Journalism

I'm a Pig at Breakfast

I turned in a feature story on Tuesday, the first paid journalism I've done for a publication since leaving the Ask Ed Brice column at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2000. Like many bloggers, I've had a lot to say about journalism over the years, and I internalized the self-glorifying notion that I practice a form of it here on Workbench. But after a few days of conducting interviews, checking facts and documenting all of my sources for an editor, I was reminded of a substantial difference ... (read more)

2006/02/15

My Guid Could Beat Up Your Guid

Workbench was named Feedster's Feed of the Year, leading Greg Knauss to send this congratulatory e-mail: I've thought for a long time that Workbench's RSS 2.0 feed was really well-formed, and its use of optional attributes exemplary. He's got a well-designed guid format, and his output in areas where the standards document is ambiguous* is always consistent. What? They were talking about the content, too? Even better! * No, I couldn't resist. I've been hoping for years that someone would peek ... (read more)

2006/01/04

Little Red Book, Big Fat Apology

New Bedford Standard-Times Editor Bob Unger has responded to the Little Red Book hoax that ran in the newspaper, acknowledging that the original story should not have run until they interviewed the student making the claim: We -- reporter and editors -- failed here because we put our faith in what two college professors told us. We should have held off publishing the story until we had a chance to judge the student's credibility for ourselves. The student's name continues to be kept private, to ... (read more)

2006/01/04

Suck.Com Domain Hijacked by Smut Merchant

Over the holidays, Suck.Com stopped being a failed online magazine for a few days and began a new life as a porn portal. This was apparently a domain name hijack, because the portal's gone and the old site's archives are now restored. While Suck was porn, Steve Baldwin wrote a bitter sendoff: Given that this is certainly the end of suck.com's long journey as a project, one must ask: was suck.com ever really about anything more than the wiles and whims of its owners? Wasn't this the joke all the ... (read more)

2006/01/03

Student's Little Red Hoax Circles the Globe

The Drudge Retort fell for a hoax earlier this month, passing along a newspaper's report that a college student was investigated by the Department of Homeland Security for requesting Mao Zedong's Little Red Book on interlibrary loan. The student admitted on Friday it was a little red lie. I hate falling for stuff like this, because I like to think I was occasionally listening in class when I earned a journalism degree from the University of North Texas. In hindsight there were strong reasons to ... (read more)

2005/12/27

The Story of Jimmy Wales and Bomis Babes

In an interview with Wired News, Wikipedia leader Jimmy Wales renewed his objection to the statement that Bomis Babes was pornographic: If R-rated movies are soft porn, it was porn. In other words, no, it was not. That description is inaccurate. If you're not exceptionally proud of the erotic web site you ran before the dot-com bust, a defense that hinges on the definition of soft pornography probably won't help matters. As someone who grew up after cable television and before the web, I ... (read more)

2005/12/20

Wikipedia Founder Looks Out for Number 1

I spent a little time this morning expanding the Wikipedia biography of Gordon Keith, a dark-humored and hilarious radio host on the Dallas sportstalk station KTCK. Having a biography in Wikipedia is a double-edged sword, as John Siegenthaler Sr. can attest. You get the perks of being in an encyclopedia at the peril that any crank in the world can contribute unflattering or libelous things to it. When I added my own biography in a misguided experiment last August, I didn't realize that some ... (read more)

2005/12/19

Podcasting: Accept No Imitations

Randall Stross, New York Times, July 3, 2005: "Podcast" is an ill-chosen portmanteau that manages to be a double misnomer. A podcast does not originate from an iPod. And it is not a broadcast sent out at a particular time for all who happen to receive it. Steven Chen, China Daily, Sept. 8, 2005: The term podcast, a portmanteau of two words, broadcasting and iPod, Apple Computer's now ubiquitous music player is something of a misnomer, since such files do not need either an iPod or a portable ... (read more)

2005/12/12

Congress Studies Cruise Ship Disappearances

On Tuesday, two Congressional subcommittees will hold a joint hearing on the subject of cruise ship disappearances and crimes that take place aboard the vessels. My wife M.C. Moewe, a reporter with the Jacksonville Business Journal, spent six months tracking down information on cruise ship passengers who disappeared or went overboard, an elusive subject because most incidents happen in international waters or foreign jurisdictions. She found 12 passengers since 2000, including five within the ... (read more)

2005/12/12

CNN Dicks Cheney with Subliminal Messages

The Drudge Retort has obtained video footage that proves the superimposition of an X mark over Vice President Cheney during a televised speech Tuesday wasn't just an innocent technical glitch by CNN, as claimed by anchor Daryn Kagan-Limbaugh. In a story impacting hard across the conservative blogosphere, Matt Drudge reported Tuesday on a "large black 'X' repeatedly flashed over the vice president's face!" The X, which appeared for two frames displayed over one-fifteenth of a second, turns out ... (read more)

2005/11/23

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