« May 26, 2004 | Main
| May 28, 2004 »

May 27, 2004

Real

: I forgot to link to Curbed, the great new New York real estate blog from Lockhart Steele. I saw a preview and loved it and it keeps getting better. NY property is always entertaining.

LINK | Comments (2)

Pass the brie

: My colleague Joe Territo says excitement about New Media is back, thanks to blogs:

I'm looking forward to my next invitation to a new media cocktail party. It's been a long time.

LINK | Comments (2)

Campaign advertising online
: NPR's Morning Edition had a good piece this morning on campaign advertising online. Matt Gross and Scott Heiferman quoted.

LINK | Comments (0)

Nanny government: You are what you don't eat

: As upset as I get over the FCC's efforts to nanny us, I will admit they're damned libertarians compared to the looney Euronuts. There's a movement to ban advertising of junk food:

European legislation would be needed to impose an effective ban on junk food advertising, according to a public health specialist.

Dr Geof Rayner, the former chairman of the UK Public Health Association (UKPHA), said that a national ban on television commercials that promote junk food, such as burgers and fizzy drinks, would be ineffective because of widespread and growing access to satellite TV.

His comments came after the Commons health select committee today recommended a voluntary ban on TV commercials promoting unhealthy food in a damning report on Britain's obesity epidemic.

Idiots. It's not junk food you want to ban. It's excess. Is a peanut bad for you? No. Is eating two pounds in a sitting every day bad for you? Yes. But we wouldn't want any fizz in Europe.

LINK | Comments (13)

The Daily Stern

: KEYSTONE KOPPS: The scariest FCC commissioner, Democrat Michael Copps, opens his yap and pushes once again for more government regulation of media. Say that three times out loud and feel the hair stand up on end: Government regulation of media. Government regulation of media. Government regulation of media.

Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps said media deregulation is “dangerous,” news and entertainment have deteriorated, public-interest protections have “weakened and withered” and TV stations’ service to their local communities must be measured by more than blood drives and fund-raisers.

In remarks Copps planned to give at an FCC hearing on broadcast localism in South Dakota Wednesday night, the Democratic commissioner said American communications has deteriorated under deregulation.

“We are paying a terrible cost, both in the kinds of homogenized entertainment Big Media sends our way and in the news and information upon which our democratic dialog depends,” he said.

Copps, the commission’s most outspoken media critic, told the community members in attendance that he wanted to know whether they thought local broadcasters were airing too much sex and violence....

Government regulation of media is what Iran, China, North Korea, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia do -- not America. Listen to him -- he would have government regulate our news and entertainment. He's a friggin' ayatollah.

: CATCHING UP: Been too busy with meetings, meetings, meetings that go into the night to blog, even about Stern, the FCC, and the First Amendment. So here are a few catch-up links:
: Ernie Miller on the FCC regulating speech (and sex).
: The FCC plans to expand its regulation of TV violence.
: College stations being affected and even shut down for fear of the FCC.

LINK | Comments (10)

This is a test...

: The Department of Homeland Security and the FCC are holding a session on June 2 to see how local media can be better prepared in the event of, well, a terrorist attack. It will be webcast.

LINK | Comments (3)

Gulp

: Well, it's a quasi-blog, but it's relevant hereabouts: Boston.com has bought BostonDirtDogs, a Red Sox fan site. [via IWantMedia]

LINK | Comments (5)

The ultimate blog meetup

: Hoder sends word of a Weblog Festival in Tehran, Iran on June 8-10 (damn, don't you wish you could be there?). Here's a photo from the last big gathering of bloggers there at Hoder's photoblog. Iit was Hoder's photos from that session -- just folks, just eating lunch -- that first impressed upon me how blogs and the Internet can connect folks across any boundaries; this, too, is why I'm so glad to see photos showing up on Iraqi blogs. Here's Hoder's blog post on the event. And the official Weblog Festival site: "Our goal is to improve the quality of such Persian media and to improve their quantity as well." (That sounds just like the mission of the Citizens' Media Center I've been hoping to put together here.)

It's being put together by Persian Blog and the National Youth Organization of Iran -- which, mind you, is a government organization. Think about that: This is a nation that has arrested bloggers and still cuts off Internet access and yet a government organization is sponsoring a blog event and bloggers -- who write at some risk -- will come. A land of ironies.

: MORE: Hoder forwards a link to a story that by Dan de Luce, the Guardian journalist recently expelled from Iran, that explains well just how ironic a land Iran is:

Iran is a country where repression is arbitrary, not systematic as in many other states in the Middle East, and it is not as efficient either. Some laws are never enforced, some murders are never solved and some critics of the regime are left alone while others are locked up. Iranians never know where the boundary is, allowing the "system" plenty of room to manoeuvre as it pleases.
Arbitrariness makes life unpredictable and allows for a degree of debate and political ferment. But sometimes it is merely cruel.

LINK | Comments (0)

Carb news

: Steve Rubel, PR guy and blogger, is promising to read news only on blogs next week. Cute, but I say this is a completely bogus gimmick, a PR stunt without substance (sorry, Steve). The problem is that he won't click on links to journalists' stories.

Well, no [honest, sane] blogger would say that we present all the news that's fit to print on blogs. We edit the news; we select it; we give it perspective; we poke and prod and question it. But we can do all that only because we link to others' news and source material and only by clicking on those links do you get the complete story. I also assume that people who read blogs are not living in caves and are not idiots and do care about the world and do get news from TV and radio and newspapers and web sites. At this juncture, bloggers do not attempt to give you all the news and so the result of this "experiment" is a foregone conclusion: You won't get all the news.

: Steve responds in the comments:

Jeff, I appreciate your opinions, as always, but this isn't a stunt. It's a true experiment to see if I can use the perspectives offered on weblogs as a window onto the core news delivered in the media. If you read my post I state strongly my belief that the media will always be important. I am simply trying to see if I can get the news I need to live by learning about it all through blogs. Normally, I would definitely click on the news links, but that defeats the purpose of the experiment.

: And I respond:

Sorry, Steve. Love your blog. Don't agree with you here. I don't see the "experiment." Reading blogs and NOT clicking on the links they recommend to you is not reading blogs; it's tonedeaf to the medium and how it works. Links are essential to blogs and by ignoring them, you're not performing an experiment that tells you anything about blogs.

Separate from that, I think the apparent hypothesis behind the "experiment" is flawed because you're assuming that bloggers even try -- even as a whole -- to give you a full news report. They don't. When people yell as us for not writing about a given topic, that is what we yell back: We're not trying to give you all the news. So this becomes self-fulfilling; you will not get some big stories (because they don't interest the bloggers you happen to read -- which is another deciding factor in the "experiment" and because bloggers assume you'll get commodity news elsewhere).

I don't object to this in defense of news media. I object to it in defense of bloggers; it misinterprets the medium.

LINK | Comments (8)

Quote whore

: I guess I've been so busy because I've been giving so many interviews. Herewith a summary of recent press:

: Quoted in today's NY Times Circuits story about obsessive bloggers. When the (intern) reporter called, I worked hard to get them off the idea that bloggers are all a bunch of looney cat owners typing in bathrobes. My bits:

Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, a company that builds Web sites for newspapers and magazines, and a blogging enthusiast, defended what he called one's "obligation to the blog."

"The addictive part is not so much extreme narcissism," Mr. Jarvis said. "It's that you're involved in a conversation. You have a connection to people through the blog." ...

Mr. Jarvis characterizes the blogging way of life as a routine rather than an obsession. "It's a habit," he said. "What you're really doing is telling people about something that they might find interesting. When that becomes part of your life, when you start thinking in blog, it becomes part of you."

: Daniel Radosh did a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece on the agent to the blog stars, the wonderful Kate Lee, the one person in that stodgy old biz who gets this new world and knows it's a goldmine of talent and ideas.

Suddenly, books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon. You will probably read about it in the Sunday Times. And when that happens the person to thank—or blame—will be Kate Lee, who is currently a twenty-seven-year-old assistant at International Creative Management.

Buzzmachine [one word, factchecker, one word!] is merely mentioned in a list of bloggers who feel guilty about not working on their books and I'm grateful for that mention.

: Mark Glaser put together a good and it's-about-time roundup of how bloggers are -- cynics be damned -- having an impact on media. Here's a quote from the cutting room floor:

This is the best thing that could happen to journalism.

News is a conversation. The process of informing the public and getting
to the truth can only be strengthened when news media get help from the
audience to push harder for accuracy and fairness....

: And rounding out this ego roundup, I'm honored that Xeni Jardin quoted this blog in her Wired News story on Rumsfeld's sudden photophobia.

: UPDATE: Felix Salmon gives the NY Times obsessive-bloggers story -- and the bloggers quoted in it -- a proper tweak:

Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, a company that builds Web sites for newspapers and magazines, and a blogging enthusiast, defended the fact that he is quoted in every single article about blogging ever written.

LINK | Comments (7)

The Daily Blog

: WashingtonPost.com's Dan Froomkin writes a very instructive piece for editors of online news services. Among its many good ideas is a love song to blogs:

Consider if you were starting a "newspaper" today. Wouldn't you want to facilitate exchanges with readers? Wouldn't you want to encourage your readers to find out more than what you can publish? Wouldn't you want to make it easier for them to take action? Wouldn't you want to define and create a community? Wouldn't you want to make your readers feel important?

Blog tools give you all that -- not to mention the ability to easily and quickly post something you just found out about. (What could be more journalistic?)...

So I think that at least a portion of every online news site's home page should be turned over to some sort of blog space, where journalists can post items and readers can post comments, effective immediately. Try it and see where it takes you....

The most successful blogs all have something in common. Their authors are unashamedly enthusiastic about the topic at hand. (Often, of course, they're outraged.) The lesson: There is no virtue in sounding bored online.

Online, journalists should not conceal their fascination for the topics they cover. They should not hide behind the traditional bland construction of news stories. They should still be fair, of course, but they should also have voice and passion -- and sometimes even outrage. There is a risk here that the line between news and opinion may get blurry, but so be it. We should be turning our online journalists into personalities -- even celebrities -- rather than encouraging them to be as faceless as their print colleagues. The Internet demands voice.

Hows would you incorporate blogs into the news sites you read (or, for that matter, don't read)?

LINK | Comments (9)