BuzzMachine
by Jeff Jarvis

September 30, 2003

BBC's nevermind
: Well, it seemed to good to be true. Now it appears it's not true. Remember when the BBC was going to open up all its archives online? Well, Rafat Ali reports that they're not doing that.

Firstly, right now the process is going through a jumble of lawyers, mainly due to copyright issues. It is likely to be in that stage for some time. Secondly, BBC will not open up all of its archives online...it says it will only open up content which is deemed to be otherwise unprofitable or non-commercial. Now who's to decide that? Well presumably, another battery of lawyers and supposed independent firms like KPMG, for sure. For all you know, it might end up just being educational programs.
On another front, DRM issues will be a big hurdle...I asked Gambino about whether users outside of UK will be able to access Creative Archives, and she said they won't.

The People's Network
: We keep looking at the impact of the Internet, weblogs, and audience content [does anybody have a better term for that, by the way?] on print media. But Terry Heaton [via Lost Remote] writes that all this will have huge impact on TV as more people get the tools of big media in their hands (See also Jay Rosen's reference to Michael Rosenblum of TVDojo, a service that teaches people how to create high-quality video.)
column">Heaton writes:

And for broadcasters to succeed, I believe we need to reinvent ourselves as multimedia distribution and production companies. The creation and transmission of video, formerly the sole purview of TV, is now spread over a wide variety of technologies. (Even television production itself has changed - what used to require many people can now be done by one.) ...
And the biggest online competition a TV station faces downstream is not the other guy across town with the antenna. It's the local newspaper. Incoming Associated Press chief, Tom Curley, says the A.P. will be working hard to turn newspapers into broadcasters by providing video for them to use online....
Video News On Demand (VNOD) will be the way people get their video news in a Postmodern world. The news wars of the 21st century will be online...
By denying the reality of the Internet, TV stations are abdicating their position as the purveyors of video news in the community. This is a death sentence for local television, because local news is the only video niche that cannot be filled from afar. And disruptive technologies may even change that! In some big markets, cable companies have had success doing local news, and I think the next player in this game will be satellite TV. The economics make sense, for video journalism is a lot less expensive to create these days than many think.
Right. Anybody will be able to create video, just as anybody can write online. (See also vlogs.)

Blogs, good for the grass
: Scott Moore, head of MSNBC.com, lauds blogs:

I think online weblogs actually help the online news business quite a bit. Weblogs are just another factor in the constantly increasing pace of the news cycle. Weblogs by their nature are referential; they certainly almost always point out a new development, the blogger is riffing on something that’s happened in the news. The extent that weblogs continue to grow in popularity means more people are interested in the news and engaged in getting their news online.

Compare and contrast
: When the Observer's man in America left, he wrote a simplistic screed against the country he allegedly covered.
Now compare that with the farewell piece from Telegraph D.C. bureau chief Toby Harnden [via Andrew Sullivan]:

Despite their many differences, and the divisions over the 2000 election that still linger, they believe in the idea, the ideal, almost the emotion, that is the United States.
This patriotism is based not on blind nationalism but on the embrace of universal values - freedom and democracy - that bind together a disparate people...
Americans had little choice but to rise to the challenge September 11 presented. But acting decisively has stirred the embers of anti-Americanism - among other governments and elites at least. Even more dangerous is the rise of "counter-Americanism", the doctrine that the United States has to be stopped, its goals frustrated and a counter-balance created.
Yet it is worth recognising the self-evident truth that America is a force for tremendous good in the world. Opposing it means opposing the universal values that Europeans first exported.

Useful/useless
: Too much news is useless. I don't mean it's not important, but it's useless in our daily lives.
News is rarely judged on that scale: useful vs. important. I think it's a scale we should use more -- a scale that will matter more as more people come online and reshape their definition of news.
Too often, useful news is belittled as "service," a perjorative in some halls of journalism. But the truth is, when I'm looking for a new cell phone -- and I am -- Gizmodo is filled with useful -- and thus, to me, important -- news. In the community sites I work with, when a local ballet school announces that the tutus are in, that's news; it's both useful and important to a bunch of little ballerinas.
So now judge the debate about whether bloggers and community bloggers will create news. They will. But it will often be news of a different definition. When somebody gets that new Treo 600 phone I've been panting after and tells me what they really think of it, that will be terribly important news to me. When a blogger in my town tells me something stupid happening on the planning board that's going to affect my property, that's news to me (and I heard that news the other night from a guy I then convinced to blog -- for the paper had not reported this news).

: So now look at the good questions Jay Rosen asks in his Merrill Brown interview (see post below):

Is journalism as a profession ready to open itself to ideas coming at it from the new horizon? Is it open to the people who are not journalists and who suddenly have more information power? Does journalism value its own intellectual capital?...
But the radically new thing is that the people at home can be producers of content. This seems to me a different puzzle, and trickier. You could have your eye on new competitors in the industry, and overlook entirely that the industry itself has competitors: the great volunteer army of content providers emerging on the Web. You can tell yourself, “there will always be a need for trained gatekeepers, and that’s us.” But this could be complacency on a cosmic scale. True, gatekeepers are needed in an age of instant information abundance. That doesn’t meant people will want you swinging the gates, especially if you’re still seeing them as “consumers,” like in the previous age of media. You could remain head gatekeeper at a news park that no one visits any longer because a better one opened up. It’s possible....
Can [the news business] adapt to technology? Yes, and it will become multi-media as a matter of course. But when the tools you once commanded are down at Radio Shack, that isn’t about adapting or adopting. That’s an overturning.
Right, way right. The selection of news will change. The sources of news will change (not replacing the old ones but adding to them, tremendously). And the definition of news will change.
The news business will have to embrace that, for doing so will lead to so much more useful information (let's remember: we're in the information business); it will save money (not irrelevant these days), and it will be demanded by the audience -- and the audience will now have their own printing presses (and broadcast towers).

: Now, for the fun of it, judge today's New York Times front page on the useful vs. important scale:
: Big increase seen in people lacking health insurance -- Useful; matters to my daily life.
: White House denies a top aide identified an officer of the C.I.A. -- Important (allegedly); utterly useless to me and my life. One could also argue, of course, that this is actually unimportant; government gossip. But we'll leave that to another hour.
: Insiders' new firm consults on Iraq -- Important; useless to my daily life.
: Vast, unsecure Iraqi arms depots could take years to dispose of -- Important; useless to my daily life.
: With end near, recall race starts to look conventional -- Important (to Californians); useless to me.
: Drafting of charter deeply divides Iraq -- Important; useless.
: Schools seeking alternatives to granting more transfers -- Useful to parents.
: Once-cold stock is hot, and hot one is not -- Can't decide why the story was really done; neither.
News organizations will -- and should -- always report the important news. But their audiences will also report --and demand -- useful news.
Watch that Page One change -- slowly, but watch it change.

Q & A & Q
: Jay Rosen has another blog interview up, this with Merrill Brown, founding editor of MSNBC.com, late of Real.com, and a good guy.
One minor but important observation about Jay's email interview technique: Most times when I get email questions, they all come in one lump and my answers return in a lump. Jay is asking one question, waiting for the answer, and then following up with appropriate questions. That may be more laborious and time-consuming, but it's clearly a better way to interview when you want to get more than simple answers to simple questions. In fact, I'd say that can be a better method for interviews than face-to-face over a notebook or tape recorder, for this Q & A & Q via email allows both participants to actually think about what they're saying and to respond to each other with more probing questions and answers. It's no way to trip somebody up, if that's your interview goal, but it is a way to get depth.

More on anger
: Marcus on Harry's site sticks a pin in the balloon of hot air coming from quisling MP Clare Short's mouth. She said:

I am sure that wherever he (bin Laden) is, down there or up here, he is saying it has all gone according to his plan,” the MP for Birmingham Ladywood, who has become an outspoken critic of the Government, told a fringe meeting. “Since September 11 the world has gone in the way that he wanted it to. It has got more dangerous and insecure and there are more and more angry young people in Afghanistan.
Marcus ticks off the evidence to the contrary: Afghansistan is not breeding terrorists; Iraq won't launch attacks on Israel; much of al-Queda is taken out. But then he deals with this anger thing:
I've got shocking news for you Clare, there are lots of angry young people everywhere. Try going to any nightclub, university, High Street, pool hall or football match in the country for proof. It's practically obligatory for young people, especially men, to be angry about something whether it's the inability of their team to win games or their own inability to attract girls.
I'm not sure there is much we can do to prevent youthful frustration turning to anger especially if you live in a place as poor and socially conservative as Afghanistan but I for one am pleased that that such anger and frustration is now more likely to be expressed in political debate than in exercises at Afghan training camps which taught thousands of young people that to kill and maim Christians, Jews, and Buddhists was God's plan for the world and that for them to die crashing planes into buildings containing innocent workers was glorious.
I've heard too damned much about anger and rage lately. We keep hearing about all the angry young men of the Arab world but Marcus is right: There are angry young men everywhere and their anger does not give them license to murder, and if they do murder then they get punished like any criminal. When the anger is theirs, it becomes a motive, an excuse.
But when the anger is ours (see the post below), it instead is painted as irrationality, as rage when, because we were attacked, our anger is a motive, it is a justification for self-defense.
Both views are fundamentally patronizing and wrong-headed. They turn this into a battle of emotion: We should understand their anger; we should control our anger.
But it's not about emotions. It's not about anger. It's about civilization and laws.
Don't turn the world into an episode of Oprah. Don't make Dr. Phil our President. Don't insult us. Don't trivialize their crimes.

Rage
: Chris Hedges interviews psychoanalyst Charles B. Strozier about 9/11 and rage and comes out of it with a maddening New York Times story.
The doctor, who also teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, "which lost 70 alumni in the attacks," says he sees differences in the people's reaction to 9/11 depending on whether they were there or whether they watched the horror on TV. What's that difference? Strozier doesn't seem to answer the question and Hedges doesn't seem to push him.

"Those who viewed the event through the repeated images on television alone became numb," he said. "The constant repetition of the image served to cut the disaster from reality. The images on televisions were more disorienting, more confusing and maybe more seductive. I knew from past studies that numbness leads not to anger but to rage, to anti-empathy, to undirected anger. The confusion of rage often pushes people towards violence. Numbing leads to a diminished capacity to feel."
And, so?
So what's the line between "anger" and "rage" and "undirected anger"? This pushes viewers to violence -- where; where have you seen that happen? Isn't "numbing" defined as a "dimished capacity to feel?" But Hedges doesn't push the points because, as it turns out, he wants to sneak in his own agenda. Hedges wrote the book "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." He wants somebody to say that war is bad. And the shrink says it in the last graph:
You cannot underestimate the difference between the experience and the image of the experience," Dr. Strozier said.
"Those who lived in Lower Manhattan breathed in the smell of the dead for weeks, like those at Auschwitz. We all knew what the smell was even if we did not speak about it. The dust settled over huge sections of the city, from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side.
"The chaos and fear were real to New Yorkers. This made the experience authentic. New Yorkers were much closer to the suffering. It was harder to become numb to it. And while they may have been angry, they were less filled with rage," the professor said. "It was much harder to get those of us who were there to believe in the notion that killing others would somehow make us safer."
Crap. So they seem to be arguing that we went to war because most of the country watched 9/11 on TV, which caused some strange form of numb rage. They seem to be arguing that if it were up to the witnesses of 9/11, we wouldn't be going to war.
Speaking as only one witness, I'd say that logic and experience say just the opposite. As I've written here over the last two years, it's people on the other coast, far away from the horror, who have been more likely to say, "Get over it." It's people who witnessed the event who have clear cause for anger.
Hedges and Strozier want to belittle that anger by calling it "rage" and acting as if it's out of control and irrational.
Well, we have a right to rage. And it has nothing to do with whether we were there or whether we watched what happened on TV. We know what happened: We were attacked that day and we are threatened every day since and we have to protect ourselves. We go to war out of rational need, not rage.
Right now, doc, I'm feeling rage and it's directed at you and Hedges.

September 29, 2003

Hip
: Once upon a time, I was hip: I was young... a gossip columnist... in San Francisco (when it was hip)... single... no gray hair...
Now I just visit hip.
Tonight, I visited the Soho House, the cool du jour.
Before I went in, I wandered about the former meat district, now a meet district.
Here comes a guy on a Segway damned near run down by one cab and then the next, and I side with the cabs. Too hip to bear. The Birkenstock of transport. I want to shout at the guy: Get a horse! Get a pair of Nikes! Get a cab!
I go into the Soho house and peoplewatch. Over there are Edie Falco (looking better than she ever gets to on TV) and Stanley Tucci. Celebrity quota filled.
Over at that table are single women replaced by single women: Sex and the City plus or minus 10 years.
I watch people pass by and play a new game: Pick the Brit. One guy near me looks like Mr. Bean; too easy.
I'm surrounded by hip. The problem is, I don't care about hip anymore. Used to. Don't now. I no longer aspire to it. Lileks is my model: Heartland, not hip.

Another way to make money on blogs...
: ... consulting for the clueless: Big Blog Company.

The power of the press
: I just got this wonderful email:

Thank you so much for turning me on to the Chief Wiggles website. After reading it, I wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper. While it usually takes the editor 2 to 3 days to reply and to tell me they will print my letter on a certain day, this time I heard from him in 2 hours and 50 minutes and the letter appeared the next day. On Friday, I sent a box of toys and health supplies weighing 20 pounds to Chief Wiggles and hope to do so each Friday for the foreseeable future. I felt so good and am hoping to get many other people in my hometown interested in this endeavor. Thanks again so much!! Sally McCann
No, thank you, Sally.

: Virginia Postrel has great instructions for sending the toys.

: Major update from the comments. Michele tells us:

Be on the lookout in the next few days for a separate website for the Chief Wiggles project. It's growing beyond what Chief imagined it would be.

Lunch with the interloper
: I had lunch today with Jason Calacanis, cofounder of WeblogsInc, which plans to revolutionize B2B media using blogs and which causes much hubub last week.
Jason is, as always, enthusiastic and engaging. He is also open, taking me back to his office to show me his new tools. I won't go into detail; that's for him to blog (and, yes, he will start a personal blog and work on one of this biz blogs).
I at least see the reasoning behind his creation of tools (he sees the chance to get richer data and to create links between blogs both editorially and in advertising; that, he says, will be easier to do in one environment). I heard more about his revenue strategy (he'll say more about that later). And he clarified his profit-share structure (he's not taking out his overhead before he shares, contrary to some speculation).
I don't know whether he can get as many successful niche biz blogs as he wants; don't know whether he'll get as many bloggers as he needs (though he says he's getting interested email aplenty already, thanks to the brouhaha hereabouts); don't know whether he can get as much revenue as he hopes. But, of course, no one knows any of that when you start a new biz.
We'll watch with interest....

Oh, Ted
: Ted Turner is depressed. I own Time Warner stock. So am I. But not this bad.
Ted tells a bunch of newspaper editors:

"If I had to predict, the way things are going, Id say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct or nearly extinct within 50 years," Turner said. "Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me."
Ted on Iraq:
"We spent $87 billion to blow Iraq up and then we spent another $87 billion to put it back together, and all to get one man and we still haven't got him," Turner said. "Talk about a failure."
Yeah, that's almost as much as Ted lost when he sold to Time Warner.

September 28, 2003

A life
: Relapsed Catholic recommends a remarkable obituary for a remarkable man, Emil Fackenheim, philosopher, historian, Holocaust survivor:

Sometimes, I thought Emil was Job himself, but without the complaints. I never saw him yield, or ask, "Why me?" --that question we ask ourselves when we lose our sense of our own proportion in the universe.

The protest network
: Harry complains, with good right, about the BBC once again soliciting viewers' photos from an anti-U.S./anti-U.K. Iraq demonstration.
Have they ever asked for, say, photos from the soldiers who are off in Iraq defending freedom?

The latest spam trick
: Umlauts.

The real story
: Jay Rosen continues his discussion about the quality of reporting from Iraq. The issue isn't painting the situation as good or bad but the story we're missing, the one that takes some imagination, vision, and perspective. He compares the story of the rebuilding of Iraq with the story of the unbuilding of the World Trade Center:

Journalists are suppposed to tell us what’s happening in places we are not. American journalists in Iraq, overseen by their editors back home, have every right to inform us about killings and setbacks and sabotage and how there’s not enough money or fading goodwill. But they might also investigate where, when, whether the virtues Langewiesche describes so well at Ground Zero are making a difference on the ground in Iraq. And if they aren’t, what’s happened to them?
That’s a story about the American way, but to find it you have to “see” this way as ours, as Langewiesche—a superior journalist—did. There’s no script for what’s happening in Iraq; there was none for Ground Zero. “Did Bush and Rumsfeld have an adequate plan?” is good for point-scoring; but it’s a naive expectation for action and upheaval on this scale. I expect Americans to be good at problem-solving when there is no plan, when the bosses don’t know what to do, or aren’t around, when only an unscripted experiment can work.

The real story
: Tim Blair's friend finds the real reason why reporters are painting such a bleak picture from Baghdad: They're all hungry, horny, and bored.

Presidential politics and blogging
: I've been making a lot of notes for provocative (read: obnoxious) questions to ask the participants -- that is, everyone in the room -- at the Bloggercon day 2 session on presidential politics and blogging. I'd like the discussion to start here, now (so I can lazily get more provocative questions). To start the bidding:

: Is it more important for a presidential candidate to create a blog -- or to read the blogs of the voters? Or to put it a big more abstractly: In this medium, is it better for the powerful to speak or to listen? (And we can -- and will -- ask the exact same question about big media and weblogs.)

: I say the best thing a Presidential blogger can do is to link to posts in voters' weblogs. That proves they listen. But will the spinmeisters fear linking to someone with whom they may agree on one issue and disagree on another? Will the lack of control freak the control freaks?

: What happens when your online supporters are bozos -- for example, bozos who spam blog comments? Can your own fans give you a bad name?

: I want to see webloggers fact-check candidates' asses, too (and not just media's asses). We need the Presidential Snopes.

: Can and should webloggers organize around an issue? Can't a pack (or PAC) of webloggers gather together enough critical mass to, say, make spam an issue in Congress? Can't they make a difference that way? Can't they prove their combined influence that way? Or are webloggers constitutionally incapable of organizing themselves? (And, by the way, is that why so many of them are Libertarian?)

Dave Winer created a comment link for all the BloggerCon sessions here. Please leave questions, comments, views, curiosities, and random controversy for the discussion there or here.

: Doc's post on Wesley Clark and blogging from Friday is more rich and warm fodder for discussion:

...I suggested that the General instruct his staff to find all the blogs that support him on the Web, to contact them personally, and to turn grass roots support into working relationships. By relating to his bloggers, he could start to "out-Dean" the Howard Dean campaign, which is by far the most clueful of the bunch, Web-wise; but hardly perfect. There is still plenty of wiggle-room for others who might be even better grass farmers than Dean.
Well, now comes news that Clark is, incredibly, scorching the earth where his grass roots were just beginning to spout. Follow both those links and you'll read a story that's both extremely complicated and clearly just beginning to play out....
Now is the time for him to call those pissed-off supporters, publicly admit the mistake of killing off their sites, and get on with the business of out-Deaning Dean.
Which, of course, I'd give a snowball's chance.
[Later...] Backblogs here, here and here.
: More questions...

: Do candidate blogs have to be boring?

: Do candidate blogs have to be pompous or self-righteous? (Check out this headline: "Why can't we all just listen to Bob Graham?"

: Is it necessarily true that unofficial candidate weblogs are better than the official versions?

Hockey stick
: Technorati is now tracking one million weblogs.
That's a real number: no blogs that are started and left to rot but blogs that are linking. An impressive number.
Now more them should link to me.

September 27, 2003

Campaigns by the people, for the people
: Steven Johnson creates a campaign ad on his blog. He says he hasn't decided who'll get his vote yet; the commercial is a whim. It's a proof of concept: that in this new, bottoms-up world of populist media, the winning strategies,the best strategies -- the memes with mo -- will come from the voters, now that they have a voice on the web:

Ever since the fall of Trent Lott, I've been fascinated by the thought of the web contributing ideas and strategy to political campaigns, and not just money and meetups. (Both of which are crucial, of course.) I have a feeling that as the 2004 campaign heats up, the blogosphere will become an increasingly rich source of "message" brainstorming, given how easy it is to put together a relatively polished attack ad these days.
More on this at Bloggercon...

Funny, you don't look Jewish
: So I was sitting yesterday with some of my great colleagues at Ibby's, the greatest falafel in Jersey City (the greatest falafel I've ever had) and I'm watching across the street.
There's an old synagogue across the street and I see lots of men going in, more and more, the parade doesn't stop.
But, funny, they don't look Jewish.
Sure enough, it's a temple: Star of David in stone; appropriate symbolism in the stained-glass windows, Hebrew in stone.
The men are wearing head coverings, but they don't look like yarmulkes.
Irony of irony: It's a mosque. I wander across the street; only the mailbox -- and the shoes sitting in the vestibule -- mark this as a mosque. Otherwise, it just looks like an old temple.
I wonder whether they see the irony.

The vast fast-food conspiracy
: I was so excited. Burger King has a new chicken sandwich. I loved fast food. But I can't eat the Whoppers and Quarter Pounders I used to. And I still have to go to the fast-food joints because that's what the kids eat. So I get excited when one of the giants comes up with a new, low-fat item. It's sad. But it's life.
sfcb.jpgSo I went today to try the new Santa Fe Fire-Grilled Chicken Baguette.
What a slab of crap.
First, the thing is tiny. It's a frigging finger sandwich. The name is longer than the bread.
Second, they slather on a "southwestern sauce" (read: salsa for wimps) that is dreadful; it tastes like canned ratatouille.
Third, the chicken is mealy.
Fourth, the bread is tasteless.
What a damned disappointment.
I wonder whether it is a vast fast-food conspiracy: They make the low-fat stuff taste so dreadful that you have no choice but to keep eating the fries.

Google allowance
: While everyone and his uncle is talking about starting business empires out of online blogs and interactivity, my 11-year-old son and guru is making a business online. He runs a forum where friends talk about the things friends talk about (don't go leaving your boring adult political opinions there, please... but feel free to click on the ads!) and he signed up for Google Adsense. I was, I'll admit, surprised that he was accepted; he was and put up the ads on all his inside pages. I was even more amazed at his news this morning that on his first day in business, he made $2.56.
Beats a lemonade stand.
Google: The new allowance.

Stop the stop-the-war madness
: Harry Hatchett has a counter demonstration to the demonstration against the "occupation" of Iraq going on in lovely London town.
I have one suggestion to the marchers: Why don't you take the example of David Blaine and just shut up for 44 days?
To leave Iraq would be to leave it to anarchy, violence, economic chaos. These people want the U.S. to fail so badly that they would sacrifice the civility and lives of the Iraqi people to meet that goal. These people don't give a rat's rump about the Iraqi people.
And the liberation (nee occupation) of Iraq is ahead of, say, the liberation of Germany. Rumsfeld excerpted from the Washington Post:

“Within two months, all major Iraqi cities and most towns had municipal councils – something that took eight months in postwar Germany.
Within four months the Iraqi Governing Council had appointed a cabinet – something that took 14 months in Germany.
An independent Iraqi Central Bank was established and a new currency announced in just two months – accomplishments that took three years in postwar Germany.
Within two months a new Iraqi police force was conducting joint patrols with coalition forces.
Within three months, we had begun training a new Iraqi army – and today some 56,000 are participating in the defense of their country. By contrast, it took 14 months to establish a police force in Germany and 10 years to begin training a new German army.”
Freedom takes work.

Nation of thumb-suckers
: The Guardian is trying to find the cosmic, politically correct meaning of magician David Blaines' 44-day stay in a plastic box in London:

But isn't there something obscene about turning starvation into a public spectacle when half the world suffers involuntary hunger? Even a chosen incarceration seems vaguely decadent when victims of tyranny rot in the world's jails.
Oh, ferchrissakes, it's just a publicity stunt. Much has been made about Britons' hostile reaction to Blaine and Americans' accepting attitude to his tricks. The difference is simple: We know show biz when we see it. We don't waste time getting mad at or analyzing a TV trick. We have lives.
Writer Michael Billington goes to the site of Blaine's stunt and interacts with the other Britons-without-lives who now hang out there, contemplating the meaning of it all and trying to find haughty intellectualism in even this.
But the bizarre paradox is that Blaine's act of imprisonment seems to have a liberating effect on the rest of us. Stay there long enough and you not only begin to forget your own rushed daily routine but meet lots of interesting new people. It says something about our own form of solitary confinement that it takes a man in a glass box to get us to open up to other human beings....
But, precisely because we can all attach our own private meaning to Blaine's action, this strange public confinement in the end acquires something of the unresolvable ambiguity of art.
Man, this guy could find the true meaning in a pile of dog poop.

Armed bloggers
: A Michigan man having a zoning dispute over the trailers he put on his property has started a blog to tell his side, capture the press he's getting (he used audblog to broadcast a radio interview), and mobilize his supporters (he quotes another blogger who advises citizens to take tape recorders and digital cameras to the next town meeting so it can be posted online; he also links to my email chat with Jay Rosen and the prediction that bloggers will cover town meetings newspapers can't afford to cover).
All that's quite cool: power to the people and all that.
Just one more thing: This blogger has also recruited help from the Michigan Militia (whose site says that an "armed standoff" has been averted). Armed bloggers. Well, there are already lots of those. But they don't wear camoflauge.

The Times Club
: If I didn't already subscribe to, read, and like The New York Times, its commercials certainly would never get me to start. What a bunch of pompous twits.

Blog-bashing, sport of old-timers
: In a desperate plea to get publicity and links, The Paper bashes blogs [via Henry Copeland]:

...Time was—and what a glorious time it was—we could update our website with personal anecdotes, stories, bits of miscellaneous writing, and it hadn’t been given a name. Wired was still interesting, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was fighting the good fight and we early adapters were going to change the world....
Sometime around 1999, our internetal offspring pulled up in their RVs and turned the web into a wasteland of irrelevance, indulgence and hackery. The weblog had been created, and the entire construct was ruined for everyone who’d inadvertently birthed and championed this "new form."
No, no, go ahead, bloggers and bloglovers, call it a publisher revolution. Just know that like Magic: The Gathering, fantasy football and rehab programs, blog culture is a circle jerk. Like missing a rerun of Friends, when you stop reading any given blog, life is no worse for it.
Blogging is not the new journalism. It’s the new zine. They will disappear when some of the more high-profile bloggers—those who came up from nothing with a will to write, not those high-vis journos who slummed in the freeform—find jobs in the mainstream press, where they clearly thirst to be. Their sites will atrophy, and the left-behinders will become bitter, scream "sellout" and lose interest.
The blog is a dead form within two years. On the outside.
How sad it is to be a has-been. How sad it is be an ass.

September 26, 2003

The real blogging revolution
: Whenever we brag about the impact weblogs are starting to have on media and politics, we should be humbled by the truly revolutionary impact they are having in Iran. Hoder, the guy who started that revolution, writes a very good piece explaining how it happened and what's happening.

Weblogs are powerful bridges in a widely divided society. Bridges between immigrants and homeland inhabitants, girls and boys, parents and children, and especially between journalists and writers who were not able to publish their works freely in the politically closed atmosphere in Iran and their thirsty readers.

2+2=48
: A great bit of 2+2ing from Ken Sands:

Bruce Willis, the self-appointed Bob Hope of the Iraq conflict, visited a remote desert outpost Friday to meet with a small number of U.S. troops monitoring the border with Iran. Here's one quote:
"I feel a lot of pride for these guys out here. If I was a little younger, I would be out here with them," the 48-year-old actor told The Associated Press.
Ken then proceeds to list the brave men of 50 or thereabouts who have given their live for freedom in Iraq.

My Bloggercon panel
: Dave Winer just asked me to play host to the Day 2 Bloggercon session on weblogs in presidential politics. So far, Ed Cone and Dan Gillmor have signed on; others soon. But the panel is really the entire room. In my words, I'll be Phil Donahue (in Dave's word, Oprah) asking everyone not just to critique what the candidates are and aren't doing right with weblogs in their campaigns -- it's still too soon to write the real reviews, no? -- but instead to imagine the real power and impact of weblogs on presidential politics (and state and local politics as well): What can and should not only candidates -- and media -- but also voters be doing with weblogs to bring more information, action, organization, and impact to politics? I'd like to start the discussion here and now; leave comments; send links. See you in Cambridge....

Blogging the Don't-Bee way
Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune blogger, has excellent advice for any major media organization itching to join the revolution:

To edit a blog almost instantly and whenever the blogger wants to post would require an expenditure of resources from the sponsoring publication that dwarfs the income -- right now, essentially zero in the free-access info-market of the web.
Yet to edit a blog conventionally -- putting it into a comparatively slow, one-way pipeline toward publication -- robs it of its essential blogness. It takes a potentially fresh new medium that, as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, is a hybrid of talk radio and print, and turns it back into just more old medium....
In reality, what needs to emerge here if the j-blog isn't going to die at birth, is an understanding on the part of editors and readers that, procedurally, a blog is much more like an appearance on a TV panel program or talk-radio show than it is a fully sanctioned, completely vetted declaration in cold type.
My fellow columnists and I frequently appear on radio and television and offer live (and in many cases broadcast on the internet), unedited statements under the color of our publications. Several Tribune staffers even have their own radio shows. We give speeches. We respond to e-mail and letters in writing. We give interviews to the New York Times.
And almost never is the substance and wording of such communication approved in advance by minders or editors.
Very, very rarely -- never in my case -- this freedom causes real problems.

Pretenders to populism
: Folks are piling on Jason Calacanis for his opening act in blogs and this inspired Tony Perkins, who was also piled on at a recent blog conference for his faux blog Always On, to write a what-I've-learned piece. The answer is not much.

I have finally learned what a blog is. (Thank you Dave Winer!) It is an amateur author who posts a regular diary on his own site that is unedited, spontaneous, and generally comments on and links to other blog sites. I think the key attribute is the establishment of an individual voice that provides an alternative to traditional media.
Well, actually, I could contest that definition but it's not worth the effort. Perkins admits that his magazine-that-couldn't-afford-paper is really not a blog and so he has learned something.
Now the last thing we need in this new world is an instant orthodoxy of what is and what isn't a blog, a new us-vs.-them wall down the world. That serves no one.
But what does matter is that the weblog revolution not be mischaracterized -- co-opted, that is -- to audiences that matter, namely: the audience itself; and advertisers (who, if they think they're paying for a blog when they're not won't then pay for what is really a blog); and media (who, if they think they're writing about blogs when they're not won't end up writing about what is really a blog).

: Perkins continues to try to get revolutionary ruboff from the blogging community and his alleged proximity to it:

The bottom line as I see it is the original blogging community represents the early-adopters of a movement that will eventually radicalize the entire media industry. Some time off in the future, if major media brands do not open up their content to more participation, readers will just not trust them, and they will go elsewhere.
Perhaps AO is one of the first commercial brands to borrow on the blogging tradition in this regard. So on one hand, we appreciate our founding fathers, but on the other hand we need to massage and build upon what you have shown us to make it more commercially viable.
Well, first, pardon me for playing PC PC (that is, personal computering politically correct) but "early adopter" is just another condescending way to say "loser geek." It's another way to say, "thanks, kids, now let the grownups take over." It's another way for Perkins to come off like a pompous ass. But fine; no news there.
And, second, I disagree with his assumption that blogging will somehow grow up to be a part of all major media. No, it won't necessarily and neither should it necessarily. The internet is the first medium owned by its audience and weblogging is the means that is giving that audience its voice. What's important about weblogging is not that big media may do it but that the people are doing it.
I'm a big-media guy and I'm a blogger and the reason that I keep them separate is that when I blog, I'm little media -- nanomedia -- and proud. That's what this is all about.
The success of this medium -- artistically, functionally, commercially, politically -- will come not from big guys taking it over and not from little guys trying to become big guys but instead from the congregation of all the little guys ending up with a voice louder than the big guys'.

Whitey, dead
: Whitey, from Leave it to Beaver, is dead, leaving a heckuva story behind:

Demons chased Stanley Fafara from Hollywood to Portland, tormenting him while he spiraled into a hand-to-mouth existence on the street. Over time, he lost everything -- family, money, dignity -- to heroin, pills and booze. But friends said that Fafara -- a child actor who had a continuing role as "Whitey" on the "Leave It to Beaver" television show -- was at peace with himself Saturday when he died.

Sprint sucks
: My Sprint mobile phone with the dying battery rang yesterday and who's calling but Sprint.
It's an f'ing spam call.
Damn them. I spewed every obscenity my feeble, uncivilized brain could come up with and this bozo wouldn't get off MY line. I said if they ever called again, I would cancel. He asked whether he should just cancel the next day. Now that's a way to get me to spend money with you!
I call the number that came up on my phone and it's the "Sprint loyalty group." Oh, yeah, good way to build loyalty.
F'ers. How dare they?
The rage at intrusion has reached fever pitch in this country.

They call it reverse publishing
: I wouldn't call it that, but I heard an executive call online-to-print "reverse publishing" the other day. And Harry tells us that's what an Italian paper is going to do in a most inventive way: Bloggers there will be able to mark posts to submit to the paper for possible publication. Now that's listening to the audience. That shows you care what the audience has to say. That gives you compelling and fresh content. And, by the way, it's free content! Everybody wins.

Blog bubble boy II
: Nick Denton pounds a few more nails into Jason Calacanis and his plans for a blog empire.

: The topic for one of the first Calacanis blogs is socialsoftware (that'll goose a competitive response from others I know). Try to go there now and you get a registration stop sign. I wonder whether they're going to require registration to read their blogs. That would not be wise.


I also note that Calacanis appears to be putting a registration wall

September 25, 2003

Meeting of the minds

: Just last week I finally got to meet Jay Rosen, head of the journalism department at NYU, patron saint of blogging with his students, and now a blogger himself with PressThink. We met over blogs, then over lunch. And we found journalist kismet because we both have aggressive respect for the audience and its power and potential in both media and politics. Jay comes at this via civic journalism; I come at it from pop cultural criticism and the web; we landed at the same public square.
So Jay thought it would be fun to interview each other via email -- call it a New York interview, for every question was met with a question. We've each posted the results of Part I:

Rosen: In your career as a writer and editor and journalist, pre-Web, did you ever think about empowering the audience? Indeed, did you think deeply, searchingly about the audience at all? And in your Net life, when did it occur to you that the people "out there" are gaining power relative to the journalist?

Jarvis: I've always liked the mass audience but I didn't come to fully respect them until I became a TV critic and found that I was defending their taste and intelligence as I defended the shows they -- no, we -- liked to watch. Even so, I still didn't much want to talk to the audience (their letters often came in Crayon script) until I went online. That is what made me a rabid populist. The Internet is the first medium to give its audience a voice. And when I started to listen, I was amazed. In forums, users have compelling opinions; they share news and information; they are eager to help each other. In weblogs, they put their names behind what they write and their links bring the cream to the top. So now the audience has a printing press -- history's easiest publishing tool connected to history's best distribution network -- and the power that goes with it. They are using this to influence and judge media (reporters now read and quote them), government (there's a reason Howard Dean is blogging), and each other. I believe that audience content is the most important, the most revolutionary development in media since broadcast. The foolish journalist will dismiss it; the wise one will embrace it.

Rosen: Now the audience has a printing press is a good way to put it. But my guess is that you thought you were in touch with the audience before the Net started changing things around, that you had a feel, kinda knew what people wanted, etc. This tells us that in journalism what counts as knowledge of the people "out there" reflects available technology for reaching those people -- and for being reached by them. But equally critical is the available vocabulary for picturing those people, the words we use for them. I note that even you, Jeff, the populist, used the term "mass audience" in talking about earlier eras in your editorial life. It's an accurate way of putting the attitudes that reigned then. But today online, the image of "masses" out there has gone into anti-existence; it's melting away. Why? Because now the audience has a printing press.

Jarvis: Busted. You're right: "mass audience" is essentially a "we-they" way to see this when it should be all "we" But then, "audience" and "populist" carry their own baggage of disconnection. So what do we call this new relationship? That's for the next Q&A exchange, First, let me ask you: What is the impact of audience content on journalism education? If the audience can report, write commentary, and exhibit their news judgment (via their links), does that diminish the priesthood of the journalist? Or is there a greater need to set standards and to learn fundamental skills (and which skills are they)?

Rosen: Well, it makes me wonder about J-schools: who needs them? Who else, I mean. I know the proprietor of a business called DVDojo on the Bowery in New York. He's Michael Rosenblum, who preaches the citizen revolution in TV and also makes it happen. Digital cameras and cheap, desktop editing systems have come within reach. Rosenblum attracts paying customers to workshops on how to shoot, edit, and prepare video documentaries, and he varies the course depth: four weeks, one week, just a weekend. He may be creating a new public for journalism education, the extension of our teaching to other audiences. Once people start acquiring knowledge of how to shoot, catalogue, and edit a piece of video, some are going to stumble into doing basic journalism, and we in the J-schools of America are supposed to know how to teach basic journalism. I don't know what this all means yet, (we may stumble) but Rosenblum teaches courses for us, so we'll be able to find out. Is the press priesthood diminished when audience empowerment gets in gear? I would say no, not diminished or demolished, but the terms of its authority are changing, as I argued in CJR this month. By the way, were you ever part of the priesthood of journalism? And what do you think it happening to it?

Jarvis: The danger is thinking you are in a priesthood. As more and more people learn how to do this -- or simply how it's done -- the only thing that will separate the media priests from the commoners will be their collars -- that is, the press passes around their necks that give them access everyone can't have. But I'll bet we'll see more bloggers on campaign busses and at the conventions. But more important, we'll see bloggers covering town meetings newspapers can't afford to cover. And that will be good. More information is good. Isn't that what we believe? Will they be better bloggers -- and their audiences better served -- if we can teach them some of the skills and tricks of our trade? I think so. But that's a bigger topic; that's worth lunch. Last question today: How do you think the priests of high media should relate to weblogs? Should they just read them or do them and why?

Rosen: I never tell the priests of high media what they should do. They get grouchy if you try that. In fact, one of them just said so this week, Jack Shafer in Slate: "The journalistic priesthood abhors advice." What a grouch. But I can tell you what my hopes are. I would hope they would keep a careful eye on this experiment in journalism that keeps happening online, and learn something from it. Elite journalism is very much needed in this country. After all, it's a country with an elite. It's not clear (yet) how the New York Times should deal with the weblog form, and I would not expect a rapid plunge. But this week, the Los Angeles Times had cause to report that it currently has no weblogs, in an article about the Sacramento Bee, which does. I found that intriguing... for the priesthood.

Comments on comments
: I've had some discussions with folks about comments lately and so I thought I should give you my policy. It's quite simple: This is my house and I do as I please. I tend to let discussions go -- I like interactivity -- and rarely kill a comment. But I will kill comments that are brazen personal attacks on anyone (and I'm shocked at those sites that don't do this). I will kill comments that are wildly off topic. I will kill comments about my work, because this is a personal site (I sometimes mention my work but that's my prerogative; otherwise, I won't drag my colleagues into this parallel universe). And I will kill a comment if I really don't like it just because I don't like it. Dont' give me any crap about "censorship." That's not censorship. That's judgment, editing, choice, dictatorship. Censorship is something a government does. Killing comments is something a power-hungry editor does. That's me. Just so you know.

Wired, unwired
: I'm trapped in meetings and conference calls all day at the office -- chained, no wired to my desk -- and so I don' t have time to get out to a 'bucks to experience Intel's Unwired Day (free access damned near everywhere with free stuff). You can go and get the free stuff here, even if you are wired.

Fame, fortune
: I'm late to this but it's good news worth spreading: Julie Powell of the wonderful Julie/Julia project just got a sweet book deal. Bravo.

The post-Internet newspaper
: I was wondering the other day how I'd design a newspaper -- functionally, not aesthetically -- if I were creating one today, in the post-Internet era.
And yes, before you ask your snide question... Of course, there's a need for newspapers. That need is changing, though. Some are responding to that change by coming out with newspapers aimed at young people. But I say you never succeed just targeting a demographic because you inevitably end up pandering to that demographic. You succeed instead with a vision for a product and then you find your audience if you deserve it. (The vision I had for Entertainment Weekly is unchanged but the demographic is not at all what my business colleagues thought it would be -- it's much younger.)
So what's a vision for a post-Internet paper?
Here's Al Neuharth today talking about how he designed a newspaper, USA Today, in the post-television era. [via IWantMedia]

There is no mistaking, Neuharth said, the public's thirst for knowledge. The question is what source is going to provide that. With new media forms like the Internet moving in, those in print journalism definitely have their work cut out for them.
He recalled when TV cut into the news pie, and "the television generation was not reading newspapers," Neuharth said. "Now I think the Internet generation is not reading newspapers."
One of the reasons he founded the USA Today was out of the observation "that the television generation will not fight its way through dull, gray newspapers."
"What we did, we got a lot of credit for doing a lot of new things," he said. "Very little was new in USA Today. We stole most of it from the tube or magazines, and made it colorful and graphic and aimed it at the television generation. It caught on." Now the biggest USA Today readers are in their 30s and 40s, a group coveted by advertisers.
So what has changed with the Internet? What can print steal from the Internet? Well...

: We can get breaking news faster than ever before thanks to online (see the post below). Thus, you have to assume that there are no more surprises (unless you break them yourselves) and you have to stop believing that you are still announcing the news. Maybe your Page One should become a better summary of the news. If you're the Times, the Post, or the Guardian, maybe it should lead with commentary on that news.
: We can look up background and source material on any story we want via Google. That means that perhaps papers shouldn't waste so much paper on the standard background graphs, or at least separate them into a box I can ignore if I know the story already. Take that out; get to the point; tell me what's new... and stories get a lot shorter (and more informative).
: We can get our news from great sources all over the world online.So perhaps a paper should also look at and summarize those sources -- like a weblog (or The Week).
: We get commodity news from all those sources online plus, of course, TV and radio. So a newspaper has to focus on its unique value, which, in most cases, is that it's local. In the longrun, online will be good at giving you the news in your backyard (we're trying) but that will, by its nature, be a bit disjointed. A local paper's packaging of local news -- its news judgment -- will still be uniquely valuable.
: We, the audience, get a voice online. That audience needs a voice in print. A paper should find and print new, surprising, compelling, controversial voices of the people. Sure, we try that with letters and op-ed pieces, but that is too limiting and that was before the web and particularly weblogs gave the audience a voice. Now we have to listen. We have to highlight that voice. We have to make the audience a star.
: We get opinion online (and on FoxNews) and its' successful. Moral to the story: News has to be more compelling, to admit its perspective, to embrace debate.
: We search online. So we browse in print. Isn't that ironic? The Internet was going to be the browsing medium but if you've sat in any focus group about online in the last two years, you've heard loud and clear that surfing is dead; people search for what they want to get, get it, and move on. So a newspaper's strength is that it can surprise us -- not, perhaps, with breaking news but with great recipes or other useful information or, of course, fresh reporting.
: We seek out the advertising we want and need online. Browsing in print means browsing through ads, of course. Print remains a great way to look at ads; magazines are bought more often then we know for their ads; newspapers, too. (When I was Sunday editor of the NY Daily News, we lost our coupons through a strike and a press-baron feud; when we got them back, our circulation went up about 100k that Sunday. People buy newspapers for ads, too.) There's nothing wrong with starting sections that attract useful ads.
: We demand a clear user interface online. We should look at the user interface of print. Content is often not well-labeled or well-organized and it takes too long to dig to find what you want. Caroline Miller, the editor of New York magazine, said a few weeks ago that when she redesigned recently she realized that her table of contents is her home page. That's the right way to look at print now.
: We expect utility online. So we expect it in print. At the Sunday Daily News, I started a section with only one mission: Everything in it had to be useful. No political thumbsuckers. No crack-baby tearjerkers. Useful. Media in general have become too useless. Online should teach us that the audience expects value and utility.
: We don't waste time online. So the worst thing to do is waste my time in print. Can the show-off leads. Edit all stories down; they can take it. Make leads and headlines clear. Make it quick; I'm busy!

: Whew, I didn't mean to launch into all that. It just happened.

Roll the presses... er, servers!
: Steve Outing celebrates the importance of online news in last nght's West Wing: The big-time reporter demands a comments from the White House before putting the blockbuster story online. And (here's the part Steve left out; he must have been in the kitchen getting a snack) when the dastardly Republican tempresident tries to scoop the reporter on the blockbuster story, his big-time paper slaps it up online first. Yes, online matters. Online is the best place to put breaking news.

No news is bad news II
: Peter Johnson in USA Today continues his theme on the quality of reporting in Iraq. Today, he talks to former Pentagon spokescivilian Torrie Clarke, who says the military is trying to get more reporters back to Iraq to report on more stories.

There's a link between fewer reporters and the barrage of bad news, says Torie Clarke, the former Pentagon spokeswoman and architect of the embedding program.
''It's a problem,'' says Clarke, 44, who has joined CNN as a public policy analyst for Paula Zahn Now. ''We went from hundreds of journalists all over Iraq covering every aspect of the war. I don't know what the number is now, but it's a fraction of that now, and I think that is too bad. There are some really important things going on in that country. Many are good, some are bad, but if there was more coverage and more comprehensive coverage, people would get a clearer picture.''
The Pentagon is ''encouraging news organizations to send journalists'' back to Iraq, she says.
Bombing network news operations won't help. But, of course, that's just the point.

September 24, 2003

The people of the dust: Register now
: Newsday reports that a disappointing 10,000 people have joined the World Trade Center Health Registry.
If you were there on that day or worked there afterwards, please sign up. The more data they gather, the more they know about the health risk to all of us, the more they know about the health risk to any one of us. The data is important. It could save lives by treating illness in time.
The survey is as easy as such a thing can be.
So please register.

Bada-blog
: I'm so damned proud: NJ.com creates the Soprano's blog.

No news is bad news
: In a smart instant essay, Jay Rosen cautions that we shouldn't fall into the why-does-the-press-report-only-bad-news trap in judging coverage of Iraq (inspired by the USA Today survey of Baghdad correspondents' weltanschauungs, linked here). He's right, of course. That stinky herring always haunts the news business. And we should ignore it. It's our job to report bad news when the news is bad.
But the question about Iraqi coverage is not whether the coverage is too negative or too positive but whether the picture is accurate; that's the issue. Do reporters have on their Kosovo (read: liberation) or their Vietnam (read: quagmire) glasses? The answer is as loaded as Charlton Heston's closet.
And Rosen asks another good question that's all about seeing the bigger problems to cover, the deeper story, the harder questions:

Maybe the complaint is not with covering the problems; it’s the narrow range of problems seen in the news. Maybe you’re not missing the positive note so much as proper warning signals about what could go wrong, if we’re not alert. Preventative journalism, (one possible alternative) talks openly about problems; it also has tacit confidence they can be solved, which is a democratic attitude.
I don’t think the press is too negative. But it is at times too unimaginative to tell me what’s going on. Personally, I want to know about problems on the ground in Iraq, a country my country has occupied; and if it takes relentless problem-scouting by special ops in the press, I want that too. But relentless problem-solving is what’s needed on the ground and in the atmosphere of Iraq. This much we know. There’s a big story in wait out there, but journalists do not necessarily know how to tell it.

Blogging the bus
: I'm making reservations for Bloggercon next week. Yesterday, someone who'll remain nameless yelled at me for going. We are a dysfunctional family, we are. I also saw that Dave Winer just put up rules for the conference and the hubris of that idea bothered me until I read them: "All conversations, whether to the entire room or one-to-one, unless otherwise stated, clearly and up front, are on the record and for attribution." Fine.
But here's my real travel note:
I'm taking the bus to Boston. But not just any bus: The new Limoliner: Manhattan to Back Bay in four hours on a single seat with high-speed Internet access the whole wayand a DVD movie and a stewardess with snacks and only 28 privileged seats.
I'll do anything not to fly.

The ombudsman's ombudsman
: Matt Welch has some very funny moments from an ombudsman under attack.

A world without editors
: The LA Time's Tim Rutten takes a long time to say little in the controversy over the Sacramento Bee's blog policy. At the end, there's this:

Question: Perhaps blogs, which derive their immediacy and vibrancy from the Web's essentially egalitarian and libertarian ethos, and conventional news organizations simply are incompatible in their pure forms?
"An edited blog is a contradiction in terms," said Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. "It's a characteristic of the Internet in general that forms like the blog emerge with great exuberance and edgy promise and then the overseers move in. That's a pity. We need frontiers of plain-speaking, even it's politically incorrect. I understand why the Bee did what it did, but it leads to a restraint on free-thinking, which is lamentable."
Rutten's question is pretentious and silly. There is no "pure" form of either medium; when there is, it will lie dead in a museum.
Schell's answer is almost right. But the issue isn't so much free-thinking, it's immediacy and honesty and understanding what makes blogs great.
Nick Denton said it better in an IM exchange I've quoted often here. What do we love about blogs? Denton: "No editors." That says it all.

If you have to explain...
: My favorite caveat! (From the LA Times story on blogminders, above):

(Exclamation points signal irony on Kaus' site.)

Gov. Spam
: In a desperate, last-minute move to get stay elected, California Gov. Gray Davis is signing into law a tough anti-spam measure.
I wish other politicians in Washington were feeling just as desperate to stay elected and did likewise.

Blogbiz: Bubble boy or baron?

: Jason Calacanis, late of the late Silicon Alley Reporter, has announced the start of his weblog company.
Nick Denton has already tried to burst Jason's bubble:

Jason Calacanis, founder of Silicon Alley Reporter and boomtime hype-merchant, has re-emerged as a blog booster. God help us.... Calacanis is a smart and engaging guy, and I'm a believer in web media, but the last thing the world needs now is his brand of late 90s enthusiasm.
But rather than trying to hype weblogs, Calacanis is trying to dehype big media and thus look bigger in comparison. In this worldview, there's zero-sum hot air and one must deflate the other guy's bubble to inflate one's own.
On my comments, below, Calacanis argues that big media can't really do blogs; it's an either-or, he says:
At a certain point a weblog stops being a weblog and starts becoming a newspaper, or perhaps more accurately a newswire. I think fact-checking and editing is one of those points.
Now, the public has an expectation that weblogs are unedited so they can be frequently updated, and that because of this dynamic sometimes there are errors on weblogs....
Now, the public has the *exact* opposite expectation of newspapers....
If publications like the NYT get into blogging they are going to confuse users---at least for a while. However, users are very smart and if the NYT put a disclaimer at the top explaining about what is going on... then there would be no issue....
He comes around grudgingly. But you can tell: He hopes newspapers don't blog. (They will.)

: Now to Calacanis' own business: It's essentially a weblog syndicate for b2b blogs (in media, technology, business, life sciences -- 100 in the first year, 500 in three years), offering hosting and other services; in return, he covers all his costs with the first cut of revenue and then splits profits 50/50 (by my calculations, he's figuring each blog will pull in six figures). The Denton model, on the other hand, is to pay a pittance but pay nonetheless. The About.com model is (or was) a combination: a guaranteed payment with a split of the upside. Take your pick. The question for any of them is whether there is sufficient advertising revenue to support anyone in blogbiz. The answer: Not yet.
And that is why this has to grow slowly. It cannot grow ahead of advertiser acceptance and performance unless you want to go get a whomp of VC cash and start the implosion clock ticking down.
In the world of weblogs, small is good; small is what makes it possible for them to succeed. And patience is more than a virtue. Patience is an asset.

: But if that's where Jason stopped -- with a business plan and a prayer -- I'd tip the hat, wish him luck, buy him lunch (which I'll do anyway) and watch his progress with eager interest (which I'll still do).
But what's more interesting to me is the zero-sum hype game he plays (when -- Denton's right -- hype is a dangeros toy to be playing with right now).
In his mission statement, Jason plays to flavor-of-the-month media bashing:

Traditional journalism is, in a word, broken. We've spent the last decade working in publishing (online and offline) and we believe that traditional journalism is imploding. Traditional news outlets like the New York Times are experiencing huge embarrassments like Jayson Blair. We believe these episodes are based on the increasing pressure media companies have to the “bottom line”, as well as the the fact that these outlets do not allow user feedback....
On top of the unnecessarily one-way journalism being practiced today, the media space is suffering from the appearance of (and in some cases outright) impropriety. Do you really trust CNBC to report on their parent company GE?...
We believe participatory journalism is a better model then one-way journalism. Of course, participatory journalism is harder, more work and still developing as a discipline. We sincerely hope to help this field mature.
Simplistic and beside the point.
Weblogs for business will succeed only because they can piggyback on the content of others. If there's nothing to point to, there's nothing to blog. If big media is so bankrupt, then why point to their stories? If you don't point to their stories, then you have to report your own. But you can't afford to do that; you're only a blog. That is the world through the hype perspective.
Better would be the value perspective: There's a lot of information out there; you don't have time to find the best; we'll find it for you; you're welcome. That is the true b2b blog promise.
Sell the positive, my friend. Nobody buys on the negative.

: The next pillar in his temple:

Talent wants to be free. One of the after effects of the dot com boom and bust is that many of the most talented journalists want to be freelancers. After the bust everyone realized that a) no company is loyal to them and b) that they can make a better living on their own as a freelancer while having a better lifestyle.
Now I found that one pretty funny. I know plenty of freelancers who wish they had regular gigs with health insurance (something Jason would be really wise to offer) and paychecks. And they're sick of writing for free. Talent doesn't want to be free. Talent wants to be paid.

: The third pillar:

Partnering is better then owning. Our goal is to partner with individual webloggers letting them do what they do best (writing, creating community, researching) while supporting them with what we do best (upgrading the software that drives their Web site, generating revenue, running the business).
Well, I have another idea on this, but I'll tell you about that later....

: If Calacanis succeeds, it is good for all of weblogging. If he hypes -- as Tony Perkins as done at AlwaysOn, trying to co-opt the buzz about blogs without creating or even knowing what blogs are and what they can be -- then then hurts everyone; it gives us all cooties.
Let's all learn our lessons. The '90s weren't that long ago. Don't hype. Don't overpromise. Don't act bigger than the next guy.
Do good work and the audience will come. Invent a better information trap and the world will beat a path to your door.

World's smartest stripper
: Howard Stern et al went to Scores yesterday to audition contenders for the World Smartest Stripper contest.
Only one of the many strippers tested knew how many states there are. One said 700. One said 52. When told she did pretty well, she was only two off, she said, "Oh, 54."
When asked who the vice president is, one said that she's not into politics. "I don't even know whether the president is Republican or Dominican."
And when Howard asked one what animal is used to make pickles, she said, "What's a pickle?"

Big-guy blogs
: Mark Glaser gathers advice for how newspapers should blog.

September 23, 2003

Oh, no, not that!
: Matt Welch says: "Anything but the ombudsman!"

Our world
: I watched much of the Fox interview with Bush last night (inbetween doing the dishes) and I'm still struck by what Bush said is the first thing he does every day: He comes to his office to review the threat sheet, the summary of those who would attack us. That is Job 1 and that is our world today.

At the creation
: The multitalented Ben Hammersley moves to Florence and plans to start writing a book via blog:

My muses are bickering. It's really quite upsetting: after nearly a year of plain Scandinavian countryside - pleasant enough, but not entirely stimulating - I find myself in Florence, surrounded by more artistic, aesthetic, scientific and spiritual inspiration than I can possibly digest.
This is a problem. Before I arrived - and I'd never been here before the day we moved into our new home - I had planned on using this weblog as the scratchpad for a book. An urban version of the usual English-in-Tuscany memoir. Less of the gaptoothed farmers and scorpions in the outside lav, and more of Dante and Vespa and jazz club caffe corretto. If not for any other sake but my own future reminiscences, I could diarise my daily discoveries, and maybe entertain some of you as well.
But in the week since I got here, I've been stuck not with too little to write about, but with far too much - and far too much of that is so fizzy in my head that all I can think of writing is line of exclamation points. Machiavelli lived just down the street!!!!! Galileo's finger is in a jar five doors down!!!!! ...
Just start writing, I advise him. Think of it as a blog, not a book, and there'll be no dam. Just start writing.

Blog search
: Moreover launches a blog search of select blogs. (Full disclosure: I sit on Moreover's board.)

Eye of the beholder
: Reporters are just witnesses with pencils. And their accounts of what they witness will, of course, vary widely. USA Today's Peter Johnson certainly proves that, interviewing a bunch of reporters about their view of progress in Iraq. They're all over the map. Here's one of the more balanced takes:

Although some paint a picture of recovery, with U.S. armed forces making progress in getting the country going again, others sketch a bleaker scene, in which bombings, ambushes and looting are the rule, not the exception.
Reporters agree on this much: Bad news -- not good -- sells.
''It's the nature of the business,'' Time's Brian Bennett says. ''What gets in the headlines is the American soldier getting shot, not the American soldiers rebuilding a school or digging a well.''
The Baghdad that Bennett sees is a city where gunfire erupts every night and dozens of Iraqis are reported dead in the morning. Looting and robberies are common. ''There is a mounting terrorist threat, and the people who want to kill American soldiers are getting more organized,'' he says.
But he also sees a city where restaurants are reopening daily, where women feel increasingly safe going out to shop, where more police means intersections aren't as clogged as they were this summer. ''My neighbors are nice,'' he says. ''My street is a pretty quiet place.''
When Bennett visited the USA a few weeks ago, he realized that, five months after the U.S. invasion, the Iraq he lives in doesn't mesh with the bleak picture that friends here are getting from the media.
''I'm not saying all is hunky-dory,'' Bennett says. ''But in the States, people have a misperception of what's going on.''
Which is why Bennett plans to pitch a story about the improving scene in Iraq, where electricity is being restored daily and people are getting back to work. ''There's been a lot of improvement that I and my colleagues noticed when we came back here. People in the States just don't see it.''
Let's keep an eye on Time and see whether his pitch is successful. [via Romenesko]
: See also Postrel and Reynolds on this.

Children who need to be children
: Chief Wiggles is collecting toys for Iraqi children.

No sex please, we're American
: Britain is amused that the Americanized British sitcom Coupling is too hot for some mid-American stations to handle.
When I was a TV critic, I gave a Sunday-morning forum to the Presbyterian church I used to attend (but, for reasons that are soon to be obvious, left). I said I loved Cheers; I said it would prove to be one of the best shows in the history of television in this, TV's true golden age. A church lady objected: "Cheers?" she shrieked. "That's terrible. It has sex."
Yes, ma'am, and so does life... for most of us.

: And in related news... Foul language on TV is on the increase, says a study. Try listening to life.

: Late-breaking profanity:

In an unprecedented move, three national newspapers used the f-word in its unexpurgated form today in their reporting of Alastair Campbell's now infamous diary entry of July 4.
I don't use those words here because I have kids who know my URL. But I'll summarize: Campbell wanted to do something to the BBC's Andrew Gilligan that could only be taken metaphorically.
: Profanity update: A commenter rightly says that the Guardian story (link above) summarizes what Campbell said quite differently from how I'd read it in the actual diary entry.

Rock 'n' blogroll
: NYU's j-czar, Jay Rosen, saw progress when the Sacramento Bee started blogging because...

By these gradual means the Web is teaching journalism back to journalists… on the Web. For when you have to decide how to use the form, when you’re sitting at your desk and there are things strange, wonderful and new on your screen, you may have to re-decide what journalism “is” and is finally about, in order to cover the new class of cases that arise when you’re doing it live online.
When the paper got nervous about their blogger blogging without editing, Rosen says that rather than editing him, a braver and more imaginative -- and more websmart and audiencesmart -- response would have been to say this:
Dan Weintraub is learning that he is edited by his readers, including the angry ones. I want you to write him at his weblog, and I will encourage him to respond at length in that space. But that, of course, will be ultimately up to him. We’ll put your letters on line in full, so they can be linked to. We’re going to look at more editing oversight, but we don’t want to kill this experiment, so help us out and write him something hard hitting and apt....

A&Q
: Uh-oh, Glenn Reynolds is going to get in trouble. He keeps answering Mark Glaser's questions on his blog.

September 22, 2003

Omblogsman
: Since I'm a newspaperman (and magazineman and mediaman) myself, I would be wise to recuse myself from the discussion about the Sacramento Bee blogger who now has a minder (see the Mickey Kaus manifesto). But nobody ever called me wise.
And I have a bigger point to make here.
First, a few observations:
: I would not be the first to predict that blogging would cause newspaper people stomach upset. Amy Langfield long ago said papers would worry about libel and copy editing and control. She's right. They do worry about such things, for they are protecting their reputations and brands; they are protecting their real asset, credibility. But...
: I sat today with a certain blog queen who's about to start blogging for a certain major metro magazine and suggested that they should post-edit her. Otherwise, if she has to wait for a copy editor to dot her i's, her blog will be robbed of its immediacy, and immediacy -- freshness, currency, newsiness, life -- is a blog's major asset. So what if there's a typo? Correct it later and the world's none the worse. Blog readers are used to that (well, here they are).
: Note in the Sacramento Bee ombudsman column a considerable hostility (not to mention a certain snotty attitude) from (a) print news to online and (b) print news to opinion. Sometimes, it's just about turf. The Bee has some issues with turf, it would seem.
But now (at last) to my real point:

: What's just as disturbing as the last half of the Bee ombudsman's column -- about saddling the Bee blogger with a minder -- is the first half, in which the ombudsman tears a new a-hole into the online operation for running a press release about a new power plant.
Now it was terribly dumb for a reporter to reprint the press release under his or her byline. But an "ethical lapse"? No, that misses the point.
News organizations have to start looking at information in new ways. I started making this point the other day when I suggested that just for a moment, we should drop the term "news" with all its heavy baggage and instead look on our job in terms of imparting information. (That same day, I had a long lunch on this topic with Jay Rosen, chair of NYU's journalism school and a blogger himself; he gets it.)
When you do that, when you see yourself as a leader in the information business, then minders and copy editors become just a little less important. The value of information to the audience becomes more important.
A press release is information. No, a reporter should never put a byline atop a press release. But that doesn't mean the Bee's online service shouldn't have run the release (without expending the effort and expense of rewriting it when they can't afford to). It's information.
A weblog is information. Maybe a typo -- or even an opinion -- will sneak through but if we're clear with the audience about the immediacy of weblogs, if we correct mistakes when they're brought to our attention -- even by the audience -- then they will understand what kind of information it is.
A forum is filled with information. Look at a kids' sports forum on a news site and you'll see tons of scores and game reports. It's information from the audience. OK, it's not journalism. But it is still information.

: So here's my real point in all of this:
I fear that sometimes we lose sight of the fact that even more than being in the news business, we are in the information business.
Oh, that's not all we do. We in journalism are also watchdogs (but so are citizens) and experts (but many are more expert than we are) and commentators (though everybody has an opinion).
But first and foremost, if we do not impart information, we are useless.
And so we cut off sources of information at our peril. So we shouldn't be scared of weblogs or forums or even press releases so long as we label them carefully and make sure the audience is never confused about their source. It's information. Information wants to be free (of minders). And often, information is free (which is good news in this age when the news business is under financial pressure). Information is what it's all about.

: Update: Just as I blogged this, I saw the Mark Glaser asked Glenn Reynolds about whether he has a minder at MSNBC. No, he has something far worse: a content management system (cue scream).

And the winner is... oh, nevermind
: A big confession from a former TV critic: I didn't watch the Emmys last night. I was curious instead to see whether I could figure out whether I liked Carnivale (it was a hung jury; now it's a hanging jury). I figured I'd watch the Emmys on tape. But reading the lists of the reputed winners in today's paper, I don't think I'll bother because in our ever-more-nichefied media world, the Emmys are a mass-market, three-networks-fits-all holdover. They are ever-more irrelvant. Well, of course, all awards are essentially irrelevant, but the Emmys are moreso simply because with my remote control and personal recording device, every night is an awards show at my house. And the Emmys don't account for Trading Spaces or Queer Eye or Howard Stern or certainly FoxNews. Prime time just isn't prime time anymore.

Tech headaches
: Unbeknownst to me, my host moved servers on me last night and because I set up MT wrong in the first place (with an IP address instead of a name ... long story), my a.m. post and your comments since last night were lost. I restored a post and a few of the comments; can't get to the others. Apologizes.
I am the post child for the Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing Foundation.

: HELP: I still can't get the comments to remember me or anyone else. My MT.cfg now lists the domain (not the IP address) for the CGI path; that's what I thought would fix it. Doesn't. Any advice? Thanks!
Kathy's trying to help me in the comments but it's still not working.
Bring back wooden type!

Blog reporting
: Tung Yin, a blogger, has lunch with Wesley Clark and reports, in detail. [via Scalzi]

The future of the World Trade Center
: Felix Salmon has a super post reviewing recent changes in the plans for the World Trade Center site:

With the departure of Westfield America and the clear determination to take control of the Deutsche Bank site, this plan really looks as though it is actually going to get built....
But even ignorant of what's going to go in the middle [in the memorial], it's clear that New York is going to have a vibrant new downtown, complete with a set of new skyscrapers which actually work – instead of compete – with each other. Anybody who's been to the Toronto Dominion Center knows what can happen when office towers work in unison: it's pure architectural poetry, and elevates the space and the spirit. Today, I'm more confident than ever that such a thing can happen in New York City.
I am amazed and impressed that this process is proceeding with impressive progress. We need that.[via Anil]

September 21, 2003

9/11, by the numbers
: I got the call last night, as expected, from the World Trade Center Health Registry. I'm now one of a few hundred thousand people who were there that day or who worked at the site afterwards and whose health is being tracked for the next 20 years.
This was the call to collect data about me: where I was, what happened to me that day, what happened afterwards. It's all data now.
They did a very good job with the script the woman from North Carolina read to me. Some of these questions may be upsetting, she said; you can quit anytime and come back later. If you want to talk to somebody, they'll give me a name. If you don't want to answer any of the questions, you don't have to. She has a tough job. I stayed as cheery as I could.
We went through all the basics: age, address,