BuzzMachine

Just fine
: For the second day, the Guardian is trying to make Tony Blair’s heart episode bigger than it is. Yesterday, they started talking about him leaving office. Today, they talk to five people who had “similar” health scares. Except there’s nothing similar about them. Three of these people had heart attacks, one had a heart bypass, and one had breast cancer. Those are all way, way more severe than what Blair (and I) have. Atrial fibrillation is an inconvenience and as such it’s a little freaky and depressing. But it’s not life-threatening; it needn’t change your routine; it doesn’t reduce your abilities in any way; it’s hardly a call for retirement, no matter how much the Guardian might wish it.

: Meanwhile, in the Indepenent, Blair blames it all on strong European coffee. Did Chirac make it?

Now in stereo

: What should the relationship of weblogs and established media be?

Dave Winer says in my comments below:

BTW, who said blogging was going to overthrow journalism? I’ve heard and believe that journalism is not doing a great job, but that blogs are overthrowing it? Feh. That’s not what’s happening.

Right. Weblogs complement established media — if established media will start to realize that (and, in some quarters, they are).

Having seen the raging success of Jay Rosen and his Top 10 Lists of what’s old and new about new media, I hope he won’t mind if I horn in on the technique — albeit not as poetically — and create my own Top 10 Baker’s Dozen List about the relationship of weblogs and online media to established media, from the big guys’ perspective (since I am the rare, two-headed beast that straddles both worlds):

1. Weblogs are meant to be read. The first, best thing a reporter, editor, publisher, producer can do is read weblogs — not write them, read them. We in established media have had printing presses for hundreds of years. Now it’s everybody else’s turn. Now the people formerly known as “they” have a voice and we should listen. We should put the spotlight on “them” and stand back. See what we will learn.

2. Weblogs add information. Established media are in the information business. And weblogs bring in more information, often from new sources. If the big guys learn how to take advantage of that, then weblogs will not replace them; they will enhance them. That is why I am trying to bring blogs to towns, so citizen journalists can gather information no institution can afford to gather on its own (especially these days).

3. Weblogs bring perspective. See the Howell Raines post below. We, the people, formerly known as the audience, want to express our opinions and know the opinions of those talking to us. Weblogs allow anyone to become a pundit.

4. Weblogs target. They are a great way to reach and serve specific audiences with content — and advertising (and to find out what those audiences want to know).

5. Weblogs capture buzz. If you want to know what the people are saying and thinking, you can (a) hire a company to perform very expensive surveys and focus groups and hope they’re right, (b) go to the nearest Dennys and eavesdrop and hope you like patty melts, or (c) read weblogs. Weblogs are good at capturing and predicting buzz.

6. Weblogs produce story ideas. I know of one reporter on one paper — Maureen Ryan at the ChiTrib — who is dedicated to finding great stories online. There should be more. And, for that matter, every reporter should be mining weblogs for ideas. They’re there to be had, ripe for the plucking. Just go get them.

7. Weblogs find (and filter) news. Remember agents? Those little virtual PacMen (well, actually, they used to bring to mind the Scrubbing Bubbles commercial) were supposed to go out into the vast, wired world and and find news and other good stuff for you. Science fiction, it was. Agents died. But weblogs live. Weblogs — and their agents, aka their readers, that is, real people — fan out and find all kinds of wonderful stuff.

8. Weblogs fact check our ass. It’s wonderful to have this world of natterers and naysayers out there, for they will fact-check (and even copy-edit) blogs and newspapers, magazines, and broadcast. That is a good thing. That adds to the credibility of all media. If Howell Raines (see above and below) had heard what people were saying about him and his paper before his own staff screamed it in his ear, he might have held onto his job.

9. Weblogs add speed. During the war, no single media outlet, print or broadcast, or online, could keep up with the news-gathering power of Command Post. I didn’t say reporting. I said gathering. The weblogs brought together the best of reporting from every available outlet — all around the world — with incredible, impressive speed. That’s valuable. A wise news organization will harnass that. Come the next war (God forbid) I’d license not only AP content but also Command Post links.

10. Weblogs breed talent. And, lo, Denton begat Gawker and Gawker begat Spiers and Spiers begat TheKicker. I just recommended another blogger to a magazine editor looking for new talent. And there are more where they came from (just ask Denton). A wise editor should be looking to bloggers to find new and fresh (not to mention cheap) voices. Mind you, some people are better at writing for blogs than for print; they thrive in the immediacy and may wilt in the smokehouse of editing. But there is great talent to be found here. All you have to do is read.

11. Weblogs experiment. Weblogs find new ways to use photos and audio and I’ve played with video weblogs. Weblogs will innovate and if we watch, old media can learn new tricks.

12. Weblogs are cheap. You want to find an easy, inexpensive, fast, geek-free, hassle-free way to publish and manage content? It’s here. It won’t put out the New York Times Online. But it will put out breaking news or reports from correspondents in the field or, soon, reports from the Little League game.

13. Weblogs interact. Once old-media people (as opposed to an old media people) have read weblogs and learned from them and milked them for news and perspective and buzz and talent and then started weblogs themselves, there’s one, last, most important value be be derived from having and reading weblogs: They will help you gain an entirely new relationship with the people we used to call the audience, the folks we are trying to serve. We talk to them and now they talk back and not just to yell at us now but to say something. We get to know them; they get to know us. That’s new. That’s exciting.

Jay is right that weblogs are neither entirely new nor old. Dave is right that they will not replace what comes before. They will add to it.

: Dave Winer adds this.

DOS attack, again
: My host — same host for Instapundit and a lot of weblogs — suffered another DOS attack tonight; that’s why we were all off the air.

How’s that, Howell?: A juicy bit of irony noted from the Financial Times [via IWantMedia]:

What is the biggest threat to American journalism?

Howell Raines, the deposed (he prefers “retired”) executive editor of The New York Times, has an answer: the Brits.

More specifically, it is the influence of the “British model” of journalism, “where the politics of the paper are thought to change the way information is presented”. Mr Raines sees this happening in America’s tabloid newspapers and television.

(Of course, a common rap against Mr Raines was that he carried out crusades in the Times’ news coverage.)

I’m surprised Andrew Sullivan hasn’t taken the opportunity to slap Howell around once more, for old times’ sake. (Though perhaps because he’s writing for the Times again, he’s gunshy.)

: And Raines has it exactly wrong, of course, for this shows that he’s not paying attention to the audience he was trying to serve. Said it before, I’ll say it again: The moral of the FoxNews story is that we, the citizenry, like opinion, are not scared of opinion, and are smart enough to separate opinion from fact — and we appreciate the honesty (and resulting credibility) of media that reveal their perspectives and prejudices. They is why it’s big on radio. That is why weblogs are clicking with their audiences.

Opinion is in, Howell. If you’d seen that, if you’d admitted it, if you’d gone with that flow, if you’d said that you were, in fact, bringing the British model to America (which is what you were doing, without admitting it), you might be seen as a pioneer; you might not be unemployed (er, retired).

So yesterday
: I’m officially bored with the Easterbrook flap now. Nonetheless, there are some more interesting links here and there.

Jay Rosen got Killing the Buddha‘s Jeff Sharlett to write about it; he’s pissed.

And in my comments below, Anil fires a scud against warbloggers over this, launching from my suggestion that we need to meter our response to blog missteps:

“Why don’t we try a little forgiveness?” Well, I wish people would, but I think there’s a sad/broken dynamic in the political part of the blogosphere (mostly warbloggers) where everyone wants to participate in groupthink. There’s a lot of reasons, ranging from the human and understandable want to participate in a larger trend, to the ego-driven (and also understandable) hope that talking about the topic du jour will result in a link from Instapundit.

The unfortunate result of such things, and I’ve been on Easterbrook’s side of it, though fortunately never to the extent of having it cost me my job, is that people pile on before they’ve thought critically about something without realizing the repercussions of all their ranting. I worry about Easterbrook, not for his career, but for the personal impact it has to have a lot of people impugning his motives even before they’ve even stopped to really read his words and understood them.

Warbloggers, heal thyselves!

Being a warblogger, I return fire with a Patriot missile:

Anil: You’re dabbling in a bit of blogger bigotry yourself. You’re lumping people together under a label for more convenient attack. That’s lazy and rather unsophisticated.

I started as a warblogger. But I write about many other things now. And I did not jump on the Easterbrook pile-on until it was time to comment on ESPN’s action. Many other webwarbloggers had nothing to say about this. But you’re attacking everyone as if we were a lock-step army, though you know better: We’re hardly that. And I think you should be happy about all these “warbloggers,” for they are what made the whole of the blogosphere much bigger — and a much better business.

: Meanwhile, Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic and a fine essayist, says in the LA Times:

“…insofar as Gregg’s comments impute Jewish motives for everything that Jews do, insofar as they suggest that everything any Jew does is intrinsically a Jewish thing, they are objectively anti-Semitic. But Gregg Easterbrook is not an anti-Semite and the suggestion that the New Republic is in any way receptive to anti-Semitism is the most ludicrous thing I’ve heard since the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Gregg typed his way into a wildly offensive formulation, into classic anti-Semitic code.”

Part of that, said Wieseltier, can be attributed “to the hubris of this whole blogging enterprise. There is no such thing as instant thought, which is why reflection and editing are part of serious writing and thinking, as Gregg has now discovered.”

To which Andrew Sullivan replies:

Hubris? I think it would be hubris if one believed that somehow blogging is a superior form of writing to all others, or somehow revealing of the truth in ways that other writing isn’t. But I know of no bloggers who would argue that. It’s a different way of writing, one that acknowledges that it is imperfect and provisional and subject to revision. In that sense, it makes far fewer claims than, say, a lengthy essay published in the literary press. But, by acknowledging its limitations, it is also, I’d argue, sometimes more honest than other forms of writing, in which the writer pretends to finality, to studied perfection, to considered and re-considered nuance or argument, when he is often winging it nonetheless…. Blogging is now a part of literature. And it deserves to be understood rather than simply dismissed.

Note this trend: The flap is now not just Easterbrook’s. Some want to make it weblogs’ flap.

Those who have problems with this new form are using this to point to its weakness. Well, newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and books all have weaknesses and all have flawed products, but that doesn’t negate their value. Weblogs are new. And weblogs’ flaws are an essential part of their very definition. I agree with Sullivan that their immediacy yields greater honesty. But their dialogue also yields correction and reconsideration (more than any other medium). If speed is our disadvantage, it is also our advantage: Easterbrook was criticized in this medium faster than he would have been in any other and he apologized far faster than any institution of media would have.

I call that a strength of weblogs.

: Yes, everybody’s using this incident to beat their own drums. Surprise, surprise: Larry Lessig is using it to beat Disney.