Lee Padgett, the Blogger to Be Named Later

I'm pretty thick-skinned when it comes to criticism, because in eight years of blogging I've made the occasional gigantic mistake that sends my credibility crashing through the guardrails into a ravine like Toonces the Driving Cat. But a recent cheap shot by Paul McNamara, editor and blogger for Network World, has stuck with me:

Cadenhead is a former newspaperman ... who appears to have forgotten a lot about the journalism business. (By the way, I worked for 20 years as a local newspaper editor before coming to Network World.)

The ellipses are part of the quote. McNamara uses them frequently in the middle of sentences for no reason.

I'm a childhood paper carrier and journalism school graduate who worked 10 years in the business and married a reporter. So I love journalism, both in the general and biblical sense. When somebody criticizes my journalism chops, it goes straight to the part of the brain that triggers inchoate rage.

I'm sensitive about the subject because I'm a failed journalist. I couldn't make a living at it, which is why I discovered web publishing early and become a technical author and blogger. A lot of the early web was built by people who failed in other mediums -- we had the free time to recognize its potential.

Given my rage, I'm enjoying the fact that McNamara's 20 years in journalism didn't stop him from making a rookie mistake: taking somebody else at his word without any evidence.

McNamara wrote that it was OK for the St. Augustine Record to engage in a public manhunt for a local blogger's identity, even though the blogger's been accused of no crime and was not being investigated in any manner for wrongdoing. To bolster his argument, he quoted an e-mail from the paper's editor, Peter Ellis, justifying the decision:

... an organized group launched a series of attacks against some elected officials. We wanted to find out what the group is (we now know). For the record, we are not friends -- nor are we foes -- of these candidates. We are, however, advocates for the public and think they want to know what organized groups are working behind the scenes to manipulate public opinion.

That was two weeks ago, and the Record has not run a story identifying the blogger or the alleged campaign to "manipulate public opinion." At this point, I think it's fair to conclude that the paper doesn't know who the blogger is, at least not to the degree it feels safe running the story.

So let's see if 20 years in journalism taught McNamara how to write a correction.

Jacksonville · Florida · Journalism · 2007/03/23 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

Rosie O'Donnell: WTC 7 Demolished on 9/11

Talk show host Rosie O'Donnell suggested that World Trade Center 7 was not destroyed by fire on 9/11 in a post on her personal weblog Thursday evening.

Writing in the poetry-like style she's adopted on her blog, O'Donnell took part of her post -- the list of reasons to suspect the building was demolished -- directly from a page on the conspiracy-minded site WhatReallyHappened.Com.

at 5 30 pm
9 11 2001

wtc7 collapsed

for the third time in history
fire brought down a steel building
reducing it to rubble

hold on folks
here we go

• The fires in WTC 7 were not evenly distributed, so a perfect collapse was impossible.
• Silverstein said to the fire department commander “the smartest thing to do is pull it.”
• Firefighters withdrawing from the area stated the building was going to “blow up”.
• The roof of WTC 7 visibly crumbled and the building collapsed perfectly into its footprint.
• Molten steel and partially evaporated steel members were found in the debris.

[WTC 7] contained offices of the FBI, Department of Defense, IRS (which contained prodigious amounts of corporate tax fraud, including Enron’s), US Secret Service, Securities & Exchange Commission (with more stock fraud records), and Citibank’s Salomon Smith Barney, the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and many other financial institutions. [Online Journal]

The SEC has not quantified the number of active cases in which substantial files were destroyed [by the collapse of WTC 7]. Reuters news service and the Los Angeles Times published reports estimating them at 3,000 to 4,000. They include the agency’s major inquiry into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom. …”Ongoing investigations at the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their work is paper-intensive,” said Max Berger of New York’s Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann. “This is a disaster for these cases.” [New York Lawyer]

Citigroup says some information that the committee is seeking [about WorldCom] was destroyed in the Sept. 11 terror attack on the World Trade Center. Salomon had offices in 7 World Trade Center, one of the buildings that collapsed in the aftermath of the attack. The bank says that back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December 2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in the attack. [TheStreet]

Inside [WTC 7 was] the US Secret Service’s largest field office with more than 200 employees. …”All the evidence that we stored at 7 World Trade, in all our cases, went down with the building,” according to US Secret Service Special Agent David Curran. [TechTV]

lets start here
ok…go slow
remember 2 breathe
use google

Update: This position puts O'Donnell at odds with Penn and Teller.

911 · Terrorism · Television · 2007/03/19 · 341 COMMENTS · Link

Keep Your Eye on Jason Kottke

Jason Kottke found something unexpected in an Online Journalism Review article about page design that used eye-tracking tests on 255 people. When looking at a photo of baseball player George Brett standing at home plate while batting, men and women had different points of attention. Women focused on the area around Brett's face, while men divided their time between the Hall of Famer's face and his crotch.

I've added eye-tracking capabilities to Workbench to determine if these results are limited to athletic supporters or extend to other photographic subjects.

Look at this photo of Kottke modeling a Defunker T-shirt, then hover your mouse over the image to see real-time eye-tracking data for visitors to this weblog.

You people are sick.

Design · Sports · 2007/03/14 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Chris Finke Joins RSS Advisory Board

Chris Finke, a senior engineer at Netscape, has joined the RSS Advisory Board.

Finke's a Netscape.Com and Netscape 9 browser developer as well as the creator of the Mozilla Firefox extensions RSS Ticker and OPML Support.

Netscape played a formative role in the development of RSS, publishing the first RSS specification in 1999 and spurring adoption by encouraging publishers to create feeds for the first aggregator -- the recently relaunched My.Netscape. Netscape published RSS 0.90, the common ancestor of both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. For the past eight years, Netscape has hosted the RSS 0.91 DTD, a document type definition that receives four million hits a day.

Welcome to the board!

Rss · Xml · 2007/03/12 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Putting a Blogger's Identity on the Record

Network World blogger Paul McNamara covers the St. Augustine Record's attempt to out a local blogger, calling me a "former newspaperman ... who appears to have forgotten a lot about the journalism business."

The Record, believing Padgett to be part of an organized political group out to unseat Rich, not merely a lonely pamphleteer voicing his displeasure with a public official, decided that making public Padgett's identity was the right to do.

They were correct. While there may be a long-held and cherished right to publish anonymously in this country, it isn't any more absolute than other First Amendment rights and should never be confused with a right to remain anonymous. After all, there was never anything stopping the lonely pamphleteer's neighbors from saying, "Hey, that looks a lot like farmer Ben's handwriting."

Truth be told, the Record didn't need a high-minded rational for outing Padgett. The mere fact that the man had kicked up public attention -- made himself a person of public interest -- makes him fair game for being identified (if not the video treatment).

I don't object to the Record seeking to identify Lee Padgett, whose LocalSafety blog came back online yesterday. I object to the paper treating him like a criminal by releasing video surveillance footage, not even explaining that his activities at its office were innocuous.

Although Record Editor Peter Ellis continues to tell people that Padgett's a front for an organized group, he has yet to feel confident enough in this fact to report it to his readers. No story has run about him since a Feb. 6 article in which Peter Guinta, its most experienced reporter, couldn't find his identity.

Ellis and McNamara appear to believe that if the press suspects a person of something, it's OK to call on the public to send in tips that might confirm its suspicions. Since when does reporting involve tossing out rumors in the hopes they'll be proven true by the public? If they want to do that, they should become bloggers.

Jacksonville · Florida · Journalism · 2007/03/11 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Newspaper Asks Public to Identify Local Blogger

A Florida newspaper appears to have hit an all-time low in the relationship between bloggers and the media. The St. Augustine Record is asking the public to help expose the identity of a local blogger who recently started a site critical of county politicians. This evening, the paper's home page has a grainy surveillance photo of a man accompanied by this text:

Who is this man?

Believed to be connected to a politically charged but anonymously-run Web site targeting the character of members of the St. Johns County Commission. Help us determine his identity. Start by watching these four movies featuring footage from surveillance cameras.

The Record published video taken inside and outside its offices March 1 that show a man dropping something off at the front desk. There's no explanation of what he's doing, making it look like some kind of threat was delivered, but I found the details on the paper's message board. He was at the newspaper buying an ad.

The ad, which the paper ran, criticized County Commissioner Ben Rich for comments he made during a televised meeting:

Unbelievably, Rich went on to say that he was angered by the police officer first responding to the Columbine school tragedy in Colorado. He actually remarked in the televised meeting that watching the police officer who was outside the school awaiting the SWAT team made him "want to go down there and shoot the cop and go in".

Mr. Rich, you should resign as an elected official, you do not deserve to serve. All of us know that in reality Rich is mad because the firefighters union supported candidates in the last election that Mr. Rich did not support. Rich has been trying to take his revenge against the firefighters publicly for months. Mr. Rich, we will not allow you to play politics with our local safety any longer.

The blogger's site, LocalSafety.org, is offline but I fished several pages from Google's cache. Allegations made by blogger Lee Padgett, as he's identified in the site's whois record and messages on the paper's message board, are backed up by the Record: Rich really did make the "shoot the cop" remark and disparage firefighters, drawing an angry response. This week, Rich filed for re-election early, hoping it would cause the site to be judged an excessive campaign contribution by local election officials and shut down.

"I find cowardice in any form repugnant," [Rich] said. "But in the political arena, where cowardice has become socially acceptable, I find it doubly repugnant." ...

"It's obvious to me that my political opponents have declared war and are using the unfair advantage of not registering as a political action committee," Rich said.

"Through the declaration of my candidacy, they'll no longer be able to operate in the shadows of anonymity. They will be forced into the open where they'll have their names and faces known to those they attack."

I don't know Padgett, but he has the right to speak his mind on the web without intimidation by politicians and the press, whether or not he's writing under his real name.

I've been reading the Record for a decade. I can't recall a single time where it conducted an effort to catch a rapist, robber or murderer anywhere near the scope of this manhunt for a blogger.

Jacksonville · Florida · Journalism · 2007/03/08 · 57 COMMENTS · Link

Ethereal Photo of Comerica Park

Ryan Southen, a photography student at Oakland University, has been experimenting with photo manipulation through something called HDR, which I lack the PhotoShop chops to properly understand.

But judging by his work so far, I'd say the experiment is a success.

Baseball · Photography · Flickr · 2007/03/07 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Read More Entries