Journalism

Michael Arrington's Rich Commitment to Journalism

TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington was recently caught scrubbing an old blog entry to hide a conflict of interest. Arrington wrote Oct. 27 about Maya's Mom, a Web 2.0 startup aimed for the Oprah crowd that received "around $1 million" in funding. When he wrote about the company in April, he told his readers that Maya's Mom founder Ann Crady Kennedy was one of his peeps: Disclosure: Ann is a former colleague and so my opinions may be favorably tinted. This sentence subsequently disappeared, ... (read more)

2006/11/20

59 of 60 Web Users Prefer the Drudge Report

The ad broker for the Drudge Report says that Matt Drudge's site broke traffic records on Election Day with 2.3 million unique visitors and 25.1 million page views. The scariest part of the press release: This proves, once again, that when Americans want reliable, unbiased, instant news on what's happening and what's important, they trust Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report to deliver. Drudge also had 100 million ad impressions that day. If you figure a click-through rate of one percent and 5 ... (read more)

2006/11/09

A tragic story in today's Houston Chronicle has an unfortunate ad juxtoposition: The ad's animated, showing an SUV stopping safely and avoiding a child's ball bouncing into the road. "You always stop," it begins. "You always drive safely. You deserve a reward." ... (read more)

2006/09/30

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

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