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March 25, 2003

15 seconds of fame
: I keep scolding Nick Denton for not bragging more about Gawker on Gawker -- think tabloid, I keep saying; he ignores me. So I had to find out somewhere else that the Observer profiled Gawker and its wonderful editrix, Elizabeth Spiers.

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Overhead
: Considering how crash-prone our military helicopters are, I have to say I'm a little worried about them flying over New York now. But I worry.

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Mars
: David Bloom of NBC has been doing an utterly remarkable job reporting with the Third Infantry. Tonight on Dateline, he took us inside the sandstorm battering Iraq. We see the sky turn brown. Then the very air turns red, like a bad movie set on Mars. Then it turns black at 4:30 in the afternoon. Bloom uses light sticks to illuminate his face for the camera. Then thunder and rain clean the air and it's merely beige. Click here and then click on "inside the sandstorm" to watch.

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Ew, Canada
: The U.S. ambassador in Ottawa scolded Canada for not helping in Iraq.

: The National Post said Canadians didn't get a chance to express their views on the war before PM Jean Chrétien decided not to join the coalition in the war, and so the paper invited letters and put them online and they are scathing about their own country. A sampling:

: Where Canada was once a proud nation, willing to fight for the things we cherish, we are now a nation confined to the sidelines, standing for nothing.

: These past few weeks have made it very difficult to be a proud Canadian. After witnessing the fans at the Bell Centre in Montreal show an utter lack of class in booing the American anthem and others in the Liberal caucus spewing anti-American sentiment, I really have to question what we as a country stand for, if anything at all.

: The opposition to the war in Iraq is as high in Britain as it is in Canada, (at about 70% of the people polled). Nevertheless, Prime Minister Tony Blair, with little regard for his political future, has staked everything on having Britain support the United States in the war effort. This can be contrasted with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's decision to look to his and his party's political future and deciding to stay out. I have little doubt that all else will be forgotten in their legacy and history will judge both men on this one decision. During the Second World War, my father, serving in the Polish Forces under British command, served for a time in Iraq. I have been a proud Canadian for 45 years, yet on hearing U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld enumerate the coalition forces on the ground as U.S., British, Australian and Polish, never in these past 45 years have I felt so proudly Polish and less so Canadian.

: Canadians are dyspeptic over the war in Iraq. On the one hand we want to be pacifist, non-belligerent; on the other we see a desperate situation in the Middle East, rife with potential for global disaster, and we choose to sit back and wring our hands.

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15 gigabytes of fame
: Leave it to today's instant media onslaught to turn Salam Pax into an overexposed star before we all even get to meet him.
Stories about him are everywhere: CNN, Der Spiegel, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and every local paper that does a story on weblogs.
I only hope that all the efforts to get closer to him, identifying his career and even his ISP, does not let Saddam's SS identify him before we get to meet him.

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Smug Frenchmen?
: According to Google's translation tool, there is no French equivalent for Schadenfreude, but you can bet there should be, for that is how the French are looking at the, shall we say, realistic pace of the war in Iraq. Says the Times of London:

THE travails of the coalition forces in Iraq were greeted with barely disguised satisfaction by many in France yesterday, as commentators concluded that Baghdad was already winning the battle for information in the war....
...a mood of “we told you so” is palpable in the spin and presentation of the “Anglo-Saxon” conflict, and the official allied version of events is treated with the same scepticism as that of Baghdad.
Bad news for the coalition is being tacitly seized upon as a vindication of the French stand against war....
A weekend newspaper poll found President Bush to be the most unpopular leader. He is disliked by 84 per cent of the French, and Tony Blair by 75 per cent. Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, is admired by 71 per cent and President Putin of Russia by 47 per cent. Opinion was not sought on Saddam Hussein.

G'bless British understatement.

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And defeat is just defeat
: Peggy Noonan writes in the Times of London today about America's tolerance for a rising body count:

The world has for some time assumed that America cannot, or will not, accept widespread casualties if the fight proves brutal and bloody. President Saddam Hussein obviously thinks that with enough difficulties and enough deaths America will fold, as it did in Somalia and Lebanon, and retreat. And of course there was Vietnam....
My own hunch is that Americans are more patient, persevering and accepting of pain than we know. We found that out on 9/11, and we may be about to find it out again. But Americans are practical. They all know how to do a cost-benefit analysis. They will be patient, persevering and willing to absorb pain as long as they feel they can win and are winning. They will accept bodybags as part of the price of victory, but not for a second will they accept them if they start to see evidence of defeat.

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Victory is the only victory
: Howard Stern has been complaining that we are trying to run the politically correct war.
The Times of London agrees.
Great minds think alike.
Says Michael Gove in the Times:

I fear that progress towards crushing Saddam’s tyranny has been hindered by the politically correct manner in which he and President Bush have prosecuted this war so far.
In the Second World War Churchill had no end save victory. In this war the allies have no end of other priorities, from pursuing a green agenda to winning Brownie points from anti-war protesters.

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Get 'im, Lassie, get 'im!
: My colleage Peter Hauck says, look for PETA to join anti-war protests. This from a CNN story:

The U.S. Navy will bring in trained dolphins this week to hunt for seaborne mines in the waters around Umm Qasr, Navy officials said. The animals will seek out floating mines and mark them for Navy divers to inspect.

: More news for PETA: Morrocco is said to be supplying monkeys to disarm landmines.

: Update: PETA has a statement! (Surprise). From the Smoking Gun:

"Our troops deserve the best defense possible, but PETA opposes the use of dolphins, sea lions, or any other marine mammals. The project is cruel and cannot provide a reliable defense or surveillance for our troops. The Navy claims they are not putting these animals in harm's way, but they've removed these animals from their homes, relocated them to foreign waters in the Persian Gulf, and are forcing them to not only inspect the waters, but to actually swim up to potential terrorists under the water, clamp a cuff on their leg, and deploy a floating marker. How can anyone say these animals are not being put in harm's way?"

:More on the patriotic dolphins here.

:And let's not forget the valuable role of -- sniff, sniff -- canaries.

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Blogs and big media
: As Howard Sherman puts it, another one bites the dust: Now Time Inc. has instructed freelancer Joshua Kucera to stop posting to his personal weblog:

My editors have demanded that I stop posting to this site until the war ends. And they pay the bills, so what can I do. Thanks everyone for reading, and I hope to be back here soon. Peace, Josh.

Just this morning in Matthew Rose's Wall Street Journal piece (below), a Time spokesperson said -- wisely, it seemed: "Time.com only asks that Kucera file to Time first, then he can blog away." Oh, well.
Add that to CNN's Kevin Sites being told to stop blogging by CNN.
We smell a sad trend.

Now I'm very lucky. I'm a big-media guy and a I blog for work and personally. I'm lucky to work for enlightened bosses who understand the power of this medium.
What's needed here is some education and enlightenment for other big-media types.
I have heard their fears.
They fear that a weblogger won't do his or her real work. My answer: You're right. You still have to manage the person. But a weblog can also bring both of you benefits: The weblogger can find new story ideas out there on the web and from the audience and that can enrich the service you give your readers. The more your reporters listen to the audience, the better reporters they will be.
They fear that webloggers will publish things on the web without editing. My answer: You're right. You could edit posts, but that's a pain and it detracts from the immediacy of blogging. So my advice is: If you trust them to report for you, then you probably should trust them to blog. But if they mess up, stomp on them. Also know that they will make typos; I do all the time (but my audience copy-edits me!).
They fear that webloggers will point to things on the web that are not reliable and not journalistic. My answer: You're right. Just the other day, I pointed to a site called Pave France. I've pointed frequently to drivel from Iran. I make fun of Michael Moore and point to him. But that's what the Web is about: You hear the buzz, good and bad, from the people. And the audience is wise enough to judge the difference.
They fear that webloggers will link to competitors. My answer: You're right again! They will. That's what the Web is about, linking. But if you provide a good service with those links, readers will return to you.
I say that the wise thing to do would be to create weblogs for these energetic contributors and see what happens. If they do it under the company banner, I'll bet they'll do it carefully and well (and if they don't, you're still the boss). And you will get new content, new perspectives, new voices, new audiences.
This isn't as easy as it looks. Companies like CNN and Time are properly concerned with protecting their credibility, their reputation, their brands. That makes them cautious. But I predict that competition will open this up. If Newsweek blogs, Time will. If FoxNews blogs, CNN will. Give it time.

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P.S. I think we are winning
: That P.S. comes at the end of a letter home on Sgt. Stryker.

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The casual warrior
: My wife suggests that President Bush would have been better off not spending the first weekend of the war at Camp David. Not good for the image.
Now Tony Blair is coming to see Bush and they're going to the camp.
On the White House press briefing today, a reporter asked Ari Fleischer why they're not meeting at the White House.
"It's a very good place to sit down in an informal atmosphere," was the answer.

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Embedded in the press corps
: New York Magazine media dog Michael Wolff is in every Centcom briefing. Today, Gen. Renuart called on him as "the gentleman with my kind of haircut."
Wolf asked the general whether the media was misrepresenting the progress of the war... or not.
"The media is reality," the general replied. "The media is a snapshot of what it sees at that point in time.... The challenge has been the immediacy.... I don't think the media has had an adverse effect... I think most of the commanders are comfortable."

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Farewell to a pioneer
: The man who truly invented mobile computing, Adam Osborne, has died. Jimmy Gutterman told me on his weblog. Here is Osborne's obit.
I still have my Osborne 1 and I'm damned proud of it. Ugly, beige, heavy, with a tiny screen, two clacking disc drives, and CPM, it was expensive at $1,795 (my printer cost even more) but amazing. I carried it around and used it to first connect to online services (at 300 baud, my children) and learn the wonders of connectivity. I wrote a very bad and never published first novel on it.
I took it out the other day and my son -- who at 11 speaks PHP already -- was entranced by its primitiveness.
Osborne got supplanted by Kaypro and in turn by Compaq and now Sony. But he was a pioneer with a vision.
He made us mobile.

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Let's go to the video
: I'm watching the Centcom briefing and now it's time for the AV guy to show the videos.
These images are so different from the ones we saw in 1991 and in Afghanistan.
It's not the big bang, the wowy woosh.
It's a tank here, a missle battery there, an occasional building. They're going out of their way, with before-and-after pictures, to show the extreme targeting of military objectives. Collateral damage is the no-no of the war (though, as they're saying right now, it's obviously hard to tell the difference when a civilian bus filled with people in civilian dress stops to join a battle and everybody on that bus is armed).

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Blog stories
: Matthew Rose, media reporter for the Wall Street Journal, writes about blogs and the war (he quotes me; only wish they'd included the URL!).
: And Allan Hoffman wrote about blogs and war for the Star-Ledger (he did include the URL).

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