Journalism

Wikipedia Leader: I Want to Be Deleted

In a provocative commentary for The Guardian, Seth Finkelstein argues that having a biography in Wikipedia is a magnet for libel: For people who are not very prominent, Wikipedia biographies can be an "attractive nuisance". It says, to every troll, vandal, and score-settler: "Here's an article about a person where you can, with no accountability whatsoever, write any libel, defamation, or smear. It won't be a marginal comment with the social status of an inconsequential rant, but rather will be ... (read more)

2006/09/29

Five Years On, 2,992 - 19 Lives Remembered

Today's remembrances of 9/11 use an official count of 2,973 people who died at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. Someone at CBS News this morning goofed and used 2,992, a count that includes the 19 hijackers, as this screen grab from Google News shows: ... (read more)

2006/09/11

Mexican Flag Raised Over U.S. Post Office

Los Angeles blogger Lone Wacko reported an incident this weekend that should be entering heavy rotation any minute now in the mainstream media: Hispanic pro-immigration demonstrators raised a Mexican flag over a U.S. post office in Maywood, Calif., Saturday as part of a counterdemonstration against Save Our State, an anti-immigration group that claims California is becoming a "third-world cesspool." Maywood became a flashpoint in the escalating immigration debate when elected officials in the ... (read more)

2006/08/29

Steve Gillmor's Got My Attention

Steve Gillmor parted company with ZDNet and shut down his InfoRouter blog a few weeks ago, stating afterward on his personal blog that there were "real issues, some of which I can't discuss except by indirection." I was upset to see InfoRouter shuttered, because I've come to appreciate Gillmor's bizarre takes on Web 2.0, which read like tech magazine hype filtered through Dennis Hopper. Cracking open the story lines: engaging Hollywood and the record business. Not by embarrassing or attacking ... (read more)

2006/08/14

The Washington Media are a Joke

After declaring that he is well-known for being funny, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen launches a weird snit today against Stephen Colbert for his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner: Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other ... (read more)

2006/05/04

Writer Tells Wikipedia He Got a Divorce

I fleshed out a placeholder entry on Wikipedia this morning, giving the Richardson, Texas, high school where "Jeremy spoke in class today" enough substance to inspire future editors to work on it. I've made around 150 edits to Wikipedia in the past year, most extensively on new bios and the unspeakably hideous "alcopop" drink Zima. Starting new subjects is a lot more fun than defending existing ones from vandalism. My Drudge Retort coconspirator Jonathan Bourne and I worked on the Zima entry as ... (read more)

2006/05/04

All Art Bell, All Romance, All the Time

I'm surprised the mainstream media has no interest in the love life of radio host Art Bell, which has become a lot more interesting than you'd expect of a 60-year-old man. In the last three days, more than 3,000 people have hit Workbench from search engines looking for information on Bell and wife, posting more than 480 comments. I covered the news because people were showing up here Sunday looking for it, thanks to this blog's top placement in Google for the term Art Bell's wife. There's ... (read more)

2006/04/19

College Pals Win Pulitzer Prizes for Katrina Coverage

While attending the University of Texas at Arlington from 1987-88, my wife and I wrote for The Shorthorn, a student newspaper filled with gifted, headstrong and completely insufferable journalists who were already clearing space on the mantle for Pulitzer Prizes. We'd get into such gigantic battles at press time you'd have thought that students at the commuter school actually read the paper. Two of my Shorthorn colleagues just won Pulitzers for breaking news photography: Michael Ainsworth ... (read more)

2006/04/19

Newspaper's Cheapness Hurts My Circulation

When I worked at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the early '90s, the place was filled to the rafters with copies of the day's newspaper, free for the taking. I loved reading papers that were fresh off the presses and still had "new news smell," and on Saturday mornings I ransacked the place looking for the bulldog edition. The bulldog, a Sunday edition published a day early for people who wanted 24 hours head start on everyone else, came out ahead of the day's news. Editors had license to fill ... (read more)

2006/04/11

East Africa Suffers Worst Famine in Decades

I've written before about the journalist Anna Badkhen, who filed incredible reports from Iraq for the San Francisco Chronicle on the day-to-day lives of soldiers and Iraqis. She's now in Kenya, covering a drought across East Africa that has left millions of people dependent on food aid that's running out: Now Isaaq's family -- her husband, Nur Muhammad, and their children, ranging in ages from 1 to 10 -- have no livestock to sell, and nothing of their own to eat or drink. They left the bush and ... (read more)

2006/03/26