« November 23, 2003 | Main
| November 25, 2003 »

November 24, 2003

Spin spam
: Tonight's presidential debate (I saw the last half) just proves Jay Rosen's points. The candidates don't answer a damned question; they stick tape carts in their mouths and hit "play." And afterward, on MSNBC, Chris Matthews goes on about who "won." What he should be doing is saying, "You guys didn't say jack! You wouldn't answer the questions. You didn't advance the debate. You didn't advance the conversation. You wasted our damned time." That's the unspun zone.

LINK | Comments (7)

European anti-Semitism
: The Guardian asks the tough question: "The 'new' anti-semitism: is Europe in grip of worst bout of hatred since the Holocaust?"

"Anti-semitism has become politically correct in Europe," said Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and minister in Ariel Sharon's government....
But it is the "new" anti-semitism that most disturbs some Jewish leaders because they say it emanates from influential groups such as academics, politicians and the media and is dressed up as criticism of Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.

It is time to honestly face this spectre. This isn't Europe-bashing. It is a warning we must heed.... this time.

LINK | Comments (16)

Uh-oh
: The Pew Internet & American Life center releases no end of great, if sometimes frightening, studies of the online us. Take a look at this chart from the latest, which looks at the technology and media consumption of relatively techy segments of the population. They asked which of these media it would be "hard to give up."
Note poor ol' print down at the bottom of the list. Most would sooner give up newspapers and magazines than PDAs.
With that in mind, read the post below this...

: UPDATE: Tom Mangan, in the comments, says this is apples/kumquat comparison. Fair enough. Also note that the PDA question was asked only of people who have PDAs; the people who don't have them would give them up easily. Still, I was depressed at the low number of people who would find it hard to give up their newspaper. That's the sad part.

LINK | Comments (9)

Interact
: Andrew Nachison, director of The Media Center, scolds journalism "pros" for dismissing and dissing weblogs and interactivity. Go get 'em, Andrew:

I’m using the word blog over and over here because I know how much it irks some people, perhaps even more so than the word convergence....
To some, blogs represent a degradation, if not a downright blight, on real journalism. One author said in a post to the ONA discussion forum [which is closed to anyone but members - ed] today, “Anyone can 'publish' their stuff. Drivel is passed off as journalism. The ramblings of someone somewhere are passed off as news. The result is acres and acres of terrible reporting. Incoherent ramblings and notes-to-myself that are published in public space.”
It’s a sentiment I encounter often with newspaper editors and other “seasoned” journalists who have been there and done that and believe that journalism is best handled by trained professionals.
Here’s some agitation: the “blogs good-blogs bad” discussion vastly oversimplifies a profound social change now under way..... Emphasis is now on the word relationship – implying a two-way conversation. Our notions of control, who’s an expert and what it takes to establish credibility, have been challenged, and the information dialog of the future may not resemble what we have known from the past....
We’re in the midst of a communications Renaissance – an explosion of dialog unlike anything before in human history.

Sad that he has to scold his industry like that, but he does.
Just wait until the New York Times blogs (it's closer than you think) and you'll see these folks trip over themselves dying to jump on the bandwagon.

: At the same time, I just got a spanking from Jan Schaffer, executive director of the J-Lab, the Institute for [so-called] Interactive Journalism. At the Online News confab, I got fed up at her panel's definition of interactivity. It was all about making the audience push Flash buttons rather than truly interacting with people. They said interactivity was about getting involved in a story. See my snarky views here; see her scolding in the comments there:

Jeff -- I wish you would have asked a question at the ONA Interactivity panel and provoked some of the vaunted "conversation" with people that you pay such lip service to.

Well, Jan, I'd say the conversation is happening right here, on weblogs, not in a hotel conference room where a handful of people had to pay hundreds of dollars to get in. The conversation is here, where many people can have their say and respond to each other on the record. And it's here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. That is a conversation. That is interactivity.

LINK | Comments (4)

Aren't we cute
: All Things Considered airs your basic condescending report on blogs and presidential candidates tonight. The only thing they quote from Dean's comments is somebody giving the candidate sartorial advice. They give blogs the back-handed compliment of being "cool" (how frigging '90s). They dismissively say that blogs don't have a big audience. They don't get it: This is not another computer game. It's the people -- the audience, the voters, the citizens -- talking. Wanna listen, NPR? Try reading some. [Here's the link to listen.]

: Ed Cone's growling about it, too.

: Update: Two commenters point out the tasty irony of NPR dismissing any medium for having a small audience.

LINK | Comments (11)

Correction
: The Pentagon denies reports that the soldiers killed in Mosul did not have their throats slit and were not pummeled by a crowd. They were shot and killed and robbed. But now Atrios may not see a bad sign.

LINK | Comments (3)

Payday
: Parade (full disclosure: it's part of my company) is working on its annual income surveya and went to John Scalzi to find out what bloggers make. Boy, is that a straight line.

LINK | Comments (3)

An Iranain politician blogs
: Hossein Derkhshan reports the amazing news that an Iranian politican is now blogging:

Mohammad Ali Abtahi is the first Iranian politician who has a weblog (Unfortunately only in Persian). Surprisingly, he doesn't discuss much about politics in his weblog. But he takes secret photos from Eduard Shevardnadze, he tells the story of how he was among thousands of Iranians who welcomed Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner, in Tehran Airport, and he writes about personal and unreported conversations with prominent politicians such as Mehdi Karrubi, the parliament speaker....

And who says it's not a revolution?

LINK | Comments (0)

Welcome back
: I kept telling myself, It's just a train ride.
The last time I rode these tracks, as many of you know, was on the last PATH train into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Today, I returned. And I didn't know how I'd react. I often feel as I live with a webcam pointed at my psyche, always watching, always recording the reaction to anything 9/11: today sunken, tomorrow angry, the next day tired, the next day numb, someday hopeful. So what will it be today?
Well, the first, best indication of my own reaction came when the train pulled into Jersey City and the conductor droned, "World Trade Center." And I smiled. Relief. Even a touch of victory.
The midmorning train wasn't crowded. One grizzly guy sat by the front window; a tourist/pilgrim with camera sat a few feet away. I kept my camera in my pocket; I dislike turning tragedy into tourism.
As we went under the river, a guy in a PATH reconstruction jacket came up to the front window to look. So did the rest of us. The tunnel -- where rowboats navigated after the attacks -- looked new and clean. And up ahead, we saw daylight. That, alone was shocking; this station always seemed as if it were a mile underground. Now, of course, there is nothing above.
The train halted just at the entrance, as if to let us get ready. The grizzly guy muttered, "Graveyard." The rest stared ahead. I felt a clutch coming but then stopped.
It's just a train ride.
There was no more enormity to it. I've felt the enormity again and again; have not stopped feeling it. We came out into the Trade Center site, with the floors chewed off by the devil himself, the scarred walls, the ramps, the yellow construction equipment. I've seen it from above. Now I see it from below. Same enormity.

The train takes a big loop around the site and then pulls into the station.
It's odd that the authorities try to subtly stop us from looking even as millions are drawn to the site just to look. The new bridge over West Street, which also opened today, is designed to block the view. The grate and green canvas surrounding the site all but block it. In the new PATH station, there are huge, transluscent fabric walls with quotes about New York that don't quite block the view but do block cameras. We can glance. We can't stare.
"Something's always happening here," said Myrna Loy. "If you're bored in New York, it's your own fault." It borders on bad taste to stare through that quote at the destruction and rebuilding. But, hey, this is New York; we love the edge.
So people stood and stared, of course. On the platform -- pure, clean concrete -- some stood. Up a level, more stared.
And then came the escalators. Those were the most striking feature of the original station: So many stairs going so high, always moving, forever full. They symbolized New York business and ambition to me. And on That Morning, it was coming up those stairs and hearing silence -- a sound never heard in this place -- that made me realize something was wrong, very wrong.
Now there are fewer stairs. But they are back and they lead up to another level and then stairs take you up onto Church Street, right where the Borders Books used to be. When I was last here, I ran across that street as debris fell and a cop shouted for our lives, ordering us to run.
Now, I come up on the street and it's crowded. Some are still staring. Some are rushing; real jobs, real lives. Some take pictures in front of the World Trade Center PATH signs (suitable for framing?).
The mood there seems to match my own: relieved, glad, a little triumphant.
The bustle's back.

LINK | Comments (9)

Harry's birthday
: I don't usually mark others' blog birthdays (I don't even mark my own). But when Harry says nice things about you, well, flattery will get you a link. I often agree with Harry; I often disagree; I always enjoy the conversation and it has been a nicer nabe since he moved in.

LINK | Comments (0)

Georgia on his mind
: Pedram wonders whether the velvet revolution in Georgia provides an example for Iran. He fears religions would get in the way.

LINK | Comments (0)

So an ayatollah, an imam, and a rabbi walk into a bar cafe...
: Here's a good story promoting the talents of Arab-American comics -- better yet, it comes from Steven I. Weiss in Jewsweek: "If you want to turn an average Arab-American into a comedian, give one a plane ticket and then wait to see what happens."

LINK | Comments (0)

Michael Jackson blogs
: ... well, not quite. But like everyone else today, he comes to the web to tell his story.

LINK | Comments (2)

For the dead
: Ays tells us that obituaries for those Saddam executed were prohibited. Now that he is gone, the dead get their day.

LINK | Comments (0)

Feeling left behind?
: Rafat Ali is posting to PaidContent.org from a small town in India, where he gets broad Internet access thanks to his 3G phone (giving him faster access than I get off my Sprint Treo). If he were here, he'd be sniffing out the nearest Starbucks. Good for India. Bad for us.

LINK | Comments (0)

Stop the presses: NY Times editor reads blogs
: NY Times Executive Editor Bill Keller tells Howard Kurtz that, yes, he reads weblogs:

One striking thing about Keller's style is that he doesn't dismiss criticism of the paper out of hand. "I look at the blogs. . . . Sometimes I read something on a blog that makes me feel we screwed up. A lot of times I read things that strike me as ill-tempered and ill-informed."
Perhaps the best example of Keller's open-mindedness toward outside critics is his choice for the Times's first public editor. He picked former Life managing editor Daniel Okrent, whom he had never met, rather than a Times veteran.
"Maybe we were a little too closed off to how the world sees us. . . . The more I interviewed people, the more I realized it would be more interesting to listen to someone who hadn't grown up in our culture," Keller says. Over time, he admits, "I may want to eat those words, or the staff may want to shove them down my throat."

We'll see that excerpt all over weblogs today. But there shouldn't be anything surprising about this. A good reporter or editor should want to know what's happening out there and should want to find new sources of information and read criticism.
The big news would be if he did not read blogs.
Now what would be more impressive is if you saw Keller et al leaving a comment or two on weblogs to enter into a dialogue. Because -- repeat after me -- news is a conversation.

LINK | Comments (3)

Tough times
: Blogger Gary Farber is living Murphy's Law right now. Go here to give him a helping hand. [Note: The direct link is hosed so go to the top and scroll down.]

LINK | Comments (0)