Journalism

I've Been X'ed

I did an interview yesterday with AVNOnline, believing the "AV" stood for audiovisual, like the A.V. Club entertainment site published by The Onion. I liked the final piece, although I thought it was odd for the reporter to quote another papal domain registrant talking about "nipples and snatch." That kind of talk hasn't appeared much in the media since the end of the Clinton administration. When I showed the story to my wife, she noticed that the ads around the piece were for X-rated sites and ... (read more)

2005/04/27

Jumping Over the Lazy Dog

In another story about the no-holds-barred cage match between journalists and bloggers, Samantha Israel writes that she only has been corrected once by a reader. Let's go for two. Israel writes: More than arrogant, some old-time reporters think bloggers are plain old lazy. Former CBS news correspondent Eric Engberg made himself clear in his "Blogging as typing, not journalism" article on CBSNews.com last November. "Given their lack of expertise, standards and, yes, humility," he wrote, "the ... (read more)

2005/04/13

"When you write commentary, as we do, you are generally dependent on reasonably accurate news reporting. When the facts of a story bounce around -- which is not unusual -- you are left commenting on a moving target." Shorter PowerLine: The media has a responsibility to get the facts straight so that bloggers don't make embarrassing mistakes when we correct them. ... (read more)

2005/04/08

All the News That's Fit to Hide

How to make the least amount of money possible with newspaper archives: Follow the example of Canada's Sun Media Corporation. Check out this old article from the Toronto Sun, one of 20,000 archived articles from Sun newspapers that have been crawled by Google. Nestled inside an ungodly mess of navigation links, ads, and other boilerplate, the 37K page contains less than 100 words of unique content that might attract a web searcher: Digging into the boys in the band DOC DIG! FOLLOWS THE EXPLOITS ... (read more)

2005/04/04

A comment on the Drudge Retort beautifully captures the mood tonight as the world's broadcast media hovers uncomfortably between life and death: This just in. The pope is not dead. We will be reporting that the pope is not dead until he is dead, then of course, we will remove the "not" so that we will say the "pope is dead." Then we will inundate you with slick already produced stories about his life, retrospectives, montages, just as soon as we can say he is dead. There will be lots of shots ... (read more)

2005/04/01

Florida attorney Matt Conigliaro has done an unbelievable job of reporting on the state legal issues of the Terry Schiavo case. Beginning in August 2003, a month after he began his weblog, Conigliaro has covered the subject extensively, providing a reference page that manages to be both thorough and fair, though some people would consider his respect for the legal process as an attempt to pick sides: The facts of this case are terribly sad, but they are not hard to understand. There's really ... (read more)

2005/03/28

Sorry, I Broke the News

An e-mail to the Drudge Retort this afternoon revealed that Jeff Weise, the teen who allegedly shot up his Minnesota high school and killed himself Monday, was an active participant on a UFO, conspiracy, and cover-up site called AboveTopSecret.Com. The posts appear legitimate and are corroborated by several other members who participated in the discussions with Weise, so I posted a news story about the messages. Because this appears to be the first media report on these messages, I needed ... (read more)

2005/03/23

Tina Brown compared bloggers to the East German secret police in Sunday's Washington Post: We are in the Eggshell Era, in which everyone has to tiptoe around because there's a world of busybodies out there who are being paid to catch you out -- and a public that is slowly being trained to accept a culture of finks. We're always under surveillance; cameras watch us wherever we go; paparazzi make small fortunes snapping glamour goddesses picking their noses; everything is on tape, with ... (read more)

2005/03/21

All of My Distortions Lack Purpose

Dick Rogers, ombudsman of the San Francisco Chronicle, compares bloggers to the ink-stained wretches in his profession: Other [bloggers] poke at contemporary issues but toss responsibility out the window. Five minutes with an Internet directory such as www.globeofblogs.com will turn up blogs that don't even bother to guess at the truth. They traffic in falsehood, innuendo and purposeful distortion. Journalism? I sure hope not. I challenged him in e-mail to name five actual weblogs that run ... (read more)

2005/03/15

If you're not already panicked enough about the "overdue" killer flu pandemic, Guardian science editor Robin McKie offers a new periodic cause for alarm. Every 62 million years, the species of Earth suffer a mass extinction: After analysing the eradication of millions of ancient species, scientists have found that a mass extinction is due any moment now. Their research has shown that every 62 million years -- plus or minus 3m years -- creatures are wiped from the planet's surface in massive ... (read more)

2005/03/13

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