I see your point and i think your right. I just in knowing and talking to him think the institution is taking a big step by brining him in. He’s very well respected in the media out there.

I just feel like everyone is routing for this to fail and I just want people to be hopeful.

I must disagree. I have seen too many people with the “I’ve seen it in print, it must be true” mentality. How many emails did you get saying that the Gap, or Bill Gates, whoever, was going to give you something free? There are dozens of websites dedicated to debunking rumors which run rampant.

But it’s lazy and stupid at best, and dishonest and underhand (usually) to use that fact to legitimate a self-interested disdain for even attempting to understand and question one’s own perspective and to strive for a truth that rises above it.

I doubt that anyone here (ok, most everyone here) is advocating that we have no obligation as writers to try to rise up and grasp the complexity of any issue. Sure, it is lazy to ignore other viewpoints simply because they’re in opposition. Yet blogging is somewhat differant than journalism. You put your ideas out there, theoretically with rationale. Other bloggers will support or challenge your assumptions. Blogging is not about presenting information that you “should” know. It’s about the questioning mind challenging assumptions, adding a roundness to a story or idea (more than what news editors decide you should know…or that can be crammed into a 1/2 hour show). The ultimate beauty of the blogosphere is the ability to deeply flesh out an idea and all its permutations. It’s not just one person (or a small group) controlling information. Everyone with the least bit of interest gets to weigh-in, with a (relatively) equal weight given to their contribution.

Then there is journalism as a craft/profession working against this. I just heard a pretty snarky commentary on NPR about Brian Williams blog being nothing but navel-gazing and about how real news is not about blogs, blah, blah. This from someone calling herself a journalist.

I’m skeptical with evidence for that stance.

This sort of post-modern-theory/self-justification-for-hackery really shits me.

The observation that humans find it difficult to identify, let alone limit the effect of their own biases, is something that all intelligent people understand.

But it’s lazy and stupid at best, and dishonest and underhand (usually) to use that fact to legitimate a self-interested disdain for even attempting to understand and question one’s own perspective and to strive for a truth that rises above it.

Of course we are better off if we strive for objectivity.

And of course a person who strives for objectivity is to be trusted to a greater degree than one who makes no such effort.

Meanwhile, I want to know why Howard Dean is wearing the “I Love Oil” button.

I think there is a huge world of bloggers out there and blog readers. I’m more one of the readers than bloggers and I rarely comment. Only when I think my two cents is worth the little time i have to stop reading.

I’d just like to say there is a group of us out there, though small, that would like to see the MSM become blog friendly. So, before we glibly criticize people that are trying new things, let’s wait till something is there and use this space to offer advice. Criticize him and CBS if they don’t learn, if they are obtuse, if they don’t adapt, if they ignore.

Don’t criticize them for trying. Sometimes you need to fail in order to learn.

If it is not personal is it still a blog? Or is it just a news section that updates more often?

Blogs are people, not institutions.

What we want from CBS is as much transparency as possible. CBS is cool with this when it comes to others (they want absolute transparancy in government and corporate affairs), but not so much when it comes to themselves. As news consumers, we don’t want to just trust them that they will always be objective, we want them to show us by their daily choice of stories and the angles they take on those stories.

Often, when I watch old movies on TV, I will have the laptop open to IMDB so that I can look up the characters that go by, see what other roles they have played, see how their careers went after the movie I’m watching and so on. It makes a good movie all the better if you can set it more and more deeply in context. If I could do the same with CBS – read more about the story behind the story, read other points of view that weren’t chosen to air, see video that didn’t make the story, see stories that didn’t air due to lack of time, read the comments of contributors to the story who may not have agreed with the story in its final form, and so on – then I would enjoy the news more, I would come away vastly more informed than I do now and I might start to trust CBS as a source of news.

By hiring their own critic and making the criticism public, they would force themselves to evolve and improve. This would be painful in the short term, but it seems to me like their only chance in the long run.

The only thing is, I’m going to have to hear about this from somewhere else: no way I’m going to go back to watching the news on TV until I’m convinced that it will be a good use of my time.

Clear signals that Vaughn should start polishing his resume:

1. The blog’s central goal, though, is to facilitate and give voice to the conversation between the audience (including bloggers and professional critics) and the CBS News people they’re squawking about, without smothering that conversation with his own opining. This is the job description for a flack, not a blogger.

2. The flack has a flack. If that’s not the kiss of death, I don’t know what is.

3. Jeff, you’ve given free advice to many, many people, but you have to pay the bills just like the rest of us. You, at least, can bank some favors for the future. As a blogger with no props in New York, there can be no quid pro quo expected for me. If I thought CBS was worth helping, I’d do it, but I don’t.

4. It doesn’t have to be opinion-writing-with-attitude not to be lame. Very true, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

Clearly, the CBS Evening News Managing Editor can’t be expected to read, let alone respond to, comments on any blog they might produce or have ghosted; they’d get nothing else done.

So how about the people three or four tiers down from the top. How about letting employees — assistant producers, camera technicians, make-up specialists, hell, janitors — have unrestrained access to a CBS blog for brief periods of time and see what shakes out.

My experience in journalism is that production/distribution people have very clear understanding of what’s going on.

But the control freaks at the top will never let it happen.

Did you share the Neo-Marketing list from Creating Professional Users with Vaughn? You should. It could help his handlers get a clue.

B’shalom,

Jeff Hess

I completely agree, of course, but have one question. Exactly what is “objectivity?” Not trying to delve into a vast estoric area. but….. If it means “just the facts, ma’am,” what would that convey? To properly comprehend the facts, one needs context and point of view, I would think.

That’s what media does all the time. We all do. But that opinionated selection is why we’re driving to get content from other places. The view of the world that CBS provides is not enough. It’s limited – and slanted. The music of evening news that we crave is not the notes on the page, but the notes left off. That’s where the real story and readership/listenership of CBS News is. Give us the whole story. CBS has a whole nation of relatives for the soldiers in Iraq, for example, but even FoxNews always leads with blood. Try telling the fuller, more personal, more heroic stories. The good, and the bad. Use the blog to amplify that. Be different than the other networks.

Otherwise, the TV is off at my house. I’ll gather what I need from the web.

yeah, snowball’s chance in hell on that one.

As I reflect about the blogs that I read (I would assume that readership is the ultimate goal of this), a few key things stick out. The blogs that I read are opinionated: Blogs are inherently personal. That’s the risk that Mr. Ververs will need to take, to make his bias public and open to critique. Additionally, like Jeff’s blog here, the well read ones have authority and insight. They bring up points of view that MSM wouldn’t touch; too unbalanced. Lastly, true engagement will be crucial. He needs to pop open Technorati every so often and read those posts linking to and about CBS, and respond.

It’ll be a challenge, really, to come out of the corporate shadow into the irreverent blog sunshine.

You cannot blog, or what we call a web journal of sorts, and not institute some sort of slant on it. It’s inevitable.

If you weren’t doing that, you would simply be a very sad news outlet. And we have plenty of those, balanced or not.

A blogger with a handler. A PR person at the ready. What a sad state this blogger is set in. He has no opinions, he has no access to share them.

If he’s a real blogger, he’ll need to start an anonymous blog just to share his -real- opinions, you know the one(s) that CBS won’t let him blog about.

Nothing to see here, move along.

But seriously…. I meant what I said about giving Vaughn and CBS your suggestions. Take them at their word and tell them what you think they should do … and then watch to see whether they do it.

Which is only interesting if it is two-way. How likely is that?

What CBS could do, instead of re-arranging again the deck chairs on their Titanic, is clean up the snarky bias that transcends their products like the Evening News and 60 Minutes and half of the articles on their website.

If these people really had vision they would have chained Dan Rather to a keyboard, opened a blog for him and insisted he respond to comments from the public.

They really don’t get it.