BuzzMachine

Pandora, the product of the Music Genome Project, is neat: It recommends music based on finding songs similar to the ones you like. If only Firefly were around for a merger.

I’ve been remiss in not linking to J-Lab’s new J-Learning center, with lots of helpful advice and instruction helping anyone and everyone do journalism online.

I got a call last week from a PR person at CBS asking whether I wanted to meet Vaughn Ververs, the new CBS Public Eye blogger who’ll be trying to install a window in the cinderblock-and-steel fourth wall of TV news, starting next month. I have to say I was amused and maybe jealous: a blogger with his own flack! But come to think of it, maybe that is precisely what big media thinks every blogger should have: a handler.

But we met Friday in a Starbucks near CBS and across from CNN, the nice PR person sitting silently a table away; she said this was embargoed until today because, I suppose, there’s a press push, as Vaughn ends his first week on the job giving interviews to Variety and the Hollywood Reporter — blogs are show biz! — and the AP, LA Times, Business Week, and the Financial Times.

Vaughn looks like a good pick for the post: He’s friendly, unassuming, sincere, and he has a convenient resume: The author of The Hotline at the National Journal since 2002, he did stints at CBS News and Fox News and also was Pat Buchanan’s press secretary in his 1992 presidential run. I asked whether his GOP cred would help in the House That Dan Almost Tore Down. Vaughn chortled and said that Buchanan doesn’t exactly have GOP cred. In his career, he said, “I think I’ve been able through that to achieve sort of a balanced cynicism.” He said that Hotline was balanced and he wants Public Eye to be balanced.

When CBS News President Andrew Heyward announced Public Eye, he said the blogger would not have opinions. Vaughn reiterated that. “Ours will be different than what most people think of as a blog,” he said. It will be conversational but not flip; it will be edited; and it will “not be opinionated.”

Try this on for size: I think there’s no such thing as an objective blogger. Or you’re probably not blogging. You’re probably not talking with people, eye to eye. We’re about to kill the myth that journalists can be thoroughly objective; let’s not start trying to accrete that artificial ethic to blogs. I say that opinion is the proxy for transparency and it also makes a relationship more compelling: Agree or disagree with him, you knew where former NY Times Public Editor Dan Okrent stood and he made an interesting read; the current Timesman, the more balanced and traditional Byron Calame, is as dull as limestone.

As I pushed back on this, Vaughn conceded that the decisions he makes on what to write about will, of course, reveal opinions. But his assignment in this regard is clear: He’s not there as a political debater.

He’s also not there as an ombudsman, charged with answering every complaint and question about CBS News (now that would be a nightmare job). Heyward coined the job description “nonbudsman.”

Exactly what Public Eye will be, Vaughn says, is “eclectic” — which is to say, I think, that it’s still being invented. In fact, Vaughn is looking for advice and at the end of this post, I’ll ask you to give him some.

So far as I can tell Public Eye will include efforts to:
* explain how and why a story gets on the air, with video from behind the scenes, including from occasional news meetings, “following a piece from inception to air.”
* answer questions and complaints about CBS News stories — whether that’s “a critique that’s launched on Rush Limbaugh or the blogs” or from an email to the network.
* “facilitate a discussion” between the public and the news organization (I’d say that’s the most important task).
* and sometimes join in a discussion about issues faced by journalists outside CBS News (his example: using the Bob Costas’ refusal to talk TV trash as a peg to ask journalists at CBS “about what talent’s responsibility is vis a vis the editorial process: can a correspondent at CBS News refuse to do an assignment?”).

Being an opinionated blogger, I wasn’t shy about giving my two cents. I said that Job No. 1 should not be explaining how the news is produced but instead discussing the substance of the news and what it says.

On his relations with CBS News: Vaughn reports up to Larry Kramer, president of CBS Digital Media, and not to Heyward, giving him some separation. He says he has told CBS News staffers, “Treat me like Howard Kurtz if you want to. If you don’t want to comment, you don’t have to comment.” He added that he would reveal if a CBSer wouldn’t comment. He said he is not there as a critic of CBS News: “I’m not the judge, jury, and prosecutor of the case against CBS News or anything else.” He said that so far he has found “there’s a lot of willingness to go along with this.”

I think initially there was some trepidation because this is a hard concept to explain to people… I think the fear is that we’re going to come in and take a magnifying glass over every newscast and criticize it… It’s not what we’re going to do. If we see something we have a question about, we’re going to try to get an answer.

The company is devoting resources to the blog: Vaughn, who’ll be based, oddly, in Washington, one full-time person in New York and another in Washington.

I asked what he thought of NBC anchor Brian Williams’ blog. On the one hand, he said, it’s trickier to be the anchor, but on the other hand, Williams can give readers more perspective. He said they are trying to do similar things. I think there were two telling moments in the New York Times’ feature on Williams’ blog last week: First, the lead said that Williams was channeling his “inner Gawker” — when you become an offhand cultural reference, you know you’ve arrived — and second the story called on tvnewser blogger Brian Stelter:

…Mr. Williams has managed to captivate at least one influential viewer. He is Brian Stelter, whose own blog - a compendium of the daily doings in television news (tvnewser.com) - reads as if it were written by a grizzled veteran, not, as is the case, by a 19-year-old junior at Towson University in Maryland.

On 10 occasions over the last three months, Mr. Stelter has provided links to “The Daily Nightly” on his own blog. Never mind that at this early stage, Mr. Stelter receives about as many page views, or entries called up on his site, in a weekday (about 27,000) as “The Daily Nightly” does in about a week.

“It makes me want to watch the evening news, and I haven’t watched in years,” Mr. Stelter said in an interview. “It’s so honest. Sometimes I’ll wonder why he’s allowed to tell us what he’s telling us.”

Besides pointing out that in this medium, Stelter is bigger than Williams, what’s neat about this is that a young person — presumed lost to network news — is saying that the human and frank relationship with cold on-air “talent” that a blog enables actually gets him to watch. It won’t save network news. But it won’t hurt.

I asked Vaughn what would have happened if he’d been blogging at CBS News when Rathergate hit. He didn’t seem to have a ready answer for that. “We’d try to get answers,” he replied. “It’s up to CBS News how to respond to us just like it’s up to CBS News how to respond to anybody.” I asked what CBS should have done. “I don’t know. That’s their call.” And then he added that Rather was “just one more chip in the wall of mainstream media that comes on the heels of so many others: Jayson Blair, USA Today….”

I asked Vaughn what the greatest danger is and he replied, “Just not being seen as credible.”

And then he asked me whether I have advice for dealing with the blogosphere. I told him I’d ask you. So leave comments with your best advice: How would you like to see him interact with you? What do you hope to see from a CBS blog? Vaughn seems to be a good guy in a tough but cool job and I think we should help him do it well. So presume you have a friend who snuck into the citadel: What should he snoop on? What questions should he ask?

: Full disclosure: I’ve given friendly (read: free) advice on blogs in chats with Heyward, Kramer (a long-ago colleague), and CBSNews.com Editorial Director Dick Meyer.

So I finally got a call from Dell because of my blogging about problems with the company’s products and service, two months after it started.

Jennifer Davis of the corporate communications department rang me up and we had a pleasant chat: We discovered our sons share the same name. She said her mom thinks she’s famous when she gets quoted in media stories such as the ones on this corporate kerfluffle. Then there was an odd moment when she asked whether she was speaking to me on a cell phone and whether I was recording the call. I said I was taking notes. She said that was fine. Made me wish I had a recorder.

But nothing new came out of the call. I’ve spent so many years listening to PR people (and politicians) who are adept at sticking to their company line, I finally know when there is no hope derailing them to get anything more.

Dell’s company line is that they are trying to improve their customer service and that will solve everything.

There is no realization that there is an opportunity (and, don’t they now know, a danger) in this era of the empowered consumer-as-publisher. I kept coming back to that as my uncompany line: You have the chance to talk with consumers, to build a new relationship with the public in public.

“We do talk to people in public through the standard major media and through our forums,” she said.

She said they read blogs now as a means of getting “feedback from customers.”

But they refuse to see that they could connect one to the other: Rather than just talking to consumers, they could talk with consumers.

They “monitor” the blogosphere, they say, but they don’t engage in conversation in it. Davis said she “can’t comment on when or if that will change.”

She did then add they they are “looking at ways to leverage the blogopshere.” Leverage us? How? To promote products, she said. In other words, they’ll use it to sell.

I asked her whether she had a message to the blogosphere. One last time, I got the company line about being committed to improving the customer experience, blah, blah, blah.

They haven’t learned a darned thing and I hereby give up trying to help them to learn.

: SEE ALSO: Seth Godin on why negative feedback is more valuable than positive.

: Here’s a link to my piece about all this in today’s Media Guardian.

But this is more than a sort-of-happy ending to a consumerist nightmare. This is a story of customer relations in the new age - an age when, to quote blogger and Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls, “‘consumer’ is an industrial-age word, a broadcast-age word. It implies that we are all tied to our chairs, head back, eating ‘content’ and crapping cash”. Now consumers don’t just consume. We spit back. We have our own printing presses.

Oh, to be Jon Stewart today. The moments of unselfconscioius self-parody on the news channels keep flying by faster than a garbage-can lid in a hurricane. Well, in fact, we’re getting live reports of just such lids flying by on FoxNews and on CNN, Anderson Cooper reports on a single barge in the Mississippi. They all can do little more than report on what they happen to see where they happen to be. On CNN this morning, they cut to a guy so he could use his little wind-meter (quite the gadget in this storm) and he couldn’t it working and then said things were actually pretty calm, as he demonstrated when his meter got up to only 4 mph. My favorite is that CNN has dubbed a satellite truck Hurricane One. I do hope they have more than one person in it, so we can get Team Coverage from Hurricane One.

: Please do add in the moments of news self-parody you see today in the comments.

: LATER: So much for Hurricane One.

Nola.com editor Jon Donley is blogging from inside New Orleans, in the Times-Picayune’s hurricane bunker:

OK, it’s official, Katrina is beginning to knock on our door. We’ve already been without main power for about two hours . . . no air conditioning (not to harp on that) . . . flashlights to get around the building. Thankfully, no televisions turned to helmet-haired weathercreatures yapping away about worst-case scenarios. Times-Picayune staffers huddled around a radio, or gathered at the second-floor landing, where there’s a view of the newspaper’s front drive circle.

The scene out the windows is frightening, and it’s just beginning. Gusts slamming the big windows, and people reflexively ducking, knowing they’ve got to break. Trees whipping as if they’re about to be uprooted.

: Terry Teachout is keeping a good directory of hurricane blogging.
: Kaye Trammel is blogging via Blackberry from LSU. Ernie the Attorney couldn’t get out of Dodge. [via Winer]

: UPDATE: My friend Jon Donley got a good picture of the damage to the Superdome.

: NowPublic just put up a board for people to connect with those who are missing — or at least hard to reach — in the storm.

: MSNBC obviously couldn’t get to the satellite feed from its New Orleans affiliate, so it put the station’s web feed on the air.

I watched WDSU, New Orleans’ station, over its stream. The station staff was evacuated, so they were broadcasting from a fellow Hearst station and they also put up streams from other local stations. The power of networking.

: AND FOR DESSERT: I have to say, in spite of everything, the Times-Picayune had great red beans and rice.

Leo Laporte, geek star of TV and podcast, had a hissy fit over Feedburner revealing his feed count… until he realized that he’d consented to that. The point is that Feedburner wasted not a second responding to Laporte and they even left a comment on my son’s blog when he wrote about it. It’s not hard to put out a fire; you just have to smell it before it gets out of control.

Hugh MacLeod is in love and here’s the reason, a wonderful wrap-up of “neo-marketing”:

In today’s Times, public editor Byron Calame interviews standards editor Allan Siegal and comes up with an answer that demands a follow-up question:

By the charter that my job was given when it was set up, I have the guaranteed right to go not just to the executive editor with any misgivings I have, but directly to the publisher. On one occasion, when I thought that there was too much opinion seeping into the news pages, I went to both of them simultaneously.

And just what occasion was that?

Also, Siegal reacts to the blogs:

Q. How have reader expectations about the paper’s standards changed over the past few years?

A. It’s a very hard question to answer because with the blogs out there drumming up opposition to the “mainstream media,” and with the Bush administration and some of its most fervent supporters drumming up contempt for the news media - for the Eastern liberal news media, so called - it’s very hard to tell which expressions of reader sentiment are genuine….

Oh, I’d say that if someone took the effort to write what they thought, it’s genuine. And this:

Q. What have been the most important changes in the standards editor’s job?

A. The big one that I’ve mentioned is the degree of scrutiny and our awareness of the scrutiny from the blogs, and the degree of expectation on the outside that we must be doing something wrong and we’re not to be trusted. So we have to explain ourselves and prove we mean well, and in ways that we once probably wouldn’t have had to.

I’d say you always should have, whether you had to or not.

A great place to keep track on Hurricane Katrina is the hurricane center at Nola.com, one of the services I used oversee. Jon Donley, the editor there, is a weather madman.

See tomorrow’s “hurricane edition” of the Times-Picayune here. And no one will be in the town to read it.

Here is the disaster scenario, put forward in a scary Times-Picayune series about The Big One:

…emergency officials’ worst-case scenario: hundreds of billions of gallons of lake water pouring over the levees into an area averaging 5 feet below sea level with no natural means of drainage.

That would turn the city and the east bank of Jefferson Parish into a lake as much as 30 feet deep, fouled with chemicals and waste from ruined septic systems, businesses and homes. Such a flood could trap hundreds of thousands of people in buildings and in vehicles. At the same time, high winds and tornadoes would tear at everything left standing. Between 25,000 and 100,000 people would die, said John Clizbe, national vice president for disaster services with the American Red Cross.

“A catastrophic hurricane represents 10 or 15 atomic bombs in terms of the energy it releases,” said Joseph Suhayda, a Louisiana State University engineer who is studying ways to limit hurricane damage in the New Orleans area. “Think about it. New York lost two big buildings. Multiply that by 10 or 20 or 30 in the area impacted and the people lost, and we know what could happen.”

Hundreds of thousands would be left homeless, and it would take months to dry out the area and begin to make it livable. But there wouldn’t be much for residents to come home to. The local economy would be in ruins.

Read the rest of the scenario. This is why they’re hightailing it out of there.

: Here’s audio of Donley driving on the bridge going into New Orleans. He’ll be working out of the hurricane bunker at the T-P.

: From the Nola.com breaking-news blog, this terrifying warning from the weather service:

“Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer,” says the statement. “At least one-half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail, leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed.
The statement says the majority of industrial buildings will become “non-functional,” with partial or complete wall and roof failure.
“All wood-framed low-rising apartments will sustain major damage, including some wall and roof failure,” the statement said. “Concrete block low-rise apartments will sustain major damage, including some wall and roof failure.”
The statement says high-rise office and apartment buildings will sway dangerously, “a few to the point of total collapse.” And all their windows will blow out.
Airborne debris will be widespread, and may include heavy items — household appliances and light cars and trucks —and even sport utility vehicles and trucks will be moved.
“The blown debris will create additional destruction,” the statement said. “Persons, pets and livestock exposed to the winds will face certain death if struck.”

: More links from Rex Hammock and Rogers Cadenhead.

: Here, via Nola, is a list of New Orleans bloggers. Fleshbotter Jonno has a storm edition.
Another list of local bloggers here.

: Here are Nola.com cams; you see a deserted city. Lost Remote has media links.

: Here, via NowPublic, is the “before” shot we’ll be seeing after: An aerial image of New Orleans as it stands today:

: And here is a link to the Google satellite view of the Superdome and the French Quarter.

: Here’s Donna at Southern Spaces writing from Mississippi on evacuating:

But the real horror is the number of homeless people who call New Orleans home. They’re the ones who truly are trapped. I’m bitching and griping because of the timing. Especially with the recent car repairs and fifteen other “inconveniences” that have sprung up recently. Fact is, I can get in my car and drive as far as I want….

…you make damn sure you pack a razor. A smart girl knows shaved legs are an absolute must. She might not have a bathttub upon her return, but she’s damn sure got a razor!! You also pack baseball caps for those inevitable bad hair days that are coming. And barettes to pull your hair up with. Especially if you have long hair. And you pack your cell chargers. I’ll be packing several….

Finally, you make it out to the yard. Things that you look at every day you suddenly realize will become a missle in a hurricane. So you move it to the barn or tie it up with those bunjee cords. It’s never finished. You’re never satisfied that you’ve remembered everything and thought of everything. You take one last look on your way out the door. The truth is, you don’t know if you’ll even have anything to come back to. You say a prayer, get in your car and then drive. We’re human. We’re going to stress, grieve, worry, lose sleep, not eat, become cranky…oh, it’s endless the emotions one goes through.

Read the rest.

: Max Sparber at the Daily Lush writes a simply wonderful report from Pat O’Brien’s where they were drinking — what else? — hurricanes:

NEW ORLEANS MAYOR C. RAY NAGIN, usually a laconic man with a neat moustache, shaved head, and sleepy eyes, has a panicky air about him on television tonight. He has just received a phone call from Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center, and the news was not good. Katrina, a monstrous hurricane swirling in the Gulf Coast, is making a beeline directly for New Orleans. Mayfield informed Mayor Nagin that in his entire career, Mayfield has never seen a storm like this. Mayfield strongly urged Nagin to make the evacuation of New Orleans mandatory; if there’s any political fallout, Mayfield said he would take full responsibility. On a local newscast, as the anchormen detail the growing storm, Nagin shouts a single word: “Leave!” …

There is a certain poignancy to tonight, though. After all, tonight Pat O’s is filled with tourists who might very literally be dead in the next few days — if the rumors are right, volunteers at DMORT are packing their body bags at this very moment. These very tourists are happily consuming a beverage that bears the name of the monster that might kill them in a bar that might be underwater within a day or so. If the unimaginable were to happen, these might be the last moments of these people in this bar in this city. Unless the most educated men in the study of weather are wrong in their best guess, a disaster named Katrina is coming to bury us all.

But, just at this moment, it is business as usual at Pat O’s, the busiest saloon in America, and “Stayin’ Alive” is playing throughout the bar.

: See also Storm Digest. [via Rubel] And Terry Teachout has more links. And here’s Joe Gandelman’s roundup.

: How long before this is called America’s tsunami?

Fred Wilson’s for:fredwilson Del.icio.us tag spreads to Cool Hunting. Now that’s the way to send them tips.

Somebody just asked me to define blogs. I refused and said:

I don’t care. There is no need to define “blog.” I doubt there ever was such a call to define “newspaper” or “television” or “radio” or “book” — or, for that matter, “telephone” or “instant messenger.” A blog is merely a tool that lets you do anything from change the world to share your shopping list. People will use it however they wish. And it is way too soon in the invention of uses for this tool to limit it with a set definition. That’s why I resist even calling it a medium; it is a means of sharing information and also of interacting: It’s more about conversation than content… so far. I think it is equally tiresome and useless to argue about whether blogs are journalism, for journalism is not limited by the tool or medium or person used in the act. Blogs are whatever they want to be. Blogs are whatever we make them. Defining “blog” is a fool’s errand.

So there.