BuzzMachine

Get ‘im, Lassie, get ‘im!
: My colleage Peter Hauck says, look for PETA to join anti-war protests. This from a CNN story:

The U.S. Navy will bring in trained dolphins this week to hunt for seaborne mines in the waters around Umm Qasr, Navy officials said. The animals will seek out floating mines and mark them for Navy divers to inspect.

: More news for PETA: Morrocco is said to be supplying monkeys to disarm landmines.

: Update: PETA has a statement! (Surprise). From the Smoking Gun:

“Our troops deserve the best defense possible, but PETA opposes the use of dolphins, sea lions, or any other marine mammals. The project is cruel and cannot provide a reliable defense or surveillance for our troops. The Navy claims they are not putting these animals in harm’s way, but they’ve removed these animals from their homes, relocated them to foreign waters in the Persian Gulf, and are forcing them to not only inspect the waters, but to actually swim up to potential terrorists under the water, clamp a cuff on their leg, and deploy a floating marker. How can anyone say these animals are not being put in harm’s way?”

:More on the patriotic dolphins here.

:And let’s not forget the valuable role of — sniff, sniff — canaries.

Blogs and big media
: As Howard Sherman puts it, another one bites the dust: Now Time Inc. has instructed freelancer Joshua Kucera to stop posting to his personal weblog:

My editors have demanded that I stop posting to this site until the war ends. And they pay the bills, so what can I do. Thanks everyone for reading, and I hope to be back here soon. Peace, Josh.

Just this morning in Matthew Rose’s Wall Street Journal piece (below), a Time spokesperson said — wisely, it seemed: “Time.com only asks that Kucera file to Time first, then he can blog away.” Oh, well.

Add that to CNN’s Kevin Sites being told to stop blogging by CNN.

We smell a sad trend.

Now I’m very lucky. I’m a big-media guy and a I blog for work and personally. I’m lucky to work for enlightened bosses who understand the power of this medium.

What’s needed here is some education and enlightenment for other big-media types.

I have heard their fears.

They fear that a weblogger won’t do his or her real work. My answer: You’re right. You still have to manage the person. But a weblog can also bring both of you benefits: The weblogger can find new story ideas out there on the web and from the audience and that can enrich the service you give your readers. The more your reporters listen to the audience, the better reporters they will be.

They fear that webloggers will publish things on the web without editing. My answer: You’re right. You could edit posts, but that’s a pain and it detracts from the immediacy of blogging. So my advice is: If you trust them to report for you, then you probably should trust them to blog. But if they mess up, stomp on them. Also know that they will make typos; I do all the time (but my audience copy-edits me!).

They fear that webloggers will point to things on the web that are not reliable and not journalistic. My answer: You’re right. Just the other day, I pointed to a site called Pave France. I’ve pointed frequently to drivel from Iran. I make fun of Michael Moore and point to him. But that’s what the Web is about: You hear the buzz, good and bad, from the people. And the audience is wise enough to judge the difference.

They fear that webloggers will link to competitors. My answer: You’re right again! They will. That’s what the Web is about, linking. But if you provide a good service with those links, readers will return to you.

I say that the wise thing to do would be to create weblogs for these energetic contributors and see what happens. If they do it under the company banner, I’ll bet they’ll do it carefully and well (and if they don’t, you’re still the boss). And you will get new content, new perspectives, new voices, new audiences.

This isn’t as easy as it looks. Companies like CNN and Time are properly concerned with protecting their credibility, their reputation, their brands. That makes them cautious. But I predict that competition will open this up. If Newsweek blogs, Time will. If FoxNews blogs, CNN will. Give it time.

P.S. I think we are winning
: That P.S. comes at the end of a letter home on Sgt. Stryker.

The casual warrior
: My wife suggests that President Bush would have been better off not spending the first weekend of the war at Camp David. Not good for the image.

Now Tony Blair is coming to see Bush and they’re going to the camp.

On the White House press briefing today, a reporter asked Ari Fleischer why they’re not meeting at the White House.

“It’s a very good place to sit down in an informal atmosphere,” was the answer.

Embedded in the press corps
: New York Magazine media dog Michael Wolff is in every Centcom briefing. Today, Gen. Renuart called on him as “the gentleman with my kind of haircut.”

Wolf asked the general whether the media was misrepresenting the progress of the war… or not.

“The media is reality,” the general replied. “The media is a snapshot of what it sees at that point in time…. The challenge has been the immediacy…. I don’t think the media has had an adverse effect… I think most of the commanders are comfortable.”

Farewell to a pioneer
: The man who truly invented mobile computing, Adam Osborne, has died. Jimmy Gutterman told me on his weblog. Here is Osborne’s obit.

I still have my Osborne 1 and I’m damned proud of it. Ugly, beige, heavy, with a tiny screen, two clacking disc drives, and CPM, it was expensive at $1,795 (my printer cost even more) but amazing. I carried it around and used it to first connect to online services (at 300 baud, my children) and learn the wonders of connectivity. I wrote a very bad and never published first novel on it.

I took it out the other day and my son — who at 11 speaks PHP already — was entranced by its primitiveness.

Osborne got supplanted by Kaypro and in turn by Compaq and now Sony. But he was a pioneer with a vision.

He made us mobile.

Let’s go to the video
: I’m watching the Centcom briefing and now it’s time for the AV guy to show the videos.

These images are so different from the ones we saw in 1991 and in Afghanistan.

It’s not the big bang, the wowy woosh.

It’s a tank here, a missle battery there, an occasional building. They’re going out of their way, with before-and-after pictures, to show the extreme targeting of military objectives. Collateral damage is the no-no of the war (though, as they’re saying right now, it’s obviously hard to tell the difference when a civilian bus filled with people in civilian dress stops to join a battle and everybody on that bus is armed).

Blog stories
: Matthew Rose, media reporter for the Wall Street Journal, writes about blogs and the war (he quotes me; only wish they’d included the URL!).

: And Allan Hoffman wrote about blogs and war for the Star-Ledger (he did include the URL).