I got a most odd invitation to come to Nashville to blog Justice Sunday II Tom DeLay, Zell Miller, Chuck Colson, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Phyllis Schlafly. I got email with the offer but there’s also an open invitation here. That’s most odd, since I’ve held these events — and politicians sucking up to them — in disdain. But what’s interesting is that they offered to cover travel expenses. I said no thanks for a few reasons: don’t want to publicize their event, don’t want to take the money. But if any blogger does take their money, I hope it is disclosed.
Tag: Weblogs
-
-
On the new newsroom
I wrote a column for Monday’s Media Guardian about changes in the newsroom, based in part on this post.
They asked for a pegged to the merger of the print and online newsrooms at The New York Times. I made it clear that I’m consulting for The New York Times Company and couldn’t comment specifically on that news (as I said here, I don’t know anything specific). So I wrote a generic piece about the state of newsrooms and we included the obvious disclosure at the end of the piece. On Friday, after the section went to press, it occurred to me that the disclosure wasn’t full enough. Though it was clear that what I was saying was generic and not about The Times or any specific newsroom, the line at the end should have said I was working with About.com but was not involved in the paper’s newsroom, just to be triply clear. The change has been made online.
So that made me realize that I should put a fuller full disclosure on this site, which I added to my about page. Go take a look and tell me what I’m missing (as I’m sure you will).
: SPEAKING OF CHANGE IN NEWSROOMS: See this job listing from Knight Ridder:
Director, Digital News Developmenet
This position will help lead and support transformational change on the websites and in the newsrooms of the nation’s 2nd-largest newspaper company. In the 27 markets where Knight Ridder Digital operates sites, editors increasingly are demanding cross-platform skills for creating and packaging compelling, innovative, interactive news and other locally relevant content. This position will provide leadership, training, communication and recommendations as KR editors transform their newsrooms to meet the needs of their changing audience.
The successful candidate will have:
Exceptional organizational skills and the ability to influence and teach across a large, diverse organization
The desire to drive transformational change for a major national media company
Extensive online and related digital experience with content development and programming
Familiarity with the culture, organization and operations of newspaper newsrooms of all sizes
Familiarity with online publishing tools and technologies, such as HTML, Flash and online audio/video productionThe position reports to Knight Ridder Digital’s VP/Content and Local Operations. Working with KRD’s executive news editor, local digital managers and newsroom editors, this position will:
Create and implement training programs for online reporters, editors and producers
Identify and drive the adoption of best practices in online content creation and packaging
Develop and manage systems for measuring and evaluating progress in multiple newsrooms
Document and communicate initiatives via intranet and other systems across the organization.In short: News revolutionary needed. [via Paid Content]
: LATER: Guardian link was broken. Fixed now.
-
Op-ed
Here is Joi Ito’s very good — and surprising — NY Times op-ed on the anniversary nuclear bombs over Japan; I say surprising because Joi says:
…the bombings don’t really matter to me or, for that matter, to most Japanese of my generation. My peers and I have little hatred or blame in our hearts for the Americans; the horrors of that war and its nuclear evils feel distant, even foreign. Instead, the bombs are simply the flashpoint marking the discontinuity that characterized the cultural world we grew up in.
And here is Joi writing about writing the op-ed with a little help from his friends.
-
In search of an MP3 recorder
I’ve asked this before but I’ll bet things have changed since. I need recommendations for an MP3 recorder that will record in the MP3 format and not require reformatting, that allows me to monitor levels and to use two mics for portable podcasting. As I remember, the Sony minidisk recorders don’t do their voodoo in MP3. An iPod will record in MP3 but (a) you can’t check levels and (b) I have a mini and it doesn’t work there. Oh, and I need it to be very portable and small. Recommendations?
-
They’ve got it… by George, they’ve got it….
I’ll confess to some trepidation when I picked up today’s New York Times editorial on the exploding blogosphere, inspired by Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere reports. And I cringed as I read a few late-to-the-party notions: They think that MSN and AOL made blogs easy when, of course, the entire reason it all exploded more than five years ago was because Blogger made it easy. They also surmise that what marks blogs’ arrival is that big media is now blogging:
The conventional media – this very newspaper, for instance – have often discussed the growing impact of blogging on the coverage of news. Perhaps the strongest indicator of the importance of blogdom isn’t those discussions themselves, but the extent to which media outlets are creating blogs – or bloglike manifestations – of their own.
That is the serious side of the blogosphere….
But let that go. Give them their moment of protective hubris. Have faith. Keep reading until you get to the last graph:
It’s natural enough to think of the growth of the blogosphere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it’s also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in. Every day the blogosphere captures a little more of the strange immediacy of the life that is passing before us. Think of it as the global thought bubble of a single voluble species.
Now I suspect that some will say that the Times editorialists are trying to diminish the importance of blogging by making it merely personal chatter. But actually, I’ll argue, that instead, they are coming to understand the essence of this movement or phenomenon or social shift or whatever it is: They realize that it’s about people.
In my blog and email exchange with Times Executive Editor Bill Keller (who does not oversee the editorials), that was where at least I came out: Blogs are people.
So now the real question is — and it’s a question for you, Times editorialists — how do you join in that conversation at that human level?
: MEANWHILE…. David Perlmutter, a professor of mass communications at LSU, hocks up the same furballs all the old cats do about blogs in the house organ of the old, Editor & Publisher. Hey, professor, haven’t you heard: “Mass” communications is dead.
: A commenter who woke up on the wrong side of the bed this week says I should disclose for the hundredth time that I’m consulting for The New York Times Company at About.com. I have nothing to do with the editorial page of the paper nor them with me.