How Bloggers Fared at the Newseum
While on a trip to Washington D.C. last weekend I made my first visit to the Newseum, the museum of journalism that moved to Pennsylvania Avenue in 2008 after an extensive $450 million upgrade. The museum's $20 ticket is a lot when you can walk across the street to visit the Smithsonian for free, but as a J-school grad I spent around five hours engrossed in the six-story facility. Highlights include an emotional Pulitzer Prize photography exhibit, an exhibit on the Berlin Wall that features several sections of the wall alongside an actual East German sniper tower, and a 9/11 exhibit that includes the crumpled World Trade Center antenna. I didn't realize that it had survived the collapse.
One wall of the 9/11 exhibit displays dozens of newspaper front pages covering the attack. Headline writers had a hard time capturing the enormity of the event in the few words permitted by a ginormous font. The Boston Globe declared it a "New Day of Infamy," the Indianapolis Star called it a "Day of Death," and the San Francisco Examiner offered the lamest attempt of them all, the one-word exclamation "Bastards!"
I was curious to learn how the Newseum treated the touchy subjects of blogs and Matt Drudge, neither of which were likely to get much love from a place created by pro journalists to celebrate their own awesomeness. The picture atop this post was from a survey you could take. The next question was, "Do you read a news blog every day?" After I answered in the affirmative to both questions, I think I heard USA Today publisher Al Neuharth quietly weeping in an adjoining room.
The only bloggers I saw mentioned in the Newseum were Mayhill Fowler and Mary Katharine Ham on a wall about the 2008 presidential campaign:
A Blogger Scoops Big Media
Bloggers became a major force in campaign 2008. Mayhill Fowler, who blogs for the Huffington Post's "citizen-powered" Off the Bus web site, broke two stories during the campaign that sent reporters scrambling to catch up. Though critics panned her unconventional methods, her stories rocketed through the mainstream media. She captured Democratic nominee Barack Obama on tape saying that some "bitter" working-class voters "cling to guns or religion." She also taped Bill Clinton crudely insulting a reporter, sparking a backlash against Hillary Clinton's campaign. "Politicians need to learn that anyone can break news, and citizens who run into you ... can post it anywhere," said blogger Mary Katherine Ham.
The Newseum misspelled Ham's name and T.S. "Elliot" when quoting him in a film. There was no exhibit honoring the work of copy editors.
Blogs also were described in a recent-event timeline:
The Internet Explodes
Web logs, a new form of personal journalism, began to cover everything from computer programming to politics. Now known as "blogs," the constantly updated sites -- with links to other sites -- bypassed the traditional news media and gave individuals direct access to millions of Internet users. This cartoon (right) reflected the Web's growing popularity.
Let me be the first to express outrage at the glaring lack of credit for Dave Winer in that paragraph. The guy invented everything in those sentences except for popularity.
As for Matt Drudge, he got some love for stealing the Monica Lewinsky scoop that Newsweek spiked in January 1998, which "helped shift the balance between 'old media' and 'new media.'" I refuse to transcribe any more because Drudge's continued importance to the contemporary history of journalism crushes my spirit.
The Newseum has a TV studio where you can report a news story and watch the video. Because it has been too long since anyone asked me to be on television -- 1,398 days, 8 hours, 22 minutes and 18 seconds as of this post -- I paid $7 to shoot a story and take home the commemorative photo.
For Newseum Network News, I broke the exclusive that D.C. United was about to start a new soccer season. You're given around six seconds to vamp at the end before sending it back to network. My story, which you can see on the web, was way better than the one produced by the 10-year-old girl in the adjacent studio. Watch closely as I remain cool under pressure even though an errant ball nearly clobbers me.
This was the first time I ever used a Teleprompter, which completely removes the need to think about the words you are saying. I now know what I want for Christmas.
Hosting Unlimited Blogs with TypePad Premium
Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter and one of the pioneers of blogging, recently moved his self-hosted personal blog to TypePad:
I really like Typepad and though I'm giving up things like custom .htaccess redirects for old posts and my old permalink URLs, I'm gaining things like the easiest to use posting UI available and most importantly, I'll never need to update any software by hand ever again.
It's been a long, frustrating week with several days spent trying to move off Wordpress (I was tired of my weblog app chiding me for upgrades every two weeks) followed by several days trying to get MT to work followed by brief experiments with Textpattern followed by giving up and finishing here.
I made the same journey, installing several weblog publishing programs on my server before throwing in the towel because of frequent security and feature updates. I finally decided last year to buy a $299 yearly subscription to TypePad that gives me unlimited hosted blogs, each of which can be published at its own domain, use guest authors, and employ advanced templates.
I'm still publishing Workbench with software that I wrote, but all new sites that I create begin as TypePad blogs. I love being able to turn an idea into a web site in five minutes, particularly when I'm creating sites with other people. Now, when I pester somebody I know to begin a blog, I fire up TypePad and create one for them to show how easy it is.
So far, I've only run into one area where using TypePad was problematic. The service makes it easy to incorporate content from other sites on a blog using widgets, but I couldn't find a widget for adding Google AdSense or any other ads to a blog. I had to put the ad code in a TypeList and give the list an empty title containing nothing but space characters (" ").
This workaround is awkward, because you end up with a bunch of no-title TypeLists containing ad code for different blogs. Finding the code later, when changes need to be made, will be an enormous pain in the ass.
Six Apart has been extremely responsive to new developments in blogging, adding new features to TypePad as they become popular in other publishing tools. It was one of the first companies to adopt the recommendations of the RSS Profile, such as including an atom:link element to identify a feed's URL.
How to Deal With Obnoxious Blog Comments
Matt Asay, an executive who writes CNET's Open Road open source blog, got so mad at commenters on his site yesterday that he began hunting them down:
... most people are not jerks. They just become losers when cloaked in anonymity. They say things they'd never say if confronted with the people they flame on discussion boards, in comments sections, etc. They're probably nice people "in real life." It's just on the web that they let it all hang out, to the detriment of the web and intelligent discussion.
Take the comments to one of my recent posts. The first is led off by "h3h" who apparently has no sense of humor (completely missing my point in the post), but can't leave it at that, then going on to lob ad hominems into his "argument."
"H3h" turns out to be Brad Fults. Judging from his Flickr feed and Twitter feed, he's probably an OK guy. He happens to be wrong in the way he chose to comment on this blog, but he's probably a well-intentioned person, normally.
Asay doesn't seem to understand the concept of anonymity. Fults' comments on CNET include a link to his web site, which contains his name and is presumably how Asay found it.
Anyone who reads Workbench knows that I get my fair share of anonymous abuse, particularly from people who read my Target story and let me know I'm a bad parent. That never gets old.
If you publish on the web and accept user comments, you're going to be a punching bag for a steady procession of dillweeds. Your choices are to stop taking comments, pick them off one by one like Asay, or just keep telling yourself you're a beautiful snowflake and soldier through it.
Credit: The photo of Matt Asay was taken by Ilya Schurov of Computerra Weekly and is available under a Creative Commons license.
Importing a Multiple-Author Blog to TypePad
I'm paying Six Apart $300 a year for a premium subscription to TypePad, which gives me an unlimited number of multiple-author weblogs that can be hosted on my own domains. I recently decided to move Watching the Watchers to TypePad, because I'd like the site's writers to have a more friendly user interface, but I've run into a dealbreaker -- the software doesn't import the authors of blog entries. All 1,400 articles on the site are stored in my name.
TypePad supports multiple authors and Six Apart's weblog import format, which has an Author field, but the software ignores this information when you import:
TypePad is unable to import posts from different authors. If a post was created by a different author, it will be associated with the weblog's owner instead. This would require that TypePad create the authors during the import process and this feature is currently unavailable.
I can probably work around this by making each author a category, but that's a clumsy kludge, so I'm going to bang on Six Apart first and see if they might change this policy. I've opened up a support ticket and contacted some of my homies at the company.
Hugh MacLeod Ages Like Fine South African Wine
It's funny what people reveal about themselves online. Read my blog for any length of time and you can probably figure out my uneasy Michael Corleone-like relationship with journalism, the field I majored in and subsequently escaped. I can't decide what to think about my long absence from the profession or the fact that I don't seem to be missed.
Read online marketing guru Hugh MacLeod, the guy who plies bloggers with a South African wine in the expectation they'll sing its praises, and you discover he's got a gigantic mean streak about middle age.
This morning on Twitter, MacLeod posted this tweet to blogger Frank Paynter: "Mssg to Frank Paynter re. your attempts to 'friend' me on Facebook. Go. ----. Yourself. -------. http://listics.com/."
He then followed with another message: "Seriously. Frank Paynter. Go ---- yourself. And your Mean Kids friends. Stupid, middle-aged Losers. Enjoy."
This was at least the third time I've read MacLeod point out somebody's age in the course of insulting them, so I did a little checking on the Google. Contempt for middle age is one of his regular themes.
An art director I know was laid off from Ogilvy's in New York about 2 years ago. He's had a very hard time. His current situation is a total disaster. He's 40 years old. Before the layoff his career had been less than spectacular.
Forget to upstream and you end up like him: middle aged and crashing on a friend's couch in The Bronx.
Apparently these MeanKids folk were taking the occasional pop at me as well. Mommy! Mommy! Come quick! A posse of middle aged, self-loathing underachievers is being mean to me Boo hoo hoo hoo...
Watching the big Madison Avenue agencies trying to get with the program is a bit like watching a middle-aged married man hitting on a co-ed in a bar.
I had it in my head that MacLeod was young, but I think this impression was based solely on snarky comments like these. As someone who turned 40 this year and gray 10 years earlier, I've cultivated an appreciation for young people who sneer at quadragenarians in their dotage. Unlike racists and sexists, agists always get what's coming to them in due time.
But as it turns out, MacLeod's no spring chicken. He noted his 40th birthday in 2005 with this gloomy cartoon:
That snide young whippersnapper is one of my elders.
Techmeme: We Find the Sites You Already Visit
Tim Bray on Techmeme:
I go there and see the same stories about the RIAA and Paul Graham's latest essay and what Apple might be doing, the same stories that are on Slashdot and Ars Technica and boring old ZDnet too. Plus a smattering of whatever Scoble & Winer & Arrington & Calcanis and their posses are up to.
For all of the attention paid to the Techmeme leaderboard this week, the latest popularity contest for self-fascinated, high-traffic techbloggers, there hasn't been much scrutiny of the manner in which Gabe Rivera creates his site. Techmeme, which publishes a software-generated roundup of tech news based on links stories receive from favored sources, isn't entirely automated. Rivera begins with a "seed list" of hand-chosen sites, as he explained to Wired News earlier this year:
I do use lists of sources to help my system determine which sources to monitor. Essentially, I'm telling it to "find more sites like these." These aren't exhaustive lists, or even close to exhaustive, and therefore not "white lists." ...
The full set of sites it monitors is constructed automatically, and even changes in real time based on linking. A small "seeding" list I construct manually is used to help the system build the complete list.
Rivera's good at making it sound like an egalitarian discovery process is going on, but Techmeme isn't exactly Lewis and Clark heading off into uncharted territory with a blank piece of paper and a pencil. The site's About page breathlessly declares, "At this moment, the next big story in technology may reside on a blog you've never heard of or a news site you don't have time to scan." Or it may reside on Engadget and TechCrunch, sites discovered 42 times on Techmeme the past week alone.
The Techmeme I want is one that identifies the 100 most-linked sources in technology, then pretends they don't exist. Show me the blogosphere that would exist if Robert Scoble finished journalism school, Mike Arrington remained in the domain name trade, Jason Calacanis became a psychologist and I pursued a career in modern dance.
There's an element of democracy in Technorati rankings and Google pagerank, since they're based on incoming links and the rank of those linkers. TechMeme's leaderboard, on the other hand, is determined by the sites Rivera chooses for his seed list and the stories they link. If he published that list, I expect you'd find the same people and publications who end up on the leaderboard. What goes in one end comes out the other. If you put turkey between two slices of bread, you get a turkey sandwich.
BlogRush Offers Link Sharing Service for Blogs
As an experiment, I added a BlogRush widget to the sidebar of Workbench and several other sites this morning. BlogRush is a new JavaScript-based blog headline exchange driven by RSS. Here's how it works: Headlines that might be of interest to readers appear in a box like this one, headlines from my site appear on other member sites, and we all get an enormous boost in traffic, a slobbery cover story in Wired and obscene wealth we can lord over others. Or at least the BlogRush founders do.
BlogRush is viral -- your headlines appear more often based on how many hits, clicks and member referrals you attract. The site's just six days old, but the marketing gimmick's bringing the Orlando-based startup a ginormous amount of traffic. On Alexa, BlogRush has passed Slashdot and is threatening TechCrunch.
The BlogRush widget only displays the first 40 characters of a headline, including spaces, so a lot of the headlines it displays are cut off or misleading. Although the service suggests that you write headlines with this limit in mind, that's too much to ask. A better solution would be to create a BlogRush namespace for RSS, so publishers who wanted to write shorter headlines for the service could define them in their RSS feeds, like this:
<item>
<title>'Kid Nation' Contestants Rip Into President Bush</title>
<blogrush:title>'Kid Nation' Stars Rip President Bush</blogrush:title>
</item>
I've never found a widget I wanted to keep around for long, because their providers always have trouble ramping up servers fast enough to avoid slowing down the sites that belong to the networks. But some of the headlines BlogRush has found for the Drudge Retort widget have been interesting, which is either dumb luck or good context-based filtering. I'll follow up this post in a week or two with details on how much traffic BlogRush generated for my sites.
Five of My Favorite Blogs
Bored with what his RSS reader has been feeding him, Kent Newsome is rebuilding his reading list from scratch using the recommendations of others. He's asked me to suggest five blogs, which is a good excuse to pimp some sites I follow that deserve a bigger audience.
Retrospectacle, a blog by neuroscience postgraduate student Shelley Batts, consistently finds great stories in science before the mainstream media. She won a blogging scholarship last year and answers questions I didn't realize I wanted to know, like why do fireflies bioluminesce?
Sharkbitten is Todd Smith's blog on Americana music, a genre of earthy, blues-inspired rock that claims Johnny Cash, Neil Young, Todd Snider and Tom Waits, along with Smith's own Doc Wheat. As someone who doesn't turn on the radio any more for fear I might hear music, I appreciate Smith's search for life beyond the monotonous same-song dreck on FM. He's also a fellow Jacksonville local whose wife is the Tiger Woods of kindergarten teachers.
James Robertson's Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants has become one of my favorite tech blogs. Though he writes a lot about Smalltalk as part of his job as product manager for Cincom Smalltalk, and I no speaka the language, Robertson's an incisive observer of the tech industry who finds interesting nuggets on other sites without obsessing over every tiny tempest that gets the Underoos of other techbloggers all bunched up.
Self Made Minds by Al Carlton and Scott Jones covers how to make money publishing web sites. The subject matter is baldly mercantile, but it's not shady get-rich-quick stuff. There's a brisk business these days in buying fixer-upper web sites, improving them and selling them. If you'd like to figure out what your own sites might be worth and whether you're missing revenue opportunities, this is a good place to start.
Jeff Rients writes the best blog on the planet about roleplaying games and comics. Some people might shudder at that recommendation, but I spent every weekend during my teen years as a dungeon master -- and not the cool kind. Rients digs up obscure, bizarre and unspeakably horrible old games and comics, obsessing over things like the origin of the bulette and one panel of ROM SpaceKnight issue 24.
I could go on, because I've been engaging in my own effort to look outside the usual suspects for infotainment. But these five bloggers are a good start. To steal a favorite saying from Rients, everything they touch turns to awesome.
Cluetrain Derails in Blacksburg, Virginia
One of the best-known techbloggers was embarrassed Monday when he sent the following private e-mail and it was published by the recipient:
From what I gather so far (and info is incomplete), most of the cell phones in use by students at Virginia Tech, and the system they used as well (much more feature-rich than phones provided by big carriers, and user-programmable to boot) were provided by a company in New York run by my friend ... . I think what they're doing is critically important: helping the users help themselves and each other. And using this tragedy to create the phone systems we want, rather than what the carriers are willing to give us.
Though he backed away from this sentiment, for reasons that should be obvious, he can't deny thinking that the massacre might be a useful lever to get better phone services.
Not long ago, another prominent techblogger proclaimed that a new computer chip was more important than cancer, using a news story about an actual teen with cancer as his example:
... having cancer is important to that one person. Intel chips change the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Yesterday, a third techblogger's first take on Cho Seung-Hui's release of a multimedia manifesto was to claim him as a vlogger, a person who publishes video updates of his life as a blog.
The Virginia Tech shooter sent a package of video and pictures to NBC.
In other words, vlogging comes to mass murder, in ways no one anticipated (or no one I know).
It makes perfect sense, in a perfectly senseless way.
I've been a techblogger for a long time, hyping stuff that excites me about web publishing, programming and affiliated forms of geekery. But there ought to be subjects that are larger than their ability to sell cutting-edge technology, and I'm pretty sure that mass murder and childhood cancer are two of them.
The Internet's Chorus of Calumny
Frank Paynter's getting his groove back after the Internet's long tail knocked him around like a stegosaurus. For all of the talk about how bad it is to be the focus of an angry mob, an angry Internet mob gums its prey rather than biting. Once you get used to the slobber it's not so bad.
Now that the horde's moved on to Tim O'Reilly and his stinking badges, Paynter's mocking the outrage brigade by quoting Karl Marx:
All this chorus of calumny, which the party of order never fail, in their orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that the bourgeois of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to the baron of old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair against the plebeian, while in the hands of the plebeian a weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime.
Katharine Newman, a college student in Virginia, works me over a little for defending Paynter, Jeneane Sessum and Chris Locke:
The reaction of some of the Big-Fishes who owned these group blogs became defensive, arguing that they were being unfairly indicted for hate speech, which they weren't particularly accused of authoring. And that was when the story really got under my skin. All these Big-Fishes standing in line to say they wouldn't apologize for what they hadn't said, to decry Sierra's story as a black mark on their careers? Backing these Big-Fish, folks like Nick Denton and Rogers Cadenhead? I really would have hoped not.
I defended them because the mob was 99 and 44/100ths percent wrong. Once people had a compelling story -- mean web publishers drive female blogger into hiding with misogynistic death threats -- they never let go of it, because the facts were more complicated and less entertaining.
Kathy Sierra and the Mean Kids Controversy
There's more than one side to the story about threats made against technologist Kathy Sierra, as an article by Dan Fost in today's San Francisco Chronicle does a good job of explaining.
I strongly sympathize with Sierra, because it sucks to be the target of somebody's rage on the Internet. I imagine it's considerably worse for women, for whom misogynistic threats from men are depressingly common, as my Java book coauthor Laura Lemay relates.
But Sierra's weblog post made the publishers of the now-defunct Mean Kids and Unclebobism blogs look like they endorsed or even authored the odious threats against her, which appears to be an unfair and inaccurate accusation to level against Chris Locke, Frank Paynter and Jeneane Sessum. Her partner Bert Bates continues to hold them responsible as this controversy rages around the web.
I've read several dozen Mean Kids posts by poking around the caches on Google and Bloglines. From what I've seen, the site began in early February as a harmless spleen-venting exercise, as Sierra acknowledged when she suggested herself as a target:
It's about f'n time. It's always Tara Tara Tara.
Like other exercises in misanthropy on the web, Mean Kids became less playful and more malicious over time, especially in terms of the audience it attracted and new authors it took on. When one of the site's writers posted a racist and hateful post about blogger Robert Scoble's pregnant wife Maryam on March 16, describing her as an "Iranian princess" and "brown sow," Paynter responded by shutting the site down and was rebuked by another contributor as a "control freak." Locke shut down the site he created in response, Unclebobism, for similar reasons.
You can fault them for beginning rant sites that ended badly, as if there's any other way those sites turn out, but it should be pointed out that Paynter and Locke closed both blogs in rejection of offensive content before Sierra's post. Sessum's involvement in Mean Kids was a single post that quoted a John Lennon song.
The Internet's newest incarnation of mean kids -- the torch-wielding mob going after people named by Sierra -- should focus their wrath on the people who made the actual threats and the reprehensible post about Scoble's wife.
Toronto Star: Only 100 Blogs Make Money
A story on the business side of blogging in today's Toronto Star makes a wildly inaccurate claim -- only the top 100 blogs make money.
Many blogs do make money but a vast majority of them don't, according to Derek Gordon, vice-president of marketing for Technorati, a San Francisco-based Internet search engine for blogs. The site tracks about 65 million blogs. It also ranks them.
"Typically, the top 100 blogs do some form of monetization," says Gordon.
There's money being made in blogging beyond the big names. I run four blogs that aren't anywhere close to the top 100 -- ranking on Technorati from 4,000 to 10,000 -- and they've become a decent part-time job. (I could double the income overnight if I wasn't rejecting all text-link ad offers.) Randy Charles Morin recently turned his KBCafe blog network into a full-time gig because of the revenue it's earning.
Take a look at the rate card for the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, the group that kicked my ass to the curb in 2005. Even in a slow period before the presidential election ramps up, the 20th most popular blog in that network is making $500 this week in ad revenue.
Aaron Brazell recently put his TechnoSailor blog up for auction on SitePoint Marketplace, a place where web publishers can sell established web sites.
TechnoSailor has decent-but-not great numbers -- a Technorati ranking of 2,300, Google page rank of 6 and monthly income of $250 -- yet the auction sold for $23,750. The deal subsequently fell through when they couldn't reach terms on a contract, but it's comparable to what buyers are paying for other sites in the same marketplace.
A business reporter who thinks there's no money in blogging should talk to people like Morin, BlogAds founder Henry Copeland and the publisher of SitePoint. As blogging matures and some publishers look to get out, the ones who sell out are going to be pleasantly surprised at what their sites are worth.
Was the First Blog a .Plan File?
The 10th birthday of Scripting News April 1 is likely to usher in a bunch of "blogging turns 10" press coverage, since Dave Winer hasn't been shy about staking his claim as an originator of the medium.
Though he didn't call the site a weblog until February 1999, Scripting News employed a link-heavy, short take, reverse chronological style adopted by hundreds of web publishers, especially after UserLand Software began free hosting on EditThisPage.Com later that year.
The first blog I recognized as a different kind of web site was Harold Stusnick's Offhand Remarks. When Stusnick began his blog in September 1997, he credited Winer and Michael Sippey.
While doing some research on the finger protocol for a networking project in Sams' Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days, I found a site that ought to be mentioned among the earliest blogs: Blues News.
Blues News sprang from the PC game programming community, which had a lot of coders spreading news via .plan files read over finger in the mid-'90s. The first posts from the site, which date back to July 1996, follow all of the characteristics of an early blog.
I've never thought of finger as a precursor to blogging, but .plan files share several things in common with early blogs: reverse order, tech-heavy content and an emphasis on personal activities.
For my book, I had trouble finding anyone who's still updating their .plan file. The last active person in the fingosphere may be Id Software programmer Timothee Besset, who posted on Feb. 2 about a new release of Doom 3.
Media Takes a Pass on the Convention
After reading Charles Cooper shred the convention bloggers as hayseeds and "cybertourists," I'm officially revoking his credentials to be a self-proclaimed fan of weblogging.
Cooper demonstrates in his piece that he doesn't understand the medium he calls "one of the most exciting developments of the last five years."
In a CNET commentary that doesn't link to a single subject he's talking about -- can't risk losing those eyeballs -- Cooper defines the success of webloggers by what the pro media thinks of them:
Whatever the reason, few came to town with their "A" game. And that's a shame, because I'm sure many from the world of mainstream media left town thinking they had little to worry about if this is the best the blogging world can produce.
Reaching back to 1976 to establish his own pro journalism bonafides, Cooper reminds us all that his colleagues are not only difficult to please, but also hard-working, underappreciated, fast, talented, and did I mention hard-working?
... with the pressure on to work under the constraints mainstream hacks have to contend with on a daily basis -- get the story, get it right in all its complexity, and oh, by the way, get it 10 minutes ago -- they were found wanting.
Anyone who thinks that weblogs should be measured by whether they impress the professional media has jumped the cluetrack and gone skittering into the clueravine.
Collectively, weblogs represent a mass consumer revolt against the giant electronic media and the bottom-line fixated, risk-averse, synergy-loving infotainment cesspool that it has become.
This week, the major networks abandoned their FCC-required obligation to serve the public interest by skipping convention coverage in favor of tripe like Extreme Makeover, decided ahead of time that events like Barack Obama's stirring keynote speech wouldn't be newsworthy, and cut away frequently from the few moments they did cover to promote their own talking heads.
In the times I ventured from C-Span to the cable news channels, I found them more interested in the latest pregnant wife tragedy porn than in the events in Boston:
Fox News yesterday -- and it wasn't alone -- seemed unwilling or unable to let go of the Lori Hacking police story. Even with the Democratic National Convention gearing up, Fox, more than any other cable news organization, kept tracking such breaking info as the various mattress purchases by Hacking's husband, a suspect in his pregnant wife's disappearance.
MSNBC was guilty here, too. It labeled each of its updates "Looking for Lori," as though staking claim to the title of the inevitable telemovie.
A search of the weblog search engine Feedster demonstrates the glaring difference in news judgment between the professional arbiters of current events and the horde of blogging amateurs:
Barack Obama on Feedster: 3,557 hits
Lori Hacking on Feedster: 229 hits
The time to be concerned about webloggers isn't when they fail to match the standards of the electronic media, but when they succeed.
Subscriptions
Favorites
Projects
New Music
Life Itself / Glass Animals
Oh My My / Blue October
Hero / Weezer
Wake Up Call / Nothing But Thieves
Welcome to Your Life / Grouplove
Statistics
This blog has been published since Nov. 7, 1999 (a span of 7,515 days).
Thank you for visiting Workbench.
