbent upon news organizations to do the not-very-hard work of Googling people to prevent it."
The controversy and call for a boycott is reminiscent of one earlier this year involving Demcratic bloggers and Fox News, CNN's leading rival. In that case, pressure from the bloggers prompted the Democratic presidential candidates to withdraw from a debate hosted by Fox because of allegations of bias.
There is a nonpartisan twist to the CNN story, though. Even the liberal Think Progress is bashing the network for its handling of the debates it has hosted this year.
"While many in the media credited the network with bringing 'originality and spontaneity' to the debate process by partnering with YouTube," Think Progress concluded, "its debates have more often been characterized by sloppy preparation, a lack of transparency, and theatrics that undermine the intelligence of the American public."
UPDATE: Get more information at Bluey Blog.
UPDATE II: On the same day that CNN has been under relentless fire for its handling of a new debate format, ABC News announced that it will join the Internet politics game by partnering with the online social network Facebook to host a series of debates in January before the New Hampshire primary.
UPDATE III: Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz also covered the CNN debate controversy.
Posted by Danny at 08:40 AM | Comments (6)
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Googling: A Synonym For 'Stalking'
Well, at least I'm assuming that's the definition in the netroots handbook because Todd Beeton of MyDD today accused conservative blogger Michelle Malkin of stalking for daring to use Google to fact-check CNN.
Beeton's attack against Malkin for uncovering and disclosing the political affiliations of the video questioners at last night's CNN/YouTube debate of Republican candidates is bizarre for multiple reasons:
1) Beeton, Malkin and and bloggers of all political stripes routinely use Google to fact-check journalists, politicians and even each other. Smart journalists and politicians do the same. Why is it all of a sudden "stalking"?
2) The fact-checking that Malkin and other bloggers are doing is obviously aimed at CNN, not the questioners. The network botched the debate big time, making a mockery of objective journalism, and it deserved to be called out -- especially in light of CNN's pre-debate suggestion that it was trying to moderate the debate in a way that would help Republican voters pick a candidate.
3) CNN should have done its own research. Remember, the network has insisted time and again that it must filter the questions rather than bestow that power on the Internet community (including those untrustworthy, pajama-clad loons we know as bloggers) because only CNN knows how to make sure a debate is fair and balanced. Live by the filter, die by the filter when it fails, I say.
4) CNN's partner in the debate was YouTube. YouTube's parent company is Google. Ironically, CNN could have used the valuable tool created by its partner to conduct the necessary due diligence.
5) One of the cardinal rules of the blogosphere is disclosure. Bloggers believe it's OK to have what some readers might consider conflicts of interest as long as those conflicts are acknowledged. They weren't in this case, and they should have been.
The take-away: Malkin and bloggers aren't stalking the people whose questions made it onto the air for the debate; they are behaving like the journalists that CNN's political team should have been. In this instance, they deserve praise, not scorn, even from people like Beeton who disagree philosophically.
Posted by Danny at 08:06 PM | Comments (12)
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Think Before You Blog
Journalists sometimes get a bum rap for being cynics. I've had that slam directed at me many times, and my stock answer is, "No, I'm not a cynic; I'm a skeptic." I adhere to the trust-but-verify philosophy.
OK, the line is a fine one and I've crossed the divide from skeptic to cynic at times in my career. But in this business, it pays to be skeptical. Bloggers could afford to be a bit more like journalists in that way.
I learned that anew yesterday when I saw a blurb in the daily digest at techPresident about a program to pay bloggers to post flattering comments about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The program seemed plausible. There are unethical sites that pay people to blog, after all, and candidates have a history of paying bloggers. So I bookmarked the link for a closer look later.
I'm glad I decided to think before I blogged because the story appears to be bogus. Now both Josh Levy of techPresident and Ben Smith of The Politico, as well as other bloggers who linked to the pay-for-comments project in order to condemn it, have egg on their faces.
Smith corrected his "Dollars For Comments" post with this admission: "On further examination, this site is parody, or something. ... Excuse my gullibility."
Jeff Bercovici of Mixed Media was in no mood to excuse Smith or anyone else for being duped. "To be fair, it's not immediately obvious that Vote for Hillary is a prank -- if by 'immediately' one means 'within the first 10 seconds of reading,'" Bercovici wrote. "After that, it's pretty darn obvious. My favorite part is 'Mission: Bumper Sticker,' a grassroots effort to put Hillary stickers on as many cars as possible."
I don't think the prank is quite so obvious. Whoever is writing Vote For Hillary does a good job of disguising the intent, and I imagine many people will be fooled.
But there is a clear lesson in this episode for journalists, bloggers and even voters: If you read something on a blog, especially an anonymous blog, don't believe it until you can verify it by more reliable means -- and definitely don't blog about it until you've verified it. Second-guessing is a good thing in the online world.
Posted by Danny at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)
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As noted in Technology Daily this morning
Citizen journalists have interacted online with the mainstream media at an unprecedented level during the 2008 presidential election, but many observers are still trying to figure out what role the contributors play.
The Washington Post reports that some media experts see the work of citizen journalists, who often post online and comment on multimedia content they generate themselves, as invasive. "People are becoming Big Brother, either with a camcorder or a keyboard, and following the candidates around," said author Andrew Keen.
Dan Gillmor, a former newspaper technology columnist who founded the Center for Citizen Media, said many citizen journalists are frustrated with traditional media. "The publishing tools -- digital cameras, blogging software -- are at the people's disposal" to try to make a difference, he said.
Posted by Danny at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)
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Kos' Curious Attack On James Carville
On the day that Newsweek published his first commentary as a Democratic partisan, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos curiously decided to attack CNN for using another Democratic partisan as a commentator.
Kingpin Kos' gripe: CNN included "partisan [Hillary] Clinton supporter" James Carville in its roundtable of analysts after the network hosted a Democratic presidential debate last night.
"Would it kill CNN to not include partisan supporters of the various candidates in their post-debate spin?" Kos wrote. "Would it kill CNN to disclose that James Carville is a partisan Clinton supporter when talking about the presidential race? Would it kill James Carville to disclose that he is a partisan Clinton supporter when on the air talking about the presidential race? Apparently so."
Both The Caucus, a New York Times political blog, and John Aravosis of Americablog seconded Kos' complaint, and I agree with all of them. CNN shouldn't let Carville serve in that role, and if the network is going to do so, it needs to be more transparent about his political ties.
But it sure sounds hypocritical to hear Kos attacking the ethics of a guy like Carville when Kos is now doing similar work for Newsweek as a "movement partisan." Maybe he's just angling for Carville's job to complement his magazine work.
Kos, by the way, included no disclosure about his own partisan activities on his first Newsweek piece. Then again, his opening shot was aimed at Democrats for not standing firm against the Iraq war, giving weight to the distinction that Kos sees between movement partisan and "establishment hack." Carville probably falls into the latter category in Kos' eyes.
I called Newsweek editor Jon Meacham to ask his views on disclosure by Kos if and when he writes about candidates whom he supports. Meacham has not yet returned the call.
Posted by Danny at 04:07 PM | Comments (1)
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Many political bloggers like to think of themselves as modern-day pamphleteers, after the tradition of Thomas Paine and others who rallied British colonists for the revolution that made America. A Web site called The New Pamphleteer even caters to them.
Others liken the emergence of the political blogosphere to the early American press, where partisan passion in print was a virtue and objectivity most assuredly would have been a vice.
Today's new media, in other words, is a return to a much older media time in America. The journalism of the blogosphere is more about advocating a world view than it is about informing the world.
Based on what I heard yesterday from the people planning the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions in 2008, I'd say America's dominant political parties have gotten the message -- and share that vision of blogs. They see the blogosphere as a great tool to be exploited for partisan ends and bloggers as footsoldiers in an online militia.
That's why you're probably not going to see either party treating bloggers like traditional journalists when it comes to granting credentials for the conventions.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans have made final decisions about which bloggers will win the limited blog credentials for convention access. But comments by spokesmen for both convention committees don't offer much reason for Republican bloggers to hope they will get access to the Democratic convention, or vice versa.
After I posted yesterday's entry about blog credentials for the conventions, I quizzed Jason Rosenberg of the Democratic National Convention Committee about the possibility of GOP bloggers getting some space. Democrats are working to ensure that Democratic bloggers with limited audiences will be at the convention, but niche Republican bloggers may not be so lucky.
"We fully anticipate the presence of conservative bloggers at the Democratic convention," Rosenberg said, noting that some GOP bloggers should qualify for access as traditional media. But GOP bloggers without those kinds of connections may be hard-pressed to cover the convention anywhere other than from home in their pajamas.
"It's going to be a case-by-case situation" for any of those bloggers," Rosenberg said. They could apply along with Democratic bloggers, but it doesn't sound like their applications will be treated equally -- as would both journalists and bloggers who work for mainstream media outlets.
Matt Burns, the spokesman for the GOP convention, also could not say whether Democratic bloggers would be eligible for special blog credentials.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. The parties are within their rights to decide who gets credentials and what criteria they must meet. But making that choice does pose a broader credentialing conundrum.
If bloggers want government officials to see them as media when it comes to covering Congress, the White House, state legislatures and everyday news, they should unite in this instance and demand parity regardless of party. Otherwise, they risk being seen as people who embrace equal treatment when it works to their media advantage but accept unequal treatment for a political advantage.
In the long run, that makes it much trickier to decide who should get press credentials unrelated to party functions.
Posted by Danny at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)
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I have chided Republicans in the past for their misguided attacks on bloggers in press releases, commercials and the like, but Democrats aren't immune to the temptation.
One example (subscription required) is cited in this week's hot-off-the-presses issue of National Journal magazine. This particular episode involves a quasi-blog called The Dead Pelican that is modeled more after The Drudge Report than standard blogs, but it's still about a politician attacking an upstart, online news source.
Here's the story, as recounted by Kellie Lunney:
The Dead Pelican, an "underground" Louisiana news site and blog that leans right, reported in June that sources told it that Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who received campaign contributions from New Yorkers, put in an earmark request for a New York-based company. Landrieu, who says that the request was for a program benefiting Louisiana, attacked the blog through a press release, and the story eventually made the local television news.
The lesson to be learned: Attack a blogger and all you're likely to do, other than irritating said blogger and rallying his friends for a blog swarm, is to keep a negative story alive another day.
The story also includes an interesting quote from John Randall, the e-press secretary for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Randall "doesn't feel beholden to bloggers as he once did to the almighty traditional media. 'If they burn me, I don't have to go back,'" he said.
Posted by Danny at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)
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I thought commenters were joking yesterday when they said Newsweek would have to get former top White House adviser Karl Rove as a political commentator to balance Kingpin Kos, but apparently they were speaking as prophets.
Newsweek made it official today: Kos is "the left's Karl Rove" -- and Kos is OK with that. "They balanced out a movement progressive with a movement conservative," he wrote.
I'm betting all of Kos' friends will be on board with Rove's hiring, too. They've long hinted that the conservative blogosphere was just a tool of Rove's anyway.
UPDATE: The Politics Blog at the San Francisco Chronicle doesn't share Kos' view that Newsweek got it right by picking Rove. "While hiring Moulitsas was an out of the box move for a mainstream outlet, hiring Rove wasn't. Will he say anything surprising -- or that deviates from the party's talking points?"
Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters also is puzzled -- but by the selection of Kos, who apparently was chosen after Rove even though the announcement about Kos came first. "It's as though ESPN hired a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback and a Division III college QB to analyze the upcoming playoffs. The latter may have some trenchant analysis to provide, but in terms of expertise, they don't compare."
That point is rather telling in the context of Kos' arrogant slam against bloggers on the right for thinking one of them might be chosen to balance him.
Posted by Danny at 07:07 AM | Comments (0)
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Kos, Ben Domenech And The Quest For 'Balance'
The decision by Newsweek to hire Kingpin Kos as a political commentator and its quest to find the perfect conservative flame-thrower to "balance" him calls to mind the brouhaha that erupted in early 2006 when The Washington Post tapped RedState co-founder Ben Domenech as a blogger.
Before Domenech was exposed as a plagiarist and resigned three days after he started blogging, liberal bloggers spent a good deal of time discussing the issue of "balance."
Kos and plenty of diarists at Daily Kos were among those to comment on Domenech. "I wonder if the Post thought their lame efforts at 'balance' would result in such tragic hilarity," Kos wrote. "I wonder how the paper's staff are feeling about their paper's credibility right now." And I wonder if Kos thinks Newsweek's effort to balance him are equally lame.
Here are more links and pull quotes to help you flashback with me to the Dark Days of Domenech:
-- Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report: "The idea, apparently, is to offer WaPo blog readers -balance' -- with Domenech on the right and Dan Froomkin on the left. This is, of course, patently absurd. Froomkin is a professional journalist who offers hard-hitting analysis of the Bush administration. He is not a partisan, nor a hack, nor an ideologue. ... Domenech has an agenda -- to promote a far-right worldview and defend Republicans against any and all criticism. He is, for lack of a better word, an advocate. ... If this is 'balance,' the establishment media needs less of it, not more."
-- Duncan Black at Eschaton: "I'm not of the belief that the Post is required to provide balance on its editorial page or Web site. But Posties have expressed a desire for balance, and if hiring Domenech, who has no counterpart on the left, is their way of achieving that, it's ridiculous."
-- Brad DeLong compared Domenech with "left-wing nut-boy Alexander Cockburn" and, much like conservative bloggers are starting to do with the idea of Kos at Newsweek, ridiculed Domenech's qualifications for the job: "a man with no policy or analytic or reportorial qualifications save a couple years as a right-wing speechwriter, an unarmed man in a battle of wits."
-- Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory: "I thought the hiring reflects some highly questionable editorial judgment, given that Domenech's writings are trite, rage-fueled rants filled with mindless talking points which one can find anywhere -- he aspires to be some sort of juvenile online Rush Limbaugh -- but WashingtonPost.com has the right to associate itself with that level of writing and analysis if it wants."
-- Hullabaloo: "[W]e do have to consider the obvious fact that [Howard] Kurtz and The Washington Post believe that this blatantly partisan Republican blogger 'balances' an allegedly 'left -eaning' White House critic. That they still don't understand the difference between the conventions of overt partisan media and mainstream online criticism like Dan Froomkin's column is painfully clear. That this particular blogger has been exposed virtually overnight as a racist and plagiarist proves that they had no idea how the right-wing media works."
-- Oliver Willis: "The braniacs at the Washington Post have decided that they should sign up a right-wing blogger. Okay. I'm sure there's a liberal blogger to even it out. What's that you say? They don't have one? Oh, okay then. ... The bastion of journalism that uncovered Watergate and printed the Pentagon Papers is devolving into yet another mindless oultet of the conservative cult."
Traveling back into real time, Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters ponders what might be necessary to balance Kos: "I'm not certain that I would be a complete analog to Markos in any case. I try to expand minds, not explode heads; a proper balance would have a conservative willing to match Kos' stridency on topics, and hopefully with better arguments."
UPDATE: RedState has a list of prominent bloggers on the right who haven't been approached by Newsweek, including anyone from its own site.
Posted by Danny at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)
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The announcement that will set heads to "exploding in wingnutlandia": Kingpin Kos is going to be writing commentary for Newsweek during the 2008 election. Still to come: the announcement about which Republican blogger will get a gig to act as a balance to Kos.
And the MSM/blog convergence continues. Let's hope this experiment goes better than the one in Cleveland.
Just to make clear to the folks at Newsweek in case they haven't read his blog or this one closely enough: Kos has helped raise money for candidates and donated money to them himself. His most recent donation of $500 went to Barry Alan Welsh, a Democratic challenger to GOP Rep. Mike Pence in Indiana, on Sept. 30.
You can bet Kos will continue to contribute and encourage others to do the same. If you're not comfortable with that, you should have decided before you sent that press release. Now you need to dance with the one you brought.
One more thing: Kos is looking for new contributing editors at his own site, Daily Kos.
UPDATE: The bloggers in "wingnutlandia" so far have trotted out two familar storylines in the reaction to Newsweek hiring Kos -- that he is hateful in his writing and that he has a "pretty dismal" track record when it comes to politics.
Posted by Danny at 10:45 AM | Comments (14)
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Do you want to know what matters to conservative bloggers or liberal ones? Are you curious about the blogospheric rumblings on health care from the perspective of health policy experts, doctors or political moms? Do you need to track what political bloggers in the United Kingdom are saying?
If so, you should click on over to Virtual Vantage Points, a new blog analysis service of the public affairs and communications consulting firm APCO Worldwide. Those three subjects are covered in the maiden posts of the new blog about blogs, which went online yesterday.
"Blogs are influencing public discourse in ways we never imagined possible," APCO Online Director Evan Kraus said in a release. "Virtual Vantage Points provides snapshot views of what Web-based thought leaders are saying, as well as a breakdown of how those conversations fit into the complex tapestry of media, government, business and personal opinion."
The APCO blog analysis team includes: Craig Fuller, a former chief of staff to George H.W. Bush when he was vice president; corporate responsibility expert Trevor Neilson, U.K. political strategist Darren Murphy; and health policy expert Bill Pierce. They identify online leaders and examine discussions in well-defined blog communities.
"Blogs are an incredible demonstration of how new media is democratizing public policy debates that used to be limited to talking heads," Fuller said in the release. "Virtual Vantage Points pulls the thinking of the Web's most important bloggers into one cohesive picture. The result provides insights not gained through any other process."
The mission of Virtual Vantage Points sounds a lot like what I've been doing here at Beltway Blogroll for two-plus years, though with a scientific edge to it rather than an anecdotal one. With that in mind, as of today I'm the first subscriber to the site via Bloglines. If political blogs matter in your world, you should subscribe, too.
Posted by Danny at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)
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Blog Tips From Washingtonpost.com
Fishbowl DC has an internal memo about blogging at washingtonpost.com.
Among other things, the memo answers these question:
1) What’s the blog’s topic or what event will it cover?
2) What’s the competition, and how will your blog win?
3) How will your blog supplement what appears in print and online?
4) How often will it be updated, and at what time(s) of day?
5) Who will write your blog?
6) Who will edit your blog?
7) Who will moderate comments on your blog?
8) How and where will your blog be promoted?
9) What names and “taglines” do you propose for your blog?
I don't agree with all of the answers -- the dictum that "blog items need to be edited" is too sweeping (I'm biased because this blog's writer is its only editor) -- but the memo is a pretty good guide as to what will work and how to make it work, especially on newspaper-owned Web sites.
Posted by Danny at 07:57 PM | Comments (0)
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Arketi Group, an integrated marketing and public relations consultancy, has some answers in a survey of journalists released last month. I just learned about it via Americablog.
Here are the details about blogs:
-- A whopping 84 percent of journalists would or already have used blogs as primary or secondary sources for articles. (I know I do -- not just (obviously) for Beltway Blogroll but also for Technology Daily.)
-- 60 percent of journalists say they spend more than 20 hours a week on the Internet, and of those, 72 percent say they spend that time reading blogs (I spend far more time than that per week online, much of it either reading blogs or blogging myself)
-- 54 percent get story ideas from blogs (that's probably a weekly occurence for me and sometimes almost daily)
-- 25 percent say that blogs make their jobs easier (definitely true for me).
-- Despite all those positive uses of blogs, only 41 percent of the journalists surveyed consider blogs to be credible sources of information. That is equal to the percentage for activist Web sites and only slightly higher than the 35 percent for politicians. Only chat and message boards rank lower on the credibility scale (18 percent), and public relations professionals scored surprisingly high (77 percent).
-- Journalists use company blogs and industry blogs as secondary sources.
-- The survey also gauged journalists' opinions about company attitudes toward blogs. Fifty-eight percent agree or strongly agree with companies monitoring employee blogs, while 33 percent believe it is ethical for a company to discipline an employee for posting negative comments about his firm on a personal blog.
Posted by Danny at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)
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Must we hear about it every time this crack addict attempts to rehabilitate himself with some new -- and typically half-witted -- political grandstanding? I'd be grateful if you would take me off your mailing list. I cannot think of anything the useless Marion Barry could do that would interest me in the slightest, up to and including overdose.
Well, you can if you're a blogger. In fact, you'd probably win a big round of applause in the blogosphere.
But if you're a journalist and say that in an e-mail to anyone, let alone a public persona like D.C. Councilman Barry, you're going to be reprimanded and publicly humiliated.
Yet another difference between blog ethics and journalistic ethics.
Posted by Danny at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)
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Your Ethic, My Ethic, Our Ethic
One thing is clear to me after reading the different viewpoints about Cleveland's blog scandal: Journalists and bloggers will never be able to work together in peace until people in both worlds find some common ethical ground.
Right now, the two groups are talking past each other with an air of superiority. Old-timers like those at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland think their longstanding ethic against donations to political candidates (though obviously not set in stone) is the only way; political bloggers and their allies in new media insist just as strongly that the blog ethic of disclosure is both more enlightened and enlightening to readers.
The latest post by Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine ends with a particularly telling statement: "[T]his should be about one tribe trying to understand -- and learn from -- the ethics of the other. The Plain Dealer didn’t try. That is its loss."
Did you catch that -- "one tribe trying to understand ... the ethics of the other"? It's ironic that Jarvis criticizes the newspaper for not listening when he doesn't seem to be interested in listening himself. He is so convinced that the blog ethic is superior that he won't even entertain the possibility that the ethic of the trade he has plied for decades has some merit -- or that perhaps a converged ethic is worth pursuing in a converging media world.
I've offered my thoughts in comments here and at other blogs over the past two days. What we need now is a cease-fire and a commitment from both sides to truly hear what the other has to say.
And forget what happened in Cleveland. Just have a forthright discussion about what the next newspaper should do when trying to create the kind of venue The Plain Dealer's editors too quickly abandoned. Everyone needs to stop talking about your ethic and my ethic, and come to an agreement on our ethic.
When Jarvis hosted his excellent Networked Journalism Summit in New York last month, he warned me and other participants that he would not tolerate blogger attacks on journalists and vice versa. He even thought about bringing a gong to the event to call out violators.
I'd say it's about time to gong to a close this battle in what is beginning to look like the information age equivalent of the 100 years war between bloggers and journalists. Maybe it's time for another summit -- or one of those blogger ethics panels that too many bloggers think are just a punch line.
Posted by Danny at 04:12 PM | Comments (1)
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I don't often find myself disagreeing with Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine for his views on the way things oughta be in the new media world. But his ongoing criticism of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland -- read it here, here, here and here -- is a bit off the mark.
First, the background: The newspaper made a bold and praiseworthy move this summer by opening a blog called Wide Open and paying four political bloggers, two Republicans and two Democrats, to contribute content to the site. Imagine that, old media curmudgeons not only welcoming new media rebels into their world but also paying them for their work.
Newspapers don't tend to take those kinds of risks, but the Plain Dealer did. It seemed to be working, too. But Wide Open took a seriously wrong turn only a few weeks after launch.
It turns out that one of the Democratic bloggers, Jeff Coryell, donated $100 to Bill O’Neill, the Democratic opponent of U.S. Rep. Steve LaTourette, a Republican. LaTourette complained to the newspaper; the paper's editors were not happy and demanded that Coryell refrain from writing about LaTourette; Coryell refused and either "parted ways" or was fired, depending on who's talking; the other Democratic blogger promptly resigned; and The Plain Dealer then closed the politically lopsided Wide Open.
No one is without fault in this whole mess. The newspaper goofed by not making its ethical standards clear to Wide Open bloggers; Coryell erred by not disclosing his financial ties, however small, to a candidate he might have mentioned at some point; and LaTourette embarrassed himself by making a stink over a blogger's $100 donation.
But anyone who gets his information on this story from BuzzMachine -- or Daily Kos, MoJo Blog, MyDD, Politics & Technology, Right Angle Blog in Ohio and other blogs -- might be misled into thinking there are clear heroes (the wrongly maligned blogger and the blogosphere at large) and villains (old media editors and a petty politician).
That's too bad -- especially coming from Jarvis. The our-friends-can-do-no-wrong attitude is no surprise coming from political bloggers who defend their own at all costs, but Jarvis is an excellent media analyst and should be able to see that Coryell is not an innocent victim in this episode.
Jarvis is right to scold the newspaper for assuming that Coryell should have known better than to think he could donate money to a candidate whose rival might have been a subject of Coryell's blogging. Even some journalists don't grasp that political donations create at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.
But Coryell most certainly should have known that he needed to at least disclose the contribution -- first to his editors and then, if they decided to keep him as a blogger, to Wide Open readers. He is guilty of violating the one widely held ethical standard embraced by bloggers: transparency.
Jarvis needs to cut The Plain Dealer some slack. His tirade against Ted Diadiun, the newspaper's ombudsman, is particularly harsh. Yes, Diadiun's column about the Wide Open controversy is over the top, but that just means he, like Jarvis, would be a good blogger.
More to the point, the editors had their journalistic hearts in the right place; they realized the promise of media convergence and welcomed it instead of fearing it, as too many of their colleagues do.
Their experiment, not yet a complete failure because The Plain Dealer is working to resurrect Wide Open, is a sign of progress. Ethical concerns, not content restrictions, are at the heart of this controversy, and those can be overcome with more education in both directions -- newsroom to blogosphere and blogosphere to newsroom.
But they can't be overcome when smart men like Jarvis mercilessly badger and berate the few journalists who are willing to try something new. Keep that up and the curmudgeons most assuredly will continue seeing the media world through the green-tinted eyeshades of yore. Rather than charging forward, they will retreat into and fortify their ivory towers, and they will delay the inevitable, Internet-driven evolution of media.
(Read more coverage of Cleveland's blog scandal at the Poynter Institute and Editor & Publisher.)
CORRECTIONS: Jill Miller Zimon, the other blogger who quit Wide Open, corrected me in the comments. "I did not resign in sympathy," she said. "I resigned because I had the same conflict [political donations] and wasn't going to wait for them to offer me the same ultimatum." Coryell also noted in the comments that he never actually blogged about Bill O'Neill or LaTourette at Wide Open. He refused not to do so in the future, however, so my point on that score is still relevant.
That said, I have changed my phrasing in the two sections noted by Coryell and Zimon to address their valid points.
UPDATE: The debate continues at BuzzMachine and PressThink, where Jarvis and Jay Rosen respond to my post and those of other bloggers. It's also worth reading what Mark Potts has to say at Recovering Journalist.
Posted by Danny at 09:14 AM | Comments (6)
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The Verdict On Blogs And Campaign Coverage
National Journal's insiders had a few things to say about blogs this week when answering the latest poll question for the magazine.
The question: "Overall, is presidential campaign coverage getting better than in past elections, getting worse, or staying the same?" Here's what some of the insiders volunteered about blogs in response to that open-ended question:
Democrats
-- "There's no question that the multiple facets of the 24-hour campaign, website analysis, blogs, and multicandidate fields on both sides have added to the information base available to the average voter."
-- "Mainstream media -- much worse. New media, including blogs -- much better."
Republicans
-- "Bloggers can be irresponsible and self-obsessed, but more news is getting out."
-- "Better, because the establishment media is facing stiff competition from the bloggers and Internet-based media."
-- The worsening of the coverage is "being driven by blogs, which in general do not subscribe to the standards of mainstream media. But they are the tail wagging the dog."
-- "More quantity of coverage due to blogs and new publications, but same quality: all focused on horse race and short-term issues."
ADDED: I missed a blog-related tidbit from last week's National Journal magazine. It was from an interview with Andrea LaRue, a partner at the Democratic-leaning lobbying firm NVG and at one time a counsel to former Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle, about her media habits.
Asked whether she regularly listens to any podcasts, LaRue said: "No. And I don't read blogs. People keep telling me how useful they are. I have a friend in California who is not in politics, who pokes fun at me mercilessly saying, 'How could you possibly be in your business and not read the blogs twice a day?' I'm fortunate in that I work with a team of people and if something important happens on a blog, it will get e-mailed around."
So LaRue apparently isn't one of the "influentials" who reads blogs, she's just friends with some who keep her informed.
Posted by Danny at 11:59 AM | Comments (1)
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Will RedState's Ron Paul Hysteria Spread?
We already know that the directors of RedState hate Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul with a passion deep enough to ban his supporters from the blog. But after Paul's supporters yesterday raised more than $4.2 million online, setting a single-day record, the question is how quickly the GOP fear-mongering about Paul will spread.
In the short term, Paul is likely to benefit from another burst of positive press and commentary about his remarkable online base and what it all means. Like this bit from the Baltimore Sun's blog The Swamp, for example:
That so many people have invested so much in someone who stands such little apparent chance of winning his party’s presidential nomination, let alone the White House, speaks volumes about alienation in modern American politics.It is the same alienation that once handed H. Ross Perot close to 20 percent of the presidential vote. It is the same alienation that handed Ralph Nader just enough of the vote to deny Democrat Al Gore an Electoral College victory to accompany his popular-vote majority.
It is people voting for someone other than the establishment, odds be damned.
But the more money Paul raises and the more media coverage he earns, the more likely he is to be subjected to the RedState ridicule treatment.
If you doubt that, recall what happened to Perot in 1992. The entry about him at Wikipedia will help you remember:
Perot's candidacy received increasing media attention when the competitive phase of the primary season ended for the two major parties. ... With several months to go until the Democratic and Republican conventions, Perot filled the vacuum of election news, as his supporters began petition drives to get him on the ballot in all 50 states. ...Accompanying the surge in support for Perot was increased scrutiny of his background. Reports surfaced of Perot hiring private investigators to obtain personal information about business and political adversaries. His temperament was brought into question by some who claimed that he exhibited irritability and an authoritarian management style. Around the same time, Perot was criticized for a remark made during a speech at the NAACP convention. ...
These developments had an adverse impact on Perot's campaign and his approval rating in opinion polls was no longer rising. On July 16, 1992, Perot reconsidered running for the presidency, even if he was not placed on all 50 state ballots.
Perot eventually decided to run and his impressive finish on Election Day arguably helped elect Democrat Bill Clinton. Paul's candidacy is still far from achieving that kind of status -- $4.2 miilion in a day is nothing compared with the personal fortune that Perot poured into his independent bid. But as more people take Paul's candidacy seriously, even if only as the preferred longshot, anti-establishment candidate, odds are great that he will be cut both ways by the double-edged media sword.
UPDATE: Like me, Micah Sifry at techPresident sees some analogies to Perot in Paul's presidential bid.
Plus here are more blog reactions to the online fundraising boost Paul received Monday:
-- Ron Paul And The Crazy Uncle Theory Of Politics (Open Left)
-- Ron Paul ... Keep[s] Saying Things I Agree With -- Does That Make Me A Bad Person? (Americablog)
-- The Ron Paul Phenomenon (Salon.com)
-- Ron Paulmania (Eschaton)
-- Ron Paul's Very Big Day (Captain's Quarters)
-- Ron Paul: Ralph Nader, Bill Buckley Or Howard Dean? (Outside The Beltway)
-- Paul's Haul (Ankle Biting Pundits)
-- The Significance Of The Ron Paul Fundraising Haul (Real Clear Politics)
-- The Most Impressive Online Campaign This Cycle (Daily Kos)
-- Schooled (MyDD)
-- What Ron Paul's $4.3 Million Means (techRepublican)
-- Learning From The Ron Paul Online Fundraising Frenzy (e.politics)
-- Ron Paul's 'Gimmick' (techPresident)
-- Understanding Paul's Haul (The Fix)
-- Paul's Money-Bomb Throwers (The Trail)
-- Ron-ulans (Swampland)
-- National Public Radio Political Editor Ken Rudin: "[I]f this support from the blogosphere doesn't translate into strong showings in the primaries and caucuses, I'm not sure I know what the point is."
Posted by Danny at 11:14 AM | Comments (10)
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Bloggers Fight Fox's Policy On Debate Footage
Fox News is under increasing fire for its decision last week to claim intellectual property rights to presidential debate footage after Republican candidate John McCain used a brief clip in an advertisement.
McCain, a senator from Arizona, defied Fox's request to stop using the clip in his ad, and now a coalition of bloggers and others in the online world and across the political spectrum have joined him in protesting the news stations policy toward debate footage.
"Every other news organization has liberated their debate footage and FOX should either be no different or no longer have the privilege of airing debates," Erick Erickson of the conservative RedState said in a release ironically distributed by the liberal online group MoveOn.org.
Here's a snippet from the story that Andrew Noyes reported for us at Technology Daily last week:
The News Corp.-owned network ordered McCain's team to nix the 30-second spot because the company's policy forbids candidates from using debate clips in political ads. The snippet bears a Fox News logo in the corner of the screen.
The commercial has an excerpt of the GOP debate in which McCain slams Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York for backing a $1 million set-aside for a museum to commemorate the 1969 Woodstock festival. McCain joked that he was "tied up" as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam while the concert was held."The law is very clear," a campaign aide told Technology Daily. "We have the right under the fair-use doctrine to air a small fragment, in this case about 18 seconds of Senator McCain's own comments in a 90-minute public broadcast."
The campaign got a cease-and-desist letter from Fox, but it will continue to air the spot. ... "We're considering filing a lawsuit, but that would give McCain's campaign the oxygen it desperately needs since it's obvious they're running out of money," a Fox spokeswoman said.
After Fox faced criticism for targeting McCain, the company later warned all presidential campaigns against using any debate footage. Fox's policy runs counter to an open policy that CNN adopted for its debates earlier this year. ABC and NBC later adopted similar policies.
Fox's decision to restrict its footage has riled the online world. On Thursday, McCain and the other campaigns found support from the same coalition of bloggers that fought the other television news outlets for free access to debate footage earlier this year. Those blogs include RedState on the right and Daily Kos on the left, according to MoveOn's release.
Jeff Jarvis of PrezVid also has opined against Fox. "[O]ne way to solve this is for all the candidates to pledge that they will not appear on any network’s debate unless that network frees the footage for all candidates and citizens," Jarvis said. "It is, after all, our election."
Posted by Danny at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)
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A weekend journalism discussion at the Phillips Foundation has sparked a mini-debate about whether "backpack journalism," where reporters carry more than pen and pad, is a good development.
Rob Bluey, head of the Center for Media and Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation, spoke approvingly of the idea after noting that his alma mater, Ithaca College in New York, even teaches a class called "Backpack Journalism" that requires students to carry Macbooks, videocameras, digital cameras and other equipment to do their jobs. "Personally, I think it’s the right approach — preparing the next generation of journalists with the tools they’ll need to tell stories," Bluey said.
Not everyone in the audience agreed, and Bill Beutler of Blog P.I. noted that Michael Scully, a journalism professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, also is not a fan of backpack journalism.
"It's an accountant's dream but an editor's nightmare," Scully said. "Accountants love it because you're sending one person out into the field to produce the work of three people; it's an editor's nightmare because the quality of the work is diminished." He recounted his own bad experience as a multitasking reporter in the pre-digital age to bolster his argument.
I'm with Bluey on this one. As Scully's own experience testifies, backpack journalism is really just a new phrase, not a new concept. Journalists have been doing it for decades. I've done it often myself -- and loved every minute of it. And I've hated the stories I missed when caught without my "backpack."
I remember covering a house fire in Morgantown, W.Va., once when family and friends formed a prayer circle with a distraught mother and her children right on the street, as their home smoldered in the background. I was in a perfect elevated position above the street to snap a moving photo but didn't have a camera.
Moments later, when I told our news photographer on site about that scene, he said he had witnessed it but couldn't get a photo because too many onlookers blocked the way. We were both kicking ourselves the rest of the evening for having missed one of those pictures that would have been worth a thousand of my inadequate words.
I worked at a small newspaper at the time, and most journalists who do are used to serving multiple roles. But I've also been a backpack journalist in Washington.
A few years ago, while reporting a story on prison labor for National Journal magazine, I was "on the inside" of minimum-, medium- and maximum security federal jails in Pennsylvania, where I both interviewed and photographed wardens, labor supervisors and inmates. My photos illustrated the text better than another photographer's might have because I was envisioning the story from start to finish as I snapped them -- and that assignment is to this day one of the favorites of my career.
The digital future offers even more promise of doing such stories for tomorrow's journalists. They needn't worry about carrying unwieldy equipment and learning how to develop film with chemicals (though I actually enjoyed the creativity of the darkroom). These days, everything really can fit into a backpack, and the tools are much easier to use on the front end and easier to edit with on the back end.
Scully may be correct in arguing that one journalist should not have three tasks while covering breaking news. Although the reporter still should have a digital camera and perhaps a videocamera just in case, it might be better to have three people with distinct duties in those situations.
But Scully's broader condemnation of backpack journalism as the "spork" of new media is wrong. It's only an editor's nightmare when he hires reporters who can't do more than one narrow aspect of journalism well -- or worse, who won't learn how to. It's an editor's dream when he finds the total package, a journalist who can report, write, record and film a story.
That's a goal every journalism student who wants to get ahead should aspire to, and shame on professor Scully for setting the bar lower.
[Full disclosure: I am an adviser to Heritage's media center.]
Posted by Danny at 09:20 AM | Comments (8)
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Ron Paul And David All
In politics and in life, people who can't win arguments often tend to get personal, indiscrimately attacking their rivals rather than sticking to the subject at hand. That's what happened this week as Republican bloggers debated the decision by RedState to ban supporters of GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul from the site.
The target in this case: GOP new media consultant David All. The personal attackers: Erick Erickson of RedState; another GOP e-politics expert, Michael Turk of Kung Fu Quip; and blogger-turned-campaign-aide Lance Dutson, who is working to re-elect Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.
All's cardinal sin was not toeing the GOP line as envisioned by RedState. At his techRepublican blog, All joined Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarter's in scolding RedState for banning Paul supporters.
"Generally, Republicans need to welcome Ron Paul (and all others willing to wear a Republican banner) to the debate and the discussion," All said. "If Ron Paul doesn't win the nomination, we need him to actively endorse and support the winner so that his supporters will use their energy to defeat Hillary [Clinton]."
It was a relatively mild criticism when compared with Morrissey's argument that "this doesn't hurt Paul's credibility as much as it does Redstate's." But rather than merely disagree with All about the "retarded vulture fringe" as he had with Morrissey, Erickson got personal.
He accused All of "riding our story into the media spotlight as a professional tech consultant" and of being "too enamored by the technology the Ron Paul supporters use." "I really don't want David being the tech strategist on the right the media goes to for comment if he's more dazzled by the bells and whistles than by the cause," Erickson wrote.
Turk, a competitor of All's in the e-politics world, took the attack up several notches with a post headlined "I've Lost What Little Respect For David All I Had Left."
"David is, by all accounts, a master of self-promotion," Turk wrote. "It's entirely possible that he made a conscious choice to take the contrarian position solely to further his agenda of making David everything that David can be. ... I think David is calculating and has come to the conclusion that taking these positions gets him noticed. I think that's why he took his post against RedState and circulated it to the media (as Erick alleges)."
When All responded, Turk pounced again. Among other things, he criticized All for not having embraced efforts to improve the RightRoots online fundraising site that failed miserably last year and for instead building a competing site, Slatecard.
Dutson, who still writes at Maine Web Report while serving as the Internet strategy director for Sen. Collins, rounded out the third component of the David All attack machine, and like Erickson and Turk, he had a chip on his shoulder about something All had written. Dutson voiced his irritation at All for having supported the Google search engine in a spat over a Collins advertising campaign.
"David All is providing a crass misrepresentation of the work that the rest of us are doing, he's proffering poorly deduced theories about how the right should use the Internet, and he's allowing the traditional media to paint Republicans as inept and childish when it comes to technology," Dutson wrote. "I've been fortunate enough to work with some extremely talented people in this world over the last few years, and it really bothers me that David All has become the public face of what is in reality a remarkable group of people."
He added that the GOP should not allow "self-appointed, self-serving hucksters like David to pass themselves off as leaders on the tech-right."
That was a whole lot of verbiage expended on David All -- none of which served to further the debate about whether RedState made the right call in banning anyone who supports Ron Paul.
Posted by Danny at 02:15 PM | Comments (13)
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The Center for Independent Media, which operates the blogs Colorado Confidential, Iowa Independent, Michigan Messenger and Minnesota Monitor, is expanding its operations to Washington and is looking for a couple of leaders to run the shop.
First on the list is a Washington news editor. "You will develop news, investigative and feature stories with a team of full-time reporters and part-time contract contributors," the job listing says. "You will combine the best of traditional journalism with the new paradigms of the Internet."
The Washington news editor will work with Jefferson Morley, who earlier this month decided to leave The Washington Post to become the center's national editorial director. "With Jeff's magazine experience from The Nation and New Republic, daily newspaper experience from The Washington Post, and track record as an editor of the Post's Web site, Jeff is ideally suited to help lead the way to the 21st-century newsroom," David Bennahum, the center's president and CEO, said in a statement.
The other job now being advertised for the center as a part-time (30 hours a week) managing editor. It entails training and supporting reporters, as well as recruiting new writers. The center is looking for candidates with at least two years of Washington experience in news or policy and also online news experience.
Here's a description of the outfit from the job listing: "The center's programs emphasize the importance of citizen-driven journalism as a critical founding principle of our nation, the positive role of democratically elected government in securing the common good and social welfare, and the continuing benefits of our founding culture of government by the people, for the people."
The center figured in a blog scandal last year when folks at the Minnesota Monitor clashed with Republican blogger Michael Brodkorb of Minnesota Democrats Exposed over the appropriate way to disclose financial relationships on blogs.
Posted by Danny at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)
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Note To Bloggers: Gripe And Ye Shall Receive
The liberal blog Think Progress took the Pentagon to task yesterday for playing favorites at the roundtables it has been holding with bloggers this year.
[T]he Pentagon has reserved space almost exclusively for conservatives and military bloggers. ... Despite the regular frequency of the “Blogger Roundtables,” progressive bloggers or anti-war military bloggers are rarely featured. Furthermore, small blogs like that of Fox News anchor Griff Jenkins are featured on the calls while more prominent progressive blogs are not.
Apparently the gripe was all about the folks at Think Progress angling for access to future roundtables -- and they got it. "Since publishing this post," an update said, "ThinkProgress has been in contact with the Pentagon, and they have agreed to allow us to participate in the bloggers roundtables."
That's an encouraging sign. Now if the President Bush, members of Congress and presidential candidates will heed the Pentagon's example, maybe blogger conference calls will produce less fluff and more newsworthy stuff.
They will be far more worthwhile for the bloggers and their readers when that happens.
Posted by Danny at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)
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In the 2004 election cycle, many journalists considered blogs an entertaining curiousity at best and an annoying, disruptive fad at worst. Plenty of my peers in the political reporting world actually hated blogs and slammed them at every opportunity, and they continued to do so through the next election cycle.
But in the 2008 cycle, the blog revolution has taken root in old media, as I always knew it would. The green-eyeshade gang in America's newsrooms has finally awakened to the power of the blog and realized that it's just a new, and in some ways superior, medium for delivering the news of the day. Political candidates have realized it, too.
That's why mainstream media outlets across the country now have political blogs -- and why candidates are looking for ways to get their messages into those blogs. Some of the MSM blogs -- I can't think of a more apt representation of media convergence -- are even written by old-timers who have realized that they will be left behind if they don't embrace the journalistic tools of tomorrow. To wit:
After a Des Moines Register blogger ridiculed Sen. Hillary Clinton online last spring, the New York Democrat telephoned the journalist to respond to his criticism, The Washington Post reports.Veteran reporter David Yepsen is one of many political bloggers on newspaper and magazine Web sites who have been getting attention from candidates and campaign officials. The nature of blogging, which enables constant updates, has altered the terrain of the election, pitting journalists and political strategists against one another over smaller items on shorter deadlines.
Clinton spokesman Phil Singer said that when he worked on the 2004 presidential campaign of Democrat John Kerry, "we were essentially at the mercy of the so-called old media. You had to struggle to get something into the paper. With the advent of these blogs, it's much easier to get your message out through accredited newspaper channels."
Posted by Danny at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)
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Winning Bloggers And Influencing 'The People'
My analysis last week that Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga could change the dynamics of the presidential race by formally endorsing a Democrat in the primary has stirred some debate.
My entry was only marginally about the kingmaking potential of Kos. I mentioned his influence in the Democratic Party only to buttress my argument that endorsements by branded bloggers carry much more weight in these new media days than the tired and utterly predictable endorsements by anonymous newspaper editorial boards.
But my passing reference to Kos became the focus when Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo quoted it at the start of an interview with the man himself.
Conn Carroll, a National Journal colleague who walks in the same blog circles as me for The Hotline's Blogometer, disagreed with my analysis. He argued that Kos has all but endorsed Barack Obama (though Kos picked Christopher Dodd as "the go-to guy" over Obama yesterday) and that Daily Kos readers are "a pretty non-comformist bunch" anyway.
The latter point certainly is true. As I said this summer in a debate about the "Politics 2.0" package in Mother Jones, "There is no Boss Tweed of the blogosphere, and I don't think there ever will be." Kos' readers do and will make their own decisions about which Democratic presidential contender to support.
But that doesn't mean an endorsement from Kos couldn't change the dynamics of the race. His opinions do matter to his readers, including other prominent liberal bloggers, and those who are undecided voters in the presidential contest could well be swayed by Kos' views.
What's more, Kos has shown time and time again how effectively he can financially rally his readers behind anointed candidates. Money can change the dynamics of any political race, and if Kos all of a sudden started promoting contributions to Obama or Dodd, they could expect an online rush of funds.
The cash might not help either one of them win the Democratic nomination -- remember, Kos picked Howard Dean in 2004 and he washed out quickly -- but it could make them more competitive in a key early state. And if they scored higher than expected in, or even won, such a contest, big donors and big media might wake up to the potential of Kos' favorite son.
Blogs have the same kind of trickle up effect in politics as they do in journalism, and branded bloggers like Kos are the ones at the base of the long tail of politics. Politicians who win them as friends will have a better chance of influencing "the people."
UPDATE: As if to prove my point, Kos mentions Dodd as the go-to guy, and suddenly Dodd mania begins.
Posted by Danny at 11:37 AM | Comments (1)
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Massachusetts Blog Denied Access To Debate
The results of this week's special election in Massachusetts' 5th District made the news -- in case you missed it, Democrat Niki Tsongas mustered a surprisingly narrow victory over Republican Jim Ogonowski and was sworn in to office today -- but you may not have heard that earlier this month, a television station in the state kicked bloggers out of its studio at a debate between the candidates.
It happened Oct. 5. Charley Blandy and David Kravitz of Blue Mass Group initially were allowed into the NECN studio to cover the Ogonowski-Tsongas debate. But when Ogonowski's campaign asked that the bloggers be booted, NECN obliged the request.
"We were just unceremoniously hustled out of the studio because 'our organization' had 'endorsed Tsongas,'" Kravitz wrote. "... I asked whether, if The [Boston] Globe had endorsed Tsongas, they would be permitted to sit in the studio. No answer."
Presence in a studio is not necessary for debate coverage -- in fact, we journalists were in a completely separate building at the CNN/YouTube Democratic presidential debate in July -- so the bloggers at Blue Mass Group were not silenced by the disruption. But the episode triggered a discussion about whether bloggers should be given credentials to such events and be treated like journalists.
Here's what the opposing campaigns had to say in the Lowell Sun about Blue Mass Group's bloggers being relocated:
"Supporters weren't allowed in the studio," Ogonowski spokesman Barney Keller said. "They're her supporters, and they broke the rules.""We certainly believe that Blue Mass Group should have been allowed to stay," Tsongas spokeswoman Katie Elbert retorted. "We're into including people, not excluding people."
WGBH in Boston also covered the story in a segment on "Beat The Press." And Melissa Ryan at MyDD added her views: "Are bloggers journalists? Is the question even relevant? Bloggers are media and smart politicians appreciate any local media coverage."
The discussion prompted one diarist at Blue Mass Group to ponder the future of blog (and journalistic) ethics:
Should some of us, should I, join the Society of Professional Journalists and attempt to raise the journalistic standards of blogging? ... Should Blue Mass Group, or some of the very good diarists here as individuals take that step in adopting the standards put forth in the code of ethics above? Is BMG or any other blog site prepared to ban, delete and recant unethical diaries or diarists? Will there some certification board be created to uphold the journalistic integrity of member blogs? A "Society of Ethics in Weblogs?" Are those here and elsewhere prepared to give up their right to rant in order to preserve the ideal?I think that it's coming for certain, and when it takes hold, the world of journalism will change as much as it did when the first news was broadcast over the airwaves.
Too many bloggers ridicule the idea that they even need to think about ethical practices for our emerging medium, so it was good to see at least one of them thinking out loud about the issue.
Posted by Danny at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)
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A Shield For Bloggers -- Or Maybe Not
The House yesterday passed a bill aimed at shielding journalists and some bloggers from having to disclose their anonymous sources to the government. Technology Daily reported on the development this morning. Here's our summary of the news as reported in other publications:
The House on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed legislation to shield reporters from federal prosecution for refusing to divulge their news sources or information except in a few circumstances. CongressDaily (subscription required), The Washington Post, News.com and the Los Angeles Times report that the vote was 398-21.Under the bill, journalists engaged in news-gathering activities, including bloggers, still could be compelled to disclose information on sources if needed to prevent an act of terrorism. The House adopted language to let judges consider the public interest in forcing disclosure in cases involving leaks that could be harmful to national security, not just criminal cases.
But the bill has too many restrictions to please Matt Stoller of Open Left. He said the requirement that a "substantial portion" of a blogger's livelihood come from gathering and publishing news will exclude most bloggers, including himself.
"I have no opinion as to whether shield laws are a good idea or not," Stoller said, "but it's worth noting that this law doesn't cover amateurs, consultants like me, people like Steve Clemons [of The Washington Note], diarists on [Daily Kos] or [bloggers] who derive most of their income from other sources. I don't understand why 'gathering and publishing news and information for dissemination to the public' isn't a good enough standard."
UPDATE: Add Duncan Black of Eschaton and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos, two of the left's top bloggers, to the list of skeptics about the House-passed bill. "Boo defining journalism based on whether it makes you money," Black said.
Kos was a bit more circumspect, acknowledging that there are legitimate concerns about people "availing themselves of these shield protections by merely throwing up a quick fake blog." But he said the Senate could improve the bill "by changing 'substantial financial gain' to something along the lines of 'substantial publishing history.' Or by giving authors protection only from suits arising from legitimate published materials."
What he apparently does not realize is that the Senate may be even less inclined than the House to offer legal protection to bloggers. Earlier this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that does not specifically mention bloggers.
Posted by Danny at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)
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I haven't had any time to blog here until today because I've been focused on a blog-related project at my day job as the editor of Technology Daily. The subject: the push to make permanent the moratorium on taxing Internet access that will expire Nov. 1 unless Congress acts before then.
Yesterday, the House passed a bill that would extend the moratorium another four years, but stakeholders in the Internet community still want a permanent ban. With a deadline looming and Republican leaders in Congress framing the issue as a backdoor attempt by Democrats to raise taxes down the road, this seemed like a good time to try something new at our blog, Tech Daily Dose.
In a nutshell, we are asking guest bloggers to move the debate about Internet taxes onto the Internet. We're hoping they will write blog posts and engage in debate with commenters and other bloggers as the debate moves forward over the next several days -- the idea being that our sources know more than we do and both we and our readers can become better informed by hearing what those sources have to say.
You can get more details in my introductory post and follow the debate for yourself at our "Net Tax Talk" page.
And if you have a dog in the Internet tax fight and would like to contribute to this attempt at interactive media innovation, you can e-mail me at dglover@nationaljournal.com.
Posted by Danny at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)
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John Aravosis of Americablog thinks that is a distinct possibility under the Bush administration's current philosophy about anti-terrorism surveillance.
Aravosis and I exchanged e-mails recently over my post about MySpace buying space for political bloggers at a MySpace online presidential debate. Aravosis was one of the bloggers.
Confused about how that may make me a target for spying? Here's Aravosis' explanation of the three degrees of separation between me and potential terrorists in Pakistan:
Any one of you who have ever e-mailed me, or chatted with me by phone, may very well have had your name included in the government's domestic spying sweep.Why? Because a good friend of mine is Pakistani-American, and she regularly chats with folks in Pakistan. And under our government's new standard, if you chat with me and I chat with someone who chats with someone in Pakistan, then the government has the right to look at the details of your communication with me.
Of course, it being a well-known fact that I keep company with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, I've probably been a surveillance target for quite a while now. Such is the burden of misinformed fame.
Posted by Danny at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)
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The Endorsement Game: Newspapers vs. Blogs
Newspaper endorsements have been a mainstay in politics for generations, but as the reach of influence of papers has waned, so has the power of their recommendations to voters.
Politicians still covet endorsements and subject themselves to grillings before editorial boards to win them because the written votes of approval make great fodder for press releases and campaign literature. But especially at the national level, media endorsements of candidates long ago lost their political punch. Honestly, do Joe Six-Pack and Jane Soccer-Mom even read them anymore?
The writing is tired, and the candidate picks are predictable. And because the endorsements are bestowed by anonymous editorial boards, as opposed to "branded" individuals, they hold little, if any, sway with voters.
In this revolutionary era of new media, however, blog endorsements can carry far more weight. Bloggers made now-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean a household name in 2004, and in the 2008 presidential race, they have had a similar albeit so far more limited "long tail" effect for Republican candidate Ron Paul. Dean screamed his way out of the running early and Paul is still in the also-ran category, but the fact that they have been noticed at all demonstrates the impact of positive blog publicity.
Blog endorsements matter because politically engaged "influentials" who shape opinions in their local communities read blogs. They also matter because leading bloggers, unlike editorial boards, are known entities. A presidential endorsement from Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos could change the dynamics of the Democratic race -- which is no doubt a factor in Moulitsas' decision to stay neutral thus far this year -- and state-based bloggers have even greater potential to swing electoral votes one way or the other.
These new media endorsements matter enough that smart campaigns track them, and now Micah Sifry of techPresident is trying to do the same on a broad scale.
"If you've decided on your presidential candidate, let us know," Sifry wrote last week. "You can start by just adding a comment with your name, blog URL, link to a post with your endorsement (if any), and if you feel like it, your city and state. We'll build a directory to make it easy to find out who is supporting whom, and we'll make it in such a way that it's easy to add additional names."
This subtle, ongoing shift in the endorsement game is further evidence that live pixels, not dead trees, are the future of both politics and journalism.
Posted by Danny at 09:28 AM | Comments (2)
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Ghostwriting In The Blogosphere: A Bad Idea
Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine think it's a bad idea for politicians to try to adopt in the blogosphere the same "false voice" they have employed in ghost-written columns and press releases for generations.
I agree. This is a new media era, Washington. Your readers expect you to behave differently than you do in old media, and you only irritate us when you send your flacks into the blogosphere on your behalf.
Posted by Danny at 01:27 PM | Comments (0)
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Guide To Networked Journalism
Cross-posted at AirCongress
I'll be attending the Networked Journalism Summit in New York next week to brainstorm with other new media innovators.
In preparation for the event, David Cohn of NewAssignment.Net has been interviewing the forum's participants by telephone and e-mail. He has created a helpful guide to the interviews, including an e-mail chat about my site, AirCongress, the online voice of Capitol Hill.
Posted by Danny at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)
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Arianna Huffington Prospers In The Blogosphere
How has The Huffington Post prospered since the media site and companion blog went online 2-1/2 years ago? USA Today has the answers:
Co-founder Ken Lerer says the Post will be profitable next year, when its audience could double, thanks to interest in the 2008 election.The staff has grown from three to 43 full-time employees. And Huffington's list of bloggers has grown to 1,800 -- including well-known names such as comedian/pundits Bill Maher and Harry Shearer, screenwriter/director Nora Ephron and actor Steven Webber.
And what of the site's future? "While it's still a politics-driven, anti-war site, [Arianna] Huffington is trying to remake the Post into more of an all-purpose digital newspaper, with sections devoted to lifestyles, business, media and entertainment."
Posted by Danny at 07:00 AM | Comments (0)
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Uncle Jay Explains The Blogosphere
With the help of a friend, I discovered "Uncle Jay" earlier this month and embedded his video explanation of congressional "recess". Now Uncle Jay is back with a new episode that explains the blogosphere to all the kids.
Among the thousands of political blogs, he said, there is "one for every type of political prejudice." He divided them into helpful categories and flashed screenshots of examples for each category:
1) The "godless, socialist, hate America, Bush-is-Hitler, cut-and-run, nanny state, tree-hugging, amnesty, traitor, left-wing, scumbag blogs": Crooks & Liars, Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo and TalkLeft.
2) The "neocon, corporate, racist, Bush-is-god, flag, Bible, homophobe, cold-dead-hands, transfat, right-wing scumbag blogs": Instapundit, La Shawn Barber's Corner, Little Green Footballs, Michelle Malkin and SteynOnline.
3) And the "more independent-thinking, left or right, perhaps libertarian, make-up-your-mind, who's-side-are-you-on, mamby-pamby, scumbag blogs": Ann Althouse, BuzzMachine, Lileks.com and Andrew Sullivan.
Other enlightening insights from Uncle Jay:
-- A blog "is something that lets ordinary people link to professional reporting and great writing, and then add their own opinions and bad writing.
-- Commenters on blogs "know even less and write even worse" than the bloggers.
-- And my favorite, laugh-out-loud moment from the video: The blogosphere is like the atmosphere because "it has lots of illuminating light but also gasbags of hot air. And it can be polluted by humans who overuse toxic substances."
Posted by Danny at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)
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Go Ahead, Cop, Taser Me And Make Me Famous
Here's some great analysis from Conn Carroll of The Blogometer in the wake of the tasering of a student showboat at an event with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.:
Those under the delusion that the tasering of that FL student is a "iconic turning point" "in the annals of a closing society" need to get a hold of themselves and study up on the incident. The kid involved has a long history of taping practical jokes and by eyewitness accounts only fought police when the cameras were on him. Taser Bro is not a free-speech martyr: he is just the latest example of traditional media rewarding abject narcissism at the cost of public political discourse.Unfortunately Taser Bro is not an isolated incident, and unless the media wises up fast they should expect more and more campaigns to shut off candidates from the public in response. For example, in '06 blogger Mike Stark, who was tackled by ex-Sen. George Allen, R-Va., staffers, admitted that he attended Allen events for the sole purpose of hoping to cause embarrassing altercations. For every macaca video out there that sheds justifiable light on a candidate, there are going to be 10 provocateurs seeking to disrupt public events in the hopes of becoming the next YouTube hero. The next time someone disrupts an event, before anyone gives them a second of coverage, let's first ask if this is just another Taser Bro.
On the other hand, not everyone with a camera has to be a Taser Bro. You can be a "preditor" instead. What's that, you say? Republican new media consultant David All has the answer:
With the rise of available and accessible distribution mechanisms ... there’s no longer an excuse for a candidate not to appear early and often on our desktops talking about all of the issues we care about. School choice. Broadband accessibility. Stem cell research. All the “long tail” issues we care about. ...Quite simply, a preditor is an operative who is not only the producer/creative mind behind an ad, but also the editor. We produce and edit online videos. Some of it may go viral. Most of it won’t. But who cares? The investment is worth it. ...
We’re armed with cameras, Macs, and a clever eye for creative messaging. And perhaps most importantly, we know how to use all the tools in our tool box, which means a quick turnaround when time matters.
Posted by Danny at 09:15 PM | Comments (4)
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Is OffTheBus Going Off Track Politically?
When Arianna Huffington and Jay Rosen announced their plan for OffTheBus early this year, I was excited by the prospect of a network of citizen journalists covering the 2008 presidential campaign. I even pondered the idea of volunteering as an OffTheBus professional mentor to the budding reporters.
The more developments I see at OffTheBus, however, the more skeptical I become about whether it can fulfill its promise of offering "a wide variety of voices and perspectives" on the 2008 campaign.
I was mildly surprised in June when Huffington and Rosen recruited their first two employees for the project and both had ties to the 2004 Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. Amanda Michel is the project director for OffTheBus, and Zack Exley is its senior adviser and featured correspondent.
Both seem well-qualified for the jobs, albeit in a nontraditional way, but it struck me as unwise for Huffington and Rosen, whose personal politics are liberal, to pick not one but two liberals as their first hires. Robert Bluey of the conservative Heritage Foundation, where I serve as an adviser to the Center for Media and Public Policy, also questioned the wisdom of hiring political operatives as journalists.
Now comes the news that another liberal, veteran journalism Marc Cooper, will serve as OffTheBus' editorial coordinator and as a special correspondent at The Huffington Post.
Again, Cooper is well-qualified for the job. A press release outlined his stellar credentials: contributing editor to The Nation; columnist for LA Weekly; international and domestic political journalist for three decades; and articles, essays and interviews in publications like The Atlantic (whose parent company is my employer), Harper's, the Los Angeles Times, the Times of London and The Washington Post.
Rosen also made a strong case for why Cooper is right for this particular job: "It's rare to find someone with Marc's experience who is so open to the Web and to contributors who can come from anywhere. We couldn't pass that up."
But OffTheBus risks sending a confusing message to both its readers and potential contributors when all of the people at the top of the organization skew one direction politically. Will people of different persuasions really want to write for that kind of operation? And if they are reluctant to do so, how hard will Huffington, Rosen and Cooper work to recruit skeptics so OffTheBus doesn't go off track politically before the tour really gets started?
I still have hope for the project, especially when I see the array of volunteers OffTheBus is seeking. The volunteers, after all, are the heart of the idea, and if people across the political spectrum actually sign up for both meaty jobs like campaign finance researcher and creative ones like "wiki gardener," OffTheBus may well succeed.
But my hopes are not as high as they were six months ago.
Posted by Danny at 09:07 AM | Comments (3)
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A Friendly Tip For Flacks: Don't Annoy Bloggers
You know bloggers have arrived when they start whining about being overwhelmed with useless PR pitches. That's exactly what happened yesterday at Americablog and Eschaton.
Americablog's John Aravosis is particularly annoyed because he is constantly bombarded with pitches looking for free media on his site, but too few of the folks who contact him are willing to drop a few bucks on blog ads:
Now, you might argue, "But John, you're just like a journalist, we shouldn't have to PAY you to write about us!" And that would be correct. I am like a journalist, sometimes, and you don't have to pay me to get me to write about your story. But like a journalist anywhere, your story has to be a real story before I'm going to write about it. And the notion that I'm going to do you a favor by writing about a non-story, when you've never before given me the time of day [in advertising], is laughable.And in any case, that's what advertising is for: non-stories. In politics, there's one sure-fire way to get your story/non-story in the paper: buy an ad. It's no different on the blogs. You don't expect favors from the Washington Post, why do you expect them for us?
I liked Aravosis' post because it showed yet another difference between old and new media. We journalists just whine privately about PR folks who won't invest any time in researching our publications before sending pitches; bloggers lambaste the flacks for all to see.
Regardless of their political leanings, PR folks in the public affairs realm would be smart to spend some time digesting the "New Tools Campaign" created by the New Politics Institute. It makes a solid case for why candidates and causes should not only be advertising online but also be engaging blogs -- and one good way to engage the blogs indirectly is to reach their readers by advertising on the sites.
Posted by Danny at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)
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The Future Of Journalism
Cross-posted at AirCongress
With the help of a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine and PrezVid has organized a Networked Journalism Summit in New York next month in New York City. I will be there along with bloggers and new media innovators from across the political spectrum.
Here are some of the participants.
-- N.Z. Bear, The Truth Laid Bear. He has been a key player blog-driven activist projects like Porkbusters and the Victory Caucus, and he was among select bloggers who met with President Bush in the White House today.
-- Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads.
-- Robert Cox, Media Bloggers Association (of which I am a member)
-- Jonathan Dube, CyberJournalist.
-- Jane Hamsher, Firedoglake. She was one of the bloggers who covered the trial of former vice-presidential aide I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby this year.
-- John Havens and Alan Levy, BlogTalkRadio.
-- Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post.
-- James Kotecki, a college student who gained notoriety as "Emergency Cheese" for his online video reports on YouTube as the site developed a niche in the political world.
-- Mike Krempasky, Edelman Public Relations. He is a co-founder of the conservative blog RedState.
-- Jay Rosen, NewAssignment.Net. He's also an organizer of OffTheBus, "campaign coverage by people who aren't in the club."
-- Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident.
-- Mark Tapscott, editorial-page editor of The Washington Examiner. Upon taking the job in 2006, he created a board of blog contributors to the newspaper.
That's just a partial list of people I know and/or have mentioned at Beltway Blogroll. See the full list of attendees here.
Jarvis described the goals of the conference in a post at BuzzMachine:
This is a day about action: next steps, new projects, new partnerships, new experiments. The first two-thirds of the day will be devoted to sharing lessons, ideas, and plans with a representative sample of different kinds of efforts, hyperlocal to national to international, with participants from big and small media, from editorial and business, from the U.S., Canada, the U.K, Germany, and France. The last third of the day will be devoted to what’s next, with participants meeting to come up with new collaborations.
David Cohn of NewAssignment.Net, an organizer of the summit, has details, too. I'm looking forward to the summit.
Posted by Danny at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)
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Writers Find Careers Inside The Blogway
As noted in Technology Daily's AM Edition
A new group of young Washington journalists, pundits and political consultants have embraced the blogosphere as a hobby or to launch a career, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The blog tracker Outsidein.com6 has listed Washington as the fourth "bloggiest" city behind Boston, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Washington bloggers are generally not well-paid, but opportunities have increased. The nearly 150-year-old Atlantic Monthly recently acquired six blogs and pays their creators to write under its moniker.
"It's only going to grow," says Spencer Ackerman, a D.C.-based blogger for TPM Muckraker and a former New Republic reporter.
Posted by Danny at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)
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Norman Hsu: A Man Of Many Puns
Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu, a fugitive until last week, has been the subject of unrelenting torture by pun in the blogosphere for the past several days. Hsu many puns, Hsu little time to share them all, but I'll do my best.
Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters has been one of the most prolific Hsu punsters, treating his readers to "Hsu On The Other Foot", "Hillary Not Hsu Happy", and "Steady Eddie And A Boy Named Sue."
Don Surber also played off the Johnny Cash song "A Boy Named Sue" and even wrote lyrics for it. He skillfully managed to squeeze a Larry Craig reference into the song:
Hillary dropped me like I was a blue dress
The Democrats made my life one big mess
I shook like a leaf or Larry Craig’s shoe.
In jail I think about how I just cannot win
But if I ever have a son, I think I’m gonna name him
Bill or George!
Anything but Hsu!
I still hate that name!
You can find more Hsu-related lyrics over at Old War Dogs, this time under the title "Shoo, Hsu, Baby":
You've seen him in Shanghai and Beijing too,
And now he's wearin' the Demos’ blue,
Hil had a tear in the corner of her eye,
As he said his last goodbye.
Musical Hsu puns actually have been quite popular. Dinocrat chose "Runaround Hsu," and Instapundit Glenn Reynolds opted for "Hsu-fly, don't bother me." Reynolds also offered this thought after Hsu's capture: "I wonder if they've got him on Hsuicide watch."
Shoe puns are a hit, too. From Townhall: "Waiting For The Next Hsu To Drop." And TPMCafe went for the headline "When The Other Hsu Drops" (with a link to "Hsu Done It" over at TPM Election Central).
VarvBlog blogged about Hsu's troubles under "The Hsu Fits," and The Powers That Be opted for "This Hsu Is Made For Runnin'"
Here are other Hsu puns I found in a blog search after realizing the trend:
-- Three Sources: "Hsu Fly Pie"
-- Southern Ledger: "Hsu's On First"
-- Forward Movement: "Democrats Hit By Hsu-nami"
-- The Latest Word: "So Hsu Me!"
-- Gather: "More Hsu-nanigans"
-- Tusk & Talon: "Deja Hsu"
-- TigerHawk: "Stomach Hsu"
-- Grammaticus: "Hsu Two"
-- Small Dead Animals: "Hillary Hears A Hsu"
-- A Blog For All: "Hsu's Money Is It?"
-- EPluribus Media: "Who's Hsu?"
-- Attytood: "Hsu Are You?"
-- The Belmont Club: "Hsu Goes There?"
UPDATE: Don Surber has more Hsu puns to share. He added one in the comments and sent me this one via e-mail about my entry: "You Hsu did a good job." Anyone else, or does that just about Hsu it up? Sorry, I couldn't resist.
UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin has been very punny when it comes to Hsu. She was one of the early users of "Hsu, fly, don't bother me" and noted his "Hsu-rrender!" late last month.
One of her readers also penned lyrics to "Runaround Hsu." Here's a taste:
Here’s my story, sad but true
It’s about a guy that I once knew
He [took my] money, then ran around
Giving money to every dem in townAh, I should have known it from the very start
This guy will leave me with a broken heart
Now listen people what I’m telling you
A-keep away from-a Runaround Hsu
UPDATE III: Another one from Instapundit -- "Strange But Hsu." Plus many more in the comments. (ADDED 9/10: Glenn Reynolds clearly is competing for top honors in the punitry now. His latest at Instapundit: "There's no business like Hsu's business.")
(Time for a Hsutable) UPDATE: Howard Mortman, the Prince Of Puns, joins our game of Trivial Pur-Hsuit and gives his readers an education about Jewish holidays at the same time. All of this playing on words may make the victim adopt a Hsudonym.
UPDATE IV: Howard Mortman just e-mailed to say it's time to change gears in the pun mobile. "Let’s revisit our Charlie Trie puns from 10 years ago!"
Posted by Danny at 09:08 AM | Comments (39)
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Bloggers Cry Media Foul In Maine Senate Race
As noted in yesterday's AM Edition of Technology Daily
Democratic bloggers are questioning whether a Maine newspaper editor's decisions are being swayed by the interests of his wife, who is a staff assistant to Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Editor & Publisher reports that Bangor Daily News Executive Editor Mark Woodward is married to Bridget Woodward.
That fact has been public knowledge for years, but bloggers like Eric Kleefeld on TPM Election Central last week complained about the newspaper's coverage of the Senate race and its editorial against video "tracking" of Collins by supporters of her Democratic opponent, Rep. Tom Allen. (See TPM coverage here and here)
Mark Woodward said there is no conflict of interest in his work and denies slanting coverage in favor of Collins.
UPDATE: Mark Woodward, who also once worked as a press secretary to Collins, has recused himself from coverage of the race. So has Bangor Daily News assignment editor Tim Allen, whose responsibilities include politics. Tim Allen is a first cousin of Rep. Allen.
Posted by Danny at 10:56 PM | Comments (0)
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Bloggers Crashing The Watergate
Ask netroots cheerleaders Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and they'll tell you that bloggers are successfully "Crashing The Gate" of political Washington. Ask me and I'll tell you they're taking over the Atlantic Media building -- literally.
We have new blog tenants here at the Watergate building on New Hampshire Avenue in Washington. The Huffington Post has located its four-person Washington staff, including political editor Thomas Edsall (also a contributing editor at National Journal magazine), on the other side of the fifth floor from the corner we occupy at Technology Daily.
Add that bit of news to Atlantic Media's embrace of blogs, including six of them as of now at Atlantic.com, and National Journal's experiment with campaign embeds, and it's clear: The ivory tower is being overrun by the rabble!
Posted by Danny at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)
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So said Richard Cohen of The Washington Post in a cheapshot, throwaway line in his lame attempt at satire this week. Most political bloggers never leave the country, he said, and they are so stupid that all they read are "Harry Potter" books.
The column has generated a smattering of well-deserved derision and ridicule from the likes of Matthew Yglesias, Blog P.I., Daily Kos and Eschaton. I thought I'd join the party, playing off Kos' post about his travels by taking polls about bloggers' travel and reading habits.
First, here's the scoop on me: As I said in a post last month, I'm not a big fan of books in general and especially not fiction, but I probably read two to three books a year. I also don't travel outside the country much -- though more for budgetary reasons than a lack of desire (overseas trips with a wife and three children are a bit pricey).
My world travels thus far have been limited to Guatemala for three adoptions (1999, 2002 and 2005), to Russia on a religious mission (2004), and if travel to our northern neighbor counts, to Canada for an editorial writers' convention (1998). Where would I go if I could afford it? Australia, China and Japan for starters.
As for "Harry Potter" books, I haven't read any of them, but my mother is a huge fan and I bought her a Russian version of one of the books when I visited there. (No, she doesn't speak Russian, but the book is a conversation piece of sorts because folks want to know why a retired nurse in West Virginia has a "Harry Potter" book in Russian.) And I've seen all of the "Harry Potter" movies, usually on DVD but a couple of them in the theater. I just watched the most recent one while on vacation last week.
Now it's time for a poll of political bloggers and their readers. Go to the extended entry to share details about your travels, your book-reading habits and even your passion for Harry Potter.
Posted by Danny at 09:31 AM | Comments (1)
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FEC Exempts Daily Kos From Campaign Law
The Federal Election Commission yesterday reaffirmed its position that political blogs are not subject to campaign finance disclosures because they fall under the media exemption to the law.
AP, UPI and The Politico report that the unanimous decision was reached in response to a conservative blogger's complaint against the liberal blog Daily Kos. The ruling was expected in light of the FEC's decision last year not to regulate political blogs.
"The law was clear before today, and it's even clearer now," Daily Kos lawyer Adam Bonin wrote. "What this site does and what sites like this do is protected under federal law, and should not be the subject of baseless, time-consuming complaints." (Read the official Daily Kos response to the complaint here.)
Blogs from the left to the right praised the decision.
On the same day, the FEC unanimously dismissed another blog-related complaint. In that case, Rep. Mary Bono had accused blogger Michael Grace of coordinating with her Democratic opponent, David Roth, to defeat her last November.
The two cases combined send a strong message that the FEC does not want to regulate blogs under campaign finance law.
Posted by Danny at 01:29 PM | Comments (0)
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You Can't Trust Those 'Ideological Bloggers'
Blogs rose to prominence in the 2004 election in part based on their skills at fact-checking the political reporting of traditional journalists. Now four years later, one media outlet has turned the tables and accused "ideological bloggers" of manipulating the facts for the benefit of their favored candidates.
Neil Brown of the St. Petersburg Times, who brought me to Washington from West Virginia back in 1991 when he was a top editor at Congressional Quarterly, said in a Times opinion piece on Sunday that bloggers are at least part of the problem with today's political coverage.
He lumped them among"cynical political operatives, partisan pundits on cable TV and talk radio" as outlets that are "good at manipulating 'facts' to manufacture an aura of accuracy and attack those who would challenge them." Brown also lamented mainstream political reporting that he said too often "sticks to stenography and puffery" -- ironically, one of the gripes that bloggers themselves frequently aim at journalists.
The Times/CQ answer to the problem: PolitiFact.com, a Web site that will gauge the truthfulness of the presidential candidates' statements and advertisements.
Now if someone will just create a site that fact checks the truthfulness of those ideological bloggers, the new media revolution will have come full circle, with everyone playing watchdog on the work of everyone else.
Posted by Danny at 12:31 PM | Comments (0)
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'Blogs Can Backfire' -- But Keep Blogging
To hear Editor & Publisher tell it, Lesson No. 1 for newspapers to remember in the online era is that "blogs can backfire."
The journalism trade publication reached that conclusion in a piece about "online flops or failures" by newspapers as they gravitate toward the Web, with online and digital editors providing the evidence for the story. Self-describd Recovering Journalist Mark Potts, who co-founded washingtonpost.com, rightly noted that "every newspaper should be trying all of these things (and many more), over and over, until they get them right."
That's especially true of blogs. So a few newspapers goofed by thinking their readers would like a reality-television blog, a real-estate blog, or a series of poorly written citizen blogs and neglected staff-written blogs. That doesn't mean blogging itself is a risky venture for newspapers to embrace. It just means newspapers need to do a better job of picking their blog subjects and bloggers.
E&P admitted up front that some blogs have been successful. But then it tried to downplay that fact by highlighting a few that haven't been successful.
Let's hope a future issue of E&P recounts the newspaper blogs and other online journalism efforts that have worked. Smart newspapermen will look to them, rather than dwelling on flops and failures, if they want to survive in the inevitable digital future.
Take the advice of Potts who is fresh off a failure called Backfence.com but still high on the Internet as a news medium. "Stretch. Take chances. Don't fear failure," Potts wrote. "Don't be discouraged. Keep trying until you get it right. The future of the industry -- and your job -- depends on it."
Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media, himself an unsuccessful Web entrepreneur, had similar thoughts when Backfence failed 15 months after it bought his venture.
"Most startups fail. That is not a bad thing," Gillmor wrote. "It is a necessary thing because a tolerance for risk -- no, a need to embrace it -- is at the core of how good things eventually come from experimentation. It’s a vital part of how we learn, and improve"
Posted by Danny at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)
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A Timeline Of Blog Journalism
Jay Rosen has put to the lie the myth repeated this week by a colleague of his in journalism academia that bloggers do not produce journalism.
Journalism professor Michael Skube of Elon University in North Carolina made the charge in an anti-blog screed in the Los Angeles Times. The column prompted Rosen, a new media innovator and professor at New York University, to call Skube "an embarrassment to my profession" and urge his resignation.
But Rosen didn't stop there. He invited bloggers and his readers to help him compile a detailed response to Skube's piece for publication in the Times. That piece went online yesterday, and here's a timeline of the solid journalistic work by bloggers that Rosen highlighted (go to the Times for links and details):
-- 2003-present: Groklaw covers SCO vs. IBM
-- August 2004: Chris Allbritton goes to Najaf
-- September 2004: "Rather-gate"
-- August 2005: Unbossed.com does a series on toll roads
-- 2005-present: Citizens construct Katrina timeline
-- February 2006: EPluribusMedia series on post-traumatic stress
-- February 2006: Blogger's work spurs NASA resignation
-- August 2006: Porkbusters and others expose "secret hold"
-- December 2006: DallasFood.org investigates Noka Chocolate
-- December 2006-April 2007: TPM covers firings of U.S. attorneys
-- 2007-present: Blogger Michael Yon reports from Iraq
-- March 2007: Firedoglake at the Libby trial
-- June 2007: EdCone.com scoops paper on its own layoffs
-- June 2007: Pet-food scandal ignites blogosphere
And that list really only scratches the surface of what I dubbed "The Blog Journalism Movement" earlier this year. More recent developments are under way on "The New Campaign Media Frontier," and the next year or two seem certain to produce a steady stream of blog journalism.
I don't know Skube's work as a professor well enough to take a stand on whether he should resign from Elon. But any students there who want to get ahead in the new media world that Skube clearly mistrusts definitely should dismiss as uninformed any career advice from him -- and the Times should think twice about ever publishing his opinions about journalism again.
Posted by Danny at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)
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The New Campaign Media Frontier
Add MTV to the list of citizen media innovators in the 2008 campaign. The music network that made "Choose or Lose" a part of the political vocabulary is recruiting young folks from every state and the District of Columbia to write stories, produce online videos and take photos on the campaign trail.
The effort is being underwritten in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. MTV won a $700,000 grant for the mobile youth journalists in the Knight News Challenge
Here are more details from an MTV press release (via techRepublican):
Ideal candidates will have their fingers on the pulse of issues that are important to young people in their states and be passionate about politics and the possibilities of new technology. Strong writing and reporting skills are a must. A distinctive voice and an authoritative point of view? Even better.We'll load you up with some production gear and bring you to MTV's headquarters in New York City for orientation. In return, you will be expected to work in a paid, part-time capacity to file video, written or photographic stories weekly throughout the election year. Your pieces will be posted online and spread to mobile devices -- and the top stories will be broadcast on [MTV channels] each week.
MTV's team will focus on the campaign next year, with the citizen journalists working in their states from January to November, but similar efforts by old and new media already are under way.
In June, National Journal announced a partnership with NBC to hire "campaign embeds" for the primary season. The Huffington Post and journalism professor Jay Rosen of PressThink also are building a team of citizen journalists and professional mentors at a site called OffTheBus.
All of which makes this an exciting campaign cycle for people who want to report political news. Every journalism student with a passion for politics who is set to graduate in 2008 or 2009 should try to hitch their wagons to one of these innovation convoys. They may well be the best way to stake a claim on the new media frontier.
Posted by Danny at 02:36 PM | Comments (0)
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Gross Generalizations About Old And New Media
I spend a fair amount of my time here coming to the defense of blogs when journalists attack. Today a little role reversal is in order thanks to James Lewis at American Thinker, who in a rant against the press penned this gem about "The Media Mob":
Like other unaccountable elites, they are monumentally fickle, self-indulgent, snobbish, vain, vulgar, entitled, incestuous, arrogant, ignorant, unprincipled, hysterical, and demagogic. They sound like a unified chorus for the same reasons that street mobs run as a group -- because by and large, they don't dare to stand alone.
Were a journalist to write something like that about blogs, the blogosphere would be up in rhetorical arms, and rightfully so. Journalists should be no less furious when bloggers engage in such unhinged, stereotypical blather. It is especially bizarre to hear Lewis, whether rightly or wrongly, bashing the media as a "mob" when bloggers pride themselves on their ability to "swarm." There's no difference between the two behaviors.
Two columns in The Washington Post precipitated Lewis' insulting invective, but he didn't limit his criticism to just two journalists. Instead, he tarred the entire media with the same broad brush. That's exactly what journalists do to bloggers, and it's unfair in either direction.
Many of the same adjectives that Lewis hurled at journalists -- and plenty of others -- have been aimed at bloggers by journalists. This week's anti-blog screed in the Los Angeles Times is a perfect example. Here's a nugget from journalism professor Michael Skube that adopted a tone as derisive as Lewis' blog post:
One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background -- these would not seem to be a blogger's trademarks.
Skube's commentary undoubtedly is true of specific bloggers, but he clearly has contempt for the blogosphere as a whole. Ironically, Skube is now the legitimate subject of blogger scorn for engaging in shoddy journalism after admitting that he hadn't even read some of the specific blogs named in his piece.
Sometimes the outrage about both journalists and bloggers is warranted, and sometimes it's intentionally exaggerated to make a point. But too often, the criticisms cross the line into inexcusable bigotry. The critics become like the very people they revile.
It's just plain wrong to demean an entire segment of the media, whether old or new, based on the flaws of a few practioners within it. The modern media world would be a far better place if the converging interests would crank the cynicism and animosity down a notch or three.
Oh, how I wish Jay Rosen, a more enlightened journalism professor than Skube, had been right back in January 2005 when he said "Bloggers vs. Journalists Is Over." Alas, the rivalry is still going strong, and it has left both fighters with eyes swollen shut.
Posted by Danny at 11:18 AM | Comments (3)
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Sen. Dodd's Defense Of Daily Kos
Sen. Christopher Dodd and Fox News talk-show host Bill O'Reilly clashed on the air last night about whether the liberal blog Daily Kos, the subject of a celebration in Chicago this weekend, is a "hate site." O'Reilly said yes; Dodd countered that O'Reilly is unfairly tarnishing a huge online community by highlighting the random misdeeds of a few users.
The video of the encounter is going viral through the blogosphere as I write. Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and his friends said Dodd crushed O'Reilly; conservative blogger Michelle Malkin said O'Reilly "shredded" Dodd. Dodd's campaign also claimed victory.
It's the blogosphere's equivalent of the spin room after a presidential debate!
Watch the video (below), read the account in The Hartford Courant, and decide for yourself. As Fox News' motto says, "We report. You decide."
Posted by Danny at 09:10 AM | Comments (1)
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YearlyKos vs. BlogHer
The media have converged on Chicago for the second annual YearlyKos Convention that began today, and tens of thousands of words are bound to be written about the event before everyone leaves town after the weekend.
But where were all the journalists a week ago when the BlogHer conference was held in the same locale? That's what Jennifer Pozner, the founder and executive director of Women in Media and News, wants to know. She thinks America's great female bloggers deserve as much attention as the "blustering A-list boys of the 'netroots.'"
"If many believe that blogging is a primarily male sport, it is partially because old-school gender disparities in resource allocation, power and popularity long entrenched in traditional news media are replicating themselves online," Pozner wrote in an article for the Women's Media Center.
"In the blogosphere, young men -- mostly white and mostly economically comfortable -- link to, write about, promote and fund their buddies' blogs; and corporate media play star-makers, quoting, profiling and featuring the punditry of this New Boys Network."
Posted by Danny at 08:41 PM | Comments (0)
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As noted in Technology Daily this morning
The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday approved a bill designed to shield journalists, including bloggers, from federal prosecution for protecting confidential sources.
CongressDaily and News.com report that the bill was approved by voice vote, despite numerous complaints that its definition of who is a journalist and exactly what protections would be available still need work.
The bill states that federal prosecutors may not compel testimony from journalists unless a crime has been committed, to prevent terrorism or or protect national security, or if prosecutors prove that the "public interest" in disclosure is greater than in disseminating news."
Posted by Danny at 09:28 AM | Comments (0)
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The Bureaucracy's View Of Blogs As Media
The federal bureaucracy isn't known for consistency in anything, and that includes its approach to the blogosphere. Hence the mixed messages about blogs as media being sent by agencies like the CIA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The CIA took the view that bloggers are journalists, too, when it recently decided to waive the fees for Freedom of Information Act requests filed by bloggers. Professional journalists have long been exempt from the printing costs associated with fulfilling FOIA requests, but citizen journalists pose a conundrum for a system that charges citizens and not journalists.
GovExec.com reported earlier this month that the CIA decided to err on the side of inclusiveness when adopting new FOIA fee rules. It embraced a broad defininition of "news media" drafted by the White House in 1987 in an attempt to encompass emerging technologies like blogs.
ABC's The Blotter noted that the CIA's move may not change much in practice because the bulk of its information is classified.
But Stop The ACLU offered this thought: "What I like is not that much that the CIA has extended its FOIA privileges to bloggers but that it sets a precedent for other governmental agencies, organizations and institutions."
Recent news involving the ATF, on the other hand, shows that some bureaucrats are hostile to the idea of citizen journalism. The agency has been investigating Red's Trading Post in Twin Falls, Idaho, for firearms violations, and the manager of the shop, Ryan Horsley, has been blogging about the investigation. On a recent ATF visit, a supporter of Horsley's took some photographs of the ATF in action.
That didn't sit well with the agency, so it complained about the episodes in a filing with the U.S. district court in Idaho. ATF said the person at Red's taking photos with a digital camera "did not have any affiliation with any newspaper or news agency" and argued that "instantaneous entries on Mr. Horsley's blog created a safety concern for the inspectors."
The ATF quoted a "recent posting" -- an anonymous comment, actually, and Horsley removed it -- that said ATF agents are "a band of jack-booted, counterdicting, lying, lowlife criminals that should be hung from the nearest tree and left there until their flesh rotts [sic] off."
Blogs that are critical of ATF defended Horsley and the rights of other bloggers to document ATF activities.
"I repeat my call for a rapid-response team of 'minuteman' volunteers to make themselves available via a phone tree to go to gun stores being audited, and audit/document/photograph the auditors," David Codrea wrote at The War On Guns. "Don't let creatures of the shadows hide there -- expose them to the light and make them live there -- or cravenly slink back under the baseboards where they belong."
Posted by Danny at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
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Round Two Of The YearlyKos Obsession
In June 2006, bloggers and mainstream media alike treated their audience to never-ending coverage and commentary of the first annual YearlyKos Convention. It looks like we're in for more of the same this week as the Daily Kos community gathers in Chicago.
For a taste of the coverage that seems sure to come, here's a preview from the San Francisco Chronicle:
The second annual gathering of the Daily Kos political blog starts this week in Chicago, and here's all you need to know about how influential the YearlyKos convention has become: Five top presidential candidates are going -- including front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, even though the Kos bloggers don't like her that much. ...Another sign of the growing power of the Daily Kos convention is that none of the attending Democratic hopefuls -- including Sens. Barack Obama and Chris Dodd, former Sen. John Edwards and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson -- are scheduled to appear at the Democratic Leadership Council gathering this weekend in Tennessee. The DLC is the moderate organization that former President Bill Clinton led for two years before beginning his successful campaign for the White House in 1992.
"It's hilarious that (Hillary Clinton's) not even attending her own group," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the Berkeley resident who founded Daily Kos in 2002.
The burst of fairly positive YearlyKos coverage last year was quickly followed by a rush of critical stories about the ethics of Kos and his friends. We'll see soon enough whether that pattern repeats itself this year.
Posted by Danny at 08:37 PM | Comments (0)
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Kingpin Kos: 'Remember To Be Polite'
I agree with the folks who think the Fox News crusade against JetBlue for its role in the YearlyKos convention next week is misguided, and the contention that Daily Kos is a "hate site" is ridiculous.
On the other hand, now that Daily Kos and other liberal blogs have launched a counter-crusade against Fox News and its advertisers like Home Depot and Lowe's, it is amusingly ironic that Kingpin Kos still has to send admonitions like this to his minions: "Remember to be polite when e-mailing. If your e-mail looks anything like the winger hate mail I'm getting, it won't be effective at all."
He wouldn't be writing warnings like that unless he knew his community was capable of generating the same kind of "hate mail" as Daily Kos critics.
Posted by Danny at 11:51 AM | Comments (2)
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Is Fox News Out To Get Bloggers?
Brave New Films thinks so and has plenty of evidence to bolster that view in this video mash-up of on-air Fox attacks against liberal bloggers. The closing message: "Sign up to become a Fox attacker. Tell the advertisers to stop endorsing Fox."
By way of reminder, Bill O'Reilly is the general in the latest attack, which is aimed at the JetBlue airline for aiding and abetting the enemy bloggers who will gather at the YearlyKos convention in Chicago next week.
Liberal bloggers also are attacking conservative blogger and Fox commentator Michelle Malkin, saying that she actually runs the kinds of hate sites that Fox condemns.
Posted by Danny at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)
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Experiments In Online Journalism
Assignment Zero, a journalistic venture the involves professionals and amateurs, started its publishing phase with a series of stories in Wired. The articles focus on "crowdsourcing" and online collaboration, the very idea being pursued through Assignment Zero.
Here are links to the articles:
1) "Can Crowds Create Fiction, Architecture and Photography?"
2) "Open-Source Journalism: It's A Lot Tougher Than You Think"
3) "Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book"
4) "Your Assignment: Art"
5) "Stock Waves: Citizen Photojournalists Are Changing The Rules"
All of the interviews conducted for the series also are available in blog format.
Congresspedia, meanwhile, has been expanding its own experiment in online collaboration. The site is a "wiki" project of the Sunlight Foundation that allows anyone to write and edit entries of policy and political topic. It now includes a legislation and issues portal that includes extensive background on the following topics:
1) Culture
2) Economy
3) Education
4) Elections and government
5) Energy and environment
6) Food and agriculture
7) Health
8) Infrastructure and transportation
9) Labor, immigration and retirement
10) National security and foreign affairs
11) Rights, liberties and courts
12) Science and technology
13) Social policy
14) Telecom, media and intellectual property
Posted by Danny at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)
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Blog Power On Display In The Annals Of Congress
A recent report on the blogging revolution in government that included a handful of footnotes to my work here reminded me that I hadn't searched the Congressional Record for blog references lately.
When I finally did a search last week on references within the first six months of this year, I was surprised by how often blogs are making it into the annals of Congress these days. Several of the references, including multiple ones by Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa, laud blogs for their ability to serve as government watchdogs. Lawmakers also have quoted blogs to emphasize their viewpoints about the Iraq war.
Blogs most recently garnered attention when House Republicans last month criticized "pork" spending earmarks in appropriations bills and forced the Democratic leadership to change its stance on the issue. Porkbusters, a blog-inspired group whose primary mission is to curtail earmarks, created enough of a stir during debate about the fiscal 2008 homeland security bill to earn a plug on the House floor.
During floor debate on the bill, Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., quoted part of a Porkbusters petition offering to help Congress evaluate earmark requests. "[V]olunteers are now coming forward, and the American people are standing ready and they will be willing to help," Lamborn said.
Iowa's King added that "if the bloggers could see the things that are going on, they would weigh in on us, and perhaps that would be some of the regulatory function that the bloggers could perform."
Earlier in the year, lawmakers turned to the blogs for information during their debates about sending more U.S. troops to Iraq. In the Senate on Jan. 31, for example, Texas Republican John Cornyn quoted from the "Why I Joined" MySpace entry of Army Second Lt. Mark Daily, who was later killed in Iraq.
Hugh Hewitt and Michelle Malkin were among the prominent bloggers who cited Daily's words.
As the Iraq debate continued Feb. 7, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had this admonition for senators who might be tempted to respond to pressure from bloggers: "I know what it is like. I have been through this on immigration. Once your base gets mad at you, it is not pleasant, but you can't build policies around bloggers." (Graham has been under even heavier fire from bloggers in recent weeks because of his work on an immigration bill.)
Amid House debate in February, meanwhile, Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., inserted into the Record a quote from a military blog that warned: "If the Democrats block these troops, we're screwed. We need them." And Rep. Jerry Weller, R-Ill., separately quoted from another milblog.
While the Democratic netroots get more public attention than GOP blogs for their innovation and influence in political circles, thus far they have not received as much recognition during official congressional debates.
Even on the subject of the Iraq war, the topic that most animates the netroots, an online search of the Record yielded only one hit about blogs by a Democrat -- and a noncontroversial one at that. In May, Rep. John Salazar of Colorado highlighted a comment about an "immigrant soldier" on a site created to honor fallen soldiers.
For several more blog references from the Record this year, click here.
Posted by Danny at 07:12 AM | Comments (1)
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Rep. Steve King has been talking up the blogosphere on a regular basis this year. A search of the Congressional Record for use of terms like "blog" and "bloggers" during the first six months of this year shows that the Iowa Republican has praised the work of bloggers at least a half-dozen times, typically as justification for his proposals to bring more transparency to government.
Here are excerpts from King's comments on the House floor
Jan. 5 (second day of 110th Congress): "[L]et us say there is a crazy appropriation out here that got slipped into a bill. ... Let us just say that the blogosphere out there is lit up, that people go to their Web pages, and they scrutinize the work that we do. We need to give them a lot of access to do that because they are the next watchdogs on this Congress.
It used to be that the watchdogs sat in this gallery, and many do, and I am glad they are here. ... Well, now we are real time. ... [I]t is even better now because we have an Internet, we have a blogosphere. ... I submit that we should submit ourselves, Madam Speaker, to the scrutiny of the blogosphere; that we should have FEC reporting, campaign finance reporting in real time in a searchable, sortable, downloadable format that will allow anyone out there in America that has access to a computer or to the Internet to go click on that information."
Jan. 11: "I am for sunlight on everything that we can provide, and I am for real-time reporting. Every American has access to the Internet today. Whether they own a computer at home or go to the library, they can sit down to a computer. And I believe all of the records, the records of the lobbyists' contributions to members of Congress."
Jan. 30: "[T]his is an instantaneous information age if we give access on the Internet to the people in this country. ... We need to let them have real-time bloggers be able to access all of the bills that are filed, all of the amendments that are filed. They need to be able to track this whole process."
March 8: "I would love to see television cameras up before the Rules Committee as well, Mr. Speaker. I think that will help the decorum of the Rules Committee."
May 24: "[T]he language that I offered in the lobby reform bill that passed the floor today and was eventually included in the bill was the requirement that the information be posted on the Internet in a searchable, sortable, downloadable format that would allow the bloggers across the country to be able to go on the Internet and see what is going on with campaign donations and those activities between the lobby and the members of Congress.
In another statement about the lobbying bill that day, King said transparency in the legislative process "turns loose and activates the bloggers across the country. ... There will be new blogs that will open up. There will be others that will be activated and animated."
June 13: "If the bloggers could see the things that are going on [with pork-barrel spending], they
would weigh in on us, and perhaps that would be some of the regulatory function that the bloggers could perform."
Posted by Danny at 07:00 AM | Comments (0)
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As bloggers gain prominence in political and media circles inside the Beltway, as well as throughout American culture, they are getting more official recognition from lawmakers in the form of notations in the Congressional Record. Searches for January through June yielded the following hits (and more passsing references):
Jan. 17
Blogs were a subject of debate during Senate consideration of a lobbying reform bill, particularly a provision aimed at "astroturf groups."
"What happens if someone goes on the Internet and urges everybody who sees his blog to write Congress and then makes the mistake of hiring somebody and paying him to write that notice on the blog?" said Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah. "Has that not created a lobbyist for hire? Somebody finds out the man who created the message on the blog got paid and files a complaint. I don't know what the lawyers would do with it, whether he would end up paying the $200,000, but I do know what he would run up in legal fees to protect himself against that kind of situation."
April 12
While discussing the fiscal 2008 budget and tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, critiqued the opinions of bloggers at Daily Kos and entered two of the posts into the Congressional Record.
April 19
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, lauded the Supreme Court's Gonzalez v. Carhart decision that upheld a federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortion and condemned the "anti-Catholic venom" of one "citizen agitator" he quoted from Daily Kos in response to the ruling.
March 20
During a debate about assault weapons, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., cited a blog posting in opposition to the guns that hurt the career of longtime hunter and writer Jim Zumbo of Outdoor Life. The magazine severed its relationship with Zumbo, and the publication's blog no longer exists. Zumbo's controversial entry and subsequent apology were reprinted at Hunting Sense. "We all owe Jim Zumbo a debt of gratitude for his forthrightness, his honesty and his courage," Levin said.
May 9
Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee noted in an insert into the Record that a blog, rather than the Homeland Security Department, discovered a security flaw on a Transportation Security Administration Web site that contains the personal information of air travelers. The insecurity, subsequently reported at the Security Fix blog of The Washington Post, existed for four months and eight days.
June 6
During a discussion about the efforts of House Democrats' "30-Something Working Group," freshman Rep. Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania called attention to the role bloggers played in getting him elected and their subsequent interest in the working group. He specifically praised Philadelphia-based bloggers like Duncan Black of Eschaton and Chris Bowers, until recently of MyDD.
May 25
In a statement upon introducing a resolution, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., cited a soldier's comment at the Military Times blog in support of pay raises for the military. Kerry's resolution would express the Senate's view that basic pay for the armed forces should be increased.
Jan. 29
Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., touted the benefits of globalization by saying they "can be seen every single time that a Chinese blogger gets past government censors or a U.S. company trains factory owners in Thailand in worker rights and protections.
June 21
Upon recognizing the 18,000th Senate vote case by fellow Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois said, "Senator Byrd is a hero among bloggers and so many others because of his unyielding dedication to our Constitution and his obvious love of our nation and the principles for which it stands."
May 21
Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., mentioned "some blog" he had read that, as McDermott did in his House speech, raised questions about the Bush administration's diligence in trying to solve the murder of gun-control activist and former assistant U.S. attorney Thomas Wales.
May 16
Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., encouraged fellow lawmakers to visit the blog about the Congressional Food-Stamp Challenge, during which lawmakers live on a $3-a-day food budget: " It is not easy eating on $3 a day," McGovern said. "But it is nothing compared to the hardship faced by millions of Americans every single day." Days later, he mentioned comments on the blog.
April 19
In extended remarks entered into the Record, Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia recognized Bob Keegan upon his retirement as deputy director of CDC's global immunization division, including his work in starting CDC Chatter, "an unofficial blog for CDC employees.
June 7
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, quoted from the comments to a Sioux City Journal blog entry in praise of former Rep. Wiley Mayne after Mayne died at age 90 on May 27. King said he entered the excerpts so history will record how Mayne inspired people "to go to the keyboard and type some words in to post on a blog."
Jan. 17
Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-Va., honored NASCAR legend Benny Parsons after he died of lung cancer Jan. 16. "Even at his sickest moments," she said, "he had set up a Web blog for his fans, continually sharing his optimism that he would recover and that the will to fight is so important."
June 26
In separate written statements for the Record, Reps. Deborah Pryce and Patrick Tiberi of Ohio lauded Worthington Libraries for being selected "Library of the Year" by Library Journal, including for innovations like its teen blog and MySpace page.
Posted by Danny at 06:55 AM | Comments (0)
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New Jersey Blogger Gets Press Pass Yanked
The New Jersey Law and Public Safety Department has yanked the press pass of a blogger who earlier this year was granted permission to officially cover the state legislature's activities in Trenton. State police cited "security issues" in reversing the decision.
The blogger in question is statehouse correspondent Jay Lassiter of Blue Jersey. The New York Times profiled him yesterday, after the press pass was revoked:
Mr. Lassiter -- who has never applied for press credentials from the New Jersey Press Association -- said he was told by the police that he did not qualify for an identification card because Blue Jersey did not have an office here. He can enter the statehouse to conduct his reporting, he said, but instead of circumventing security and metal detectors with an official ID, he must be issued a visitor’s badge.The new crop of blogger-reporters -- they have also cropped up at the capitols in California, Tennessee and Georgia, among other states -- have made legislators and journalists wary. Some of them do not consider bloggers worthy of credentials.
"A lot of these guys are fairly partisan, so I have concerns about opening the full membership to people who are not in a traditional sense objective reporters," John L. Micek, the president of the Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents’ Association, told State Legislatures magazine in January.
"We couldn't be more proud of Jay for going where no blogger has gone before, right down into the thick of things in Trenton," Scott Shields, who was the Internet communications director U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., in last year's campaign, wrote at Blue Jersey. "Here's hoping he's reporting from the Capitol for some time to come."
(Hat tip to Jersey Blogs.)
CLARIFICATION/UPDATE: I attributed the decision about the press pass to the state's attorney general after misreading the blurb at PoliticsNJ.com. The attorney general is the head of the Law and Public Safety Department, but Blue Jersey editor Juan Melli e-mailed to say that he doesn't think the attorney general had any direct involvement in the decision. I've corrected the lead paragraph above.
I also added the word "officially" to the lead because Melli emphasized that Lassiter was covering the legislature before he received the press pass and will continue to do so. "In practice, this changes little to nothing," Melli said.
Maybe so in practice, but it's a symbolic setback for bloggers. New Jersey could have been at the forefront of redefining "press." Now they've moved to the back of a long line of other states -- and Congress -- who are bound by outdated traditions of journalism. That's a shame for New Jersey and the country.
Posted by Danny at 01:32 PM | Comments (2)
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Mother Jones And 'Politics 2.0'
The Mother Jones article I mentioned in a recent "Blog Bits" post was part of a larger package on "Politics 2.0" that is generating some heated discussion in the blogosphere.
You can read the reactions at The Bivings Report, Left In The West, PressThink, techPresident, and even in numerous posts at MoJoBlog (go here, here, here and here).
The negative reaction from bloggers is pretty consistent with my quote in the article "Meet The New Bosses": "I've been surprised at how thin-skinned bloggers can be. You compare that with how they treat the mainstream media and how they'll go after them and attack them, but when anything at all is said about the blogosphere, they go off half-cocked."
Unfortunately, nothing else I said in a lengthy conversation with reporter Daniel Schulman made it into print, including the fact that I disagreed with his very thesis -- that an elite group of mafia-type bosses in the liberal blogosphere controls lesser bloggers and intimidates traditional power brokers.
Many bloggers, including at least one quoted by Schulman, have challenged the would-be bosses of the left blogosphere. And while this blog is dedicated to the proposition that blogs have and are gaining power, I also have noted that they have only as much power as the establishment is willing to cede -- at least until Election Day, when influential bloggers can redirect the "power of the people" to a new establishment.
All of which is to say that there is no Boss Tweed of the blogosphere, and I don't think there ever will be.
As I told Schulman, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos and his cronies may want great political power (despite their protestations to the contrary). They may even grab it one day and ultimately be corrupted by their absolute power. But the open, democratic nature of the online world will leave the door wide open for Kos 2.0 -- the Anti-Kos -- to fill the populist vacuum and become the thorn in the side of the new bosses.
Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident made much the same point when talking to Schulman. "It's true that Josh Marshall and Markos Moulitsas are very influential, but they are constantly held accountable by their audience," Sifry said. "If Markos makes a mistake, right there in the blog comments people are bashing him. He can't stray that far from accountability, the way that editors of the old gatekeeping institutions ... were inherently insulated."
Ironically, Mother Jones actually offered the "Meet The New Bosses" assignment to me, but I declined because I've cut back on freelance work (too many obligations at my day job and my own side project, AirCongress). I'll just say that it would have been quite a different article if I had written it -- or it would have been killed because I disagreed with the pre-determined thesis.
The point Jay Rosen of PressThink made about the "writing and framing" of the article -- the tone, in other words -- is a legitimate criticism.
That said, once again bloggers are going off half-cocked against a mainstream publication that decided to take a critical and important look at the work they do. Schulman did a decent job with his story. He gave voice to numerous bloggers, even those who had different viewpoints. And the overall "Politics 2.0" package raises some issues that merit consideration by bloggers, politicians, new media experts and journalists.
The magazine also deserves praise (and has received some) for its outreach to bloggers upset by the coverage.
So lighten up, bloggers. Listen for a change, and if you still disagree with Schulman and everyone else at Mother Jones, fine. At least you will have listened and reached a rational conclusion rather than just jerking your knee one more time.
FOOTNOTE: More commentary on the Mother Jones series at The American Mind and The Moderate Voice.
UPDATE: A similar discussion about the bosses of talk radio is raging in the Republican blogosphere these days in the wake of the Senate's immigration debate. Interestingly, Dean Barnett of Townhall noted Kos' influence and how Democratic leaders react to it to make a point about the relationship between talk radio and the GOP. Here's an excerpt:
In the Beltway’s eyes, Markos leads a movement of progressives in the blogosphere. But this is inaccurate, and Markos would be the first to tell you so. Markos doesn’t lead the movement. He stands in front of it and is symbolic of it, but the movement’s direction and interests flow directly from the people who compose it. The movement is a bottom-up thing, not something that a guy leads from the top.It’s probably comforting for Democratic politicians to believe that Markos leads the movement in the progressive blogosphere. That being the case, all they have to do is soothe the savage breasts of Markos and other rabble-rousing bloggers and then get back to business as usual. That’s why Democratic politicians are so unfailingly solicitous of the liberal bloggers.
But it doesn’t work like that. If Markos came out tomorrow and said he’s supporting Hillary, the people who read his blog would tell him to pound sand. They would keep reading his blog, but they wouldn’t open their hearts or their wallets for Hillary.
Posted by Danny at 07:21 PM | Comments (10)
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Big Bucks For New Media Innovation
The Searle Freedom Trust wants to hear from bloggers, podcasters and video producers with great new media ideas "to foster research and encourage public policies that promote individual freedom and economic liberty" -- and its willing to pay grants of up to $250,000 for them.
"Proposals that may hold particular interest, the trust said in an online request for proposals, "include fellowships for bloggers who focus on government spending, tort reform or problems in higher education; projects that encourage emerging filmmakers and video producers and help them develop their talent; and podcasting."
As an incentive to write a proposal and submit it to John J. Miller, take a look at this funding for past ideas:
-- $100,000 for a think tank to produce “viral videos” on government intervention;
-- $100,000 for an organization to sponsor film and Web-video internships;
-- $75,000 for a Web site to host a contest of free-market videos;
-- $27,000 for a contest to encourage blogging on campus issues by college students;
-- And $100,000 for a think tank to produce and market a video on an issue central to its mission.
Pitches are due by Oct. 1 and will be considered at the trust's December meeting. The guidelines state that proposals "should include a project description, budget and supporting materials, including a list of key supporters. Evidence of an organization's nonprofit status is also required."
Posted by Danny at 03:37 PM | Comments (1)
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Bloggers To Get Credentials For Candidate Forum
This bit of good news on the credentialing front comes from the Media Bloggers Association, of which I am a member:
PBS has set aside a limited number of media credentials for bloggers who wish to cover the upcoming "All-American Presidential Forums on PBS" hosted by Tavis Smiley, to be held June 28, 9-10:30 p.m. at Howard University in Washington.
Bloggers have until Friday (10 days more than the mainstream press had) to contact MBA President Robert Cox about getting credentials. The participating bloggers will have wireless Internet access in the media room and "will have the same post-event access to candidates as other credentialed media."
This is an excellent development. Will the YouTube video-sharing site do the same for the debates it is co-hosting with CNN in South Carolina and Florida? It should. And one of these days, maybe Congress will wake up and decide to credential bloggers, too.
Posted by Danny at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)
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From Jail To 'The Colbert Report'
Blogger Josh Wolf spent nearly eight months in jail for refusing to turn over a videotape to police investigating protestors at an anti-globalization rally, but hey, at least it got him five minutes of fame on "The Colbert Report."
He held his own with Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, too, though it's kind of tough to make a reasoned case about free speech on a comedy show. Click the link above to watch the episode.
Posted by Danny at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)
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Two online specialists who worked for the 2004 Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry have decided to try their hand at journalism in the 2008 race.
Zack Exley and Amanda Michel have joined the OffTheBus new media team being recruited by blogger Arianna Huffington and journalism professor Jay Rosen. Michel will be the project director, and Exley will be a senior adviser and traveling correspondent.
As described by Huffington and Rosen back in March, OffTheBus aims to get citizens across the country involved in covering the leading presidential candidates over the next two years. The writers they recruit will have blogs dedicated to each of the campaigns.
"Of all the people we talked to and interviewed for this project, Zack and Amanda were the ones who really understood what we are trying to accomplish," Huffington wrote in a new post about the project. "They are prime examples of a new breed of young people who get politics, get the Internet, get journalism -- and see how citizen journalism can completely change the dynamics of the game."
Rosen said the two already have had an impact by convincing him and Huffington to make the blogging platform for OffTheBus more open than originally planned. The plans as of now, according to Rosen, include:
-- An open blogging platform with a filter-to-the-front-page system for culling the best stuff;
-- A corps of bloggers, some of whom may wish to track particular candidates or develop beats;
-- A larger pool of occasional collaborators for "distributed reporting";
-- A network of volunteer experts in areas like election law;
-- Disclosure forms and routines that describe contributors' political views;
-- And professional editors and writers to mentor and consult with the bloggers.
"I’m really looking forward to this," Exley wrote. "In 2000, I watched the presidential race as a … well … Internet crank ... publishing a parody site and making various other kinds of trouble. In 2004, oddly enough, I got to experience the race from the inside. This time, I’ll be observing as a journalist."
At least one blogger and former journalist, Rob Bluey of the Heritage Foundation's Center for Media and Public Policy (where I serve on the advisory board), is skeptical about "Political Operatives Acting As Journalists":
It’s an admirable goal, but Huffington comes at it with a partisan agenda. What’s confusing is the choice of liberal political operatives Amanda Michel and Zack Exley to lead it. ... I’m sure they’re both extremely talented, but I think it’s a mistake to put political organizers ... in charge of what strives to be an alternative form of journalism.Huffington could prove me wrong, but I fear this project could devolve into something far different from what’s being advertised.
Posted by Danny at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)
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Administration Opposes 'Shield' For Bloggers
Washington state thinks bloggers deserve a "shield" to protect their anonymous sources, but top law enforcers in this Washington remain opposed to the idea even after tweaks to a pending bill on the topic.
Here's a summary from Friday's AM Edition of Technology Daily:
The Bush administration still opposes legislation to shield reporters from being forced by federal prosecutors to reveal sources, even after the bill's sponsors added exceptions for national security, a Justice Department official said Thursday.CongressDaily and News.com report that one of the bill's sponsors, Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said it was changed in hopes of getting administration support for a federal shield law similar to those enacted in 32 states and the District of Columbia. The legislation would let prosecutors compel disclosure in certain cases, such as to prevent "imminent and actual" harm to national security or imminent death or bodily harm.
But Assistant Attorney General Rachel Brand said the proposal, which also would protect some bloggers, is too broad. "The definition is just so broad that it really includes anyone who wants to post something to the Web," she said.
That position is consistent with what a U.S. attorney told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 2005 hearing on similar legislation.
Like Washington state, the latest state to enact a shield law, Texas has been considering a shield law. But the issue of whether to extend the protection to bloggers has been an issue there as well. Earlier this year, the sponsor of the legislation said it could not cover bloggers and still win passage, and when the state House rebuffed the bill in late May, that issue reportedly was a concern.
Even though the measure was written to exclude bloggers, apparently not everyone was convinced, according to Jeremy Warren, a spokesman for Senate Democratic bill sponsor Rodney Ellis. "There was concern over language difference," he said. "The National Manufacturers Association felt that the bill would include bloggers."
Count Rob Port of Say Anything as one blogger who doesn't think bloggers (or journalists) should have a shield to protect sources -- because he thinks the sources should be willing to take the heat for leaking information to the press.
"If some bureaucrat or partisan politician feels there is a government secret that the public simply must know about, let that bureaucrat or politician attach their name to the leak so that the public can decide whether or not the leak was justified and whether or not the person in question should be held accountable for the leak under the law," he wrote. "That way anyone thinking of leaking will think twice, as opposed to the leaking 'open season' that would exist should shield laws come into existence."
Posted by Danny at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)
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'Blogging Is A Way Of Getting The News'
This argument, made in a newspaper editorial after the NCAA booted a blogger at another paper from a baseball game for doing his job, is a milestone admission by a mainstream media organization:
Blogging is simply a quicker way of getting news than waiting for the end of a game. It doesn’t disrupt the game, and it’s a medium ground between print and live broadcast. It is neither print nor broadcast but combines aspects of both. The NCAA should review the case and make a reasonable ruling that live blogging during games is allowed.
Granted, The Muskogee Phoenix, where the editorial appeared, doesn't hold much sway outside its circulation area in Oklahome (if it has any influence there). But the newspaper's argument that blogging is a medium for breaking news is a big deal.
With MSM outlets embracing blogs as news tools, they can't help but make that argument. And once they make it for themselves, it will be harder to deny that anyone who uses blogs in like fashion, whether an amateur or a professional, deserves the same kind of treatment.
Doors will open to bloggers. They will get more credentials, as they should. And the media profession and its readers/listeners will be the better for it.
Let the convergence continue.
UPDATE: I'm guessing that Andrew Keen, the author of the new book "Cult Of The Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture" a, would disagree. He despises the interactivity of Web 2.0, the emergence of user-generated content, and what he called "a cacophany of amateurs" in an interview with National Public Radio.
Here is his thinking in a nutshell: "I prefer the wisdom of the professional" to bloggers and people who write content for the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Posted by Danny at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)
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Blog Credentials In College Sports -- And Congress
Some journalists were crying First Amendment foul earlier this week when the NCAA ejected a writer from a college baseball championship game for live-blogging the event. I disagree.
The league's decision was an ignorant and backward PR blunder, and it should be challenged by all means possible -- especially ones that will annoy the NCAA. But the First Amendment does not guarantee anyone the right to a press credential.
The reporter, Brian Bennett of the Louisville Courier-Journal, broke the conditions placed on receiving the credential, so the NCAA had every right to revoke it, even if it was unwise to do so. Some of Bennett's own readers said he was at fault.
"When you accept a credential, you also accept the conditions that go with it," a blogger at AOL's Fanhouse noted. "And when it comes to adjusting to new technologies, it's up to individual bloggers, whether we work independently or for a larger organization to explain to the party who issues the credential that they ought to make some sort of allowance."
The good news from this confrontation is that media professionals defended blogging as a form of journalism worthy of a press credential. So the next step for the mainstreamers at the Courier-Journal and elsewhere is to defend that right not only for themselves but for pure bloggers.
That's exactly what Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association (of which I'm a member) thinks should happen. "I would suggest the NCAA not only reconsider a policy which prohibits 'live-blogging' from NCAA events by credentialed journalists," he told Knoxville, Tenn., journalist/blogger Michael Silence, "but reach out to bloggers through organizations like the Media Bloggers Association to bring in qualified individuals and credential them to have more 'live-blogging.'"
And that's what I think should happen, too -- not just in the sports world but also in Congress. It's time for the elite press to ease the credentialing process and open the people's house to more of the people independently involved in a blog journalism movement.
Follow the lead of the United Nations and the U.S. court system.
Posted by Danny at 07:25 PM | Comments (0)
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Here's some hot news: National Journal Group and NBC News will expand the political reporting partnership started last year by embedding reporters with presidential campaigns. The venture promises lots of blogging, audio and video.
From our company press release:
Beginning this summer and reaching full strength as the campaigns swing into high gear, these campaign reporters will blog and file video, audio and text dispatches from the trail for NBC News, National Journal, The Hotline, CongressDaily, MSNBC, MSNBC.com, NBC Mobile, NBC Radio and Telemundo. ...Based on the success of NBC News’ campaign embeds from the last presidential election, this cycle of reporters will also be dedicated video-journalists, each of whom will serve as their own mobile campaign bureaus (reporter, producer, cameraperson and blogger), armed with the latest technology for both video and text. The “Decision 2008” campaign reporters will also provide viewers and readers with behind-the-scenes coverage and unprecedented insider access to news and information about the candidates and their top advisors.
Posted by Danny at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)
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Blogs? What Are Blogs?
I can't believe newspapers are still writing introductory stories like this about the blogosphere:
Four months ago, they didn't exist on the Poughkeepsie Journal Web site. Today, they're one of the ways the newspaper connects with people who want good information on topics they're into and want to talk to other people about them.I'm talking about blogs -- the five letters near the top of the list of the latest techno buzzwords. If you haven't heard, "blogs'' is short for "web logs.'' They're online resources of information for niche audiences that are written informally in a diary-like style.
Blogs haven't been a "techno buzzword" for, oh, at least three years now; they're as mainstream as you get today. It just goes to show how technologically backward too many journalists are. Some folks are already talking about Web 3.0, and some newspapers haven't even discovered Web 2.0 yet. That's sad.
Posted by Danny at 07:20 AM | Comments (0)
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MSM Talking Points About Blogs
You've heard them all before:
-- Blogs are not journalism.
-- You can't write with authority unless you are a reporter.
-- Bloggers don't have editors.
But newspaper dinosaurs like Pete Hamill have been repeating those same tired and irrelevant criticisms of blogs for so long that I'm beginning to think there really is a mainstream media memo somewhere that I'm missing. Maybe the green-eyeshade gang won't show it to me because they think I'm one of The Others in the publishing world.
Ironically, Mr. Hamill (like so many of my journalistic brethren before him) exposed himself as an ignorant critic when he admitted that he would never stoop so low as to "squander reading time combing the blogs."
News flash, Hamill the Hypocrite: If you had done your reporting and actually read some blogs, including this one, you would know that there is plenty of journalism in our sphere. You would also know that a blog is just another communications medium -- like a Web site or a television station or those newspapers you (and I) love so much.
You're a talented journalist, but you've become too comfortable in your role as an author and "opinion maven." You should, to paraphrase your own words, get out of the ivory tower, go to the place and look at this wonderful "thing" we call the blogosphere.
I assure you that you will learn plenty. One very important thing you'll learn is that an MSM organization as revered as the Knight Foundation last month recognized a handful of bloggers by giving them real money in the first annual "news challenge" awards. The winners included:
-- Lisa Williams of Placeblogger to "make it easier for people to find hyperlocal news and information about their city or neighborhood through promotion of 'universal geotagging' in blogs" ($222,000). It doesn't get much more journalistic than "hyperlocal" news.
-- Amy Gahran and Adam Glenn of I, Reporter to "track Boulder, Colo.’s, implementation of a carbon tax" ($90,000). "I, Reporter" sounds an awful lot to me like reporting will be involved.
-- And nine bloggers who won $15,000 each to pursue their pet projects, such as "a centralized, user-maintained news system."
If you dig deeply enough into the blogosphere, Mr. Hamill, you might even learn a thing or two about "Moby Dick."
Posted by Danny at 07:39 PM | Comments (0)
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Inside The Blogway
Folks are talking about a map of the political blogosphere published by The Politico this week. I produced an "Inside The Blogway" map of my own back in January when I spoke to journalism students about blogs and the future of media. I thought Beltway Blogroll readers might like to see it, too.
Here's the image (larger version available as a PDF file), which illustrated the conclusion to my speech, and you can click to the extended entry for my explanation to the students:
I could stand here all day and tell you stories about blogs and technology in politics:
-- I could tell you about the triangulation approach to blogs employed by candidates like Ned Lamont of Connecticut -- embrace them whey they are helping your campaign, deny that you're involved with them when they do things like paint Joseph Lieberman in blackface;
-- I could tell you about the other scandals some bloggers created for their favorites;
-- About the "Google bombs" that bloggers used to try to influence voter perceptions;
-- About the attempts to vandalize candidate bios on Wikipedia, a collaborative online encyclopedia whose content can be edited by the public;
-- About the candidate pages, both real and satirical, that began appearing at Facebook, MySpace and other online social networks;
-- And about the blog luncheon with former President Clinton that deteriorated into a bizarre fight about whether one of the female bloggers "posed" in a way that was meant to showcase her breasts.
But you get the idea. Blogs matter. YouTube matters. Google matters. Wikipedia matters. Online social networks matter. And in a couple of years, desktop applications called "widgets" may be the new, new thing that will matter.
I'll close by giving you a peek at all of those things -- a peek inside what I call the Blogway. This quick slide show will give you a sense of just how rapidly the political media world is changing.
The innovators
-- Instapundit
-- Daily Kos
-- RedState
-- MyDD
Working from outside
-- Outside the Beltway
-- The Agonist
-- Captain's Quarters
-- Hugh Hewitt
-- TalkLeft
-- Right Wing News
Working from inside
-- Americablog
-- Political Wire
-- Personal Democracy Forum
-- White House Watch
Emerging media
-- Center for Citizen Media
-- NewAssignment.net
-- Wikipedia
-- MySpace
Hottest trend: Internet video
-- YouTube
-- PoliticsTV
-- Hot Air
More Beltway bloggers
-- Porkbusters
-- SCOTUS Blog
-- Congress Blog
The newcomers
-- The Politico
-- AirCongress (my personal site, launched in November)
And that's just a sampling. The size of the blogosphere has been doubling about every six months for quite a while now, and it seems like there's a new site or service that goes online every week or two. The bottom line is that blogs and the Internet are powerful forces in politics and the media, and that is not going to change anytime soon.
The new leaders of Congress acknowledged that power last week by granting bloggers special attention when the new session started. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California gave Democratic bloggers special access inside the Capitol, and numerous lawmakers sought out the bloggers. PoliticsTV, which is part media and part activism, posted video interviews with more than a dozen House Democrats. Other bloggers did likewise. In the Senate, Minority Leader MItch McConnell held a conference call with select Republican bloggers.
More of the same can be expected by both parties and in both chambers. And before you know it, more lawmakers may be blogging themselves. Just a few weeks ago, the House approved secure software that every office can use to add blogs to the offerings on their Web sites.
Whether they will avail themselves of it remains to be seen. ... The technologically driven changes we are seeing in politics and the media terrify a lot of my colleagues and a lot of politicians. Rather than embrace the wonderful opportunities presented by the Internet, too many of them have taken cover beneath the imagined safety of their green eyeshades or in their smoke-filled backrooms.
But soon enough, those people will be relics of the past. You are the future. Journalism in the 21st century will be what you make it. Politics will be what you make it. I look forward to seeing how you use the tools you have today and the ones you are certain to create tomorrow.
Posted by Danny at 09:02 PM | Comments (4)
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Some Thoughtful Media Criticism From A Blogger
Yes, I said "thoughtful," and frankly I was surprised to read it. Bloggers typically don't put much serious thought into their criticisms of the mainstream media; they just rant against the MSM machine. I was even more surprised to see the criticism at Daily Kos, a forum that might better be called the Daily Knee-Jerk.
Even Kagro X, the blogger who penned the entry, wasn't quite sure he had said anything profound. "I'm not sure exactly what the point of these observations actually is, but hey, that's my prerogative as a blogger," Kagro X concluded. "And if I'm no more clear-headed in my conclusions, nor advanced the ball any further than your average pundit's weekend brain dump, then so be it."
But by my reading, Kagro X's analysis of the constraints facing the typical journalist and the value that the expert blogger can add to the information age was right on the mark.
I especially liked this part, where he nicely captured the challenges of being a journalist:
Journalists are, I think, by the nature of their business, limited in their ability to bring a mass audience "the Truth" in doses sufficient for everyone. What I mean is that they're limited in several critical ways, most of which are beyond their control:1) Personal knowledge/understanding/expertise in ever-changing subject matter -- they are, of necessity, generalists
2) Space constraints -- even if they wanted to report on every intricacy, most traditional media don't have the time or space for it
3) Deadline pressures -- even if they knew everything there was to know and had the time/space for it, they couldn't get it all done by 5 p.m.
I have found all of those limits to be true throughout my 16-year journalism career -- and never more so than in my current job as the editor of National Journal's Technology Daily.
Our reporters have more knowledge, understanding and expertise of technology policy issues than anyone in the field, but each of them has a broad beat, forcing them to be generalists within their areas of expertise. That sounds like a contradiction, I know, but it's true.
The e-government reporter, for example, covers everything in the e-government realm -- and also is our expert in health information technology, education and labor. Our politics reporter also covers tech-related lobbying, science-related issues like competitiveness and tech matters emanating from the entire Bush administration, plus she writes our weekly "People Column." And we have one reporter who covers all tech issues in all 50 states and another responsible for keeping tabs on tech issues in other countries.
As for space limitations and deadlines, most of our daily stories are capped at 500 words, and the turnaround time on the typical news story is two to three hours after an event begins. We publish an AM Edition, a daily feature and a PM Edition, and we have other recurring features like topical backgrounders on issues ranging from telecommunications to privacy.
In short, we produce thousands of words a day, multiple times a day, on short deadlines. The demands of the job are great, and my reporters rise to the challenge daily. But they rely on experts -- the kinds of techies who now write blogs -- to help them do their jobs.
That's one reason we instituted an AM feature called "Blog Bits" (a spin-off of my own "Blog Bits" here) that calls attention to what techies and others are writing about tech policy issues in the blogosphere. I love the blogosphere because it helps us help our readers.
So to all you bloggers out there who are the kinds of experts that Kagro X rightfully praised, please keep doing what you're doing. We journalists may gripe about "bloggers" collectively at times, but most of us really do appreciate at least one blog out there and usually many more.
That's why we have our own now, like this blog and Tech Daily Dose, the one written primarily by one of my senior writers, Andrew Noyes, and others on the Tech Daily staff.
Posted by Danny at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)
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CNN Frees Presidential Debate Video
This is a summary of the top story in yesterday's PM Edition of Technology Daily, as reported by senior writer Heather Greenfield.
CNN is winning praise for its announcement over the weekend that the network will grant unrestricted access to video footage from the presidential debates it will host in June.
The decision will let citizens use excerpts of the debates to make their points in online discussions or in relaying news. CNN is scheduled to host a Democratic debate June 3 and a Republican debate June 5.
In April, Republican and Democratic bloggers, online political consultants, and even some presidential candidates joined a bipartisan group called Free Debates to protest online usage restrictions on debate coverage. The appeal heightened last week as MSNBC, one of CNN's competitors, hosted a debate with Republican candidates but did not make the video freely available for distribution online at sites like YouTube.
Before the MSNBC debate, some 75 people, including Democratic candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama, had urged the Democratic and Republican parties to back open access to debate video. CNN is the only network to adopt the idea, so there is still pressure on the parties to act.
Earlier this year, the public-affairs television network C-SPAN made a decision similar to CNN's regarding use of C-SPAN's footage of House and Senate floor debates.
Posted by Danny at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)
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Newspaper Bumbling In The Blogosphere
I've watched with a mixture of satisfaction, great expectations and occasional bemusement as the mainstream media have made inevitable albeit cautious and reluctant moves into the blogosphere the past couple of years. Today definitely falls into the "bemusement" category.
The reason: I just read this piece in the Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where the county columnist of the past five-plus years announced that he has been made the paper's new "blogs editor."
I'm glad to see another newspaper finally acknowledging that new media is the future of journalism, and it's especially heartening to see the Sun-Sentinel taking that future seriously enough to hire a full-time editor to the post.
But come on, the grey-haired county columnist who may never have read a blog other than the few produced by his own newspaper? A guy who felt compelled to explain to his readers what a blog is -- and came up with this definition: "That's short for 'Weblogs,' personal essays and political broadsides that proliferate all over the Net."? Who put "blogosphere" in quotes, like it's still in the new word category and not on equal footing with, say, "newspaper"?
I don't know Howard Goodman. I trust that he's a good journalist and deserving of professional advancement at the Sun-Sentinel. But I don't understand what MSM outlets like his hope to accomplish in the blogosphere by putting people who seem to know little to nothing about new media in charge of new media.
If newspapers are going to have blogs editors, they need to know the blogosphere. They need to read blogs, and they need to be bloggers. Otherwise, the papers will just be recreating their tiresome, dying publishing businesses in a new format -- and their decline will continue.
I wish Mr. Goodman and the Sun-Sentinel the best of luck in the blogosphere. I hope they get it right. But if they want to succeed, the first thing Mr. Goodman needs to do is hire a good assistant editor who actually knows something substantive about blogs.
UPDATE: The Star-Tribune in Minneapolis also has made a bone-headed new media move in canning the column written by popular columnist/blogger James Lileks and making him a reporter.
What is it about most newspapermen these days that makes them so backward in their thinking about the online world? Don Surber of the Charleston Daily Mail, whom I met while working as an intern at that West Virginia paper in the summer of 1989, aptly calls it "hot-type thinking in a digital world." Sadly, it seems to be a brain disorder without any known cure.
(Hat tip to Instapundit)
Posted by Danny at 11:49 AM | Comments (1)
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Opening Congress To Bloggers And Online Media
As noted in Technology Daily this morning:
The Open House Project, an effort designed to increase transparency in government, is proposing the creation of an Online Media Gallery that would give press passes to Internet-based journalists, including some bloggers.
Robert Bluey, director of the Center for Media and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation and a participant in the project, advocated the creation of the gallery in a column in The Hill.
"This gallery would serve as a sister organization to existing congressional press galleries, adapting the rules of those galleries for individuals who operate exclusively on the Internet," he wrote. "The formation of the gallery would allow a committee of peers to establish new rules applicable for Web sites."
Such a gallery would "alleviate the problem that exists with access to lawmakers," Bluey added. "Currently, bloggers seeking to gain access to events in the U.S. Capitol must secure approval from a congressional office, letting staffers control the credentialing process and creating the potential to discriminate against certain bloggers whom members would like to exclude."
(Full disclosure: I am a member of the media advisory board for the center that Bluey runs.)
Posted by Danny at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)
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A 'Shield' For Washington Bloggers
Reprinted from Friday's PM Edition of Technology Daily
by Michael Martinez
Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire on Friday is expected to sign into a law a measure to shield journalists -- including bloggers in the news business -- from being forced by the government to disclose confidential sources.
The bill, H.B. 1336, would make Washington the 33rd state to enact such a "shield law." The District of Columbia offers similar protection.
Under the Washington proposal, people engaged in the "regular business of news-gathering" would be protected from being compelled to reveal confidential sources who wish to remain anonymous, regardless of what type of technology they use to distribute their content. Bloggers employed by news-gathering entities would be protected. Independent bloggers could be considered as entities several ways, such as becoming limited liability corporations.
Bruce Johnson, an attorney at the Seattle-based firm Davis Wright Tremaine, helped draft the bill. He said it would draw a fair line between bloggers who are operating as journalists and those who are purely "hobbyists."
He said the cost of business licenses in Washington should not preclude many bloggers from applying for them.
The Washington law also includes another technology-related wrinkle -- it would shield reporters from attempts to seek telephone or Internet records and other information for the purpose of identifying their sources. Johnson said the provision would be particularly useful in cases where parties try to use such techniques to sidestep the shield law.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said she hopes Washington's new law will help spur momentum in other states and on Capitol Hill. Shield legislation stalled during the 109th Congress but is expected to be revived this session.
Dalglish said she is not aware of any state shield laws that explicitly exclude bloggers -- even though many of them were authored before the blogging boom of recent years.
She noted that Alabama's statute is particularly unique. Sports Illustrated lost a defamation case in 2005 when a federal court ruled that the state's shield law does not protect magazine reporters.
Massachusetts, Missouri and Texas all are currently considering shield laws. Dalglish recently testified in support of the Texas proposal. "I haven't gotten any frantic e-mails about it yet," she said.
Few state-level shield laws have been tested by questions about whether they should apply to bloggers. Apple Computer sued last year to unmask the sources of bloggers who leaked information about an unreleased product. The company dropped the suit after a California appellate court ruled against Apple in May 2006.
Johnson said the legal landscape is still evolving, but the growing number of states with shield laws is making it harder for federal lawmakers to ignore the issue. "Each state law is an additional brick in a building that may turn into a federal shield law," he said.
Posted by Danny at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)
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As noted in Technology Daily this morning:
The United Nations is one of the only institutions comparable in its size and importance that allows bloggers not affiliated with traditional media to have press credentials and join its permanent press corps, The New York Times reports.
Stephane Dujarric, who was a chief spokesman for former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and works for the U.N. department that oversees media accreditation, said guidelines for bloggers are a work in progress.
"New media is definitely a challenge to all organizations who accredit journalists, and I think we're doing well in meeting that challenge," Dujarric said.
In other news, The Washington Post reports on a study that said as women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they can be the targets of more sexually threatening language from readers than male bloggers.
Posted by Danny at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)
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Invasion Of The PoliBloggers
The rise of political blogs will be evident in San Diego today at the California Democratic convention. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 50 credentialed bloggers will join the 400 mainstream journalists registered to cover the event -- and there are sure to be both journalists and delegates who also live-blog about the event.
Are such developments good or bad for politics? The Chronicle tackles both the enlightened pro, boon-to-democracy answer to that question ...
"What this is doing is blowing apart the old calculus for who gets to come to the party and who doesn't," says Peter Leyden, director of the San Francisco-based New Politics Institute, a think tank that tracks the intersection of the Internet and politics.With the 2008 presidential election just 556 days away, political parties and candidates understand that bloggers have become a critical part of the commentary on political developments "on a scale that is absolutely astounding," he said.
"Many of them have passionate followers, people who are crazy about politics," Leyden said. "And if you legitimize them, and bring them into inner circles ... they will get a huge new segment of folks energized that aren't necessarily reading newspapers and aren't involved in politics."
... and the naive, fear-the-blogs con answer, given by someone who ironically trashes anonymity on blogs while cowardly insisting on anonymity for himself in the mainstream media:
[O]ne key state Democratic strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of concern for riling the netroots crowd, warns that such efforts are potentially positive and negative.Netroots commentary can frequently be intensely personal, even "totally mean and irrational," the strategist said, with some bloggers finding power in their ability "to assassinate political characters online."
"It's amplified by the anonymity, and it can be scary that it's so irresponsible," the insider said. "And it's pulling the mainstream media in that direction."
Posted by Danny at 07:04 AM | Comments (0)
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MSNBC's Missed YouTube Opportunity
Some sound advice from Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine about how MSNBC (and all networks) should handle future airing of political debates in the Internet era:
If MSNBC had any sense, which it doesn’t, it would have taken every one-minute answer from last night’s ping-pong debate and put them up on YouTube themselves. Then, today, we’d be able to watch each one without feeling as if we were trying to count cars on a speeding train. And, more important, we’d be able to comment on them and embed them in our blogs. ...But it’s happening without MSNBC, of course. There are already loads of clips up on YouTube, put there by dastardly copyright thieves, in NBC News’ view, or by engaged voters and viewers, in my view. ... The net result ... is that the discussion is happening on YouTube and on blogs but not around MSNBC, thanks to the network’s rules and to the fact that its clips are not linkable or embeddable and are chosen by producers instead of voters. A true case of cutting off the nose.
Posted by Danny at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)
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Confessions Of A Beltway Journalism Insider
I've been inside the Beltway too long. I know this because of the blog entry I inadvertently posted yesterday (now deleted), before realizing I had fallen prey to a bunch of insider mumbo-jumbo about arcane Senate traditions.
The subject of my attention was the latest blog swarm against "secret holds" in the Senate. On Tuesday, two Democratic senators tried to win expedited passage of a bill, S. 223, to mandate electronic filing of Senate campaign finance documents, but an anoynmous Republican senator objected and thus blocked action on the bill.
Led by the Sunlight Foundation, blogs pounced on the inaction and accused the unnamed senator of placing a secret hold on yet another bill aimed at government transparency. The watchdog group reminded readers that two senators had availed themselves of the chamber's "hold" tradition last year to block a bill on federal budget transparency, only to be embarrassed by bloggers into lifting the hold.
"We need your help to find out who placed this secret hold!" Paul Blumenthal wrote. "Call your senators and ask them if they are the one with the secret hold on S. 223. Then report back."
Multiple blogs, including Instapundit, TPMMuckraker and GOPProgress, which played lead roles in last year's successful fight against the secret hold, touted the latest call for transparency in government. Even The Caucus, a blog of The New York Times, reported the story.
I loved watching bloggers out the secret holders last year. It was a telling example of the power of networked citizen journalism. It also put to shame we Beltway journalists who see parliamentary shenanigans all the time and ignore them rather than asking simple questions like, "Are you the senator behind the secret hold?"
With that in mind, I decided to ask that simple question myself this time. Knowing that a Republican was behind Tuesday's objection to expedited passage of the electronic disclosure bill, and that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is no fan of campaign finance law, my first instinct was to contact his office and see if he was the culprit.
McConnell spokesman Don Stewart responded immediately via e-mail and said McConnell was not behind the objection. But then he said something else that completely threw me off the scent of the transparency story: There was no "hold" on the bill at all because it had not been "hotlined" -- another Senate tradition by which lawmakers privately gain unanimous consent to a bill and then move it to the floor.
His point sounded plausible, so I did a little more reporting and indeed learned, by checking the Congressional Record, what actually happened on the floor.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked "unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of [the bill] ... that the committee-reported amendment be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be read three times, passed; and that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action." In other words, she requested immediate passage of the bill, without any floor debate.
The anonymous Republican senator in question may well oppose the bill itself, but his or her objection technically was only to an expedited vote on the measure -- and that's not at all unusual for the more deliberative half of America's legislative body.
I mentioned all of that in a post much like the one Robert Bluey of the Heritage Foundation penned when I realized that McConnell's spokesman had been dodging my other questions.
Specifically, I asked four times, in some way or another, "Which Republican senator objected to the bill?" Stewart ignored the question the first three times and never answered the fourth e-mail. In that last e-mail, I also asked whether McConnell will vote for the campaign finance transparency bill on the floor. No response.
That's when it dawned on me that for whatever reason, the minority leader's office doesn't want to talk about the substance of the bill and whether it should be passed.
While bloggers may be wrong on parliamentary procedure, they appear to be right on the money in assuming that some Republican lawmaker -- and perhaps the Senate Republican leadership -- doesn't like yet another transparency bill and may even be working to keep it from seeing action. "In our mind," the Sunlight Foundation's Blumenthal wrote, "a hold is a hold is a hold, unless you want to debate what the definition of 'is' is." He urged people to keep pressuring their senators for answers.
Republican new media consultant David All agreed with that sentiment: "Regardless of what procedure was used -- secret hold/anonymous hold -- the facts point out that this bill was blocked in one way or another. Whether it was to review the bill -- which is a noble pause for reflection -- is not the issue." He also predicted that "this procedural hiccup" will help win passage of the bill "in the very near future."
I entered this fray as a journalist, not as an activist for or against the particular bill in question. I just wanted to ask a question and get an answer. That didn't happen. With me at least, Don Stewart chose spin over transparency, and I'm not happy about it.
So to all of you bloggers out there, I wholeheartedly endorse the underlying message of this campaign against a non-hotlined, secret, non-hold objection: Keep calling your senators and demanding answers. I don't care whether you're doing it because you're more interested in journalism (like me) or campaign finance activism. Just do it -- and don't let anyone stonewall you.
Posted by Danny at 12:07 PM | Comments (1)
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National Public Radio's News Blogger
Reprinted with permission of National Journal magazine
By Kellie Lunney
Tom Regan feels like he has traded one dream job for another. The host of National Public Radio's soon-to-be-launched news blog commutes every week to Washington from Boston, where his wife and four children live.
Regan, married to Barbara Petzen, the new education director at the Middle East Policy Council, is a former, self-described "Mr. Mom." Before the NPR gig, he wrote the Christian Science Monitor's "Terrorism and Security" blog each day, until turning to domestic duties. "I can do laundry with the best of them," says Regan, who spent two years at home with his kids. "It was hard to give up."
This isn't NPR's first foray into the blogosphere, but Regan says that his blog will cover current events pegged to the daily news. "We are in severe tire-kicking stage," says the former Nieman journalism fellow of the rollout. "Every blog has to have that right voice."
Regan, 50, moved to the United States from his native Canada in 1994. An early advocate of online media, he helped the Halifax Daily News in Nova Scotia become the first newspaper to go online in Canada. He then went to the Christian Science Monitor, where he helped build that publication's Web site.
Regan enjoys the energy of online media. "Most who work in it and are interested in it are curious and innovators." As for what makes a winning blog, Regan cites quality writing, brevity and a good editor.
Posted by Danny at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)
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Since his snide dismissal of bloggers as pajama-clad losers with no checks and balances in September 2004, Jonathan Klein has been the poster child for mainstream media cluelessness about the blogosphere. But as of this week, Klein has a challenger, and one with a much higher profile, for that dishonor.
In a speech to New York University journalism students, NBC Evening News anchor Brian Williams warned them of the future that awaits them in the field: "You're going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency apartment in two years."
Dean Barnett of Townhall, Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish and the folks at ThinkProgress are among the footsoldiers of the bathrobe brigade who have taken Williams to task for the comment.
"How unbelievably rich is that?" Barnett wrote. "Three years after Rathergate, this Catholic University drop-out still thinks the blogosphere consists of shut-in half-wits."
No word yet as to whether Pajamas Media will launch a new Bathrobe Communications division in response to the latest MSM dig against the blogosphere.
Posted by Danny at 09:26 AM | Comments (9)
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Wanted: Credentialed Blogger For U.S. Senate
Early last month, I noted that blog jobs are starting to be advertised at JournalismJobs.com. Add The Raw Story to the list of advertisers. The publication is looking for a credentialed reporter/blogger to cover the U.S. Senate.
Here are some the details from the ad for a full-time correspondent:
-- Covering U.S. Senate and several presidential campaigns as political correspondent in Washington. This may include trips to the Capitol on a regular basis and covering stories related to the Pentagon.-- Making regular contact with Senate and campaign staffs, including major Senate committees.
-- Contacting several presidential campaigns weekly for updates with specific questions. Half of the campaigns will be covered by our House correspondent.
-- Compete with mainstream and online reporters for political stories. In terms of competition, the best comparison would be TPM Muckraker and the Politico.
Posted by Danny at 08:18 AM | Comments (0)
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Blogger Fired After Edwards Comments
As reported today by Michael Martinez in Technology Daily's "State Roundup":
A South Carolina-based political Web site last week fired a blogger and former aide to Gov. Mark Sanford for comments the blogger posted after Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards announced last week that his wife's cancer had returned.
SCHotline fired former Sanford spokesman Will Folks over a post he wrote on his FITSNews blog that blasted Edwards for remaining in the presidential race despite his wife's condition. SCHotline announced in a press release that it will "discontinue any editorial and or other professional association" with Folks, who recently had become a partial owner of SCHotline.
Folks had accused Edwards of shamelessly exploiting his wife's condition for his own political gain. Folks said most Americans were "completely hoodwinked" by the family's announcement that the cancer of Elizabeth Edwards was incurable.
SCHotline Vice President Jeffrey Sewell said the company will buy back Folks' shares in the company, which he estimated are worth as much as $4,000. "He just wouldn't compromise with regard to his posts," Sewell said. "The Edwards' post was over the top."
Folks posted a tongue-in-cheek response to his termination the day after he was fired.
Posted by Danny at 01:58 PM | Comments (1)
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An Online Revolution In Campaign Coverage
Coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign will be nothing like coverage of the past if bloggers Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post and Jay Rosen of NewAssignment.net have their way.
The two media revolutionaries have joined forces for a project designed to get citizens across the country involved in covering the leading candidates over the next two years. They outlined the effort in separate entries at The Huffington Post (also cross-posted at Rosen's personal blog, PressThink).
Here's the gist of it, as explained by ...
... Rosen:
[I]nstead of one well-placed reporter trailing John Edwards wherever he goes (which is one way of doing it), [the project will have] some 40 or 50 differently placed people tracking different parts of the Edwards campaign, all with peculiar beats and personal blogs linked together by virtue of having a common editor and a page through which the best and most original stuff filters out to the greater readership of the Web, especially via the Huffington Post.
... Huffington:
We'll have a Clinton blog, an Obama blog, an Edwards blog, a McCain blog, a Giuliani blog, a Romney blog, a Biden blog, a Richardson blog, a Dodd blog, a Kucinich blog, a Brownback blog, a Huckabee blog. Each offering a wide variety of voices and perspectives on the campaign they are following. These group blogs will also be a compendium of useful information about each candidate, including their latest speeches, upcoming appearances, new videos and ads, recent news articles and more.
Via e-mail, Rosen said the NewAssignment.Net will hire the editor, in consultation with The Huffington Post. One overall editor will work with "sub-editors," part-timers focused on each campaign.
"Our goal is to be interesting, offbeat and useful for readers on the open Web and from the Huffington Post," Rosen said. "Emphasis on useful, different, not the same old thing. We hope to have contributors from both parties, yes. We'll be actively recruiting people; but we're also dependent on those who raise a hand."
He added that he would like to have both Democrats and Republicans covering each of the 12 candidates currently selected.
Rosen said the effort currently does not encompass third-party candidates, independents or the Unity '08 movement, which is using the Internet to build interest in a "bipartisan presidential ticket. Senate, House and gubernatorial coverage also is not in the works.
"Why not?" Rosen said. "Well, it's good to find out if this model can work first."
The money for the project will come from donations to NewAssignment.net, which is a nonprofit based in the New York University journalism school, where Rosen is a professor. He said Huffington "has taken on most of the fundraising burden."
Rosen currently is soliciting applications for the top editor's job. Resumes can be sent to him at pressthink@journalism.nyu.edu.
Some bloggers already have taken on a more traditional role in providing presidential coverage, at least for Sen. John McCain of Arizona, one of the leading GOP contenders.
McCain's campaign team invited bloggers onto his "Straight Talk Express" bus tour. Yesterday's edition of The Blogometer had a roundup of video from bloggers who made the trip.
Posted by Danny at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
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RedState is raising money to send two members of its community to "tell the real story about what's happening on the ground in Iraq." The Pentagon extended the invitation for the coverage, and the trip will cost about $10,000. RedState's owner, Eagle Publishing, is only providing $2,500; the blog is asking readers to pitch in the rest.
Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin made a similar trip earlier this year. She merited a profile in The Washington Post not long after the trip.
Posted by Danny at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)
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New Media 'Morons' And 'Parasites'
Some columnist in Syracuse, N.Y., has his knickers in a knot over blogs and other new media. Here are excerpts from his paranoid, ridiculous rant, which once again resurrects the myth that bloggers want to replace journalists:
-- "For 24 hours, let the shock jocks, "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," the bloggers and the rest of the 'new media' darlings run with the ball. We'll see how far they get when they don't have their cloddish 'old media' brother clearing a path through the clutter."
-- "Everybody deserves a public voice, even morons. ... But the issue is: What will all those voices talk about if there's no news? Their family reunion jpegs on Facebook?"
-- "Ultimately, someone has to write the checks -- or not -- for large numbers of caffeinated journalists to cover the news or at least make up quotes and get fired for it. Everyone else is just a parasite clinging to the droopy rump of a struggling host animal."
Posted by Danny at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)
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The Blog Journalism Movement
California recently granted a press pass to a blogger, but the debate over journalistic privileges for bloggers is still going strong in other places, including South Carolina.
Tennessee Republicans attempted to find a middle ground by holding a "blogger day" earlier this month, but that concept invited scorn from Michael Silence, a blogger for the Knoxville newspaper.
"As a veteran blogger and follower of blogs," Silence said, "here's my advice to lawmakers: Ignore the pixelettes and stick with us professional print people. Really, there's no downside to ignoring the keyboard crazies." (Hey, at least he didn't go on "a manhunt for a blogger" like the St. Augstine Record in Florida.)
The folks at Firedoglake, meanwhile, called attention to what it termed the local blog journalism movement. I wonder if they'll get press passes.
More and more bloggers are certainly proving that they deserve kudos, and perhaps credentials, as journalists. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and his crew at TPMMuckraker are chief among them. The ongoing controversy over the firing of federal prosecutors might not be the hot story that it is were it not for the dogged work of the reporters in Marshall's blog empire.
He won praise in the Los Angeles Times this week and from a reporter at Time's Washington bureau chief earlier this month. Journalist/blogger Ed Cone of North Carolina thinks Marshall may well become the first blogger to win the Pulitizer Prize.
Others in media and the blogosphere also have lauded Marshall for his work. Add my name to the list.
I've noted Marshall's work both here at Beltway Blogroll and in National Journal magazine, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Cone's prediction about a Pulitzer for Marhall. proves true some day soon.
Earlier this year, blogs also were in the news for covering the trial of former vice-presidential aide I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.
And this week, The Huffington Post unearthed the identity of the technology wizard behind the much-ballyhooed "Vote Different" advertisement against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine noted that HuffPo did so "while the rest of media was tripping over themselves to do the same story of the Hillary ad, weeks after it came out, and idly wondering who made it."
Add all of that together with new networked journalism projects like AssignmentZero and older new ones like PorkBusters, and you can understand why people are talking about a blog journalism movement.
These are indeed exciting times in the media world.
Posted by Danny at 12:11 PM | Comments (1)
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That's what editor John Harris of The Politico said yesterday to the reporter who, as Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz aptly put it this morning, left egg on the face of the upstart political newspaper. And thus another mainstream journalist has learned the hard way that a blog item really isn't all that different than a story.
Listen up, my fellow newsies: A blog is just a publishing platform. If you want to retain your journalistic credibility, you should never publish anything on that platform that you wouldn't put in print or say over the air.
And don't think, like Harris, that you can "write what you know when you know it" and still maintain "standards of accuracy or fairness." You can't do it.
The Politico proved it yesterday in reporting that Democrat John Edwards would suspend his presidential campaign because of his wife's latest, and worsening, recurrence of cancer. The story cited one anoymous source and downplayed official, on-the-record comments from the Edwards campaign that the paper was about to report something false -- all because they wanted to break a story an hour before a news conference where everyone would hear the truth.
The paper deserves credit for quickly and openly admitting its error, and also for linking readers to criticism of the paper. But Harris' attitude about where the paper went wrong belies a belief that we journalists can be less meticulous online and in real time than we are when we're writing for print and on longer deadlines. The opposite is true.
News reported online can go viral within minutes, as evidenced by the mainstream news organizations and blogs alike that impulsively regurgitated The Politico's false scoop yesterday, so journalists need to be even more cautious in reporting for the Web.
If we don't, we're going to hear a whole lot more readers saying things like this from one of Harris' readers: "Politico has been removed from 'my favorites.'"
Posted by Danny at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)
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Liberal MSM Bias Against GOP Blogs?
I mentioned yesterday that Senate Democrats invited three leading Democratic bloggers to speak to lawmakers today at a regular luncheon they hold. A blogger for The Washington Post first reported the event.
My friend Robert Bluey of the Heritage Foundation took exception to the Post's plug for the event as being something groundbreaking. He noted that Republican bloggers have been inside the Capitol many times and met with many key officials but never once merited the newspaper's attention.
"I don’t mind when mainstream journalists give liberal bloggers credit for breaking down barriers, but where was the coverage when a group of conservative bloggers met with then-Majority Leader Bill Frist in his Senate office last August?" he said. "No one paid the slightest bit of attention -- revealing once again the inherent liberal bias that you get from outlets such as The Washington Post."
While I understand Rob's frustration, I disagree with his gripe. I, too, mentioned today's Democratic luncheon with liberal bloggers and also have neglected to mention many of the GOP blog events on the Hill over the past several months, but it's not because of bias favoring one side or the other. It's because the Democrats once again appear to have broken new ground.
Briefings, conference calls and the like with bloggers were news back in late 2005 and early 2006 when the first ones were scheduled. Now they are fairly commonplace and most of them simply are not worth noting just for the sake of saying they are happening -- even for an "inside blogball" publication like Beltway Blogroll.
The equivalent would be the Post writing a story about so-and-so holding a press conference. Who wants to read that every day?
Today's luncheon strikes me as a bit different. Democratic leaders of the Senate invited the bloggers so they could talk to the lawmakers, not the other way around. It gets to that whole "conversation" and "listening" thing that Democratic presidential candidates keep emphasizing. And the luncheon was before a much broader group than one or a few lawmakers at a blog briefing.
I don't see bias in mentioning that development; I see sound news judgment.
Posted by Danny at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)
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Amanda Congdon, a video blogger who has bee doing work for ABC News since late last year, is catching heat this week over some online video advertisements she created for Du Pont on the side.
Here's an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times story on the controversy, including a quote from Congdon:
While Congdon said that her reported pieces may qualify as "acts of journalism," she maintains that she is a blogger and not a journalist and thus is not constrained by the same code as her ABC colleagues. "I am not subject to the 'rules' traditional journalists have to follow," she wrote Tuesday on her personal blog. "Isn't that what new media is all about? Breaking the rules? Setting our own?"
That quote bugs me.
I agree with Congdon's basic point -- that new media is about change, including changing the rules of what is and is not out of bounds. I also liked the "Science Stories" videos she made for Du Pont well enough to show the one about hurricane wind to my 7-year-old son, and I personally don't think her work for Du Pont in any way undermines her work for ABC News or hurts that news organization's reputation.
But the dismissive attitude apparent in Congdon's response to criticism is too common in the blogosphere.
Anytime a journalist dares to ask whether a blogger has crossed an ethical line, his or her knee-jerk response is to say, "I'm not a journalist. I don't have to live by your code." Bloggers also are fond of sarcasm about blogger ethics panels directed at the media.
Both responses dodge the real issue -- that bloggers should adopt some ethical boundaries.
Congdon acknowledged as much when she alluded to "setting our own" rules, and I agree with her on that point, too. Although we in old media have some pretty good ethical rules, I don't necessarily think bloggers should adopt them. Those principles certainly could serve as a good starting point for discussion, but new norms of behavior make sense for new media.
I'm not advocating a "blogging council" of the sort recently proposed by Eric Alterman, who now blogs for Media Matters for America. The Online Integrity movement that flopped last year and was pulled offline after a few months also obviously was a bad model.
But bloggers need to quit making a joke of idea that ethics matter, or they will be the joke soon enough.
UPDATE: FishBowlNY didn't care much for Congdon's response, either, and took her to task for not engaging in "full disclosure" about the Du Pont ads.
Posted by Danny at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)
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'Captain Ed' Sets Sail With BlogTalkRadio
Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters, known affectionately as "Captain Ed" to his readers, has parlayed his talent as a part-time blogger into a full-time gig as the political director of BlogTalkRadio, an emerging service that lets bloggers host their own call-in shows online for free -- and potentially make money from it.
Morrisey announced the move Friday. He will be leaving his full-time job as a call-center manager in Minnesota and will work from home to promote BlogTalkRadio and help hosts who use the service.
"I will help BTR build a roster of bloggers for the talk-show schedule, host a daily show myself, and work on marketing other new products and services that BTR will roll out in the near future," Morrisey said in an e-mail. And he added at Captain's Quarters, "Within a few weeks, I will be a full-time worker in the new media industry, working from home, and blogging even more constantly than before."
Posted by Danny at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)
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Journalistic Innovation Occurs On The Outside
The Project for Excellence in Journalism this week released its annual report on the state of the media, and it has some fascinating insights into the role of blogs and other technologies in revolutionizing the field.
Here are the highlights:
-- "Some of the most interesting experiments in new journalism continue to come from outside the profession -- sites such as Global Voices, which mixes approved volunteer 'reporters' from around the world with professional editors." As reported at Beltway Blogroll last year, the blog aggregator Global Voices Online won a $10,000 journalism award. And you can add Assignment Zero, which teams traditional journalists with citizen journalists, to the list of "interesting experiments." It went online today.
-- "Bloggers offer voice and citizen input but have also taken steps in the last year to set their own reporting guidelines. Citizen-based sites, according to our study, have shown some of the most sophisticated experiments in newsgathering and dissemination -- embracing original reporting and a wide mix of voices, as well as firm editorial control."
-- "Alerts of journalistic failures are coming more frequently from politicians, bloggers, mainstream press critics and, with more ways to add their own voice, even citizens themselves. Perhaps most important, with more choices, the public can easily see the limits of what any one news organization is offering."
--"[T]hose the press is charged with monitoring, including the government, corporations and activists, have reacted more quickly [to the changing media world]. Politicians, interest groups and corporate public relations people tell PEJ they have bloggers now on secret retainer -- and they are delighted with the results."
-- "Blogging is on the brink of a new phase that will probably include scandal, profitability for some, and a splintering into elites and non-elites over standards and ethics. The use of blogs by political campaigns in the mid-term elections of 2006 is already intensifying in the approach to the presidential election of 2008. Corporate public-relations efforts are beginning to use blogs as well, often covertly. What gives blogging its authenticity and momentum -- its open access -- also makes it vulnerable to being used and manipulated."
-- "Over the previous two years, some of the long-term cutbacks seen in newsrooms appeared to ease. Blogging gained momentum. We found the beginning of more genuine investment in the Internet. The cutbacks in network news appeared to stabilize. In 2006, however, the situation for most of the media we study appeared to worsen."
-- "[M]ore online managers valued content-related skills like copyediting than technology skills like producing audio and video. That may reflect something of a change. After getting the technical skills into the operations, it may be that newsrooms are now turning to think about creating more content rather than simply importing it."
Posted by Danny at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)
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The Blogs Are Coming! The Blogs Are Coming!
An online revolution is under way at Atlantic Media/National Journal. I've been aware of the discussion internally, and now it has gone public via a story in yesterday's Washington Post, which was based on an interview with David Bradley, the head of our company.
I was particularly thrilled to see the emphasis on blogs. It's further evidence of mainstream media embracing new media. Here are the high points from the article:
-- Bradley "aims to expand the media company by using Atlantic's brand for serious journalism as a magnet for online talent." The plan includes at least two Web initiatives on business and lifestyle over the next year. "Bradley and Atlantic editor James Bennet are researching which bloggers to hire and what journalistic personalities would fit the bill for Atlantic online."
-- Bradley "spent four months visiting Web sites of major publications such as USA Today, The New York Times and Business Week. He talked to bloggers and online personalities around the country."
-- And this quote from Bradley: "James Bennet and I have about 40 blogs that we're supposed to read across the next few weeks where we would want our brand associated with their writing. ... I love the process of creating a culture of great talent. That's what I do for a living."
Blogs aren't new to the company. Beltway Blogroll, The Blogometer and Hotline on Call have been around for one to two years, and Fedblog of GovExec.com has been online since October 2004. Just last week at Technology Daily, meanwhile, we made Tech Daily Dose a permanent blog.
But the talk of "pouring millions of dollars into the new venture" and of recruiting "a cadre of uber-experts" is both new and exciting. The first step came early this year when Bradley lured high-profile blogger Andrew Sullivan away from Time.com and made his blog, The Daily Dish, a cornerstone of The Atlantic Online.
I'm eager to see the rest of the revolution play out.
Posted by Danny at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)
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Who Needs 'Media Reform' When You Have Blogs?
Sen. Bernie Sanders thinks America needs a good dose of media reform because of the "growing corporate control over what the American people see, hear and read." Andy Roth of The Club For Growth thinks Sanders, I-Vt., needs a shot of online reality.
"Has Sanders not heard of the blogosphere?" Roth wrote. "The dissemination of information is becoming more and more decentralized everyday. It's one of the most exciting emergent products of the free market, which is probably why Sanders fails to acknowledge and appreciate its existence."
Posted by Danny at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)
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Here we are in March 2007, and The New York Times, the Old Grey-Haired, Green-Eyeshade-Wearing Lady of the mainstream media, is finally waking up to blogs. The evidence is this ad on JournalismJobs.com, posted last week:
The New York Times is looking for a news producer to join our Web newsroom and help in the development of blogs on NYTimes.com. The producer will work with editors, producers and reporters from the digital and print newsrooms to conceive and maintain multiple blogs on NYTimes.com. This person will also focus a significant amount of attention on the New York/Region section of NYTimes.com. He or she will work with members of the Times metro desk to insure that our coverage is up-to-date, visually arresting and brings the smarts and sophistication of The New York Times to life on the Web.
The Times already has blogs, of course, including The Empire Zone (New York politics, since last May) and The Caucus (national politics, since October). But it's a great sign to see a publication as innovatively backward as the Times awakening to the power of the blog -- even to the point of recruiting someone "to conceive and maintain multiple blogs" on a regional level.
Now if the paper would just pull The Opinionator and eight other blogs out from the behind the TimesSelect subscription firewall, it would really be making progress.
Are you charging? Are you charging? There's no charging in blogball! THERE'S NO CHARGING IN BLOGBALL!
UPDATE; I wonder whether more journalists will respond to the Times' appeal for a blog expert or to this ad for editors, writers and bloggers at a new media company in Phoenix focused on spa and resort travel. You might get to be interviewed at a spa in Los Angeles!
But seriously, it's fantastic that old and new media companies alike are recruiting bloggers these days.
Other recent examples just at JournalismJobs: cell-phone bloggers for wirelessinfo.org; a blog syndication network; and a political reporter for Grist Magazine whose duties include blogging.
Blogs are getting attention over at National Public Radio, too. The "News & Notes" program has been looking for both an online producer and an editor/producer of blogs with a "strong understanding of blogging and online communications."
UPDATE II: I just saw this tidbit on Romenesko about The Wall Street Journal: "The Journal plans to introduce more blogs, columnists and updated breaking news stories to online.wsj.com, though a definite timetable for when the enhancements would appear was not revealed."
Posted by Danny at 06:37 PM | Comments (4)
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How Live-Blogging Got Its Start
In today's Politico, columnist Roger Simon offers this snapshot of political journalism in the information age:
Last week, I traveled from Washington, D.C., to Carson City, Nev., a distance of more than 2,600 miles, to watch a political debate on TV. ...The actual debate was going on live and in person someplace near me. Where, I am not sure, because we in the press don't bother to ask any more.
We don't care about seeing debates in real life. We care about electrical outlets and wireless connections for our laptops and a reasonable view of the TV monitor. Long ago, we gave up the battle of actually witnessing that which we write about.
And thus began the evolution to much of the "live-blogging" that exists today, where participants watch and comment on major events from the comfort of their homes or from blog parties like the one hosted by CNN on Election Night last year.
Posted by Danny at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)
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Nevada Democrats Gamble With Fox News
The Democratic Party and Fox News -- you couldn't think of much stranger bedfellows. And that explains why Democratic bloggers are angry with the Nevada Democratic Party for picking Fox News Channel and Fox News Radio to host and broadcast a debate of Democratic presidential contenders in Reno, Nev., come August.
Here is a sampling of the outrage:
-- Americablog: "The entire audience will be stuck, momentarily, watching Fox's hacks spin the debate against every candidate. I think we can do better."
-- Daily Kos: "Any presidential candidate who does the debate will further validate the conservative machine's propaganda machine. At a time when Democrats should be doing everything to destroy the network's credibility, they are planning to do the opposite."
-- MyDD: "Fox News is a partisan Republican propaganda shop that hosts 'news anchors' that call Democrats traitors on a fairly regular basis. This is not a channel that deserves legitimacy. They will screw us."
The netroots are so irritated by the planned debate that they are pressuring Nevada Democrats to reverse course on it. BlogPAC, an initiative run by Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller of MyDD, has a petition online that lets readers e-mail several Nevada Democrats at once. At last count, 2,500 people had participated in the effort.
The petition poses an interesting alternative to broadcasting the debate on television: "just stream it on the Internet where progressive blogs can carry it."
The online activist group MoveOn also reportedly is planning a campaign to challenge the choice of Fox as the debate host. "I sure hope someone tfrom the state party is reading this," Reno and Its Discontents noted. You might want to brace yourself. The Moveon.org campaign makes more sense to me than the online petition because it will be paired with a media assault against Fox News’ status as a news agency."
Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, a regular commentator at Fox, dismissed the outcry as "Fox News Derangement Syndrome."
Posted by Danny at 12:25 PM | Comments (1)
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Amanda Marcotte's Take On The Blog Scandal
Amanda Marcotte, who quit as the "blogmaster" of the John Edwards presidential campaign this week, has published her first-person account of the first blog scandal of Campaign 2008 at Salon.com.
Here's what she took away from the experience:
Blogs are popular because they provide space for everyday citizens to engage in politics, in the language and manner that is comfortable for us, if not for the establishment. To my mind, however, it would be a terrible thing if bloggers did heed the advice to mind our manners and ape our betters if we want in, since this is supposed to be a democratic system that respects the right of everyday, common people to participate in politics.While there's a chance that the crusade to separate McEwan and me from the Edwards campaign was just a singular happening, the possibility lingers that this was just the first sign that the established media and political circles will not be letting the blog-writing rabble into the circle without a fight.
A Salon writer also published an article that seeks to answer this question: "Can liberal bloggers be both partisan kingmakers and independent journalists?" The writer defended Salon's earlier report that Marcotte and another Edwards blogger, Melissa McEwan, had been fired before being rehired -- all of which happened before both quit.
[A]s Salon reported the rumors of the firing, we noticed something disturbing: Instead of the blogosphere joining the search for truth, we encountered a decision to close ranks. The bloggers had never been fired; Salon was wrong; everyone move along, there's nothing to see here; please return to your stations. It started to look as though protecting the Democrats, the Edwards campaign and the role of bloggers in the new political firmament -- or some combination of all three -- was much more important.... When Edwards announced he was "keeping" the bloggers, the lefty blogosphere declared victory. ... But a few days later, Marcotte and McEwan resigned.
Maybe I'm the one who's naive, but the whole episode made me wonder: What does it mean if liberal bloggers aren't warriors for the truth, but rather for candidates? What does it mean for media, and what does it mean for politics? Why did either John Edwards or Amanda Marcotte enter their relationship so seemingly unready for what was likely to happen (assuming anyone in the Edwards camp had read Pandagon)? Either Marcotte would blunt her commentary, and lose the constituency Edwards was attempting to court, or else she'd alienate a whole lot of other people, and Edwards would spend the whole campaign defending her.
Posted by Danny at 07:16 AM | Comments (0)
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Texas Shield Law Wouldn't Cover Bloggers
The Texas legislature is revisiting the issue of how to protect anonymous journalistic sources, but the current bill would not protect bloggers as one proposed in 2005 would have done.
The San Antonio Express-News reports that the measure aims to make whistleblowers in government and private industry feel comfortable talking to the media without fear of their identities becoming known -- but blogs would not fit into the definition of media.
Democrat Aaron Pena, one of the sponsors of the House version of the bill, said similar legislation died in the Senate in 2005, and if it is going to pass this time, it will not cover most bloggers.
Posted by Danny at 10:41 PM | Comments (0)
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Blogger Now Jailed Longer Than Any U.S. Journalist
As noted this morning in Technology Daily:
A man who kept a freelance video blog has now become the longest-serving journalist behind bars in U.S. history, but he has lots of supporters, News.com reports.
On Wednesday, dozens of people gathered for a demonstration at San Francisco City Hall to demand the release of Josh Wolf. Ross Mirkarimi, a San Francisco supervisor, said he was "angry as hell about this" and called for a "serious outcry, and not just only by us."
In a statement, California state Assemblyman Mark Leno, called Wolf's plight a "travesty of justice."
Wolf's friend, Julian Davis, said that "if Josh isn't released today, he'll be the longest-held journalist under contempt."
Posted by Danny at 08:58 AM | Comments (0)
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The Trashing Of The Blogosphere
You know the mainstream media are out to get blogs when you see a headline that says "Blogs Make Spreading Untruths Easier" over a story that mentions blogs only in passing.
The Indianapolis Star slapped that headline on a story about rumors that Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, a likely Democratic presidential candidate, attended an Islamic school in Indonesia as a 7-year-old. In reality, the school was "public, secular and open to all faiths."
While the AP account did blame blogs in part for spreading the rumor, it said Fox News was "most notably" the media outlet that fostered the misperception. And the story was actually more about how politicians need to respond to fast-spreading controversies in today's changing media world than it was about blogs.
"Stories seemingly trivial or even untrue will appear instantly and reverberate through the media," the article said. "Candidates most skillful in anticipating them and reacting swiftly will have a big advantage."
So why the headline? Simple. Some green-eyeshade journalist, either at the Indianapolis paper or AP, hates blogs and saw an opportunity to unfairly trash bloggers just as some media outlets did Obama.
He or she is not alone. The Calgary Sun has a report about a new blog book that characterizes blogs as political communities for lonely people. The book is titled "Blogosphere: A New Political Arena," and the author is Michael Keren, a university of Calgary professor.
Here's an excerpt from the article, beginning with a quote from Keren:
“Blogging promised to give us some control ... but I think we are the same human beings we have always been, basically confused and alienated from the systems all around us.”Although the medium offers seemingly unlimited freedom of expression, Keren said bloggers too often shape public opinion by reporting distorted versions of the facts. “Social dialogue and political dialogue must be marked by restraint -- one of the victims of the blogging phenomenon is the truth,” he said.
Keren notes blogging has become a tool for politicians, big business and celebrities, which he said undermines notions of the medium belonging to the masses.
UPDATE: The Chicago Tribune did much the same thing as the Star in Indianapolis, but it chose an editorial as the forum for this bizarre poke at bloggers: The Obama story "is a sign of the growing indifference Internet 'journalism' presents on the question of truth. Rumor is good enough. Bibles of blogging are created based on nothing more than rumor."
Americablog and Think Progress rightly chastised the newspaper for publishing that drivel.
Posted by Danny at 12:04 PM | Comments (1)
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Last year amid the blog swarm against the "secret hold" on a budget transparency bill in the Senate, I offered a friendly warning to congressional staffers about e-mailing bloggers. It's time for a refresher course.
Why? Because Eric Carbone, the flack for Sen. Joseph Biden Jr. goofed big time yesterday in firing off an e-mail to Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos and no doubt is regretting the decision now. Carbone has learned a bit about the blogosphere by living; his colleagues in Capitol flackery can learn by reading what happened to him.
The back story: Biden, D-Del., officially announced yesterday that he is running for president in 2008. On the same day, he talked about the "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" that is Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, himself a likely Democratic presidential candidate. All that sounds flattering until you put in front of it the part where Biden said Obama is "the first mainstream African-American" running for high office to fit that description.
Moulitsas was among the bloggers to pounce on that remark, calling Biden a vulgar name for his racial insensitivity (Biden has now apologized for the remark).
As flacks are wont to do, Carbone tried to run interference for his boss. He e-mailed Moulitsas and griped that Kos, a blogger of all people, was giving a "one-sided impression" of Biden. That was not a smart move because it only invited Moulitsas to attack again. Here's the result:
"Aside from the fact that this poor guy (Eric Carbone) thinks blogs are supposed to be 'fair and balanced', it's true, I've completely forgotten to write about the other side of the story -- how Biden is a bought and paid for subsidiary of MBNA. When Bank of America acquired MBNA, Biden was likely part of the package deal."
So instead of Biden catching just a little bit of grief for an insensitive racial comment, thanks to Carbone's e-mail, Biden got slammed with the longstanding allegation that he is in the hip pocket of the financial industry that is such a big presence in his home state.
The lesson for flacks: Think before you click.
You're much better off griping to me about bloggers on background than you are going on the record and taking your complaints directly to the source. Odds are good that the blogger you criticize is going to react just as Kos did -- by mocking you and attacking your boss with even more ferocity.
Posted by Danny at 09:15 AM | Comments (1)
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Apple Pays Legal Fees Of Bloggers
Apple Inc.'s unsuccessful lawsuit against two bloggers it accused of helping expose trade secrets has cost the company $700,000 as a reimbursement for the bloggers' legal fees.
The bloggers argued that California's "shield law," which lets journalists protect anoymous sources, applied to them as they concealed their sources of information about forthcoming Apple products. A state court sided with bloggers last spring, and Apple dropped the case in the summer after a stream of bad press over the suit.
The outcome of the case was one of several instances of official recognition of bloggers as journalists, which I ranked among the Top 10 blog stories of 2006.
According to ipodNN, a California court earlier this month ordered the company to pay the legal fees that the bloggers incurred in their defense. More than half of the $700,000 -- a total of $425,000 -- went to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented the bloggers. The rest went to co-counsels in the case.
"Bloggers break the news, just like journalists do," EFF staff attorney Kurt Opsahl said. "They must be able to promise confidentiality in order to maintain the free flow of information. Without legal protection, informants will refuse to talk to reporters, diminishing the power of the open press that is the cornerstone of a free society."
Posted by Danny at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)
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Who's Blogging The Libby Trial?
Bloggers will be among the credentialed media tomorrow when the trial against I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, a former aide to Vice President Richard Cheney begins. He faces federal charges for allegedly leaking intelligence information to the press.
Crooks & Liars and Firedoglake are among the blogs that have annnounced they will be there.
The Media Bloggers Association (I'm a member) is coordinating a rotation of some bloggers for the trial, but apparently others received credentials from the court on their own.
If you're aware of other bloggers who are covering the trial, let me know at dglover@nationaljournal.com, and I will include links here.
Posted by Danny at 09:50 PM | Comments (0)
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Blog Power: The Top 10 Blog Stories Of 2006
Here, in David Letterman-style, are my picks for the Top 10 blog stories of 2006:
10) YearlyKos
9) Supreme Court confirmation hearings
8) Congressional Leadership elections
7) Bloggers hired by campaigns
6) Blogs officially recognized as media
5) Network neutrality
4) Telephone privacy
3) Primary defeats
2) The "secret hold"
1) Election Day
Now for the back story of how the list came to be:
My blogging has been light since the beginning of the year for a reason. As I noted a couple of days ago, I was invited to speak about blogs at The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars.
On the one hand, I was esctatic because the center gave me an entire hour to talk about blogs (and other technologies) -- 30-45 minutes dedicated to a lecture on their policy and political impact, and the rest of the time for questions from the students. When I've tackled the subject before, it's always been as part of a panel discussion where I had a brief time for introductory comments and then the panel took questions. I loved the idea of addressing my favorite subject exclusively and at length to college students who knew little about it.
On the other hand, I was baffled as to how to fill the hour. Oh, it's not that I have any trouble talking about blogs. If I were a senator, my name would be Mr. Smith and I'd deliver the best blog-ibuster you've ever heard. No, the problem was that I wanted to keep myself from rambling and not giving the students the most useful information.
Fortunately, right about the time I received the invitation last year, I had decided to do a Top 10 list of the best blog stories from 2006. That was pretty much why I was invited to speak. What I quickly learned, though, is that it takes an awful lot of writing to fill 30 minutes of time, so that's what I've been doing in my spare time.
The good news is that the end result is worth publishing here, too. For a detailed explanation of why I made the choices, go to the extended entry.
#10: YearlyKos. That was the name of the June convention organized by the fans of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the publisher of the blog Daily Kos.
Think about that for a minute: Readers of a blogging community, and contributors to it, held a convention ... in Las Vegas ... to celebrate the leader of their favorite media outlet. Can you imagine readers of The New York Times or The Washington Post doing something like that?
More to the point, can you imagine the Times or the Post covering something like that? It's so inside blog-ball that you wouldn't expect mainstream media outlets to be interested. Communities of people have conventions all the time, but they never get covered beyond the trade publications dedicated to their industries or fields.
Yet the Times and the Post were there in Vegas with the Kossacks. And so were a lot of other top news organizations and columnists. Granted, much of their coverage was critical and even dismissive or mocking. But they were there.
Even if they didn't want to be, they had little choice because so many newsmakers were there. The roster of speakers included Democratic luminaries like Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, now-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and four potential presidential contenders. One of them, Mark Warner, spent tens of thousands of dollars on a lavish party for bloggers.
YearlyKos was an amazing spectacle and a great demonstration of the political blogosphere's significance.
#9: Supreme Court confirmation hearings. After President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court in 2005, some Republican bloggers vigorously challenged that choice. The Bush administration tried to win them over by scheduling the party's first-ever conference calls with bloggers.
The tactic ultimately failed, as Miers withdrew her nomination. But the GOP learned that it pays to have conservative bloggers fighting with them rather than against them. When Bush later nominated Samuel Alito to the court, the party handpicked Republican bloggers to attend this year's confirmation hearings. They treated the bloggers lavishly and gave them exclusive access to interview and hobnob with high-ranking officials.
Not surprisingly, the bloggers were quick to defend Alito, something they had refused to do for Miers after numerous entreaties. Alito is now a justice on the Supreme Court, and blog calls and other forms of outreach have become almost standard fare in Washington.
The White House had one this week. White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and Brett McGurk, the director for Iraq at the National Security Council, discussed Bush's speech on the way forward in Iraq.
#8: Leadership elections. When it comes to electing leaders in Congress, bloggers have no official say. But they had plenty to say about the elections this year anyway, and lawmakers listened, even if they didn't always vote the way bloggers wanted.
The first instance came after Texan Tom DeLay resigned as House majority leader. Some Republican bloggers didn't want Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri to replace DeLay, and they forced their way into the conversation by organizing conference calls with all three candidates for the job. Though their favorite, John Shadegg of Arizona, didn't win, the backing he gained from bloggers helped tip the election to John Boehner.
GOP bloggers had less success when they organized similar conference calls with candidates for various minority leadership posts after the November election. The top three slots all went to lawmakers they had opposed, proving that outsider bloggers still have limited influence over the insiders in the capital city.
But on the other side of the blogosphere, concerns that Democratic bloggers voiced about a couple of ethically challenged House members arguably were a factor in keeping those members off prime committee slots. Alcee Hastings was considered a candidate to head the Intelligence Committee, but his past as an impeached judge cost him the job. And William Jefferson was not reinstated to the Ways and Means Committee seat he lost last year after being ensnared in a bribery investigation.
Democratic bloggers who constantly decried the GOP "culture of corruption" during the 2006 campaign were determined not to have their party's image tarnished even before Democrats officially took control of the House.
#7: Bloggers hired by campaigns. The ability of bloggers to inject themselves into the leadership races, the most insider of debates, helps explain why some lawmakers are actually hiring them.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., was one of the first to do so. He paid two bloggers as consultants in 2004 and hired one of them onto his Senate staff after Thune defeated then-Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle.
This year, several campaigns hired bloggers:
-- Democrat Ned Lamont of Connecticut hired no fewer than four of them to fulfill various tasks on his intraparty challenge to Sen. Joseph Lieberman.
-- Now-Sen. James Webb of Virginia hired two of the bloggers who had pushed to get him into the race against Sen. George Allen.
-- When Allen's race became unexpectedly competitive because of his verbal gaffes, the senator hired a blogger. He still lost, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just hired that blogger as his new media director.
-- Democrat Mark Warner picked the company of MyDD blogger Jerome Armstrong as an Internet consultancy while Warner was considering a 2008 presidential run.
-- And at least two other presidential contenders, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican John McCain, also are paying good money to high-profile bloggers for new media advice.
The trend will heighten as the 2008 election nears. Late last month, Democrat John Edwards demonstrated the importance of the Internet in presidential politics -- and of having on board people who understand it -- when he announced for the 2008 race in an online video before he did it in person. He followed his official announcement with a guest appearance on Daily Kos to answer questions from readers.
You'll see more of that kind of activity in the run-up to 2008. And I've already seen quite a bit of it in the opening days of the 110th Congress. Several lawmakers have made guest appearances on both local and popular national blogs.
#6: Bloggers officially recognized as media. While gaining influence within the political realm, bloggers also began earning official recognition as media this year.
The first significant victory came in March, when the Federal Election Commission largely exempted blogs from new Internet-related campaign finance rules on the grounds that blogs are media. They applied to blogs the same exemption that governs newspapers, broadcasters and other traditional media outlets.
The decision followed a blog swarm against the FEC about a year earlier. The outcry began after news broke that the agency might try to regulate blogs. The FEC ditched that draft staff proposal, and dozens of bloggers filed critical comments as the agency weighed how to apply campaign finance law to the Internet. Several high-profile bloggers testified before the FEC and before Congress.
Bloggers also earned recognition as media from the state judicial and legislative branches last year. A California court ruled that bloggers can protect their anonymous sources under the state's "shield law," and Connecticut passed a shield law after rejecting an effort to exclude blog authors and people without journalism degrees.
The Media Bloggers Association, of which I am a member, is helping with such causes. The astute legal counsel provided by the group prompted one advertising agency to drop a foolhardy and unfounded lawsuit against a Maine blogger.
More recently, MBA has been working with some success at getting bloggers credentials to news events. When former vice-presidential aide Scooter Libby goes to trial next week for allegedly lying and obstructing justice in a probe about intelligence leaks, a handful of bloggers will be in the courtroom because of MBA's advocacy.
You're also starting to see mainstream media outlets embrace blogs:
-- Journalists write blogs, and bloggers write for traditional publications as prominent as Time magazine.
-- Both LexisNexis and Reuters have deals for distributing blog content, and the new BlogBurst syndication service has some major newspapers as clients.
-- Associated Press has a partnership with the blog search engine Technorati.
-- CNN Money last year listed "blog editor" among seven trendy jobs.
-- And just a couple of weeks ago, the McClatchy newspaper chain bought two local blogs in California.
One of the best examples of this convergence happened in Washington several months back. The print newcomer in town, The Examiner, hired my friend Mark Tapscott as its editorial-page editor. Mark is an ink-stained wretch who loves blogs almost as much as me, and he immediately created a "blog board of contributors" at The Examiner. He later moved his own blog onto The Examiner site.
#5: Network neutrality. Three of the five biggest blog stories of 2006 were policy oriented -- and not surprisingly, all three of them involved technology. Coming in at No. 5 was the debate about "network neutrality," or mandating that dominant, high-speed Internet firms cannot boost the fees that competitors must pay to put content on their networks.
The pro-net-neutrality crowd found the most support in the blogosphere and in the online community more broadly. Their demands, made through the newly formed Save the Internet coalition and other outlets, were a factor in killing a major telecommunications bill because it did not include strong enough neutrality rules.
The demand for net neutrality also shaped the largest telecom merger in history between AT&T and BellSouth. Just before the New Year began, AT&T agreed to some net neutrality conditions on the merger -- the kind of conditions it had fought for months. Bloggers who back neutrality celebrated the decision as a win for their cause, albeit a limited one.
Blogger Matt Stoller of MyDD, who is speaking at a media reform conference in Memphis, Tenn., over the weekend, put it this way:
"AT&T, the single-worst company in terms of net neutrality, gave up a lot of ground to an angry public. ... For now, we can take solace in the fact [that] a Bush-crony dominated FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, and a multibillion-dollar telecom industry lost to a group of public interest advocates and a fed-up public."
#4: Telephone privacy. I love this one because it's the story about one blogger who got angry about something and made a difference.
John Aravosis of Americablog was irritated to learn how easily people could buy cell phone records online. He griped about that fact online, even buying his own records to prove a point, but no one listened much.
Then he bought the mobile records of 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark. All of sudden, he was a guest on news shows and a source in stories. Lawmakers listened. They introduced a flurry of bills aimed at curtailing the practice, which is called "pretexting," and held hearings on the topic.
Both the House and Senate took action on the measures within months.
The issue faded for a while, but then Hewlett-Packard was caught buying the phone records of board members, employees and journalists in an attempt to find leaks within the computer company. Congress cleared a bill, and Bush signed it into law.
That end result might have been achieved without the involvement of Aravosis, but he clearly was a significant factor in moving the bill early in the legislative process. He brought to the subject the kind of passion that you used to see in newspaper editorials but that is too often lacking today. And he stayed after the story until editorial writers and the rest of the mainstream media listened and called attention to his pet topic.
It's a great example of how much power one person can achieve on the Internet.
#3: Primary defeats. Aug. 8 was a momentous day for the political blogosphere. On that day, they helped take down three incumbents in Congress.
The biggest news was Lamont's victory over Lieberman in Connecticut. Bloggers were involved in that race from start to finish.
Lamont met with at least one key blogger early in his campaign, hired four of them and used a fifth as a volunteer production editor for his first video blog. Bloggers helped raise more than $300,000 for him online. They also followed his campaign across Connecticut and swarmed his headquarters on primary night -- all the while shaping media coverage of the race by focusing on Lieberman's support for the war in Iraq.
Elsewhere the same day, blogs played a role in the intraparty defeats of Rep. Cynthia McKinney in Georgia by now-Rep. Hank Johnson, and of Congressman Joe Schwarz in Michigan by now-Congressman Tim Walberg.
The conservative Club for Growth used its blog to bash Schwarz for his centrism, and RedState joined in that effort. Here's what Erick Erickson of RedState said after Walberg won: "Most of our time ... was devoted to the drumbeat that Joe Schwarz is a liberal. And I think the voters believed it."
In Georgia, Johnson became the first candidate to write at Congress Blog in order to draw attention to his run-off with McKinney. He certainly was helped by McKinney herself. She had become a laughingstock and target of bloggers across the political spectrum months earlier for punching a Capitol Hill police officer.
But Johnson saw potential in the blogs. One of his aides said, "They've been effective in reaching out to the people who make the news, the people who determine what's hot and what's not ... and reaching the national media at an affordable price."
The outcomes in all three states served as a warning to incumbents: Enrage the blogosphere at your peril.
#2: The "secret hold." August was a good month for bloggers on the policy front, too. They became aggravated when a couple of senators used procedural tactics to anonymously hold a popular bill for bringing Internet transparency to federal spending, and they worked collectively to out the senators by calling every one of their offices.
From the right, an Internet coalition dubbed Porkbusters led the charge. Bloggers who are part of the coalition asked readers to call their senators and put them on the spot with a simple question: Are you responsible for the secret hold?
The liberal blog TPMMuckraker soon joined the effort, focusing on Democratic senators, and the moderate Republican blog GOP Progress also participated.
The tactic worked. Sens. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, and Alaska Republican Ted Stevens reluctantly admitted to their secret holds and eventually lifted their objections. Congress cleared the bill soon after, and Bush invited bloggers to the White House ceremony when he signed it.
The campaign added to the clout of the Porkbusters. Their laser focus against pork-barrel spending already had embarrassed Stevens over his "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska and GOP Sen. Trent Lott over his "railroad to nowhere" in Mississippi.
The presence of the Porkbusters clearly has been felt on Capitol Hill. If you go to Sen. Tom Coburn's Web site, you'll see the Porkbusters logo because he counts the group as an ally in his fight against earmarks. And if you go to the Porkbusters site, you'll find a quote from Lott proclaiming his disgust with the bloggers because "they have been nothing but trouble ever since [Hurricane] Katrina."
#1: Election Day. That is unquestionably the top blog story of 2006. Democrats regained control of Congress, and their blog allies had a hand in the victory.
Ridiculed from the right for two years over a poor won-loss record in electing their favorite candidates, the netroots came through this year with seven wins, five in the House and two in the Senate. On the flip side, Republican bloggers who took a stand for particular candidates finished with a 2-19 record.
The biggest win arguably was Webb's upset of Allen in Virginia. It was the last Senate race to be decided and the one that tipped control to Democrats. Webb and Montana Democrat Jon Tester were the two netroots candidates who also received the most personal money from Moulitsas at Daily Kos.
Here's what MyDD's Armstrong, who co-authored the book "Crashing The Gate" with Moulitsas, said of the Webb-Allen race: "Taking out George Allen, who was the runaway insider poll's No. 1 pick for the Republicans' presidential nomination in December of 2005 -- that's one of the biggest upsets in the last 50 years."
A sidebar to the top blog story of the year is the "macaca" incident that spelled the beginning of the end for Allen. Webb's campaign gave a video camera to a volunteer so he could track and tape Allen's events. Allen made a joke at that volunteer's expense, calling him macaca.
Bloggers swarmed, splattered the video all over the Internet and used it as the corner piece of a puzzle that painted Allen as a racist. Over the next several weeks, they pieced the rest of the puzzle together for the mainstream media.
The macaca video cost Webb's campaign all of $918.21, the amount it paid to reimburse the volunteer for travel and other expenses.
You can't get much more bang for the buck than that. Now you know why I said anyone with a message and a compelling voice can make a difference in today's digital world.
Posted by Danny at 12:36 PM | Comments (1)
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What Do Scooter Libby And Mitt Romney Have In Common?
Nothing ... but I made you look. Well, actually they have a little something in common. Technology Daily published two blog-related news summaries in our AM roundup, and Libby and Romney were the subjects.
The first summary is based on two Washington Post stories, one about bloggers receiving credentials to cover the high-profile trial of former top Bush administration aide Libby next week and the other about bloggers who are making money on their work. Here's that item:
The credibility of Web logs as journalism may be boosted by the perjury trial of former vice-presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, The Washington Post reports. A pair of the 100 seats at the trial reserved for media will go to bloggers, a first in a federal courtroom. Libby has been accused of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Justice Department's investigation of a White House news leak. His trial opens next week. The Media Bloggers Association, which represents about a 1,000 members, has been negotiating with judicial officials for two years to win space for bloggers in courtrooms. President Robert Cox said a diverse group of bloggers, including himself, would rotate throughout the Libby trial. The Post also reports that some bloggers are earning decent money.
The second summary focused on an "ancient" video clip of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney that has come back to haunt him on YouTube as he runs for president:
The presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney already has a YouTube problem. The Boston Globe and AP report that a video on the site of Romney endorsing a series of liberal viewpoints during a 1994 U.S. Senate campaign has generated more than 12,000 hits. Romney, a Republican who established a presidential exploratory committee last week, called Glenn Reynolds of the popular Instapundit Web log on Wednesday to defend himself and accused the creators of the video of unearthing "ancient footage" to attack his current conservative stances on issues such as gay marriage. Romney said he has gotten wiser since the 1994 race, which he lost to Democrat Edward Kennedy. "Of course, I was wrong on some issues back then," he said. "I'm not embarrassed to admit that."
Instapundit's comment on the series of events also is worth noting: "That's kind of cool, using a podcast to respond to a YouTube interview. All new media, all the time!"
UPDATE: Republicans David All and Mary Katharine Ham are among those praising Romney and his online team for how they responded to the YouTube video. Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine comments as well.
And GOPProgress said Romney's team was smart to respond quickly.
John Hawkins of Right Wing News was not impressed by the substance of Romney's response. "[H]e comes across as a politician who has changed his positions because he needs to appeal to conservatives if he wants to get the Republican nomination for president," Hawkins wrote, "and it's hard not to be leery of pols like that because conservatives keep getting burned by them over and over again."
Posted by Danny at 12:48 PM | Comments (3)
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The Price Of Admission For Bloggers
Free Press is hosting the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, Tenn., next week, and the Internet-friendly group has welcomed bloggers to cover it for their readers. But the bloggers who go will have to pay for the right to blog the event.
"Blogger credentials ... are available to those who will be blogging the event," Free Press noted on the page dedicated to press and blog credentials. "We are offering bloggers the discounted registration rate of $75."
The cost for traditional press appears to be nothing, probably because most journalism organizations don't pay to cover the news -- and with Federal Communications Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, among other officials, on the roster of speakers, it is a newsworthy event.
The conference also will feature bloggers Duncan Black of Eschaton, Joan McCarter of Daily Kos and Matt Stoller of MyDD as speakers (I wonder if they have to pay, too). And my good friend (tongue-in-cheek), actor Danny Glover, will be there.
One other note: The conference site has a blog, something that is becoming increasingly commonplace.
Posted by Danny at 01:24 PM | Comments (0)
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Mitt Romney And The Blogosphere
Likely Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is garnering some press and blogosphere attention for his early outreach to the blogosphere in advance of his official entrance in the 2008 race.
The Boston Globe yesterday published a piece on Romney's blogosphere overtures, and Paul Mirenghoff of Power Line commented on some of the predictions in the piece. Specifically, Mirenghoff expressed doubt that blogs will be a significant force in choosing the next Republican nominee for president.
"I'm a bit skeptical about claims that blogs will be 'a major political force' in Republican primaries, and that candidates will be 'judged' in any significant way by how well they've 'mobilized bloggers,'" he wrote, adding that blogs probably will "reflect political reality more than they shape it."
"Indeed, Romney's early success with conservative bloggers is a more a reflection of the strong positive impression he tends to make in person than of some special saavy with the 'new media.' His success in the primaries will depend more on his ability similarly to impress the voters he meets, than the prospect that voters will take bloggers' word for how impressive he is (or is not)."
A few days earlier, conservative blogger Hugh Hewitt, who is the author of the book "Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World," interviewed Romney and praised his early efforts in the blogosphere. "Romney is setting the standard," Hewitt said, "and this is a crucial precedent for him to set: The GOP must have a standard bearer willing and ready to use the new media environment to push not just his candidacy but the ideas that bind the party together."
Romney already has made a smart hire in Stephen Smith, who until recently was working for the political action committee of outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. Smith joined the Romney team soon after Frist decided not to run for president in 2008.
Robert Bluey of The Right Angle noted Smith's hiring in a piece that also looked at other potential new media experts available to GOP campaigns for the 2008 race.
Posted by Danny at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)
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The Next Thomas Paine
The decision by Time magazine to name "you" as the 2006 "Person of the Year" really bugs George Will -- especially because it gives props to all of the narcissists who he thinks own the blogosphere.
After Time's choice was announced over the weekend, the conservative commentator wasted no time in going on the air and ridiculing the choice. As Think Progress noted, Will mocked the decision on ABC's "This Week."
"It's about narcissism,” he said. “So much of what is done on the Web is people getting on there and writing their diaries as though everyone ought to care about everyone's inner turmoils. I mean, it's extraordinary.”
Not content to slam the blogosphere on television, Will then decided to dedicate ink to the topic in his next column for The Washington Post. It appears this morning and takes Time managing editor Richard Stengel to task for comparing bloggers to American revolutionary heroes Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.
Will's retort:
Not exactly. Franklin's extraordinary persona informed what he wrote but was not the subject of what he wrote. Paine was perhaps history's most consequential pamphleteer. There are expected to be 100 million bloggers worldwide by the middle of 2007, which is why none will be like Franklin or Paine. Both were geniuses; genius is scarce. Both had a revolutionary civic purpose, which they accomplished by amazing exertions. Most bloggers have the private purpose of expressing themselves for their own satisfaction.
Will does have a point. I haven't seen any Franklins or Paines in the blogosphere. But he also misses the bigger issue: Thanks to the amazing online tools of the 21st century that Will ridicules, when another statesman like Franklin or Paine does come along, he will have a much easier time spreading his message and winning followers.
Whether in America or countries that haven't yet tasted the sweet freedoms we too often take for granted, the democratic revolutionaries of tomorrow don't need a printing press to be heard; they don't need ABC's "This Week"; they don't need The Washington Post; and they don't need the kind of money that talking heads like Will earn for condescending rants against "the people."
All they need to share their vision is access to a computer, and they can reach the entire world.
Sure, much of the content on the Internet is driven by egotism. Then again, so is much of the content on talk shows and op-ed pages. George Will may not disclose his inner turmoils to the world, but he speaks and writes "as though everyone ought to care" -- and sometimes they should.
Sometimes people should care what bloggers say, too. Maybe someday, Will and his colleagues in the journalistic ivory tower will listen. And just maybe they will hear the next Thomas Paine.
UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times had a piece yesterday on "Reporting's Mass Appeal." Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine didn't like the tone of the coverage but highlighted his favorite quotes, including a reference about the return "to the time of the lonely pamphleteer or the tramp printers in the Europe."
UPDATE II: The Nashville Scene offered a peek into the narcissism that does exist in the blogosphere: "The main content in most Nashville-based blogs last week was about a meeting of bloggers at a restaurant owned by a blogger. Bloggers blogged about their anticipation of the event, they posted photos on their blogs of themselves with other bloggers, and many bloggers rushed home to blog about how nice it was to meet people who are bloggers -- just like themselves!"
Posted by Danny at 09:17 AM | Comments (2)
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An Ivory Tower Editor's Attack On Blogs
"The Blog Mob" -- that's the headline on the anti-blog screed that Joseph Rago, an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal wrote today for OpinionJournal.
Rago resurrected some well-worn criticisms of blogs and embellished them with a feature writer's flair, like this: "The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps."
He also dismissed most blogs as "pretty awful," many of the most popular ones as "downright appalling," and the medium as a whole as "homogenous." While that may be true, the same could be said of the mainstream media when you look at it as one big mass.
Ultimately, Rago resorted to the "mob" label that Steve Lovelady of Columbia Journalism Review pinned on blogs long ago. "Mobs are exciting," he wrote. "People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses."
Read it all if you're in the mood for another rant about how clueless republican journalists (the aristocrats) are when it comes to the democratic blogosphere (the peasants with pitchforks).
UPDATE: John Cole of Balloon Juice called Rago's piece "frighteningly accurate," QandO critiques Rago's piece at length.
Posted by Danny at 12:28 PM | Comments (8)
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The Blogosphere Plateau
Analysts at the Gartner research firm are predicting that the rise of blogs will plateau next year.
The research, as summarized by Tech Trends, speaks of blogs in general and not political blogs, which makes sense considering that 2008 is a presidential election year and will feature neither an incumbent nor a vice president seeking a promotion. Time magazine also just named the symbolic "you" as "person of the year," in part because of the blogging trend.
But the political blogosphere is nearing a peak as well. I predict that it will come in 2009, after the next presidential election.
Political blogs will be a powerful force during the 2007-2008 election cycle and may even make or break the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. If bloggers choose, they also could be a factor in picking an "alternative" Unity '08 ticket or vaulting some heretofore unknown third-party movement(s) into political prominence.
The next two years, however, will be the heyday for political blogs. While they will remain influential after that and new ones will continue to go online and gain popularity, their novelty will wane, the growth curve will level, and the blogs quickly will become an unheralded part of a newly merged media/political/activist landscape. The new media revolution will continue, but blogs will become a less prominent part of it.
I have absolutely no research to support that belief; it's just a bold, from-the-gut prediction by a guy who has been watching the blogosphere for years. That prediction may come back to haunt me, but there you have it.
Posted by Danny at 01:29 PM | Comments (0)
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Word-Of-Mouth Marketing By Blog
The Word Of Mouth Marketing Association is meeting in Washington today and tomorrow, and the group offered to pay the way of select bloggers to cover the event.
Here is the invitation from the WOMMA Web site:
We're looking for a few great full-time bloggers to thoroughly cover the conference. Write everything you see and hear -- we won't get in your way, and yes, you can cross-post to your own blog. We'll pick up your hotel stay, but you're on your own to get to Washington, D.C.
Today's agenda also included what is becoming an increasingly standard discussion on blogging: "Are Bloggers Journalists: The Politics Of Blogging." The speakers were David Armon of PR Newswire, Henry Copeland of Blogads and Julia Hood of PRWeek.
The questions they were supposed to answer: When are bloggers acting as journalists? Should bloggers enjoy freedom of the press? When must bloggers demonstrate journalistic accountability? Do anonymous bloggers deserve press privileges, or is free speech protection conditional on disclosure?
Tomorrow's schedule includes a session on "blogger relations" that will tackle tthical guidelines for working with bloggers, the role of marketers in blog conversations, the appropriate approach to commenting on blogs, and contacting bloggers with story ideas. And another session will focus on how to create and use blogs to spread messages by word of mouth.
Coincidentally or not, the FTC yesterday announced during the week of the WOMMA event that companies using the Internet and other methods for paid word-of-mouth marketing must disclose those relationships. The Washington Post reported that the advertising approach can take any form of peer-to-peer communication, such as blog postings or MySpace pages for a movie character.
WOMMA lauded the FTC in a press release, noting that the agency appears to understand "the distinctions between buzz marketing, which is a legitimate marketing tactic and strategy, and stealth marketing, a practice we strongly condemn and oppose."
Posted by Danny at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)
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Vote Beltway Blogroll For 'Best Media Blog'
Voting in the 2006 Weblog Awards is now open. If you like what you see at Beltway Blogroll, please go here and cast your ballots in the "Best Media Blog" category.
The voting will continue through Dec. 15, and you can vote once each day until then. Thanks for your support.
Posted by Danny at 12:02 PM | Comments (0)
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Journalists vs. Bloggers Revisited
In July 2005, I spoke at a media/blog forum hosted by the Center for Media and Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation. The question of the day: "Are bloggers and journalists friends or enemies?"
I argued then that journalists are bloggers are enemies -- and that their adversarial relationship is good for the readers of both. I still think that's largely true, and the way that some bloggers reacted this week to my article on campaign bloggers in Sunday's New York Times is Exhibit A.
My critics were not content just to ridicule the thesis of my piece or bash me personally; they made me into the poster boy for all that's wrong with: a) the Times; b) the mainstream media as a whole; or c) both.
Such clashes aside, though, journalists and bloggers are on friendlier terms these days than they were a year-and-a-half ago. American Journalism Review has the evidence in its December/January issue:
The Fourth Estate has fallen fast and furiously in love with blogs, from news-driven ones about professional sports teams, real estate, crime, Hurricane Katrina, immigration, and local and national politics to zanier ones that dive deep into niche subcultures. Most are written by staffers, particularly sportswriters and columnists. ... Other papers have involved entire sections in online group diaries. ... The appetite for blogs is so great that some newsrooms also are turning to local bloggers, freelancers and special guests, or actively