BuzzMachine

I’m not the only one
: Jackie risks offending Harry Potter freak/fans:

I gave into the Harry Potter thing this weekend and read the new book. I am stunned — and I mean STUNNED — at how mediocre the writing is. It makes me even more awed by JK Rowling, though, because she’s made a huge success out of something that’s not actually very good. As someone who is not outrageously talented, I take comfort in this.

We opine, you decide
: Ryan Pitts points us to a thoughtful (yes!) Bill O’Reilly column on the dawn of opinionated news in America:

But the new era of instant information rendered Brinkley and many other broadcast veterans almost powerless. No longer is the American public a captive audience, and no longer will the folks settle for an expressionless recitation of the news. With the advent of the Internet and round-the-clock cable news, the audience quickly knows the basic facts of a story. But often, along with those facts come instant spin and contradiction. Informational fog develops, leaving busy Americans in need of context.

They want to know how the journalists they trust feel about things important to their lives. The news consumer is almost desperate for someone to define the truth.

Thus, the good old days when the Brinkleys and Cronkites could simply introduce stories in measured tones are coming to an end. The audience for dispassionate news is shrinking, and the demand for passionate reporting and analysis is on the rise.

This, I have been arguing, is precisely the lesson of the success of both FoxNews and weblogs: The audience does want opinons — or at least to know what the presenters’ opinions are. The audience wants compelling, not dull, news. The audience will think for itself and isn’t afraid of opinions. O’Reilly himself is the proof.

Copycats
: Can’t say it better than Fimoculous:

There goes the neighborhood. Ann Coulter: blogger. CoulterGeist, indeed.

No entries yet.

: Wonder whether she’ll update more often than Geraldo (last entry: April 24).

Al-Jazeera hacker
: The guy who hacked the al-Jazeera web site has pleaded guilty.

Positively potted
: This is what I was talking about, below, when I complained about people giving too much credit to Harry Potter. From the Washington Post:

Harry Potter has changed the world.

You just can’t say that about many books. You’ve got the Bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Copernicus wrote something or other. So did Newton and Malthus, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Darwin.

But we live in different times: the UltraMaxiMedia-Age. We are slaves to the Next, ruled by videocracy. Taught by image; motivated by movement. Books are so old school. Reading is downright irrelevant. The world doesn’t really change these days, anyway. It fractures and reassembles and moves from abnormality to new normality to post-whatever-was-in-fashion-as-this-sentence-was-being-written.

That said: J.K. Rowling’s record-setting books — number five, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” goes on sale today — are altering our landscape. With more than 200 million copies in print worldwide, the books have been translated into 55 languages and are available in 200 countries. The literary influence is global.

Changed the world? Come now. It had far more of an impact on marketing than on literature, literacy, and culture. [via IWantMedia]

Now isn’t this a pretty sight?
: Here’s the first issue of the Baghdad Bulletin, a not-quite-weekly English-language newspaper in Iraq put out by a small group of entrepreneurs and locals.

Already, I’m seeing reporting there I’ve been wanting to see from western sources. For example, I’ve been waiting for someone to explain why restoring power has been a problem when in this war (vs. 1991), the power stations were not bombed. Here’s a comprehensive report that explains just what’s happening.

The circulation in Baghdad:

Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority – 600

NGOs, including USAID – 300

Embassies – 100

Hotels – 1000

Iraqi English speaking neighbourhoods – 2000

Businesses direct – 300

Private universities/ hospitals – 100

Supermarkets/ shops – 500

Sold through newsagents – 1000

It’s a start.

I’ll suggest writing a story about how to start a weblog.

History lesson
: Blogger Alireza Doostdar gives NY Times columnist Tom Friedman a history lesson. Friedman argues that building democracy in Iraq will have a positive impact on Iran (well, it certainly will have a positive impact on the entire region). But Alizera says:

True, Iraq, like Iran, is a majority Shiite country. But Iran, unlike Iraq, has a 150-year-old democracy movement, which started with a revolution that constitutionalized the monarchy and established a parliament during the Qajar period. The Islamic Republic was not established when clerics suddenly decided to get out of their hujras in Qom and invade Tehran. It was an important milestone in the evolution of a massive national movement, which has continued to evolve and change. I think it is very naive to think that by helping Iraqis start to build democratic institutions where they have never existed, and “experiment with defining relations between religion and politics” you would have a significant impact on a country that has been experimenting with various definitions of the same relationship for decades. If anything, it will probably be the other way around, with the Iranian experience impacting developments in Iraq (as has seemed to be the case at least so far).

Peace progresses
: Mark Steyn on Iran today:

Looked at the other way round, peace is processing apace, and the chips are all falling George W Bush’s way. Whatever the defects of post-Taliban Afghanistan, it’s no longer the world’s biggest training camp for Saudi-funded terrorism. Whatever the defects of post-Saddam Iraq, it’s no longer a self-promotion exercise for the ne plus ultra of anti-American Arab strongmen. And, whatever the defects of post-ayatollah Iran, the fall of the prototype Islamic Republic will be a huge setback to the world’s jihadi.

It was Ayatollah Khomeini who successfully grafted a mid-20th century European-style fascist movement on to Islam and made the religion an explicitly political vehicle for anti-Westernism. It was the ayatollah who first bestowed on the U.S. the title of “Great Satan.” And it was the ayatollah who insisted this Islamic revolution had to be taken directly to the infidels