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September 12, 2003

Here's the news: News is not news anymore
: It's going to take awhile for this to sink in but make no mistake about it: The definition of news is changing radically. It is no longer the exclusive property of what we used to consider news outlets. Consider:
: As we all know now, Howard Stern's show is news, as decreed by the FCC. And it was a good and proper decree. Howard makes news all the time. Howard asks guests -- including politicians and the celebrities who are on all the other "news" shows -- and asks them questions the others dare not ask. Howard is news.
: Today the Times reports that K Street, the new HBO show about lobbyists and politicians in Washington, has been forbidden access to the hallowed halls of the Senate because rules "bar the use of Capitol and Senate space for commercial or profit-making ventures." Well, folks, what do you think CNN is? Or the New York Times? They are profit-making, commercial ventures. And they have features like HBO. And HBO makes news like they do. Who's to say what's news and what's not? It's not a clear line.
: And then, of course, we have ourselves, bloggers. I'm waiting for the first, inevitable fight over blogger credentialing to a political convention or the White House press office or to a city police press room. You can see it coming: Blogger applies; blogger is rejected because he's not a "legitimate news organization;" blogger sues; blogger wins. For who's to say who gathers news and who doesn't?
: Next week, my sites will start their experiment with hyperlocal blogs using people who aren't necessarily credentialed journalists to gather news nonetheless (with a blogger's perspective); using real people -- audience members -- to help inform the audience (something that happens in our forums now) is a way for a news organization to get more local and more useful than it ever could afford to the traditional way. And who's to say that's not news? As I always point out in these discussions, this does not mean that bloggers and other new news will replace the old news; we'll always need reporters with training and resources and support and, when necessary, courage to gather facts. But new news supplements old news; it goes into details and interests old news can't reach; it expands news. And that's a good thing.
So if Howard is news, why isn't HBO? If Bill O'Reilly is news, why isn't Glenn Reynolds?
In fact, I think maybe I should be the test case, since I am a know, confessed journalist and I am a blogger. I get the news, too.

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My diet: Put a sock in it, Doc, and don't take it out
: I just saw too much of Dr. Phil's diet special with Katie Couric.
What a crock of crap.
Dr. Phil spouts his usual brand of bull: There is no such thing as will power, he says. Well, that's ridiculous. Will power builds everything that's worth building; will power powers the world. But Dr. Phil says that just so he can issue his own rule instead: "You have to program your life." As if that means anything.
It's shocking that NBC devotes not only its hours but also its news talent to this scam.
Want to lose weight? Eat less and exercise more. That's the sad reality of it, not pap and crap from the bad Dr. Phil.

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Who's who
: Dave Winer announces that he's going to publish the list of attendees to BloggerCon, complete with blog addresses: a blogroll in real life. That's a great idea and I wish most confabs would do that. They're all about networking anyway, it just makes that easier.

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Baghdad "blog"
: A site called the "Baghdad Blog" is up to promote Salam Pax's book.
Doc is right to complain that it's a "blog" without a single link. He urges them to add a few, just for appearance's sake.
Get a load of the art on the site? What the hell is that: Scary American soldier in gas mask with big gun and stars superimposed standing in front of an Iraqi dude bent over in pain. Oh, I see, the site was created by the Guardian.
And the site gives us a PDF of the first chapter that illustrates one big problem of producing a book from a blog: no links. When I tried, unsuccessfully, to pitch a book on this blog, post 9/11, I dealt with that by quoting from the linked-to sites; that would have led to copyright hassles and cost more ink. Salam's book deals with it with plenty of footnotes, which is distracting.
The blog is its own form. It requires links so you can see more if you want to. And it's immediate in every sense. The writing of it grabs immediate thoughts (so when I translated my post on the PBS WTC docuganda -- get it? documentary propaganda? stop me -- I had to translate immediate thoughts into mature paragraphs and leave out stupid asides like this). The reading of it fits in with the immediate news.
Blogs are a higher form of media -- immediate, interactive, generous -- but that's precisely what makes it difficult to translate their content into other media.

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Ah, celebrity
: This, from Au Currant, is too funny:

I love Naomi Campbell. She's so beautiful, so bitchy and so trainwrecky. You can imagine how much this has cheered me:

Naomi Campbell says she confides in Nelson Mandela about her personal problems and love life...
"He always wants to know how I'm doing. My personal life, my love life, my problems, I just tell him."

I can just imagine Nelson freaking Mandela getting woken up at 2 AM by a telephone call from a raging Naomi Campbell, in floods of tears because she caught her 65 year old boyfriend in bed with Heidi Klum and suspects her personal assistant has been cutting her coke with coffee creamer.

The obvious straightline is that this is the guy who has been slamming America and taking Saddam Hussein's side in humanitarian wars; shows what's on his mind.
But the more serious observation is that this is what happens when a smart and heroic man leaves the media-isolation of prison and gets bitten by the celebrity bug. It's just so much damned fun to be famous, eh, Nelson?

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One born every minute
: On the Internet, I'm just as proud of what I didn't do as I am of what I did. I avoided investment in Pointcast, the newsy screensaver (great: our audience isn't using their PC and we don't even know if they're seeing our product but we'll raise a lot of money from stupid VCs anyway). And I ran away from CueCat, the now-legendary boondoggle that said we were all going to sit at our PCs reading bar codes in print dto get to sites on the Internet. The man who brought us CueCat has shamelessly come up with a new, uh, product: bottled rainwater (great, does it come with acid and burned hydrocarbons?). The Charlotte Observer has the hilarious details. By the way, P.T. Barnum was wrong. There's not a sucker born every minute. But there might be a flimflam man born that often. [via Romenesko]

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The NY Post
: Here's the link to my NY Post op-ed on PBS, 9/11, and globalization.
: I neglected to give props to John Podhoretz, New York Post columnist, who arranged this after seeing my post on the show. I've been trying to convince John, via email, that he should blog. But he's busy writing a book.
: I'm already getting emails from folks about the piece; power of the press.
: The only thing wrong with getting a nice, long plug from Glenn Reynolds is that he links to the op-ed piece (of course) and I'm not getting any damned traffic.
: I forgot to put on my American flag lapel pin today. Oh, well, having a piece in the Post is the moral equivalent.
: See these wise words in my comments:

You can divde the Left into to camps - the Progressive Left, for whom liberal prinicples are a means to advance human progress, and the Scoldy Left, for whom liberal principles are a vehicle to turn the world into a morality play where they can harp endlessly about how baaad someone or something is. Perhaps Progressives vs. Scorners might be more apt. They do seem to do a lot of scorning.
Mr. Jarvis, with this editorial, seems to be launching an effort on behalf of the true progressives to reclaim the left from the scorners and scolders.

: Here's a permanent link to the column (since it goes off the Post in seven days).

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