BuzzMachine
by Jeff Jarvis

April 30, 2005

Spreading democracy

: Robert Mayer, the man behind the wonderful Publius Pundit blog on freedom, reports that the Community of Democracies just ended a meeting in Chile and we're both amazed how little this organization -- which should be the real United Nations, the collection of free nations and peoples -- gets coverage in media. He quotes Condi Rice in her speech and I'll do likewise:

Today, all the members of the Community of Democracies declare our deep conviction that freedom is the universal longing of every soul and democracy is the ideal path for every nation.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The past year has brought forth a dramatic shift in the world's political landscape. Since our last meeting in Seoul, we have seen free elections in Afghanistan and in Iraq and in the Palestinian territories. We have witnessed tremendous developments in places like Georgia and Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

There comes a time when the spark of freedom flashes in the minds of all oppressed people, and they raise their voices against tyranny. The Community of Democracies must match the bravery of these men and women with the courage of our own convictions. We on the right side of freedom’s divide have an obligation to help those on the wrong side of that divide....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Democratization is, after all, not an event; it is a process. It takes many years, even decades, to realize the full promise of democratic reform. For nearly a century after the founding of the United States, millions of black Americans like me were still condemned to the status below that of full citizenship. When the founding fathers of America said, "we the people," they did not mean me. Many of my ancestors were thought to be only three-fifths of a man. And it is only within my lifetime that the United States has begun to guarantee the right to vote for all of our citizens. And so we know in the United States that this is a long and difficult process. And every nation in this room has experienced moments of tyranny in its history -- some not too long ago.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Today, our citizens share the common bond of having overcome tyranny through all our commitment to freedom and democracy. Now, it is our historic duty to tell the world that tyranny is a crime of man, not a fact of nature. Our goal must always be the elimination of tyranny in our world.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

We at the Community of Democracies must use the power of our shared ideals to accelerate democracy’s movement to ever more places around the globe. We must usher in an era of democracy that thinks of tyranny as we thought of slavery today: a moral abomination that could not withstand the natural desire of every human being for a life of liberty and of dignity.

Well said and bravo. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

(But by the way, Condi, I can't leave this without adding that this is exactly why it was wrong for your boss to go hand-holding with an oily tyrant.)d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This is war

: At long last the ACLU says it may join the fight for the First Amendment and fight the FCC's censorship. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Why don't they just appoint Pat Robertson?

: 1115.org reports that Ted Stevens -- the twit who wants to extend FCC censorship to cable and satellite -- now wants to install one of his aides in one of the empty chairs at the FCC. This is war, people. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Consumer-controlled advertising

: Ross Mayfield (who just raised more money for SocialText... congratulations!) reports that consumer-controlled, sell-side, publisher-driven (whatever the hell we're going to call it) advertising is arriving in France with Les Influencers, which isn't about money changing hands (yet) but is about people recommending what they like. And the brain behind this leaves a comment explaining more and revealing that they're working on the flipside: Demandeurs.net.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

What blogs are and are not

: Go read Doc's PowerPoint to Les Blogs on why blogs are not content but are speech and why that matters. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Excuse me, professor, is this jihad on the final?

: The Washington Post reports that terrorism and homeland security are hot on college campuses for both research and teaching. Does anyone yet offer a degree in terrorism? And if so, will that be aimed at preventing and killing it or understanding it? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Fall or liberation?

: I seemed to notice more coverageon the 30th anniversary of the fall/liberation of Vietnam elsewhere than here. Bill Doskoch noticed the same thing. The Guardian on the 30th anniversary; the BBC on the celebrations in Vietnam. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Tagged

: Clay Shirky leads off a new group blog on tagging, which I hope and assume will blossom into a salon on what comes after taxonomy. For example....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: We are tagging not just content but also people... and behaviors... and processes... d3d9.dll aoe III trial

If I can be assured that I won't be the victim of spam, impersonation, or privacy violations (big if's), I want to be tagged so that as I go from site to site, I get what I want: Give me my local content, give me the ads I'm interested in, don't tell me what I already know, find me the job I want.... It's not a cookie but a tag I control. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: When I was at the Associated Press for a lunch recently -- among a group of smart execs who will have a big impact on the future of news not just from the wire service but also across the industry and the internet -- we speculated on the need for a content cookie: a tag that travels with content as it is syndicated. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So, for example, a wire story about, say, Apple could travel with meta data that allows the site that uses it to run contextual ads reliably targeted. And as people read and link to that story in a distributed world, it would be good to gather aggregated meta data, to find out how popular it is, who is reading it, and -- most important -- what other topics (and audience) are associated with it. This allows people to find the story more effectively in search engines and such and also educates the content provider to improve future stories. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: At Fred Wilson's Exploding TV lunch a few months ago, we also talked about the need for video (and audio) that is distributed openly (not streamed) via BitTorrent and other means to carry tags and other meta data -- content cookies -- with them so that sponsor who will kill to support this content -- they've wanted to turn the internet into TV from the start -- can measure audience and demographics and serve and target ads (cue the people tags). At the same time, like magnets, the content should attract tags and meta data from the audience and their behaviors (e.g., people filed it under a topic or people like this watched it).d3d9.dll aoe III trial

When this happens, the old networks will truly explode, for this allows you to share content and recommend and distribute it more efficiently than any old network can (witness my favorite Jon Stewart example) and it allows creators to be supported. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: AND: I should have added this and in response to a few frightened comments, I will:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Transparency and control are essential to this. I should control my tags and use them at my will; that's part of the point of tagging, after all. So I can tell an online service where I am so I can get local news or weather or business listings; that would be convienient. I can tell Google I want results in English and German because I read both (sort of). I can tell employers about me and have them rush to my door because they need a me. That only works if I control the tagging and the use of it is transparent. The same is true of tagging content: It only works if you can see the tags and add them yourself and swarm around the best ones. Sorry. I should have added that. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 29, 2005

New voices

: I've been remiss in not linking to the announcement of grants to 10 citizens' media projects from the J-Lab, led by Jan Schaffer. I was on the advisory board and for those 10 spots, we got well more than 200 applications! There are tons of great ideas and pent-up publishing (and broadcasting and blogging) energy and imagination. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Buy me

: New stuff regarding a few ad efforts for blogs: d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Greg Lindsay writes about John Battelle's new venture -- which is revealing itself as slowly as a high-class stripper. It's about acting as an agent to star blogs. With a set of bloggers of a certain size and weight, I think this will work well. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Meanwhile, Roger L. Simon, Charles Johnson, Winds of Change, and Marc Danziger team up with Tim Oren to start their own ad network. I'm not sure what the ad pitch is for a network of primarily political blogs that tilts strongly starboard but I wish them luck; they'll be stronger together than apart. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: And every blogger's friend, Henry Copeland, keeps adding new blog mininetworks, like this one for food. I can't find the full list; this post comes closest. I think this is the way to go. It's about gathering critical mass for advertisers. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But we're not at critical mass yet. And we need to stop viewing this just from our end of the pipe -- blogs that like each other or want to work together, whether the lists above or Denton's or Calacanis' -- and instead, look at it from the advertisers' end: They want to put together ad hoc networks of blogs that meet their specific goals, which include both targeting and size. We don't have the means to give that to them. All of which leads me to my predictable pitch:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I believe advertising on citizens' media -- not just blogs but also other text, audio, and video content -- will truly explode only when there are more metrics about our medium, more attention to the needs of marketers (e.g., cookies in RSS readers), and an open-source ad call.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Podcasts are dead

: Yes, Paris Hilton killed them. Un-like-bearable.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Local blogging goes primetime

: Rex (see post below) tells us that a Nashville TV station has a very good local blog -- with spiffy local blog aggregation -- by a former waitress who also blogs here. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Nevermind

: Rex has an Emily Littela moment. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Trust is not a calculation

: Michael Zimmer points us to what I think is a fairly hair-brained scheme from Google that reveals its fetishistic prejudice in favor of machines and also its prejudice in favor of big, old media. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The search engine wants to come up with an algorithm to judge trust in news. They already have a trademarked name for it: TrustRank. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But trust is not a calculation, it is a judgment -- a human judgment. If it were a calculation, news organizations -- and politicians and marketers and clergy, for that matter -- surely would have figured this out years ago: Forget the Q rating, here's the T rating. But trust is based on experience and intuition and perspective. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Still, Google trusts machines. Says New Scientist:

Now Google, whose name has become synonymous with internet searching, plans to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google's database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.

I do believe there are ways to capture trust but it is not through such metrics as number of stories, bylines, bureaus (rather than bureaux, he said, Americanesquely), and so on. That's old journalism's scale for trust: bigger = better. This eliminates experts and specialists in this age of niches. It also includes sources that many consider untrustworthy (those who can't stand the BBC on one side or FoxNews on the other). d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: I can't find the Google patent (WO 2005/029368) but I find with interest that Google has 462 of them. Are they going to contribute any of them to the world? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Earlier fretting about Google. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Is Google the trojan horse of the internet? Did it sneak in the gates over the night looking like a toy and turned out to be an army of conquest?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Just asking. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: I'll be eager to see what Battelle has to say about this. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Much discussion on SlashDot.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Technorati cosmos on TrustRank (TM). d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Touche

: Geoff busts me:

If you're going to bitch about the president playing kissie-face with the nominal leader of Saudi Arabia, then don't go and buy an SUV.
d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Your jihad news report

: Through my cohort Janice, I find the Global Jihad Monitor from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Freedom spreads

: The Syrians are out of Lebanon and the Lebanese government will hold its election on time, after all. Michael Totten blogs it.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Bush podcasts... sort of

: Andrew Leyden of Penguin Radio created a podcast of Bush's weekly radio addresses. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

More jumping back over the shark

: The Methodist Church reverses an earlier decision to defrock a lesbian minister. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

American (Ad) Idol

: Craig Newmark has a change-the-rules idea the new Current.TV: Let the audience vote off the worst commercials. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I like that: Sponsors would know the rules when they advertise and would operate under fear of being voted off, so they would improve their commercials. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But it's so, well, negative. How about a more aggressive scheme:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

How about having a contest for the best commercials, products, and brands on the network. Make it a game. Hire the Simon Cowell (or Bob Garfield) of the people to slam the spam. Have the sponsors compete for our affection. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Everybody wins:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Suddenly, consumers have a reason to pay attention to commercials. Wow, that is revolutionary. So if the sponsors have decent commercials, they win.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The network becomes a better environment for advertising. Advertisers will line up to give them money. The network wins. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The sponsors improve their commercials and consumers can get rid of the worst of them and encourage better ones. The audience wins. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The audience is in control.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This follows my first law of media (and life): Give people control of media and they will use it. Don't give the people control and you will lose them. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

That's all Craig is doing. That's all Craig ever does: He empowers the people. Good thinking, Craig. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: This also deals with a problem of marketing and media in this era when media is paid on performance: That is, if you are a publisher or blogger, you get paid only when the consumer clicks on an ad you run. But if the ad is crappy (or the ad targeting is off) then no one will click and you lose; you used up your space, your ad avail, to no avail. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So what if you got to pick the ad creative you put on your site or network... or recreate it? That scares ad agencies that make money on making that creative. But, hey, it's a new era: You win when you give up control, not keep it. So the wise advertiser and ad agency would take Craig's idea (and my add) and run with it. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

[Bad link to Craig fixed. Sorry.]d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Can you jump back over the shark?

: I was glad that in his press conference last night, Bush distanced himself from the religious fringe.

THE PRESIDENT: ... The role of religion in our society? I view religion as a personal matter. I think a person ought to be judged on how he or she lives his life, or lives her life. And that's how I've tried to live my life, through example. Faith-based is an important part of my life, individually, but I don't -- I don't ascribe a person's opposing my nominations to an issue of faith.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Q Do you think that's an inappropriate statement? And what I asked is --d3d9.dll aoe III trial

THE PRESIDENT: No, I just don't agree with it.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Q You don't agree with it.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

THE PRESIDENT: No, I think people oppose my nominees because -- because of judicial philosophy.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Q Sorry, I asked you what you think of the ways faith is being used in our political debates, not just in society --d3d9.dll aoe III trial

THE PRESIDENT: No, I know you asked me that. Well, I can only speak to myself, and I am mindful that people in political office should not say to somebody, you're not equally American if you don't happen to agree with my view of religion. As I said, I think faith is a personal issue, and I get great strength from my faith. But I don't condemn somebody in the political process because they may not agree with me on religion.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The great thing about America, David, is that you should be allowed to worship any way you want, and if you choose not to worship, you're equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship. And if you choose to worship, you're equally American if you're a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim. That's the wonderful thing about our country, and that's the way it should be.

Of course, the cynical view is that he gets to come off as more moderate -- on prime-time TV, at least -- and lets others suck--up to the religous right for him. Another cynical view is that the polls indicate that DeLay, Frist, et al went too far and so Bush is reacting to that (but if he were just listening to the polls, he wouldn't have been pushing Social Security so hard). But -- risking an Ollie Volley -- I'll say I think he is more moderate on religion. He has not pushed for regulating speech on cable and satellite and has told parents to use the remote control. He gives this speech to pull back from the right-wing religious shark-jumpers. We can only hope that this is a recognition that they went too far and Bush used this opportunity to say so, to pull back to the middle. d3d9.dll aoe III trial
April 28, 2005

Old opinions never die

: This reader once said I was too tough on The Dukes of Hazard. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I think I'm proud of that. No, I know I am. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Talk OD

: Radio ratings in Washington indicate an OD on political talk radio. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Now: YOURadio... Next: OURadio

: Infinity Broadcasting's announcement that it is turning over a transmitter to the people is big, big news: great news, gratifying news, inevitable news. But it's still just one milemarker on the road to the future of citizens' media. And no, kids, we're not there yet.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This is still a big company handing over its time and using the second-person plural: YOURadio.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

We'll know we've arrived when the people take over that station for real and change the name to OURadio. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

At YOURadio, there are still executives picking what goes onto THEIR air. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

At OURadio, WE the audience will pick what goes on OUR radio from what WE the producers make; there will be no difference between audience and producer, there will be no THEM: It's all OURs. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

That is where this road is going. And we're still driving. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Still, I'm delighted by YOURadio. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Now we have a newspaper made totally from citizens' content: NorthwestVoice. We will have a radio station made totally from citizens' content: YOURadio.com. We will have a TV network made almost completely from citizens' content: Al Gore's Current.tv. (And last night on MSNBC's Connected, I joked that blog TV is next and when we get there, I said, we'll invite Ron and Monica on.) d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But ultimately, they're all still networks. They're all still one-way pipes (but with a new way to dive into the pool that feeds them). They're media. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This is why -- I think -- Doc Searls and David Weinberger and the other visionaries behind this thing we have here refuse to call it media. Doc says it's speech. This, I believe, is why David got cold sweats at becoming part of media at MSNBC (see here and here as well): He said, 'I'm not media, I'm something else.' I call it conversation. (But I also am of the old "media." And I call this new thing "citizens' media" because this is like the English language and "snow:" We don't have as many words for that fozen stuff as the Inuit have. We don't have a word for this thing we're doing. So until sombody invents a new word -- something more sonorous than "blog," please -- I'll keep calling it citizens' media.)d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So anyway, we're creating new things: d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Google is the new library... and network... and ad agency (see the post below). d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Blogs are new newspapers, right?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Podcasts are new radio then.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Vlogs will be the new TV, yes? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But then again, no, they're not. They're none of that. They're new, they're different, and they're not done yet. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And for that matter, old media aren't done yet, either... if they know what's good for them. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So each is trying to figure out the other, how to dance and who's leading -- and that's good. That's what the blog segments on MSNBC are about. That's what YOURadio is about. They are process. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Now having said all that, I'll repeat that YOURadio is big news and good news for a few reasons: d3d9.dll aoe III trial

First, it is big media recognizing that it's time to listen -- and do more than listen: Let the people speak. It is big media recognizing the value of citizens' media. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Second, it is an admission that the old, one-size-fits-all, top-down, one-way models of programming are broken and the audience can do it better. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Third, it an admission that the old business models are soon to break and that the people can provide more talent for less than the old talent could. It's nothing less than the economic salvation of old media... if old media is smart enough to financially support citizens' media and not just exploit it. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

What's important is that a big media company knew it was time to stick some dynamite up the alimentary canal and push the plunger. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It is the tipping point. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: I've been saying that we're at the tipping point. Glenn Reynolds is tipping, too. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Jay Rosen says:

It has been pointed out that tipping point talk is cheap. But Infinity Broadcasting actually tipped over today.
: See Rex Hammock on top of YOURadio. That's the frequency, Kenneth. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Now let's tune in for a big, honking reality check from young MasterMaq, whom I last quoted on why he can't stand newspapers. Now here's his reaction to YOURadio:

You'd think I would be excited about the launch of the world's first "all-podcast radio station," but instead I'm disappointed. San Francisco's 1550 KYCY will now become KYOURadio and will feature content submitted by listeners. The problem? It's not podcasting at all:
In part because of licensing requirements, which usually cover only broadcast and streaming, the company has no plans to provide downloadable program archives.
More and more, individuals and organizations are attaching the term "podcast" to their audio endeavours, trying to jump on the bandwagon. This is very clearly one such example, and it's disappointing. KYOURadio is not a podcast radio station - they simply play content submitted by listeners.
He's a tough master, Maq. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Engadget agrees.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Doc, the original radio geek, geeks out on the signal. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: LATER: Mark Glaser sums up the efforts of new services serving our video (and audio).d3d9.dll aoe III trial

There are no free searches

: There is no free lunch. There are no free searches. At least not for media, there aren't. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Media depend on Google. Without the search engine, no one would be found. Without GoogleNews, they'd all get less traffic. Without the ad programs, advertisers wouldn't be advertising on plain old home pages; bloggers owe gratitude to Google for taking the cooties off citizens' media. With the ad programs, big media sites and bloggers alike are getting checks from Google. All that is wonderful. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So is heroin. At first. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Now cautionary notes are being heard here and there:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Ad Age reports this week (not online, damnit) that Google is beating the big boys:

:Yahoo and Google's total ad revenues this year could rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC -- a stunning achievement for the companies and a watershed moment [read: tipping point -ed] for the Internet as an advertising medium.
In terms of revenue, Google's estimated $3 billion and Yahoo's $2.9 billion compare with $6.2 billion for the big nets' prime time. And their market cap is up with the big boys: Google is No. 2 behind Time Warner; Yahoo is No. five behind Disney and News Corp. as well.
"The results from Google and Yahoo combined with softeness in traditional media, offer the strongest evidence yet of the dramatic changes occurring in the media and marketing landscape," Tony Mastin, analyst at William Blair & Co. wrote.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In terms of measured media spending, the Internet was already bigger than outdoor, TV syndication and national newspapers, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

: Now turn to Simon Waldman, biz brains behind Guardian Online, who adds up Googles plans to serve banners and allow advertisers to pick sites (which means that Google can undersell media sales teams) and sell on CPM (rather than just clicks) and add ads to RSS and ad adds to maps and local... who knows what's next.
You can look at the details of all this activity - the mind-boggling reach of the decentralised network, the efficiency of the (mostly) sales-team-free booking system, the instant creation of a major banner network (just as the market for search starts to plateau, of course) - all of which are exciting./petrifying depending on where you sit.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But the really striking thing here is the pace of it all. Blistering. Fuelled of course by an arms race with Yahoo! that seems to be bringing out the best in both players.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The point is - and let’s be honest here - there is no way that traditional media organisations can compete at this pace. Or even at half this pace. This isn’t an act of self-flagellation, it’s just a matter of fact - for better or for worse....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But if we look around and want to retain our share of readers’ attention and advertisers’ wallets, it’s going to take probably double the effort,imagination and, frankly luck that even the best of us have had over the last five years.

: Now here is Rich Gordan at Poynter looking at the same announcements and worrying:
From Google's perspective, this is a natural evolution of AdSense -- giving its advertisers more flexibility and better results, and allowing the company to sell brand advertising along with the direct-response variety. But if I put my online publisher hat on, I'm not sure I like what I'm hearing.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Most every Web publisher these days has signed on to AdSense because it offers real additional revenue with virtually no effort. But these new initiatives would turn Google into a full-fledged interactive media buying agency -- and enable advertisers to go through Google to place pretty much the same kinds of ads that they now would have to buy directly from a site or from ad networks such as Doubleclick or 24/7 Real Media.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

My guess is that many site managers will not want these new kinds of Google ads running on their sites -- but the lure of "easy" revenue (or the fear of losing AdSense money) might cause them to come aboard....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I also think that Google will sell those ads for less than what publishers are selling equivalent ads for -- just as the ad networks already do. Maybe this will be a good thing -- enabling sites to grow ad revenue without having to add salespeople.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But the Trojan horse story does come to mind. Publishers have let AdSense inside the gates. What will Google do now?

: Follow the links in the posts above to many news stories on Google's announcements. Then imagine where Google can go next, challenging not just media but media's challengers: Watch out Monster... eBay... CraigsList....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Now ask whether Google is friend or foe... or both. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The answer, inevitably, must be both: Google helped explode the internet. Without its search, no one would find our content. Without the ads, Google wouldn't make money. But then, that's Google's problem, isn't it? And a not-very-big-problem it is. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It's not a love/hate thing. I love Google; we all should. I don't hate Google. But I think it's time to consider fearing Google. Just to be safe. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So what should media sites be doing? And I don't just mean the big guys. I mean you, humble blogger with your humble ads: d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Will Google maximize your value? Will Google undersell you? Is Google being transparent with you and revealing what the ads on your pages are selling for and what share you're getting? Will Google compete with you? Can Google put the stranglehold of a monopoly on you? Should you be making Google bigger or helping to create competitors to Google? Can you afford to? Can you afford not to?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Just asking.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 27, 2005

Armed blogger

: No, that's not me in the picture at the bottom of the page. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

KYOURADIO

: I'm way jazzed about Infinity's radio station by the people: KYOURADIO.com. Will talk about it on MSNBC's Connected at 5p ET. Will write about it later. Tipping point. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Jumping the shark for Jesus (continued)

: Glenn Reynolds gets it right today in his analysis of Bush's falling polls:

Mickey Kaus refers to "the semi-mysterious slump of President Bush in the polls."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I don't think it's much of a mystery, and I agree with Bush pollster Matthew Dowd that it has something to do with Terri Schiavo. ("The country's generally unhappy, and maybe they think the Terri Schiavo case is taking away from things that Congress or Washington ought to be working on.") Only it's broader than that.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The Democrats' weakness is that people worry that they're the party of Jane Fonda. They tried -- but failed miserably -- to convince people otherwise in the last election.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The Republicans' weakness is that people worry that they're the party of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. They tried, successfully, to convince people otherwise in the last election, but they're now acting in ways that are giving those fears new life. Add to this the fact that the war is going well, weakening the national security glue that holds Bush's coalition together, and a drop is natural: People who reluctantly backed Bush because Kerry was just unacceptable on national security are now seeing their worries about domestic issues as more credible.

I think it's more than that religion is a distraction from the nation's business. I think Americans get scared when they confront people who are too religious -- especially when they do that on the other side of the church/state wall. This doesn't mean the Democrats should be godless; they should just be religously moderate (read: sane). In the primaries, we will find odd and new coalitions among conservative Catholics and born-agains pushing the Repubicans further to the religious right. But in the general election, a religious mainstreamer can win over a fringer. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Earlier Jumping-the-Shark-for-Jesus posts here, here, here, here, here, and here. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: What should Bush do? I'll say it again: Concentrate on energy and health care. Oh, but of course, those are not easy issues for Republicans with big biz interests at stake. So the same advice goes for the Democrats: Concentrate on energy and health care. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

To the tune of I Want to Hold Your Hand

: Lots of fun followup to Bush's hand-holding:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Matt Welch is blushing for us all. Oh, no, his face is red because he's frigging outraged.
: Obernews finds the PC angle, calling Welch vaguely homophobic for criticizing two men for holding hands.
: Justin Logan has a proper and well-put fit over that.
: Here's ThinkProgess' Bush Checklist: Stroll through wildflowers with dictator? Check. Stand up for pro-democracy Saudis? Naw.
: Electablog's OHarmony: the dictator dating service.
: Lew Rockwell notes the White House/Fox News spin: The poor man was just slippin' and slidin' and Bush was making sure he didn't fall.
: Yglesias: "... the whole spectacle of an American President begging the Saudi monarchs to lower oil prices is bizarre and repugnant."
: Here's a photo album of Bush-Saudi romantic moments.
: And don't miss this convenient layout moment from the Dallas Morning News: The Picture next to this headline: "House Bans Gay Unions."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Ratings

: Glenn Reynolds jokes that FoxNews' lead over CNN is declining now that CNN is paying attention to blogs. Well, actually, MSNBC President Rick Kaplan said at a Harvard confab weeks ago that he can track ratings growth in shows to blog diligence. He's not including blogs in his network's shows because he thinks we're cute. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: If that is true, then the CBS Evening News could use some bloggin'. (Last night, by the way, Bob Schieffer marveled at podcasting.)d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Chatter

: Virginia Postrel is moderating a panel that includes Bill Keller of the Times and Jacob Weisberg of Slate at UCSB. Can't tell whether it will be aired online. [via Doc]d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 26, 2005

Car stereo help

: I just bought a new car (very boring: replaced my Lexus RX300 with 115k miles with a Toyota Highlander) and I want to get a car stereo that meets these (simple) requirements:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

1. It must have an input jack for my iPod, Sirius, etc.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

2. It's OK if it has Sirius built in but I'm also fine with keeping that separate so I can carry Sirius back and forth.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

3. CD and cassette and playing MP3s would be nice but not necessary.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

That's not much. I mainly want that input jack so I can plug any of my gadgets into it. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Advice?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

More stereo comments.... I accidentally double posted the car stereo question and both posts got comments so I'm keeping this here because I don't want to lose the advice here. Thanks, all!d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Holding hands

: Bush is going to regret this photo.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: UPDATE: Great layout of the picture in a Texas paper.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It takes a village to be a newspaper

: In a wonderful comment under a post below, Bala Pillai of Maylasia.net pointed to an interview that has an eloquent expression of what news should be -- a parallel to Hugh McLeod's oft-quoted (by me) contention that newspapers must stop thinking of themselves as things but as places where people come together to do good things. Bala Pillai:

I remember in my village where I grew up in Malaysia. When there was no media there. When we needed to find out what was happening in the neighboring village. We’d send one of us over. He’d go over. And talk to the headman. Get the party platform from him. And on his way back he'd go have a haircut at that village's barber. And there he'd get the grapevine. And between the two versions he narrates to us...See that was media for us that were news....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

See what matters most to the village = media ok the reason is this... media used to be equal to community... because what mattered most to community equaled to the community... and what mattered most = media = community, as time went on, specialists creeped in... And in time the agency phenomena took over. Agency phenomena = agents become principals (another e.g. --> govt servants become masters) and thus media diverged from community. Media no more represented community. Nature abhors these divergences. It pushes towards equilibrium. So there was pressure to have facilities to enable this convergence and thus social software and citizen journalism

Beautifully put. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The star shat in the woods

: PunditGuy is having a proper fit over celebrities discovering the unpaved earth:

Drew Barrymore Quote of the Day: "I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome."
d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The great American pastime, remixed

: Andrew Sullivan goes to a baseball game:

LOVED IT: I take it all back. The Nationals-Phillies game was great fun at RFK last night. Vile but irresistible hot dogs; a new foodstuff known as dippin' dots; occasional flashes of excitement interrupted by really hot guys with guts spitting into the grass; and, the piece de resistance, Karl Rove down front, chatting on his cell-phone. We had a blast.
Does Karl Rove qualify as a hot guy with a gut spitting?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Exploding TV

: Rafat Ali has the story behind the Open Media Network, another means -- like OurMedia and Brightcove -- to distribute multimedia content without a old, closed network. I downloaded the ap and player (it wouldn't work via Firefox, only IE) and watched my favorite vlog, Rocketboom. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Tipping point... or melting point?

: Just got the Wilson Quarterly with its cover story on "The Collapse of Big Media." Getaloada the intro:

Collapse is not too strong a word to describe what has happened to America's major news media. Stripped of their old economic and technological advantages, befuddled by the changing character of their audiences, and beset by new competitors, they are reeling from the blows recent scandals have dealt to their credibility and presige. Their old authority is one, and with it, perhaps their ability to define for Americans a shared realm of information, ideas and debate."
Youch. That pretty much summarizes the melting point. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Stats from WQ compliled from many sources:


* Daily newspaper circ from 1990 to 2003: 62.3 to 55.2 million
* Number of daily U.S. papers from 1990 to 2003: 1,611 to 1,456
* By age group, percentage of Americans who read a paper yesterday: 18-29 - 23, 30-49 - 39, 50-64 - 52, 60+ - 60
* Time spent by 8-19 year olds on all media: 6 hours, 21 minutes; time spent on print media: 43 minutes
* Combined viewership of network evening news: 1980 - 52 million, 2004 - 28.8 million
* Median age of network news viewer: 60
* Percentage of people who believe all or most of what's on: network news - 24, CNN - 32, FoxNews - 25, C-Span - 27, PBS NewsHour - 23
: See also Chris Anderson's many stats on the media meltdown here.
* Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
* Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
* Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
* Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
* Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
* Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole
: See tipping-point posts here, here, and here. And much media here. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: And from PaidContent, see links to the Deloitte report on the not-so-bright future of network TV and Mary Meeker's powerpoint on the ad challenges. See this amazing chart from Meeker's presentation. Compare the ad dollars spent per household in each medium and guess where this is going:

meekerchart.jpg

And see this on classifieds in papers vs. eBay (and this doesn't include CraigsList!):
meekerclassified.jpg
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(Unfortunately in-)frequently asked questions

: The Media Center -- the real forward thinkers and nudgers in the news business -- asks a few great questions in their latest brief tome (a pdf):

OLD QUESTION: What is the future of newspapers?
REALLY ASKING: Will editors and reporters have jobs in five years?
SHOULD ASK: How is a connected society informed? What’s paper got to do with it? What future are newspapers and TV networks creating? What story do they represent?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

OLD QUESTION: What’s the no-kidding business model for newspaper companies?
REALLY ASKING: Do we really trust this Internet thing?
SHOULD ASK: Which business models enabled by the Internet and mobile, digital technologies best serve an informed, connected society? Can news enterprises reimagine their businesses?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

OLD QUESTION: How do we make money?
REALLY ASKING: How do we continue doing what we’ve always done, maintain high margins, and control markets?
SHOULD ASK: What are alternatives to the advertising subsidy? What business models can capitalize journalism-based businesses? What is the value proposition for new forms of journalism?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

OLD QUESTION: From where will journalism come?
REALLY ASKING: Do we really trust other citizens with journalism?
SHOULD ASK: How will a generation of talented storytellers use multiple forms of media to create and share stories that are relevant to the citizens of an always-on world?

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Flying over the shark

: Now everybody's going to have to blog from an airplane to say: wow, you'll never guess where I'm blogging from: an airplane. (See also the airborne email in Meeker's PowerPoint.) And then they'll IM. And then they'll Skype. And then they'll land. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The cup will put you to sleep but the coffee will wake up you

: I missed this before but 601am belatedly wakes me up to the news and I hadn't even noticed because the brown this-cup-is-too-hot-for-human-consumption thing covered them up but Starbucks, ever in search of a new form of cultural pap, is quoting grande celebs (that is, merely medium) on its cups, and some of them include: Al Franken, Goldie Hawn, Ken Auletta, Yo-Yo Ma, Keith Olbermann, Melissa Etheridge , Ken Burns, Jonah Goldberg, Po Bronson, Quincy Jones, Chuck D, Deepak Chopra. Gag me with a double latte. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Noah benShea's quote: "Do not kiss your children so they will kiss you back but so they will kiss their children, and their children’s children." That belongs on a doilie, not a cup.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And Goldberg's: "Everywhere, unthinking mobs of “independent thinkers” wield tired clichés like cudgels, pummeling those who dare question “enlightened” dogma. If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Clichés begin arguments, they don’t settle them." That is here because it wouldn't fit on a Hummer bumpersticker. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Anybody for a new agenda?

: A few polls indicate that Bush hasn't picked the right agendas out of his hat. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: ABC News/Post poll on Social Security:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"Do you approve or disapprove of the way Bush is handling Social Security?"
April '05: Approve - 31 percent, disapprove - 64
Sept. '03: Approve - 43, disapprove - 46
Not a good trend line, eh?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"Would you support or oppose a plan in which people who chose to could invest some of their Social Security contributions in the stock market?"
April '05: Support - 45, oppose - 51
Sept. '03: Support - 64, oppose - 31d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"Who[m] do you trust to do a better job handling Social Security: Bush or the Democrats in Congress?"
Bush - 32 percent, Democrats - 50d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: ABC News/Post poll on judicial appointments:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"The Senate has confirmed 35 federal appeals court judges nominated by Bush, while Senate Democrats have blocked 10 others. Do you think the Senate Democrats are right or wrong to block these nominations?"
Right: 48 percent, wrong: 36 percentd3d9.dll aoe III trial

"Would you support or oppose changing Senate rules to make it easier for the Republicans to confirm Bush's judicial nominees?"
Support: 26 percent, oppose: 66 percentd3d9.dll aoe III trial

Try energy policy, George. And health care. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: UPDATE: Ankle Biting Pundits is growling over the polls. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: AND: I repeat my wish for open-source polling. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 25, 2005

Smart mobs

: Smart mobs are not just some cute cult of the cellphone. They are, indeed, a force. Witness today's NY Times front-page story on the unfortunate anti-Japan mobs in China:

The thousands of people who poured onto the streets of China this month for the anti-Japanese protests that shook Asia were bound by nationalist anger but also by a more mundane fact: they are China's cellphone and computer generation.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

For several weeks as the protests grew larger and more unruly, China banned almost all coverage in the state media. It hardly mattered. An underground conversation was raging via e-mail, text message and instant online messaging that inflamed public opinion and served as an organizing tool for protesters.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The underground noise grew so loud that last Friday the Chinese government moved to silence it by banning the use of text messages or e-mail to organize protests. It was part of a broader curb on the anti-Japanese movement but it also seemed the Communist Party had self-interest in mind.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"They are afraid the Chinese people will think, O.K., today we protest Japan; tomorrow, Japan," said an Asian diplomat who has watched the protests closely. "But the day after tomorrow, how about we protest against the government?"d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Nondemocratic governments elsewhere are already learning that lesson. Cellphone messaging is an important communications channel in nascent democracy movements in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East. Ukraine's Orange Revolution used online forums and messaging to help topple a corrupt regime.

: Read a great followup to this in the comments: "'A Hundred Cellphones Bloom, and Chinese Take to the Streets' is a great headline for Manhattan, but meaningless in Beijing." From Danwei.org.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The prime directive: Do not lie

: I got pretty shocking email from a journalism student at NYU, who also sent it to Steven Levy at Newsweek. I'll not give the student's name in hopes that he or she will learn the lesson and not be Googled with it forever. But I will quote the email because there is an important lesson here:

Hi, I'm a student of ... d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I am writing an article on fact-checking in blogs.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I have two questions.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Recently, sent Gawker.com a fake tip (said I heard Moby say to a little girl, "Don't ever say that Teany [Moby's tea store] is Shitty"). They posted it in their "Reader Sitings" section. I e-mailed them and said it was fake. But they posted no correction and the fake tip is still on their site.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Do you think Gawker should be held responsible for any damages against Moby? Do they have a responsibility to fact-check reader tips, do you think?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Thanks!

I had a very simple response to this student: "You are responsible." Ethically and otherwise. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Gawker puts up notes from readers and clearly labels it: "Sightings are sent in by readers." Any reader with a two-digit IQ and any experience with this medium and the internet knows that readers can publish anything anywhere and so, caveat reader.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

If this would-be journalist simply asked Gawker, I'll bet they would have given an answer. Ask me about the comments here or the posts in a forum and I'll tell you quite clearly: Nothing is vetted or edited. That's obvious. But if you were a good reporter, you'd ask the question. And if you did not get an answer, you still should not resort to what you did. You lied. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And that, correspondent, is the most basic journalism lesson you will ever receive. That is your prime directive as a journalist. That is Rule No. 1:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Do not lie. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Trust is our only asset. Truth is its only measure. Ask Jayson Blair.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Do not lie. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

As a reporter, would you call the Fire Department with a false alarm just to see how fast they came? If you did, you'd go to jail and deserve it. Would you lie about a stock online to see what happened to its price? If you did, you'd go to jail and get sued and deserve it. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

You make it even worse, then, by emailing your lie to two journalists. So you defamed not only Moby but Gawker. In fact, I don't think any harm is done here. But with different players, you could, indeed, do harm to your subjects and your own reputation and the credibility of the journalists you ensare. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

You also lied about your own identity: You did not reveal yourself as a would-be journalist. In an age of transparency, that, too, is becoming ethical lapse. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So, dear student, if you were in my class, I'd give you an F on this assignment (at least). I would assign you to apologize to those you tried to smear with your little lie. And I would hope that you would learn the most important lesson in journalism: Telling the truth is hard enough without lying. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

(Oh, and by the way, it might help if you copy-edited your emails before sending them.)d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: UPDATE: See in the comments, Lockhart Steele, editorial director of Gawker Media, says that they didn't receive notice of the "correction" but have since X'ed it out. The same person hit Lockhart's own Curbed.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Also, I neglected to add the full disclosure that most know but that should have been added specifically to this post: I am friends with Gawker Media and its founder, Nick Denton. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The future of journalism is not its past (continued)

: Tim Porter suggests his fixes for what ails news (see the post below). I'll pull up to higher altitude (and lower oxygen) and suggest these steps:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

1. Set a strategic imperative for change. From both the top down and the bottom up, there has to be an agreement -- an urgent passion -- for change: for updating, improving, finding new ways. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

2. Listen to the public. Don't just go to another focus group about the paper. Go listen to the people who don't read the paper but want news. Learn how they're getting it now: They no longer have the patience to wait for the news; the news waits for them to search for it, click on it, have it recommended. Ask them about trust and brace yourself. Read Merrill Brown's Carnegie report.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

3. Perform a business reality check. Read Tim's post: The solution is still presumed to be adding more bodies. But when revenue is declining, that's obviously not realistic. Classified and retail are in decline; there are new inexpensive and free competitors; audience is declining. So new business models must be invented. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

4. Catalogue the opportunities for delivering news. No longer constrained to a printing press and truck route, list all the wonderful new ways that you can deliver news. If you want the public to get its news from you then you'd better give it to them wherever and however they want. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

5. Catalogue the opportunities for gathering news. Insert hyperlocal citizens' media spiel here. The public knows more than we ever can. How do we enable them to share that with others -- with content, promotion, training, trust, money? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

6. Reinvent the product. After doing that homework, after dynamiting old assumptions, after starting a conversation with the public -- a converstion that should never end -- now, it's time to reinvent the product and the business and the industry of news. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

7. Reinvent the relationship with the public. Now you can change the way the public views news. Hugh McLeod said, and I often quote it, that we need to stop thinking of newspapers (and their sites) as things but rather as places where help bring people together. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The future of journalism is not its past

: Tim Porter writes his best post ever -- Jay Rosen beat me to calling it that -- about pathological resistance to change in newsrooms and journalism. It's probably a good portrait of fear of change in any industry undergoing restructuring, only the situation is even tougher in journalism because it is an industry inflated with hubris as well as true principle -- an industry that doesn't even like to think of itself as an industry. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I've spent more than a third of my career trying to bring change to news media and I've been amazed hearing the notion that news should not change. Why not? The world is changing. The public and its needs and wants are changing. The technology is changing. The opportunities are changing. The competition is changing. The economics are changing. Why shouldn't newsrooms change? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

As Tim reports, the discussion is usually not about moving forward -- and taking advantage of this change, embracing it -- but, instead, about wanting to move back: back to when there were more people, there was less competition, the insiders had more power, and we had better bars (well, actually, that last one is mine... but it might help with the bad mood Tim finds):

The amount of anger and hostility, of distrust and suspicion, of inertia and ennui that pollutes the journalistic environment in these newsrooms at first surprised me....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It is a venom whose toxicity, fed by the same sort of outwardly-directed anger and suspicion that floods the waning days of all diminishing industries, weakens all hope these reporters and editors and photographers have of imagining a future in which journalism survives but its form is vastly different....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The obdurance and avoidance endemic in newsrooms rests on a bedrock belief that the "problems" at their newspapers are best solved with more bodies or a return to a more "traditional" form of journalism....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In these same newsrooms where the nattering nabobs of nostalgia pine for days of yore, there are also forward-thinking reporters and editors and photographers who envision and are working to create a journalistic future built on new story forms, deeper community connections and more truth-telling and watch-dogging....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

We are in a time of great transition in journalism. The tectonics of technology, demographics, economics and lifestyle are disrupting the ground on which newspaper journalism stood for half a century. Survival requires nimbleness, openness and a sense of the possible. The intransigent and the angry and the incurably nostalgic will fall into the cracks....

There's much more. Read it all. d3d9.dll aoe III trial
April 24, 2005

News on news

: Pegasus has a good roundup of news on changing newsd3d9.dll aoe III trial

It's like making a vegetarian the CEO of McDonald's

: The NY Times mag has an interview that's as astonishing as it is amusing with the new Corporation for Public Broadcasting chief executive, Ken Ferree [sent to me by Jonathan Miller]:

What PBS shows do you like?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I'm not much of a TV consumer. I like ''Masterpiece Theater'' and some of the ''Frontline'' shows. I like ''Antiques Roadshow'' and ''Nova.'' I don't know. What's your favorite show?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It would probably be the ''NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.''d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Yes, Lehrer is good, but I don't watch a lot of broadcast news. The problem for me is that I do the Internet news stuff all day long, so by the time I get to the Lehrer thing . . . it's slow. I don't always want to sit down and read Shakespeare, and Lehrer is akin to Shakespeare. Sometimes I really just want a People magazine, and often that is in the evening, after a hard day.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

For the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, you don't sound like much of a PBS viewer. Perhaps you prefer NPR, which your organization also finances?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

No. I do not get a lot of public radio for one simple reason. I commute to work on my motorcycle, and there is no radio access.

d3d9.dll aoe III trial

TV is good for you. No, really.

: Steven Johnson's new book is about a subject dear to my heart: Everything Bad Is Good For You starts arguing in its subtitle: "How today's popular culture is actually making us smarter." An excerpt appears in this weekend's New York Times Magazine. I got to read a version of the book a few months ago and it's damned good. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In the book, Johnson says that TV -- and other popular culture -- is more complex than it used to be and challenges us to think; it makes us smarter. I'm not sure which way the cause-and-effect really works. I believe that popular culture is just now catching up to us and that is because all our tools of choice -- remote control, cable box, TiVo -- are forcing popular culture to chase us, to get as smart as we are. In any case, TV is getting smarter and both TV and we are smarter than conventional wisdom ever held. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Ever since I was a TV critic starting in the mid-'80s, I've argued that given a chance to watch good shows, we do; that the ratings prove Americans do have good taste; and that TV is only getting better. Steven turns it around and adds one more notch: TV makes us better.

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less.....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

... [Y]ou have to avoid the tendency to sentimentalize the past. When people talk about the golden age of television in the early 70's -- invoking shows like ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show'' and ''All in the Family'' -- they forget to mention how awful most television programming was during much of that decade.

Ditto all the slathering over the other alleged Golden Age of the Vaudevillian '50s. TV keeps getting better.
In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not arguing that parents should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse themselves. What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show's violent or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind.
It's all about respect, really: The respect producers have for the audience in producing good shows; the respect commentators have for the public in recognizing that, contrary to popular wisdom, popular taste is good; the respect the audience has for itself.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Then call them the Jersey Giants, damnit

: Well, my state has agreed to spend a fortune to keep the Giants in the Meadowlands.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I say that a condition of the deal must be to change the team's names to the Jersey Giants. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Even the head of the Sports Authority is against the deal:

The opposition was led by George Zoffinger, the Sports Authority's chief executive, who said he wanted to "remain consistent" with his past criticism of a deal he has claimed will cost taxpayers at least $150 million and will force his agency to operate at a deficit.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"My opposition stems from my wife being a social worker and my seeing the things the state needs to spend money on rather than football stadiums," Zoffinger said. "We've worked hard over the past three years to accomplish some financial stability and that is going to be difficult moving forward."

I'm against the deal. But I fear there's no winning now. So we need to get something out of it: Let's make the Giants recognize that they're in New Jersey, not New York. Make them change the name. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Hey, Jersey bloggers, let's swarm 'em. I just sent this email to Acting Gov. Codey, the director of external affairs for the Sports & Exposition Authority, and to my state legislators (find them here):

If you're going to spend millions in taxpayers' money building a new stadium for the Giants, the least you can do is make changing their name to the Jersey Giants a condition of the deal.
Follow the links above and do likewise. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It's all just bits and bandwidth, after all

: Here's the final commodification of telecom: d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Skype is soon going to be available on a cell phone. So you'll be able to use the phone company's bandwidth to bypass the phone company's phone fees not only at home but also on the road (and, I assume, on wi-fi enabled mobile phones, you'll even be able to avoid the phone company's bandwidth and data charges). So no transfer of data, of bits of any sort, gets any premium at all. It's all just a commodity, all just bits and bandwidth. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I think I'm going to drive down the way to AT&T's network operations center and take a picture of the giant Golden Boy statue that used to stand by its headquarters before they melt him down. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Right after I wrote that, I went to my RSS feeds and read Fred Wilson pointing us to a great PowerPoint and two posts from Tom Evslin, the man who probably is responsible for more change in media than anyone in America aside from (1) Craig Newmark and (2) the guy who invented the remote control. Tom was the guy who forced flat-rate pricing for the internet and then he created a company that, to oversimplify, turned VOIP into an industry at ITXC. In other words, he was a guy who helped turn bandwidth into a commodity, took value away from the pipe, and thus transferred value to the bits that travel on that pipe. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

His PowerPoint and posts predict that phone calls will become like email -- "free," though email isn't exactly free. Somebody has to pay for the equipment, software, storage, and bandwidth. But once that's done, there is no incremental cost -- and fee and profit -- for the next call. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

There's no value in controlling delivery -- not in telecom, not in media. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Undervalued

: My friend Dave Morgan of Tacoda writes a column in ClickZ arguing that we're undervaluing online to advertisers (and I'd add that we haven't even begun to value citizens' media to advertisers):

Publishers must price valuable contextual inventory at what it's worth -- a lot! Great content, loyal audiences, and a strong media brand should command a premium rate. Publishers shouldn't be afraid to ask for it. They must point out to media buyers that online audience numbers and online ad views are real, unlike TV ratings or print circulation, which only measure distribution and have little connection to actual ad views. On that basis, online ad CPMs should be valued at least three times more than their offline counterparts.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Publishers should stop selling out-of-context inventory in ways that devalue their own brands and hurt consumers who are tired of cluttered Web pages with irrelevant ads. They should use the extraordinary array of audience analytics tools and targeting services and learn how to deliver relevant ads in these pages.


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April 23, 2005

Tipping point (continued)

: More evidence that we're at the tipping point in media (see earlier posts here and here):d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The Economist marvels at Rupert Murdoch's speech to newspaper editors:

The speech—astonishing not so much for what it said as for who said it—may go down in history as the day that the stodgy newspaper business officially woke up to the new realities of the internet age. Talking at times more like a pony-tailed, new-age technophile than a septuagenarian old-media god-like figure, Mr Murdoch said that news “providers” such as his own organisation had better get web-savvy, stop lecturing their audiences, “become places for conversation” and “destinations” where “bloggers” and “podcasters” congregate to “engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions.” He also criticised editors and reporters who often “think their readers are stupid”.
I, too, said the speech will be seen as a tipping point. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Ruth sends me a link to George Will's column tomorrow:

If you awake before dawn you probably hear a daily sound that may become as anachronistic as the clatter of horses' hooves on urban cobblestones. The sound is the slap of the morning paper on the sidewalk.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The circulation of daily U.S. newspapers is 55.2 million, down from 62.3 million in 1990. The percentages of adults who say they read a paper "yesterday" are ominous...d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Perhaps we are entering what David T.Z. Mindich, formerly of CNN, calls "a post-journalism age."

No, I think we're entering a new journalism age. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Will quotes the latest issue of the Wilson Quarterly, which I'm headed to a newsstand to buy now. The cover story: The Collapse of Big Media.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Bin Laden = Hitler, 9/11 murderers = SS murderers. Got it so far?

: The other day, I had a proper fit over filmmaker Brian Grazer saying he hoped his upcoming network exploitationfest about the 9/11 terrorist attacks would do for Muslims what Das Boot did for Germans: humanize them. Now Britt Blaser has issued a strange response and I'll get to that in a minute. But first, let's get our analogies straight:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

1. Bin Laden is our Hitler: the man who invents, justifies, and orders mass murder and recruits the murderers. Evil. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

2. The 9/11 hijackers are his SS concentration-camp killers. Evil. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

3. Continuing this analogy, then, Muslims are Germans: just people. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

There is no equivalency in this for soldiers. Germans fought in their government's army. The terrorists have no army and no nation and no legitimacy whatsoever. So they should not be treated as soldiers. The only analogy that works for them is members of Charles Manson's death cult; that is why I used Manson in my headline on the earlier post. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Glazer gets it all screwed up thinking that humanizing Muslims has anything to do with humanizing 9/11 terrorists. That would be like saying that we want to make a movie humanizing SS concentration camp commandants to better understand Germans. That is wrong on three counts: First, it wants us to humanize murderers who are, yes, evil, and that would be misguided, pointless, and even dangerous; it tries to give sense to a senseless act, justification to an unjustifiable crime. Second, it judges a culture by its worst, which is unsulting to millions, blaming them all for the sins of a few. Third, this assumes that war criminals are merely soldiers, which they most certainly are not. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Glazer's perspective is, of course, merely the reverse view of the dangerous notion that we need to understand our enemy, the terrorists: Bill Maher's contention that we need to build a Why They Hate Us pavilion. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

No, we need to build a memorial to their victims to remember why we hate them. We need to fear them. We need to understand them only insofar as is necessary to defeat them. To humanize them would be insane. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Now to Britt's strange post:

But Jeff and I have a fundamental disagreement on a core principle. I believe that you can be a warrior and put yourself in harm's way without hating your enemy, but he seems committed to hate and revenge as a result of his near-death experience on 9/11. Every time he touches on his personal experience that day, the bile spills onto the page and, to my gentle sensibilities, poisons the dialogue that is the core of the give-and-take of blogging. Jeff seems to seek out opportunities to pick the scab of his near-death experience. Today's example is his "dread" (Jeff's word) of Brian Grazer's NBC mini-series on 9/11, presenting the viewpoint of the perps, whereby Grazer hopes to portray the Muslims in the way that Das Boot humanized the German U-Boat crews..... [He then quotes the post and continues....]

Jeff, you got the shit scared out of you. It happens. Get over yourself. Please.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

9/11 isn't about you, and it's beneath your dignity to take it so personally and viscerally. By over-personalizing your experience, you deprive us of the best of your wonderful gifts, which you bestow so freely when you treat every other subject. We get it that it affected you so personally and strongly. Hatred is a drug that's addictive, energizing and pervasive. The problem with all that testosterone and adrenaline coursing through your system is that you can't fly your plane as well....

Britt, let's go back to the analogy above: Would you tell a survivor of a concentration camp not to hate the commandant? Would you tell a survivor of the killing fields not to hate Pol Pot? Would you tell the child of a 9/11 victim not to hate bin Laden? Would you tell them to just get over themselves? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Would you condescend to them the way you have to me: to say that by disagreeing with Grazer, I'm pouring bile and ruining blogs? I had an opinion about what he said and engaged in a dialogue. You are the one who tries to psychoanalyze and personalize that, to separate it from the substance of the discussion, Britt. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Britt then goes on to give a spiel he tried to give to me at e-Tech a year ago -- and he's no more successful getting me to drink his Kool-Aid now than he was then. Britt was a Vietnam pilot and he likes to talk about the cool and unemotional reserve of a warrior pilot. I wonder whether it's some odd effort to bring together his Vietnam warrior days with his Deaniac peacenik days -- but then, that would be psychoanalyzing him, wouldn't it?

The question we need to ask ourselves is whether we should model our behavior on poorly-trained, superstitious Muslim terrorists or on our own highly trained military aviators? Because hatred and revenge are the M.O. of terrorists, not cool-headed warriors, we lower ourselves to their standards by relying on their fuels of choice: hatred and revenge. I submit that the work we must do is too important to rely on passion as our fuel. Rather, we must adopt the smart attitudes that are effective, rather than the compelling, visceral passions that feel so good.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

9/11 was a wake up call to a reality that we've been living in for forty years but have been unable to face. Devolving into ritualized, repetitious rants about how the enemy is evil and that there are no good enemies and no bad friendlies is worse than sophomoric. It's simply ill-informed and stupid and has been proven to be so by so many wars and jihads that to misunderstand those learnings is a conscious choice to embrace the only dark side available to us: ignorance and superstition that's been proven wrong.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Like our own Vietnam vets who've gone back and had tea with their former enemies and shared family photos and wept together, we too will some day sit down with former terrorists and meet the humans within. As will they. It has happened every time, with all the Gooks, Nips, Huns, Slopes and Ragheads that we've ever railed against as we firebombed their homes for no apparent military gain.

Once again, he messes up the analogy: We went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq and now we are sitting down with Afghans and Iraqis to help them build democracies -- but we damned well should not be sitting down with the terrorists in either nation -- including the murdering slime in the post below -- anymore than we should have sat down with the SS after World War II. By this logic, we should have canceled the Nuremberg trials and held an ice cream social: "Whipped cream, Herr Goering? Cherry, Herr Streicher? Please share your feelings, Herr von Rippentrop." d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And I most certainly believe that hate is an important weapon. If we let down our guard now and think that the terrorists are merely misunderstood, then we open the door to their next attack on our children. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I'm not a soldier, Britt. Your analogies don't work for me. I'm a civilian. And it was as a civilian on my way to work that I witnessed mass murder that day. So don't tell me I have to follow your orders to be cool under fire. I'm not in your army. Scared? Well, as much as I also bristle at your macho-military attempt to belittle and demean that perfectly sane reaction, I will say that, of course, I was scared and I still am and so should you be, so should America be. Personal? You bet your ass it's personal. But I wasn't talking about that in the post you didn't like. I was talking about the portrayal of mass murderers in network entertainment and wrote my opinion about that. You are the one who tried to make the discussion personal. And I am responding personally: I am insulted by your post. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Spammer

: I just got comment spam from this piece of monkeyshit. Why don't you go and tell him what you think of spammers?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Bastards

: I was passing through the newsstand in Grand Central yesterday just as, on TV sets hanging from the ceiling, FoxNews was showing the video of terrorist bastards shooting down a civilian hellicopter in Iraq and then killing the lone survivor. The place practically stopped. People all around the store just stood and looked up at the screens. Some, like me, just kept shaking their heads. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

These are not insurgents. To call them terrorists would be to dignify them. They are murderers. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Mainstreaming media (continued)

: As is his habit, David Weinberger started a fascinating conversation out of his decision to wipe off his TV makeup and leave the set of mainstream media. Here's his original post. Pay special attention to the comments there, including Jay Rosen's nattering dialogue with David. Here's my response to David. And in the comnents here, David responded in turn and here's the juicy bit:

... - It'd be easy to pretend this is a simple situation: Bad MSM, good bloggers. And, frankly, at this point I do believe that the mainstream media's values have been corrupted. So, taken as generalizations, yeah, sure bad MSM, good bloggers. But specific real cases are always complex. We have producers who are terrific people, and who may wish they could do more news and less crap. We have bloggers out to promote the blogosphere but in an environment where we don't get to set the rules. We have the usual melange of human motivation, as Jeff so honestly declares. It's complex, and simple reactions such as "Fuck 'em, I quit" can be betrayals of the complex nature of the situation. I had the flu and was presented with an egregious case of media pandering -- the Jane Fonda spit fest -- so I blurted out that this wasn't for me. I reduced a complex situation to a binary choice. I'm not sorry, but I'm not proud either.
And I said:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

David:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I did not address the important issue you raised in your post -- really, at the start of Jay Rosen's socratic badgering of you in the comments there -- and again in your response here. And it's the real issue, of course:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Have "mainstream media's values been corrupted"?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Well, uh, duh, yeah. See Michael Jackson, OJ, cable-news yellfests, witchhunts, local TV pyromania... everybody has a catalogue. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And you are not of mainstream media.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So correct me if I'm wrong, but here's what happened: Touched by those MSM cooties and fearing contamination, you recoiled and shouted inside: "Let me out! Let me out! Before it's too late!"d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I, on the other hand, corrupted and cootied since age 17, recognize and live with those issues but find small joy in small change: "Bloggers on TV. Cool!"d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The danger for a few of the commenters on your post -- not you, and you specifically pushed this notion aside -- is that they would reject mainstream media out of hand and wholly, throwing out the value of journalism along with its present-day folly. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The danger for me is that I ignore and add to the corruption: I answer the question, "What's the blogosphere saying about Michael Jackson, Jeff?" and I take small -- but still too much -- pride in quoting you, as it so happens, asking: "How do the journalists there -- people who got into the business because they are committed to an informed democracy -- feel about this outlandish pandering?" Oh, I asked the question. I even told the folks in little boxes on the screen with me that you were talking about us. But I didn't answer your question. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So that's the danger: corruption and cooties extend into our new and virginal not-a-medium-and-we-still-don't-know-what-to-call-what-ever-it-is: Bloggers, too, end up exhibiting the values of Michael-Jacksoned mainstream media. Let us out! Before it's too late!d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But, of course, as you well recognize, there is also an opportunity: Bridging the gap, the separation (Jay Rosen's word), that has grown between the press and the public it serves. I believe blogs are the agent of that change, the bridge that can bring the press back to its public. And I believe they can do that best when they are heard. And that's why I find small joy in the MSNBC segments and CNN segments and Business Week cover story: Citizens speak. For only 90 seconds, perhaps. On an often-odd list of topics that MSM still picks and agendas it still sets. With all the odd hoo-ha of TV and slick publishing. But in still small voices, they speak. And that's good. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But let me make clear who wins in that exchange:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Blogs don't need mainstream media.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Mainstream media needs blogs.
d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 22, 2005

Jumping the shark elephant (continued)

: John Podhoretz comes as close as I can imagine someone in the New York Post coming to confessing that the Republicans have crossed a few lines and gotten themselves into a political twist:

Ever since the Terry Schiavo controversy took its unexpected turn against the Right in polls — I say "unexpected" because major Democratic politicians acted as though they thought the issue would benefit the GOP when it was taken up in Congress back in February — Republicans are privately worried that they're losing touch with the American people.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The president's decision to focus the first months of his second term on Social Security reform seems to have backfired, with the public reacting skeptically and nervously about any change to the national pension system. And the media assault on House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is beginning to pay off, in part because DeLay's undeniable tactical brilliance as a legislator is matched only by his advanced case of foot-in-mouth disease....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Add to this a 1,000-point decline in the stock market occasioned in part by rising oil prices and fears of inflation, and you might say that this is the spring of Republican discontent.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

There's a lot of dark talk in Republican and conservative circles about the mainstream media — about the one-sidedness of the coverage of current political issues and how the American people are being manipulated, especially on the Terri Schiavo matter.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

No question about it, the media are on the prowl against the GOP — but there's something unseemly about the right-wing whining.

This is why I like Podhoretz: He calls bullshit, even sometimes when it's his party's bullshit. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Vote for Tony

: I agree with every word of Tom Friedman's column endorsing Tony Blair... and I laughed at this:

Remember, in the darkest hours of the Iraq drama, when things were looking disastrous (and there have been many such hours), Mr. Bush could always count on the embrace of his own party and the U.S. conservative media machine and think tanks.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Tony Blair, by contrast, dined alone. He had no real support group to fall back on. I'm not even sure his wife supported him on the Iraq war. (I know the feeling!)

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Mainstreaming media

: David Weinberger -- one of the five smartest and most decent people I've met in blogs (go ahead and guess the other four) -- fired himself from the (unpaid) blog gig on MSNBC after they suggested he should find mainstream blog reaction to that rude and ridiculous phooey ptooey into Jane Fonda's face. Go read his tale here and then Ed Cone's reaction and return and I'll tell you mine: d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I like working with MSNBC on the blog segments, but I do it under different circumstances: d3d9.dll aoe III trial

First, I've done TV, back in the days when I was a TV critic and I was called on to give views from the mountaintop on such profound topics as whither Cosby or whether Leno. So I've already made a fool of myself and experienced the hoo-ha of it all and that strange wave of sweaty embarrassment that comes over you when the lights go off. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Second, I'm already mediaman (by day and blogboy by night). I sold out to the man at age 17 -- and became the man sometime in my 30s -- and so I'm all too accustomed to the means and modes of mainstream media. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Third, because I work only a few miles from, as they say, MSNBC World Headquarters in beautiful downtown Secaucus, New Jersey, I've been in the studio many times and I've gotten to know and like the producers on Connected, the show that does most of the blog segments. Sharon Newman, the exec producer, is great: a pro's pro who's decisive and supportive and fun (when she speaks into my ear after a segment and tells me I done good when I fear I just went over the top, it makes everything OK). Her team of hard-working producers is wonderful to work with. The daytime booking boss, Mike Tanaka, was a dorm neighbor in college. Our worldwide blog friend Joe Trippi is involved. Cohost Monica Crowley has been warm and welcoming. And Ron Reagan called me Blog Daddy. So I have a direct connection you just don't get when you only stare into a black eye. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I have not yet had a case where they tried to get me to say something with which I would be uncomfortable -- and if they had, I wouldn't have done it. I ask what stories they are working on for the show to see whether I can find related blog comment (and sometimes, that yields more than one blog segment), but I often go in a different direction. A few times, they asked me whether I could find blog comment on a story they were working on, I said I couldn't, and they were fine with it. Once, though, I pooh-poohed their suggestion and I was wrong: The second time they wanted me to find Terry Schiavo blog links, I rolled my eyes and sighed and said that I was sure I couldn't because the first time I'd tried, all I saw was blog prayers (an oxymoron, to be sure). But then I looked for Schaivo discussion and I found I was way off: There was a flood of comment from many perspectives. By the fourth or fifth time I did Schiavo links, though, I will also confess that we were well into OD territory. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

David objects to being asked to find mainstream bloggers from column-A and column-B -- as is the cable news habit -- on a mainstream topic. I understand that. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But I have found that I have been able to leave the mainstream often. In the midst of the pretty-much-endless fawnfest over Pope Benedict XVI, I was glad to be able to quote from Andrew Sullivan's fears and trepidations at length. I have said more than once that blogs do not give the attention to Michael Jackson that TV news does and in one case -- when MSNBC and other cable networks put up clocks waiting for Jackson to arrive in court -- I quoted none other than David Weinberger expressing disgust at this and said that the hosts and I were at fault in this OD. I've talked about Maylasian blog pioneer Jeff Ooi's and Bahraini bloggers' problems with authorities. I've had plenty of bloggers I've quoted, apparently out of nowhere, who've email me and asked where the hell I found them (that's my secret). I've quoted mainstream bloggers here and there but most of the time, I've tried to find new voices I hadn't read before. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So why do I do this? Well, so far, it ain't for the money (zilch). Instead, I do it for:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

1. Ego. I'll admit it. I like being on TV. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

2. New voices. I'm not sure I deserve credit for this -- even though she has given me some -- but I quoted LaShawn Barber -- even though she and I disagree about many or most topics -- and she has ended up on MSNBC often. I got Kathy Shaidle in on the pope segment the other night. It's good to see big media finally listen to the voices of new people. And I measure diversty not by gender or race but by the freshness of the perspective.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

3. Promoting blogs. Triumphalist that I am, I'm glad to see big media include citizens' media. And on MSNBC, vs. CNN, they have bloggers quoting bloggers. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

4. Learning. I am learning a helluva about TV. As anyone who has watched any of my segments can attest, I have a lot more to learn. But I've gotten more comfortable staring into that black eye and telling a story. And I'm still jazzed that I got to broadcast from my den on my blogcam. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Could the segments be better? Of course. Are there issues? Yes, there are: As I mentioned once, they had a blogger on during the Schaivo story who went off a deepend and started talking about how Terry talked when they took the tubes out (and they didn't have a means of either making sure the guy wouldn't go wacky or issuing a caveat when he did... welcome to open TV). Would I chose every topic I report on? No, but neither would I have chosen many of the stories I had to write for newspapers or magazines (but in blogs, I get to chose every story I mention -- and I'm spoiled now). d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Having said all that, I absolutely understand David's discomfort and support his decision (as he supports mine to be on the segments). Everytime I drive to the MSNBC studio, I drive by the Channel 9 studios where, when I was a critic, I walked off a tacky talk show because I was uncomfortasble. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

David's perspective is an important lesson for any mainstream media outlet trying to find ways to work with citizen journalists: One perspective, one mindset, one medium does not automatically and easily fit the other's mold. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But I am disappointed with a few of the comments under David's post, thwapping a rubber hammer under the kneecap to kick big, bad mainstream media for being big and bad.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I give points to MSNBC for recognizing and listening to and promoting blogs -- and bloggers -- and I look forward to seeing more of this on other networks and channels and shows in other publications. Every first step will be imperfect, but it's a first step toward opening media to new voices. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Henceforce known as Wilson's Rule of Online

: And I quote: "Online does not canibalize offline, it turbocharges it."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Down the pole

: I was wandering around GoogleNews and found the strangest "news" site: all fires all the time. The joy of local TV news reporters everywhere. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It's easy to complain about complaining at the FCC

: John Eggerton at Broadcasting & Cable's blog has a nice bit of Catch-22ism from the FCC, which announces that it's now EASY to file complaints with our national nannies -- damn, just what we needed: a way to make it easy for the prudes and prigs to kneecap the First Amendment and waste bureaucrat-lawyers' time and taxpayer money everytime somebody says "damn." What's wonderful about this is that Eggerton goes on a wild-goosed chase trying to get to that EASY form and it's NOT EASY (thank goodness for small favors). Followup here. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Exploding TV

: More evidence of TV's explosion in a Deloitte report:

The report, "Television Networks in the 21st Century: Critical Mass in a Fragmenting World," argues that the model of a few dominant network channels -- funded by advertising -- has long been disappearing and may soon be gone for good. However, these changes also create new opportunities -- for networks that can evolve into a multi-dimensional, highly adaptable, customer-focused model. They also are expected to result in a variety of innovative products and services for consumers.
"...Networks will no longer attract mass audiences, and therefore they won't be able to charge premiums to advertisers. Their legacy business model will no longer be viable." [said Kern, Deputy Managing Principal, U.S. TMT group].
"However, there is also good news," said Kern. "Demand for content is exploding in all forms of media, and this creates significant opportunities...."
d3d9.dll aoe III trial
April 21, 2005

The real change in the news business

: AdAge reports on a McKinsey study on falling newspaper classified revenue:

[The study] warned that newspapers could lose $4 billion of "highly profitable" classified revenue by 2007 -- or around 20% of newspapers' 2004 classifieds revenue and just under 9% of the $46.6 billion in total newspaper ad revenue last year -- if trends that afflict help-wanted classifieds spread to automotive and real-estate classifieds.
This is why it is necessary to find new models to support reporting (see Gillmor; and I've heard some other revolutionary ideas lately) and new ways to save money (for example) and new ways to get more news (repeat after me: citizen journalists). d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Google growth

: Google now offers search history and is selling its search box for small enterprises. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Quoted

: The other day, I grabbed a wonderful quote from Bill Clinton at the Oklahoma City memorial. Here is the fuller quote:

It seems almost impossible that it's been a decade, doesn't it? The memories are still so clear. Yet, by the grace of God, time takes its toll not only on youth and beauty, but also on tragedy. The tomorrows come almost against our will. And they bring healing and hope, new responsibilities and new possibilities.
[via Carpundit]d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Highly recommended: The World is Flat

: I'm only a third of the way through Tom Friedman's new book, The World is Flat, but I have no hesitation in recommending it highly, even urgently. In fact, I bought it twice: on old, dead paper and on my iPod so I could use my commute to gobble it up faster. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

What's surprising about the book is how tech-savvy it is. Friedman shows the respect and curiosity of a true journalist in understanding the world-flattening significance of open-source software, of technology that enables outsourcing, of citizens' media. And on that topic, yes, he reads and quotes blogs and bloggers. He says he has not read the paper version of The Times, his paper, in two years. He says news should be free and so he won't pay for The Wall Street Journal Online. But he's also honest enough to admit that he's not crazy about Amazon selling used copies of his books. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Well, Tom, here's a suggestion: Take giant swaths of your book and put them up online -- using Dan Gillmor and Cory Doctorow as your models -- and I guarantee that you will find your theses and writing and name spread farther faster than the best damned publishing PR campaign in the world. And you'll sell more books (and audio downloads).d3d9.dll aoe III trial

That is especially true of this book, for it speaks to the very online audience that is finding new ways to flatten this world of ours. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But don't wait for Friedman and his publisher to wake up and put the book online. Don't wait to buy a used copy off of Amazon. Go buy the book now. You'll thank me for the advice. (And I'll tell you if I change my mind after the next two-thirds.)d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Dinosaur roar

: The frequently clueless Editor & Publisher, voice of the newspaper industry (:cough:), is without clue again today with a piece that advises:

Blogs are a horrible way to deliver journalism. Forget them.
Near as I can tell, this is written by a young person named Graham Webster who says he blogs but gives neither his age (which is relevant) nor his URL (ditto). Transparency, people, transparency. Still, you don't have to old to roar like a dinosaur. He misses the point: Blogs aren't about big publishers blogging; they are about the public publishing. Webster admits that he reads blogs to get story ideas. Ding! Ding! Ding! You read them to get... NEWS! d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Still alive...

... despite evidence to the contrary. Long and crazy day of meetings. Online later. Withdrawl symptoms bad. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 20, 2005

Tab wars

: Bild, the German tabloid, complains about its English tabloid cousins and their Hitler-youth headlines on Benedict XVI: "English insult German pope!"d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The Sueddeutsche Zeitung has a gallery of front pages on the pope. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Tipping point (continued)

: Lost Remote find more evidence of big media embracing blogs at the RTNDA:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: "I think citizen journalism is a huge force that's going to get greater and greater. There's no stopping it," CNN President Klein said. "As long as we're clear what the audience created and what CNN created, there's room for both in this universe." d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: "I don't know why Brian Williams isn't blogging right now," said NBC Universal Television Group President Jeff Zucker at a Yahoo conference. "We should be looking for a more interactive component... and be experimenting more." Zucker said he also envisioned a Katie Couric blog...d3d9.dll aoe III trial

More on the tipping point here. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Next: The Chuck Manson You Never Knew

: I had to read it three times, not believing that even a Hollywood executive could say something so awfully insensitive and idiotic and so much of a self-parody of show biz PC. But in a story about the 9/11 movies and miniseries in the making, he said it:

Brian Grazer, co-chairman of Imagine Television, which is producing the NBC mini-series - and which has hired The Times as a consultant - said he hoped it would do for Muslims what Wolfgang Petersen's film "Das Boot" did for World War II-era Germans.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"Every approach prior to that was, the Germans were horrible," he said. "He humanized them, because they are human. That's what I'm hoping we do, that we don't demonize, that we humanize all the different sides, and so we see the seeds, and we get an understanding from each culture's point of view as to how they got to such a horrible place."

He wants to "humanize all the different sides." How the hell do you humanize the evil bastards who killed 3,000 innocent fellow Americans, Glazer? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

What seeds are there that make mass murder understandable or justifiable? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

What point of view do you need to see that these men are evil? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And if you try to say that you're talking about the larger world of Islam, then it's Muslim bloggers who should be flaming your ass right now for presuming that these murderers are in any way representative of them as a people. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Explain yourself, Mr. Glazer. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: This, by the way, is a classic case for wanting to read or hear the entire interview with Glazer to see whether there is any context in which what he says could possibly make any sense. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: I dread most of these movies. The Times says they are debating whether to show planes hitting the buildings. That is the least of the horror of the day. It's one matter to give witness and learn lessons, another to exploit. I'm not sure we can find the line yet. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: And there are more reasons to dread these: "The Great New Wonderful," a film about survivors a year later, comes from Danny Leiner, who made stoner movies "Dude, Where's My Car?" and "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle." And producer Scott Rudin is making a movie from Jonathan Safran Foer's novel "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," which turns images of a victim falling to his death into a flipbook in reverse. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Yes, "dread" is not too strong a word. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

RTNDA links on citizens' media

: I was virtually part of a panel on blogs and TV at the Radio-Television News Directors Association confab in Vegas (they were in Vegas and I was on the blogcast in New York but the sound was bad and I couldn't hear so I no doubt looked duh dumb and issued some non sequitors.... ah, technology). Anyway, I said I'd post some useful links for the crowd there. Here they are:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: A list of links to blogs of interest to media folks (done for the Aspen Institute last summer but not too out-of-date).d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: My PowerPoint on citizens media and the newsroom for that Aspen gabfest. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: A few good directories of blogs. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: I suggested having reporters to go Technorati.com and Pubsub as well as A9.com (as suggested by Steve Rubel here to have them find what bloggers are saying about the topics of their stories. I said I use these tools to find blogs for MSNBC blog reports. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: I recommend reading Rupert Murdoch's speech on newspapers and online (the same holds for broadcast); Merrill Brown's Carnegie report on newspapers and youth (the same holds for broadcast); and Bob Garfield's report on the coming chaos in marketing and media. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The demo vlog I made for the panel today. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: A few of my media posts: a Q&A on media's future at Corante... a new model for local citizens' journalism.... an email/blog exchange with NY Times Executive Editor Bill Keller... an argument that anyone can do journalism... two pieces on Dan Rather... two posts about challenges facing news media and ways to attack them... a post about blogcasting on MSNBC... too damned many posts about exploding TV, media, weblogs, and censorship and Howard Stern... d3d9.dll aoe III trial

No, I don't expect anybody to read much from that last bullet; I've just been meaning to compile them in one place so I can find them (ah, if only Flickr had popularized tags when I started this blog). d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Turning the other cheek and/or face

: On the third of three "hits" -- as they say in TVland -- on MSNBC yesterday, I joined Kathy Shaidle of Relapsed Catholic (my suggestion) and Mark Shea of Catholic and Enjoying It, who were both very good on the tube. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I gave my what's-the-blogosphere-saying-on-this-Jeff spiel, starting with German reaction (Heiko Hebig says now the Germans will win the World Cub and "Wir sind wieder wer," which I hope I translated correctly as, we're somebody again). Next, I went to positive reaction like Kathy's, who had said she was glad this "will annoy all the right people." I quoted Curt Jester: "Of course besides having this wonderful man as Pope we get the added bonus of him really annoying the dissidents." And I quoted from Ratzinger Fan Club, which was hammered by traffic and down just then. I said they were triumphal.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But this was also a controversial election and to illustrate that I could find no better illustration than Andrew Sullivan, who said: "This was not an act of continuity. There is simply no other figure more extreme than the new Pope on the issues that divide the Church. No one.... And I expect the Church's immersion in the culture wars in the West - on every imaginable issue. For American Catholics, I foresee an accelerating exodus.... This was a statement as much as a selection. And the statement is that the church is circling the wagons."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Shea was then introduced and asked what he was seeing on the blogosphere and he said he was seeing what I saw. He then gave a very good interview and Kathy did likewise.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

See the segment, thanks to Ian, here.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Then, this morning, I read Shea's blog. I see a very different picture there, about "a guy named Jeff Jarvis:"

After that, Jeff Jarvis came on to give the Polarization Report from the Blogosphere. It turns out that those who are happy about Ratzinger's election are "triumphalists" while those who are wetting themselves and losing control of basic bodily functions due to panic are freedom-loving custodians of the flickering flame of all that is good and decent in this world. In particular, Jarvis quoted Andrew Sullivan's magnificent shriek of hysteria with its absurd claim that this is some sort of radical discontinuity from the legacy of John Paul and the Council....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Kathy Shaidle, as possessor of the pair of XX chromosomes in the group, was anointed to speak on behalf of all Womankind, but failed her entire sex by not much caring whether women are ordained or not.

Gee, he seemed to be enjoying himself at the time; I heard no dissent or complaints. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

There are many viewpoints on this story. Blogs reflect that. I selected blogs that, in turn show that. Was I supposed to quote only the fawning posts? Oh, and yes, I would call the tone of many triumphal. And I don't think that's a bad word, being accused of blog triumphalism all the time. So what's wrong with a little Catholic triumphalism, eh?
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April 19, 2005

Media on Media: Papal edition

: Scheduled to be on MSNBC at 3:40p ET and again between 5-6p ET on -- what else? -- the new pope. Click more for the links I plan to discuss (sorry: not hot until I get time later)d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I suggested Kathy Shaidle for the Connected hits and she's going to be on at the same time. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

** ThePopeBlog.blogspot.comd3d9.dll aoe III trial

** Wikipedia.comd3d9.dll aoe III trial

** RatzingerFanClub.com (probably not up)d3d9.dll aoe III trial

** AmyWelborn.typepad.comd3d9.dll aoe III trial

** RelapsedCatholic.blogspot.comd3d9.dll aoe III trial

** DamianPerry.comd3d9.dll aoe III trial

** Hebig.comd3d9.dll aoe III trial

** RatzingerFanclub.comd3d9.dll aoe III trial

** RelapsedCatholic.Blogspot.comd3d9.dll aoe III trial

** SplendorofTruth.com/CurtJesterd3d9.dll aoe III trial

** AndrewSullivan.comd3d9.dll aoe III trial

** NationalReview.comd3d9.dll aoe III trial

** CNTodd.blogspot.comd3d9.dll aoe III trial


Plus...
: PunditGuy has a news roundup.
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They have their man

: After much debate about the hue of the smoke, there is a new pope. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: It is Ratzinger.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: There's a Ratzinger Fan Club blog.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Wikipedia had his new name in immediately.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Tube boobs

: This is incredible: The head of the National Association of Broadcasters selfishly argues for extending indecency regulations to cable just because if he has to suffer under unconstitutional FCC censorship of free speech, he wants his competitors to as well. If the man likes censorship so much, he would have done well to have stuck a gag in his own mouth before he delivered that idiotic and dangerous speech.

President and CEO Eddie Fritts, speaking during the opening ceremony of the NAB's convention in Las Vegas, said broadcasters prefer “responsible industry self-regulation” to government regulation. “But I must ask: if Congress decides to regulate broadcasters for indecency, does it make any sense for cable, satellite TV (and) satellite radio to get a free pass?” Fritts said.
But it's not just one fool. This is apparently NAB policy:
"If you are going to regulate broadcasters, the same rules ought to apply," NAB spokesman Dennis Wharton said.
Note that even Bush is not pushing for indecency regulation creeping into satellite and cable. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The Boi from Troy says it wonderfully:

This issue is not new. In fact, it reinforces my belief in Nineties Nostalgia. Rather than seek to regulate cable and satellite content, Bill Clinton pushed the market to adopt the V Chip and a ratings system. That way, even if a parent were not around, they could choose which programs and stations to which family members had access.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

What we've got here is a question of personal responsibility--a theme George Bush highlighted in his 2000 Presidential Campaign. With 200+ stations across the dial--appealing to animal lovers, women, history buffs, motorcyclists, and soon, homosexuals--you pretty much know what to expect whenever you choose to watch a certain station. If seeing kimodo dragons bite off water buffalo testicles is not your kind of thing, don't watch Animal Planet!d3d9.dll aoe III trial

By suggesting that the federal government should regulate cable and satellite content, he is saying that the "Responsibility Era" is not about taking personal responsibility...it's about the federal government taking responsibility for the rest of us. And in this case, I have to say I prefer Clinton's approach to Bush's.

: Pieter Dorsman says that the government and the industry are moving past the V-Chip to the N-chip. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Brendan Loi agrees with Boi from Troy as does Roger L. Simon; ditto Nobody's Business.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: An archive of many of my recent posts on the topic here. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: On the V-chip: I actually opposed the V-chip when it was proposed years ago and, back when I was a TV critic, I got into a loud argument about it with Democratic Rep. Ed Markey on John McLaughlin's old cable show. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

My argument was that by enabling this technology and empowering networks to decide what content gets the scarlet V, we also enable government to argue that the ratings aren't right and to decide what content should be tagged with the label. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Note that, of course, the so-called Parents Television Council is arguing that the networks aren't labeling content properly [via TVGeekSpeak]. We can see where this heads. Slippery, that slope.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Then and now I still favor (1) the First Amendment, (2) the marketplace, (3) parents' authority, and (4) the off-button. But the V-chip already exists and so it is being used as an argument against further government regulation. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Quoted

: President Bill Clinton at the Oklahoma City memorial today:

By the grace of God, time takes its toll not only on youth and beauty but also on tragedy.
d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It is relative

: Cardinal Ratzinger issued his attack against "relativism" as the cardinals went into their conclave. Of course, one can easily turn that around and say that he was merely defending orthodoxy -- his orthodoxy:

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism that has at its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires," Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger told his fellow electors....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In his sermon, Ratzinger called on cardinals to defend Catholic orthodoxy and reject attempts to update or change church teaching. He did not cite any specific teachings under fire, but the church is struggling to deal with demands by many Catholics for changes in the rules banning contraception, married priests, ordination of women and expanded rights for gays and lesbians.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"Adult faith is not one that follows tides of trends and the latest novelties," Ratzinger said.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

He saved his harshest condemnation for "relativism," which he said denies absolute truths. "Relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, looks like the only attitude acceptable by today's standards," Ratzinger said.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

He also defended fundamentalism, saying it was under attack because it was based on "clear faith."

I harken back to a post I wrote a few days ago, saying that we are still going through the Reformation as Ratzinger et al defend an orthodoxy of (their) institutional authority and the religious right defends an orthodoxy of (their) reading of the word. Meanwhile, the reformers -- myself among them -- argue that we each must work to discern morality and God's will the face of life (and if we did not, then, as someone pointed out on the radio this morning, the Catholic church would still be against usery and not against slavery and regarding slavery, the same could be said of many Protestant denominations).
This is not moral relativism. This is moral responsibility. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

These are three radically different worldviews, so different that adherents to one have trouble understanding or even tolerating adherents to another. And the conflict is getting greater as the forces of orthodoxy and fundamentalism in many cloaks face an era of d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This is an age when the individual is more empowered than ever. You can publish your message to the world from anywhere in the world. You can learn and start a business and organize a cause the globe around thanks to the internet. You can question authority. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In many spheres, we see the bearers of authority and orthodoxy fighting against this trend of empowering individuals. It's happening in religion, journalism, media, politics, world relations, academics. And the dinosaurs roar. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: At NRO, Michael Novak praises Ratzinger's speech:

This, Ratzinger fears, is a move back toward the justification of murder in the name of “tolerance” and subjective choice.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Along with that move, he has observed (haven’t we all?), comes a dictatorial impulse, to treat anyone who has a different view as “intolerant.” For instance, those (on the “religious right”) who hold that there are truths worth dying for, and objective goods to be pursued and objective evils to be avoided, are now held to be “intolerant” fundamentalists, guilty of “discrimination.”d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In other words, the new dictatorial impulse declares that the only view permissible among reasonable people is the view that all subjective choices are equally valid. It declares, further, that anyone who claims that there are objective truths and objective goods and evils is “intolerant.” Such persons are to be expelled from the community, or at a minimum re-educated. That is to say, all Catholics and others like them must be converted to relativism or else sent into cultural re-training camps.

Charles Norman Todd at Freiheit und Wissen responds forcefully to Novak:
Novak argues that the success of the Nazis depended upon a culture that embraced relativism. Shocking, isn’t it? Novak claims that in order for the Nazis to succeed, the people had to dismiss truth or meaning and embrace the individual will as the only source of significance.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Now, Novak is being sly here and he knows it. He knows that many on the Left see a tendency towards fascism in the current Bush administration. He also knows that many self-identified liberals think it would be dangerous to further integrate Christianity into the workings of the federal government, particularly into the judiciary system. And so, Novak attempts to rewrite history by saying, no, no, no, the real success of the Nazis had nothing to do with authoritarian rule or the merging of Christian rhetoric with politics, they were just modern day liberal relativists! And so, implies Novak, if you want to keep the dangers of Nazism out of this country, then you better reject relativism and embrace the absolute will of God. Scary, huh?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I cannot believe that Novak would have the balls to write something so perverse on the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing in which a right-wing Christian terrorist massacred 168 people. It wasn’t relativism that led to that bombing, but fanatical Christian extremism and the belief in an absolute truth.

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The decade of terrorism

: MikesNoise, an Oklahoma City blogger, is sharing his remembrance of that day, 10 years ago:

I had lunch out at a restaurant that day. It was probably one of the eeriest things I've ever experienced. The place was full and yet you could hear a whisper. No one seemed to be saying anything. They just ate quietly and talked in nervous, hushed tones. I finished my meal and headed back to work.
[via Malkin]d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Smoke signals

: The original BREAKING NEWS! came from that smokestack over the Vatican. The official, binary news was released -- white or black, straight from the source, no chance for rumors -- and then it spread with the speed of voice and feet. That's how news used to work and that's why it's so amusingly anachronistic to see people sitting at the Vatican with their cell phones -- "nope, no smoke yet," they're all surely saying -- while MSNBC puts up its smoke cam. Today, the news should be announced via SMS.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: LATER: At 11:50a, MSNBC is debating whether the smoke coming out now is black or white. The wires say it's black. But the crowds are cheering. And Vatican Radio, they say, just switched from saying that it's black to saying it appears white. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 18, 2005

Duh

: On MSNBC's Connected last week, I quoted a blog about McDonald's 50th and I struggled over how to pronounce the name: EEE-ah-triss-dot-com, is what I settled on. And then I got email from the very nice blogger behind that blog. ieatrice is actually I... eat... rice. It's even next to a rice bowl. I'm such an idiot.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But this does remind me, bloggers: When I want to link to a blog (or plug it on TV), I'd love to say the name of the blogger. But it's amazing how many blogs don't bother to put their names on their home pages and not because they're trying to remain anonymous but just because they apparently assume that anyone reading already knows who they are.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

As they say on NPR in letters time: Make sure to include your name and how to pronounce it.....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Spamming for Jesus

: I've all of a sudden been getting lots of fundamentalist religious spam, the moral equivalent of chain letters and indulgences. Oh, Lord, make it stop. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Informed sniping

: Over at Michael Totten's site, Mary Madigan rounds up the bugs buzzing around Prof. Eeyore, Juan Cole, starting with this from The New Republic (free but irritating registration required):

Having done hardly any independent research on the twentieth-century Middle East, Cole's analysis of this era is essentially derivative, echoing the conventional wisdom among Arabists and Orientalists regarding Islamic and Arab history, the creation of the modern Middle East in the wake of World War I, and its relations with the outside world. Worse, Cole's discussion of U.S. foreign policy frequently veers toward conspiratorial anti-Semitism. This is hardly the "informed" commentary Cole claims it to be.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Among the Arabist orthodoxies to which Cole subscribes is the view that external powers are responsible for the Middle East's endemic malaise.

[thanks, Ruth]d3d9.dll aoe III trial

If conservatives are from South Park...

: ... then liberals are from Deadwood. Or so says Matt Welch: " Out with the mealy-mouthed PC murmuring, in with the ribald & flowery language of the American frontier." d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I'd prefer the idea that liberals live on Wisteria Lane. [via Sploid]d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Next: FoxNews Friends, BBC Buddies, and Post Pals

: I keep looking for signs that it is a parody but I can't find them. There is actually a site called Friends of Al Jazeera. Why? "Journalism is in tatters and AlJazeera is trying to bring back some dignity to the profession." d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This story has legs

: Michelle Malkin compiles links finding conspiracies in making Ann Coulter -- "Ms. Right" -- ook incredibly leggy on the cover of Time. I find a different conspiracy: Making her the symbol of the right would be like, oh, making Michael Moore the symbol of the left, eh?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Freedom blogging

: Michael J. Totten, in Beirut, sends us to a Lebanese freedom blog from the tent city. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Dear Mel Karmazin,

: I've been a Sirius satellite radio customer for three months now and a Sirius shareholder for twice that time. I'm a happy customer; I'd far rather have satellite radio than not. But still, I have some advice for you, Mel:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: First, you are not a satellite company. You are not a distribution company. You are a content company in the age of consumer control. So let me control my content. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

You already stream your channels online -- though you make it a real pain in the ass to get into it (you have to send me passwords when I should just be able to get there from the account I already have). Just last week, AOL and XM agreed to replace AOL's sad online radio with XM channels. See also how millions more people watched MSNBC's pope coverage via streams instead of cable. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Streaming's OK, but it's not enough; it's already so yesterday. Listening to a PC just doesn't cut it. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So when Howard Stern finally gets fired and rejoins you, I will want his show as a podcast I can download so I can listen to it when and where I want. I'm paying for it, so give it to me that way. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And when I get a broadband phone, I'll want to stream my favorite shows over the phone instead of your satellite (since it doesn't work everywhere and it's bulky and balky). d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: As for your music channels, why not let the DJs create iTunes playlists according to their nichey tastes so I can buy from them (and you get a cut, Mel).d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Why not also let your audience program some channels: Let various communities submit their playlists and may the best taste win. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The programming you have now needs work. Lots of work. That's what I'm paying for: the content. And the content is iffy. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The Elvis channel is a cute idea but it's a sinful waste of spectrum. Some of the rock channels don't have clear identities. The classical channels are pap. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Sirius also does a crappy job explaining what the channels are and what's on them. You should treat every channel as if it were a radio station with clear format and strong marketing. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: I'm glad I can listen to cable news channels in my car. But the obvious killer ap would be to listen to broadcast channels. I'd listen to Today. I'd be happy not to miss Desperate Housewives (though, of course, I would be missing the nicely tight fashions). Go do the deal. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Your technology -- how do I put this? -- sucks. In my car, I lose the signal too often. I don't know what you can do about it, but that's unacceptable. If you have to microwave my car, get me a stronger, more reliable signal. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

At home, the room where I want to listen to Sirius doesn't happen to be on the right side of the house and so I have to put the silly little antenna on top of bookshelves and wear tin foil to listen; it reminds me of the old days of rabbit ears, man. You need to come up with wireless antennas that can send the signal anywhere in the house. Think wi-fi, Mel. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The design and user interface of my radio is the worst of it. It's dreadful. The buttons operate differently on the radio and on the remote control (honestly: hit the "up" button on one and the display goes one way; it "up" on the other and it goes the other way... didn't anybody use this thing before they started selling it?). The screen is impossible to read in the daylight. It takes a damned engineering degree and skill, patience, and time I don't have to hook and unhook the radio in the car (it should just pop in and out, damnit). d3d9.dll aoe III trial

No, I lied, the worst of it is getting the satellite signal into my car radio. Now I have to transmit an FM signal in the car and in a market like New York, where every bit of spectrum is taken, that simply doesn't work. The sound is awful. I could use a cassette adapter but in my car, the cassette play makes a terrible racket (again, not your fault) and, anyway, cassettes are going the way of dodos. That's not your fault, Mel. For years, I have wished that car radios came with a simple input plug, like any cheap stereo. You don't make the cars but you can lobby car manufacturers to fix this for satellite radio... and iPods.... and even using stereo speakers with cell phones. And, no, buying a car radio with the receiver built in doesn't do the trick since I don't want to have to buy another radio for my home and pay another monthly fee. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Which reminds me: Charging me additional fees for additional radios is the mistake the cable industry and the phone industry before it made: Don't penalize me for wanting to use your service more. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Now about your advertising: It is unbearable! Sirius is not commercial free -- only the music is -- and I didn't get that message when I signed up. I understand that you have to put something in the spots when CNN goes to commercials on TV. I could even tolerate commercials then if it lowered the cost of my subscription. But the commercials and promos you put in there are all for a truckdriver demographic and they're repeated to the point of getting me to turn back to broadcast. Mel, you're a salesman, so go sell some real commercials. Anything would be better than that junk.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

You've been on the job for only a few months. You don't even have Howard -- and his new channels -- yet. I'm patient. But I thought a few suggestions might be helpful....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

No, really, say what you think

: I find a blog by a young Canadian reacting to Rupert Murdoch's speech:

I hate almost everything about newspapers. I don't like the size of the paper. I don't like the way it makes everything black. I don't like that every page has to be jammed full of stuff. I don't like that the pages are not full color. I don't like that once I find something interesting, I can't do anything with it (like send it to a friend, or blog about it with a link, etc). Please newspaper editors, hear Murdoch's call, and bring the newspaper into the digital age!
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April 17, 2005

Dry land

: I used to think that when I got to middle age, I'd enjoy going on cruises. But between the germs and the seven-story waves, I don't think so. I'm staying on dry land.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

'You report, you decide'

: It's wonderful watching what I think is a global warming in mainstream media toward citizens' media. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

We may just be at the tipping point. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The latest evidence of the attitude shift is FoxNews' MediaWatch cordial discussion about major media using citizens (Trey Jackson has the video). It's a nice little wink from Fox that the crawl on the screen as the panel talked said, "You report, you decide."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It may or may not be a coincidence -- I'll bet it's not -- but this comes only days after Fox boss Rupert Murdoch gave a speech pushing the idea of mainstream media using citizens' media. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

As I mentioned in my full disclosure in the post about Murdoch's speech, I happened to have some small supporting role in getting that notion into the speech -- and I'm surprised it succeeded. The fuller story: Someone who was helping on the speech called -- via a mutual friend -- and I pointed him to Merrill Brown's Carnegie report and The Vanishing Newspaper -- both of which perfectly backed up the thesis of Murdoch's message. And, of course, I couldn't resist playing all my soundbites about a new world of citizens' media. I play those soundbites at every opportunity (I don't just blog about it; I bore people in person, too, like a preacher on Times Square) and I'm used to it going nowhere; that's what I expected to happen here. But the person I spoke with found Murdoch cautiously receptive and a suggestion that newspapers should be open to blogs and hyperlocal citizens' media ended up in his speech to the nation's newspaper editors: "...We may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net," he said. I think he said it because the time is right. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

About a year ago, I had lunch with a former colleague at TV Guide who's still at News Corp. and I told her that cable news should use networks of webcams in the homes and offices of experts, analysts, bloggers, pundits, and panels of citizens to get immediate input and reaction to news. I said it would take the FoxNews revolution -- which was really a business revolution that was all about turning news into an (inexpensive) on-air conversation and getting rid (expensive) produced pieces -- and bring in more viewpoints at an even faster pace and at an even lower cost. I wasn't selling the idea, just lunching on it. But my friend introduced me to an exec at FoxNews who pretty much pooh-poohed it because "the backhaul won't be broadcast quality." But it would be better than Oliver North's satphone, I protested, and it's going to be ubiquitous and cheap and fast. I was dismissed.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

A year later, I was broadcasting on competitor MSNBC with just such a webcam and Ed Cone and others are doing it now, too. It's all in the timing. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I know of the heads of at least three national TV news operations who are eager to incorporate citizens' media; I know of more newspaper editors who are finally siddling up to the concept. I hear less and less of the dismissive jabs from big-time editors about small-time citizen journalists. Blogs are now a regular feature on MSNBC and CNN. Bloggers are getting quoted in newspapers and credited with big stories (Trend, Dan, et al). Newspapers are getting published with citizens' news. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It's spreading. It's tipping.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

We are beyond the point of arguing about bloggers v. journalists (thank goodness!). We are beyond the point of screaming for bloggers to be heard. Yes, we are beyond the point of triumphalism. We are at the point of put-up-or-shut-up: Now it's about joining in and showing what we can do. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I think Murdoch's speech will turn out to be a landmark. After he scolded the newspaper (and news) industry for complacency in the face of audience desertion, after he warned of more collapse ahead, and after he suggested relying on the public to help save the day, I didn't hear a chorus of boos from the audience. We're past that. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Yes, I do think we're at the tipping point. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Tim Porter tips, too. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 16, 2005

Around the world in 80 blogs

: Global Voices is maintaining a great list of worldwide blogs. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Meanwhile, back at this ranch, DeepBlog is a good list of good blogs. When people ask you for a starting point to read blogs, this looks like a decent suggestion. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: And continuing this roundup of roundups, here's BlogHeaven from Beliefnet. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Jumping the shark for Jesus: the Dean response

: Howard Dean smells opportunity from the religious right's, uh, extreme reaction to the Schiavo matter. He's right. But he's also characteristically, uh, blunt and I wonder whether that's the best way to take advantage of the opportunity.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, who has accused congressional Republicans of "grandstanding" in the Terri Schiavo case, said his party will use it against the GOP in coming elections.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"This is going to be an issue in 2006, and its going to be an issue in 2008 because we're going to have an ad with a picture of (House Majority Leader) Tom DeLay saying, 'Do you want this guy to decide whether you die or not? Or is that going to be up to your loved ones?'" Dean said in West Hollywood, Calif.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Dean, answering questions at an Access Now for Gay and Lesbian Equality event on Friday, went on to say: "The issue is: Are we going to live in a theocracy where the highest powers tell us what to do? Or are we going to be allowed to consult our own high powers when we make very difficult decisions?'"

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If you're not aggregated, you're nowhere

: One of the online issues I've been meaning to catch up on is the report that the Associated Press is following Agence France Presse in going after GoogleNews. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

My two cents: It would be a big mistake to pull out of GoogleNews. The reason: d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In this new world of distributed media, if you're not aggregated, you're nowhere. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The prior law was: If you can't be scraped and then found via a search engine, you're nowhere. The idea that media can or should control presentation and distribution is over. Toast. Control has passed to the public, and search engines, aggregators, browsers, and the internet are their tools of presentation and distribution. Media have lost control. The flow in the pipe has reversed. So go with the flow, mediamen, go with the flow. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And there are more pigs in this pipeline: If a site does not have RSS, it soon won't be seen by many, for example. Google is trying to turn video into a searchable medium and TV stations will be fools if they don't put up their media with metadata to be found. Radio listeners are now demanding on-demand content thanks to the precedent of podcasts and radio stations should follow the examples of WNYC and the BBC and pod' their stuff. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Media must figure out how to embrace all these tools of consumer control. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So now back to the AP: When GoogleNews points to a wire story, it points to that story on a member's site. Keep in mind that the AP is owned by its member news organizations; it is a cooperative rather than a company. So if the AP pulled its content out of GoogleNews, it would be pulling traffic away from its members -- its owners -- and that would be a big mistake. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Last I heard, Drudge is the No. 1 referrer of traffic to The New York Times and The Washington Post online (not to mention Josh Marshall). You don't hear them telling Drudge to knock it off with the links, do you? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Ah, but I hear some saying, GoogleNews makes a fuller presentation of the news. But it's not so full that I could just look at that page and get all I need; I use it to link to the news I really want. And GoogleNews' fuller presentation only makes it a better aggregator with more information -- a headline taken from the news source (rather than spit out by Drudge) along with a lead -- so readers have a better idea of whether they want to click on the links. In other words: GoogleNews delivers more interested (or, as we say in medialand, "qualified") audience. I know there are more aggregators on the way that will do likewise. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

YahooNews, on the other hand, does license the AP and use it to create a full presentation of the news. The problem with that, for AP members, is that readers do not need to -- and do not -- leave YahooNews. Other news organizations see YahooNews as a competitor. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

News organizations are developing a funny, mixed relationship with Google. In terms of news, they hope that GoogleNews will continue to be their promoter. I hear many an (enlightend) editor wonder how to get more links from them. But on the business side, things are more complicated: Many media organizations are using Google AdSense to make money via targeted text ads. But the day is fast approaching when Google will compete with newspapers and local services for retail advertising. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Still, when it comes to search and aggregation -- text or video -- media organizations will want the links. Otherwise, they will become the dead trees that fell in the forest and no one was there to read or watch them. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

By the way, at the recent Reuters panel on blogs and big media, Patrick Phillips of IWantMedia asked the top execs of that wire service whether they were going to follow the AFP lead and go after GoogleNews. Absolutely not, the bosses said: They want their stories read. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So, I'm often asked, why did AFP do this? I have only one answer: They're French. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: MORE: Susan Mernit (who has consulted for the AP) has a different perspective, saying that the agency and Google should have an agreement. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Meet the pro

: Bill Grueskin, managing editor of WSJ.com, is one of the savviest and nicest and also most unsung guys in online news. He and I happened upon each other after I messed up a WSJ.com link, as I remember; we ended up having lunch (that's what media guys do; it's how we link), and quickly saw that we see eye-to-eye. But Bill doesn't blog (hint, hint) or do the panel circuit (he's the smart one) and so we don't hear enough from him and of his experience. Jay Rosen rectifies that with a great interview. Some of the bonnier mots:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: They talk about WSJ.com getting away with actually charging consumers for content online. Bill says:

Well, information wants to be free, as the saying goes. But the saying goes further than that, it turns out.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Here's the whole quote, from Stewart Brand's book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT :

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.
It's hard to believe those words were published nearly two decades ago, because they so closely capture the essence of today's argument....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I would say that the search for a single answer--paid vs. free--is as fruitless as a blogger vs journalist argument. You can be successful either way. Ultimately, it comes down to how you see your role in the media universe.

: Jay says, in a throwaway line that will live forever:
Maybe we need a new "law" of information. Lola's law. It states that information gets what information wants.
: Bill on the flurry of old/new-media deals lately (Dow Jones and Marketwatch, Washington Post and Slate, NY Times and About):
Each deal shows that we are rethinking what it means to be a media company, with a strong newspaper component, in a digital age....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

What I think is changing is that for years, the debate was largely about distribution of content; that is, how do we get our stories in front of readers and do it in a way that brings in money and doesn't upset traditional revenue models? With these deals in hand, I think we are going to see the debate go beyond distribution and on to the content itself -- how do we report the news so it works online?

And not a nanosecond too soon.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Bill on running a new-media product tethered to old-media, each with great value that cannot be overlooked by the other:

The "balancing act" approach disappoints new online readers and fails to excite print readers making the transition. So you have to come up with a new language of journalism, with traditional roots in our standards, but that treats online like the revolutionary medium that it is. And then you have to hammer it home with your staff.
: Bill on MSM blogs:
Lately, a number of newsmagazine and newspaper sites have started blogs. The results, especially in bigger publications, are often dreadful. Many mainstream-media blogs serve as repositories for the journalistic detritus that wasn’t good enough for the print edition. They manage to combine the worst of both worlds: Hemmed in by tradition, they lack the candor and point of view that distinguishes good blogs. Bereft of good material, they lack the depth and quality of print journalism.
Yup. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: These interviews are among what Rosen does best. Hope he does more. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Blog catch-up day

: There's something very wrong with your life when you start looking on Saturday as blog catch-up day. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 15, 2005

blogdaddy.jpg
On MSNBC's Connected

: Going to be on Connected at 5p ET to talk about Frist/filibuster/faith, McDonald's and Google video, all below. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Good ol' (young) Ian Schwartz has the video. Ron Reagan called me his "blog daddy." I wanted to protest that I wasn't that old; couldn't I be his blog brother? But note the lower-third (as we call it in TVland): I'm now blog daddy.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Armstrong Williams -- Oops

: New Education Secretary Margaret Spelling admits hiring Armstrong Williams as a mouthpiece was a serious lapse of judgment. Thereby she throws predecessor Rod Paige to the wolves. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Meanwhile, Congress, the FCC, and the White House says it's media's responsibility to label sources. OK. But what if they aren't told and the government is trying to fool them? Thereby officials try to throw media to the wolves; wolves spit back. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Meanwhile, the White House shields officials from the investigation. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The stink ain't over. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Thoughts? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I'm going on MSNBC at 5p to talk about this, possibly... So what do you think?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The Left Coaster says:

She all but told the AP that it was all the since-departed Rod Paige’s fault, which is standard operating procedure for this administration. I mean, it was obviously Colin Powell and Tom Ridge’s fault that Bush didn’t even know that we were planning to require Americans returning from Mexico and Canada to carry their passports, right?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Since Spellings made these comments before the release of the watered down IG’s report later today in the typical late Friday afternoon Bush Administration news dump, one wonders what is in the report.

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A 'devoutness divide?'

: Relevant to the Frist/filibuster/faith fun below, Dick Meyer at CBSNews.com says this is about "devoutness divide."

What divides Americans politically is not feuds between sects, bigotry or prejudice. The antagonism is not between, say, Jews and Baptists or Catholics and Methodists. It is not between believers and atheists; the vast majority of voters consider themselves religious and believe in God. The gap is rather between churchgoers and non-churchgoers; it is between people who are very orthodox or traditional in their religious belief and those who are more individualistic in their worship or less orthodox. The chasm is not defined by what religion people belong to but how they practice their religion.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

There is no God Gap. But there is a Devoutness Divide.

I know he's talking about voting behavior and stats but I still disagree and dislike the way that is presented with the choice of the word "devout:" d3d9.dll aoe III trial

All religious people are not conservatives (and all conservatives are not religous people [and all liberals are not godless]). d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I go to church and I'm a liberal. My sister is a minister and she's a liberal. I know lots of liberals who do, indeed, go to church. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I will also acknowledge that the growth in churches is in the conservative side and that's a challenge for us liberals. Does that mean that conservatives and fundamentalists are taking over religion or does it mean that liberals are rejecting religion? I don't know. Is the Republican Party being taken over by the religious? It looks that way, but I don't know that that's the case either; the religious right is vocal and organized and have made themselves into a force to be reckoned with, no matter how large that force really is. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But that doesn't mean that either religion or the right has been taken over by the religious right. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It's wrong to make gross generalizations that end up rejecting whole swathes of the population to make a point. Plenty of people who believe in God vote Democratic. Plenty of Republicans didn't like what Delay and the fringe of their party did in the Schiavo matter or, I'll bet, in Frist's TV follies. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So don't fall into the trap of assuming that Democrats are godless and Republicans are all on the religious fringe. It's fine to fight the religious right fringe; I do; somebody has to. It's fine for the religious right to fight for their side and use their political wiles to do so. That's what makes America great. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But let's not paint America now not as red vs. blue but as churchgoing vs. not. It's just not true. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Dick Meyer just emailed me and said I got this completely wrong. (Can't quote from the email now because I'm challenged, connectivity wise, but I will.) Andrew Tyndall called me on it in the comments, too. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I wasn't strong enough above, then, saying that I know he's talking about voting behavior.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

What I'm objecting too, in the end, is the word "devout." As I joked with Andrew, even Unitarians can be devout. I think devout is a loaded word that connotes the idea of being more religious and that is the notion I reacted to and I used Meyer as a launching point for that. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I didn't mean to get him wrong and I apologize. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: I got around tech limitations at MSNBC and here's the salient and correct quote from Meyer's email:

... I indicated quite clearly that the vast majority of American voters are religious. And the most opinionated part of the piece, at the bottom, argued that religious poeple who are both traditional and who are untraditional (liberal and conservative) have much more in common than our politicians and politicized clergy would have us think. And yes, there is no disputing that liberals are religious and church-going, too. But there is also no disputing that the greater the frequency of church-attendance, the higher the odds of voting GOP; sorry, it's a fact.
So here's an odd contention: Church attendance is not a measure of devoutness, in my view and I know that is a minority view). Religion is personal and need not be institutional and should not be judged on the basis of such open indications as church attendance or eagerness to talk about religion or willingness to incorporate religion with politics. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

That was what I was trying to say. But clearly, I failed. I'm going to blogger hell...
d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Jumping the shark for Jesus (continued)

: The Republicans just can't stop from allying themselves with the religious fringe. The NY Times reports:

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations.

They're trying to play the God card. Only I think it's been played in this hand already. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: MORE: Charles Babington in the Washington Post says:

The strategy carries significant risks for the Tennessee Republican, who is weighing a 2008 presidential bid. It could embroil the Senate in a bitter stalemate that would complicate passage of President Bush's agenda and raise questions about Frist's leadership capabilities. Should he fail to make the move or to get the necessary votes, however, Frist risks the ire of key conservative groups that will play big roles in the 2008 GOP primaries.
Well, clearly, he has made his choice: He's campaigning in the primaries already and he is sucking up to the fringe right to do that. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: James Joyner at Outside the Beltway agrees with Frist's goal on judges but says:

However, this particular move is not only unseemly but likely to backfire. Frist's appeal is that he appears above politics. This sort of slimy tactic will not serve him in the long term, especially as he seeks the White House in 2008.
: Mustang Bobby says:
Does this guy really want to run for president? Lining up with a bunch of loons obsessed with turning this country into the Christian version of Taliban-run Afghanistan isn't exactly going to win the hearts and minds of the nation. If the Schiavo case proved anything, it's that the vast majority of Americans reject the wingnuts that Frist is chumming up to.
: All Spin Zone says -- and I agree -- that it's time for the rest of religious America (that includes me) to speak up against this sort of effort to theocratize the debate.
Seems clear to me. A whole conference arranged for by Radical Right Wing Christian Clerics with the sole purpose of labelling Democrats as "anti-Christian" and Bill Frist is headlining the conference scheduled to be broadcast to radical right-wing churches throughout the nation. That violates the non-profit status of those churches, but make no mistake, absolutely nothing will be done to enforce the tax laws. This is Bush's Administration, after all.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Two things. Progressives of faith need to speak up. They need to say specifically that faith belongs in the heart, and also in caring for others. They need to decry the kind of demonization the Radical Right Wing Christian Clerics view as moral. Demonization = moral? How twisted can they get?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Second, we need to support Republicans like John McCain, who has said he will not be voting for the Nuclear option.

: Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Three Bad Fingers pushes bloggers and Republicans to go after the senators who have not gone along with the nuclear option. He already gave up on McCain.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Josh Marshall calls it "sick, dark, and demented."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Obsidian Wings, a liberal Christian, says:

The organizers of this hate-a-thon who slanderously equate "Liberal" with "anti-Christian" are truly nauseating... I'm wholly offended that anyone in Congress would suggest anyone else is less Christian than they are.
: LATER STILL: Uncorrelated asks whether I'd had the same objections if Democrats sucked up to union leaders to get a primary nod. The better analogy might be whether I'd object if they sucked up to Michael Moore and that fringe. And the answer is: yes, I would. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Supersized

: McDonald's is 50 years old today. That is, 50 years ago today, Ray Kroc opened his first Illinois restaurant and started the biggest restaurant chain in the world and changed food and culture. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Oh, I'll bet there'll be some today who'll decry the day and complain about fast food and factories and fat and salt. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Not me. I love McDonald's. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

When I was a columnist in San Francisco, I reviewed the opening of a then-fancy new McDonald's on Van Ness -- and I panned it. Ray Kroc wrote a letter to the editor complaining that I was a "codfish aristocrat." He assumed I was just another burger snob. But I called Mr. Kroc and told him that I had once been caught by a survey going to McDonald's in Chicago five times a week; I was an addict. I believed in his credo of QC and I was saddened by the lack of quality I found in his newest emporium. The tone changed immediately: He knew he was talking with a believer and he said he'd get on the case immediately. He did. The restaurant quickly shaped up. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

A quarter-cheese was my best hangover cure. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

At my worst, I used to have two quarter cheese, a large fries, and a milk shake. It's a wonder I'm still alive. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

After my cholesterol tests of later years and after seeing my father-in-law post-bypass, I had to give up McDonald's. My kids prefer Burger King, too. So it's rare that I go there anymore. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But I still like McDonald's. It represents speed, consistency, cleanliness, quality, value, and good, greasy, salty food. McDonald's is America. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So join me today and let's have a quarter-cheese and fries. Oh, what the hell, supersize that. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: DESSERT: Iaetrice.com says:

Celebrate the history of the golden arches and national obesity epidemic by visiting your local McD's today! Evil or not, they still sell the best fast food fries around. (Sorry Burger King.)
Meanwhile, Indymedia, of course, finds the evil in this, celebrating 20 years of fighting against McDonald's. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

As Mumblix Grumph says in the comments: "It's a freaking BURGER JOINT fer Chrissakes!!!"d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And veteran grillman Tony Pierce says in the comments: "best first job a young person could have because every job that follows will be easier and pay better." d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: I'm watching the McDonald's webcast of the opening of a new flagship shop in Chicago. The first customer is going to be a guy who was a teen and among the first customers on the day the first store opened 50 years ago, Glenn Volkman (if I'm hearing the name right). See: You can survive eating this stuff. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: LATER: If you speak German, here are Bild's 50 reasons why we love to go to McDonald's. I wish my German were good enough to translate the best punchlines; perhaps better students than I can in the comments....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This blog has the Parents Television Council Seal of Disapproval

: Steve Rhodes sends me a tip with a link to a survey the so-called Parents Television Council is running that give us an idea what they're all up to. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Let's all go and spam the survey! Really: Link here and give all the wrong answers. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

For my three favorite shows, I listed Howard Stern on E!, Desperate Housewives, and Deadwood. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Anyway, it's clear that one thing they want to do is come up with a PTC Seal of Approval. Oh, God, I hope Hollywood had the balls to refuse to put that on any of its art. This is the organization that is causing millions of dollars in fines from the FCC and is plundering the First Amendment and is trying to cut off artistic freedom in this country. If an entertainment company puts that seal on its product, it is only encouraging these religonuts. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I'm betting Disney will be the first in line to do it. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

They push their store with the ugliest crap this side of a rummage sale. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And, of course, never satisfied with using government to enforce their views, the PTC asks: "Would you support legislation in your state that would impose a civil or financial penalty on those who sell or rent "M" (mature) or "AO" (adults only) rated video games to children under 18 years of age?" They want to send the kid at the corner video store to jail. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I just sent in my survey. Want to bet it won't be counted?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 14, 2005

Oggle

: Google's video beta is up. I just uploaded a video to see how it works. You can charge for people to see your video. The program is only accepting videos now; displaying them comes later; they don't say when. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Blogging Dr. Kissinger

: I was blogging Henry Kissinger and Ambassador Dennis Ross at The Week's latest salon. Two seat down was Abe Rosenthal and Dr. Kissinger just came over and tossled Rosenthal's hair. Across the table was Geraldo Rivera: journalistic matter met journalistic antimatter. In close quarters were ambassadors from Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine. And over there are Mickey Dolenz, Daniel Day Lewis, Christopher Walkin, Skitch Henderson, Robert Vaughn and next to him, Tony Danza. Always a surprise at these thingsd3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The topic: Middle-East peace. The notes are merely tidbits typed as they pass. Nothing new came out at the lunch. Nothing new ever comes out on this topic, eh? But I was there and blogged it, so click more if you want more...d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Ambassador Ross says what we're doing now is just trying to end a war so we can get back to peace-making.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"If I look at it as a negotiating problem, the objective conditions for a breakthrough exist," Kissinger says. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Ross says the core bargain isn't land for peace but security for Israelis and freedom for Palestinians. Kissinger rephrases it: the survival of Israel and the dignity of the Palestinians. Ross says the give-up of Gaza is key to "reestablishing the core bargain." He says the U.S. is doing too little because they're "finding it difficult to work together."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Harry Evans asks about who the good guys and bad guys are outside: the many third parties. Ross says he was accused as a negotiator of not including the Europeans and he admits he didn't actively cut them in, but he says they would have been there if the Israelis and Palestinians wanted them. "They didn't mind making the Israelis unhappy," Ross says, but they weren't prepared to make the Palestinians unhappy. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Jehan Sadat is on the phone and asked what needs to happen she says the Palestinians need to "stop bombing and killing" and the Israelis "need to stop building settlements." She talks about her husband's visit to Israeli; it makes a person nostalgic for that moment of optimism. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Kissinger: "Sharon is one of the great men of his period." d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The Palestinian representative to the U.N., Somaia Barghouti, says that Israel has a right to exist but then, in a schoolyard he-started-it fight, argues that Israel did the first suicide bombings in the '90s. Asked what it will take to disarm Hamas and Hezbullah, she at least says that "disengagement is a step forward."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Ross: "Let's be clear: There will be no Palestinian state born of violence and no Palestlinian state with independent militias."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Kissinger: "I think it is essential that the militia be disbanded."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Barghouti says: "I agree with Mr. Ross that there will be no Palestlnian state without disarming... But this cannot be happening without substantial changes on the ground."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Ross warns that if the militias attack Israelis as they leave the territory, then Sharon will have to launch "a whithering attack" and Barghouti nods agreement. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Ross also says there needs to be a coordination of handing over the assets, including the agricultural businesses, to benefit the Palestinians. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Now former Israeli Ambassador Dore Gold says: "I think we have a problem with our entire model of expectations." When anything happens in the Middle East, people think that Israelis and Palestinians can come together at Camp David until there is white smoke and canapes on the White House lawn. He says we need to expect "imperfect diplomacy." Gold says that Abbas is different from Arafat, "who believed in armed struggle until his dying day." Barghouti shakes her head. Gold says that though "Abbas is a very nice guy... they have said repeatedly they will not dismantle the infrastruture of terrorism."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So the two sides start arguing over poached salmon. It happens anywhere, everywhere. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Bush and the 'off' button

: At the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Bush spoke and Scott Anderson of the Chicago Tribune asked him about efforts to extend indecency legislation to cable and satellite. Bush didn't hear the complete question and so it's unclear whether he's talking about regulation or merely personal standards. But he does repeat that the first and best defense against something you don't like is the 'off' button.

Q There are those who would like to place on satellite and cable some
decency standards. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I'm for that. I think there ought to be a standard. On
the other hand, I fully understand that the final edit, or the final
decision is a parent turning off the TV. I mean, the ultimate responsibility
in a consumer-driven economy is for people to say I'm not going to watch it,
and turn the knob off. That's how best to make decisions and how best to
send influences. But I don't mind standards being set out for people to
adjudge the content of a show, to help parents make right decisions.
Government ought to help parents, not hinder parents in sending good
messages to their children. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But, look, I mean, we're a free society. The marketplace makes decisions. If
you don't like something, don't watch it. And, presumably, advertising
dollars will wither and the show will go off the air. But I have no problems
with standards being set to help parents make good decisions.

: UPDATE: The White House backpedals on behalf of its man:
A White House spokesman said later Bush was merely expressing support for legislation that passed the House of Representatives last year that called for increasing fines on broadcasters that violated decency limits but did not address cable and satellite television.
d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Hear it, read it

: Audible just put up a free download of Murdoch's speech here. And Ad Age finally put up Bob Garfield's media chaos piece here. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

A new model for LOCAL NEWSpapers

: Try this on for size: d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Imagine a newspaper that is only local news -- no sports, no business, little or no entertainment, and commodity national and international news treated as the I-saw-that-already commodity it is: only local news.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Why? Because we need to seriously consider new business models for journalism. See Murdoch's speech yesterday. See Merrill Brown's Carnegie report. See a hundred posts about media here. And see the two posts directly below about editors not even noticing the revenue that supports their enterprises disappearing and about putting out one-size-fits all products. We need to stimulate radical discussion of radical new views to rethink this business before it's rethought without us. This is just one example, an exercise that leads to a point: d3d9.dll aoe III trial

As I said in the post below, by my recollection, some readership studies say that only about 20 percent of newspaper readers read sports sections ... and those pages get unimpressive ad revenue aside from tire ads ... and they add tremendous cost to editorial budgets ... and there are new competitors on TV and especially online that are more current, more animated, more complete, more conversational than a piece of paper can ever be. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In the old, one-size-fits-all view of news, you had to have a sports section to vacuum up as large an audience as you could to sell that mass audience to your advertisers, including classified advertisers. But now classified advertisers are finding less expensive ways of transacting their business online. And retail advertisers are finding new ways to target efficiently online. So one-size-fits-all is not a model for growth, to put it gently. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So let's start by killing the sports section and eliminating all the cost that goes with it. OK, so some portion of those readers will leave but I'll bet that at the end of the day, the paper will be more profitable and will be able to devote more resources to local news. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Let's keep going: Business sections aren't really local. Stock tables cost a fortune in paper to publish and most of America is now online and can get more current information there with targeted advice and functionality a piece of paper can't deliver. One newspaper down the road eliminated its stock tables and found little ill effect on circulation while saving a fortune in paper. You could argue that you still need business news and if it's really useful local news, ok. But as for the national biz news, the audience can find more of it online. So don't bother. Kill the business section and you'll eliminate cost -- editorial and paper -- and not reduce the audience or advertising base much. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Next: entertainment. OK, you want local listings, you say. But those are really better handled online as well: They are searchable and up-to-the-minute and are not limited by space on paper. You want movie reviews? OK, but do you really have to have your own reviewer in every town in America? Why not buy a syndicated reviewer for much less? Or push people to online for entertainment reviews and listings. TV listings? I haven't used them in print in years (and I used to write for TV Guide); I use the cable (or occasionally online). So get rid of them. You can save a good deal of editorial and paper cost. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Now to lifestyle news: Outside of certain cities, there isn't much that's truly local about food. Chicken still tastes like chicken. And you do want to support grocery advertising, but that's fluid. So syndicate the content you need to support the advertising and move on. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

How about national and international news? Well, that's a commodity. People already know it from the internet and cable news and sending the 15,001st reporter to the political conventions instead of just picking up wire stories really doesn't add much or justify the expense or ego involved. So let the AP give you an already-edited digest of national and international news, if you want. Or if you're Gannett, produce it all on one desk in Washington. Then get rid of the wire desks and save more money. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Editorials? If you own your bully pulpit, you'll want to use it. A blogger should understand that! But then go get the opinions of your neighbors from what they're already writing and quote it in the paper if you want -- and get rid of the columnists. That'd save money and aggravation.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And what are you left with in this exercise? You are left with your core value: local news. That's not a commodity. That's a uniqe value. And that's the point.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So now take some of your savings -- net savings after, yes, you do lose some sports fans and elderly mutual-fund owners -- and plow it into reporting. But find new and efficient ways to get more local news: Harness the power of your public and get news and information from new sources that you help support with information, promotion, training, trust, and most of all revenue. Pay the person who covers the school board if the audience agrees it's valuable. Become the meeting place , as Hugh McLeod says, for everything local, all the news that matters to you -- and the conversation about it. Become a better local news operation than you've ever been with more news and more reporting and more engagement from the public you serve. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I'd argue that you could cut all that stuff out of the old, one-size-fits-all paper and even raise your price because it would be unique and valuable. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Then you could ask the next question: Do you still want to print it on paper? For now, yes, because advertisers are slow to adapt and so there's still more money in print. But the public is not slow to adapt, so you must adapt to them and give them this valuable local news where, how, and when they want it; don't be limited by the press and its schedule. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So you become the great aggregator and distributor -- and, yes, editor -- of local news that is necessary to the community. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

That's just one model, for argument's sake -- and I look forward to hearing your arguments about it. We're seeing others with Dan Gillmor's new effort to support independent journalism, with Backfence, with others that are bubbling up out there. I have no idea what will work and what won't. No idea. But I do know that we need to consider new models and try them and invest in them or else someone else will: What Craig Newmark did to classifieds -- and the newspaper business, in turn -- others will do to the rest of news. This isn't just about newspapers; TV news has already undergone the beginning of a restructuring (see FoxNews v. CNN) but that isn't over yet, not by a long shot: See Bob Garfield's piece, which I mention again because it's now online. This is what I meant the other day when I replied to Jay Rosen's post firing me from panels to hear new people who are actually doing it: Exactly right. There are new models bubbling up everywhere and now is the time to find some to embrace. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: LATER: Terry Teachout takes this and Murdoch's speech and has advice for artists who used to depend on media for exposure: He tells them to start their own. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Sports and the one-size-fits-all society

: I don't like sports. I don't play them because I'm too damned clumsy. I don't watch them because I just don't care and as un-American as it may be, I think baseball is b-o-r-i-n-g. (Insert show-tunes jokes here.)d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So why should I have to subsidize sports fans in the rest of society? And why doesn't society subsidize my hobbies? Or my business? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In newspapers, according to studies I once read (but can't Google now), about 20 percent of a newspaper's audience reads sports. And sports sections get little advertising, apart from tire ads. Yet a large proportion of the editorial and paper budget of a paper goes to sports and in these days of declining revenues, that's an important consideration. (More on that in a bit.)d3d9.dll aoe III trial

On cable TV, I have to pay for lots of sports channels I never watch. Why should I? Maybe everybody else should help pay for my broadband internet bill, huh?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In New Jersey, the state just agreed to build a new $750 million stadium to keep the Giants -- a profitable, independent business, last I checked -- with considerable taxpayer support. But very few taxpayers will ever get to see a game at that stadium; hell, season tickets are only inherited. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In my town, the city elders -- an all-Republican team that spends our money like drunken Democrats -- levied "open-space" taxes that they regularly waste buying property next to the interstate (gee, let's go have a picnic down by the truck fumes) and near politicians' homes (hmmm). They recently bought very nice farmland by a busy road. But did they leave this as open space? No, they constructed hugely expensive baseball and soccer fields with gigantic lights that belong on a Nascar track. And those facilities will be used by a small proportion of the population. Yet the entire town pays for them. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

On a teen's blog in my town, a kid asked why the town doesn't build a movie theater because lots of teens would like to do that? I agree: If you can build a baseball diamond with our dollars, why not build a video game center where our kids could go and hang out with friends and supervision? There is one such place in our town and it's a private business. But why shouldn't it get taxpayer support the way the Giants do? This, too, is about citizens having fun, isn't it?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

When did it become assumed that sweat was entitled to support from the rest of us? Well, I think it's a view of a one-size-fits-all society that is becoming obsolete. Media used to be one-size-fits-all: If enough people read sports, we'll include it in the paper; if enough play it, we'll build the fields; if enough watch it, we'll build the stadiums. But in media, one-size-fits-all is dying. Isn't it time for that view to die in the rest of society?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Just asking. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

1. Find sand. 2. Dig hole. 3. Insert head

: Tim Porter reports a chilling moment from the American Society of Newspaper Editors meeting in Washington. In the one hour devoted to the future of newspapers (well, apart from Rupert's future-shock-therapy):

One of the most telling moments of the hour occurred just as the meeting opened when Nachison and Peskin put a slide up of Craig Newmark and asked how many people in the room of several hundred recognized him or his name. Only a smattering of hands rose. A few more hands went up at the mention of Craigslist and its free classifieds.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Nachison reminded the editors that the competition of Craigslist didn’t grow out of a business model, but arose more spontaneously from Newmark’s desire to create a community of trust – the same trust newspapers are struggling to regain.

Newmark “doesn’t seem himself as competition,” said Nachison. “He started to build trust and to build community. He doesn’t see himself as competing against newspapers.”
It's doubly frightening that these journalists aren't journalistically curious about the phenomenon of Craigs List and its impact on their communities and that they aren't vitally interested in its impact on their businesses. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Andrew Nachison, who with the Media Center is one of the people who is really pushing newspapers to think about the future, adds in the comments:

The bigger point was trust - and that there's someone "out there" who has built a business at the expense of newspapers not by trying to compete *against* anyone, but by trying to help others.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The business followed Craig's authentic devotion to helping people find each other in a trusted environment.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

We contrasted this with the recent Carnegie Corporation survey data that found just 4 percent of Americans age 18-34 trust newspapers.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

My message to editors is not that they need to fully appreciate every nuance of how their traditional business is crumbling. It's that they need to appreciate how people's lives and their relationships to media in all forms are changing, and that trust isn't a slogan, it's earned.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Journalists who seek to build a trust relationship with ordinary people need to pay attention to ordinary people and how they live their lives. The imperative is not to save the ship, save the business - it's to serve society, create a better world. Seriously. Trust, and the business, will follow.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Don't worry about competing against Craig. Think of something else, something new. Be the next Craig.

d3d9.dll aoe III trial
April 13, 2005

Verb form means 'to have psycho fit;' adjectival form means 'fast-talking'

: David Weinberger joins the ever-expanding cast of bloggers on MSNBC and calls it doing a jarvis. See his good work here. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

What, they'll sing show tunes?

: I love this promo on the American Society of Newspaper Editors site, promoting an event at their annual confab in D.C. (vs. A.C.):

ASNE will host its first-ever Gay Reception on Wednesday to help foster a more comfortable environment for its gay and lesbian members.
And what, precisely, makes gay editors "more comfortable?" Making them come out at a reception? Playing Liza? Hugging? It'd be a parody if it weren't true. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Rupert's warning

: Rupert Murdoch gave an important speech -- and warning -- to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington today, telling them that papers are whistling in their own graveyard and recommending some solutions, including even blogs:

Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint’s obituary. Yet, as an industry, most of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent.
I have the text of the speech because -- full disclosure -- through a friend, I tried to help the person who was helping write the speech. So, yes, you'll hear echoes of familiar themes in the speech. (Somebody just smashed me in email for linking to something without acknowledging I was quoted so I'll add: I was flattered to be quoted in the speech.) d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I was impressed to see Murdoch giving this warning to the nation's august editors -- and also impressed to see him embracing new ways to do things, including citizens' media. He starts by acknowledging that he and the assembled sages aren't the ones to reinvigorate news:

Like many of you, I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t weaned on the web, nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few proprietors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The peculiar challenge then, is for us digital immigrants – many of whom are in positions to determine how news is assembled and disseminated -- to apply a digital mindset to a set of challenges that we unfortunately have limited to no first-hand experience dealing with.

We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from.

He quotes scary stats and conclusions from Merrill Brown's excellent report for Carnegie.
What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle.

He uses blogs as the evidence of this and he then turns to newspapers' reaction to this new world:
In the face of this revolution, however, we’ve been slow to react. We’ve sat by and watched while our newspapers have gradually lost circulation. Where four out of every five Americans in 1964 read a paper every day, today, only half do. Among just younger readers, the numbers are even worse, as I’ve just shown.
I like his explanation of how this could happen even in the face of such Titanic market trends:
There are a number of reasons for our inertness in the face of this advance. First, for centuries, newspapers as a medium enjoyed a virtual information monopoly – roughly from the birth of the printing press to the rise of radio. We never had a reason to second-guess what we were doing. Second, even after the advent of television, a slow but steady decline in readership was masked by population growth that kept circulations reasonably intact. Third, even after absolute circulations started to decline in the 1990s, profitability did not.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But those days are gone. The trends are against us. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So unless we awaken to these changes, and adapt quickly, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans or, worse, many of us will disappear altogether.

He scolds the editors for not taking full advantage of the internet:
We have not, as an industry, embraced digital technology and the Internet in the way … or to the extent … that we should, and must....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I venture to say that not one newspaper represented in this room lacks a website. Yet how many of us can honestly say that we are taking maximum advantage of those websites to serve our readers, to strengthen our businesses, or to meet head-on what readers increasingly say is important to them in receiving their news?

Murdoch says he is optimistic about the news business because the public, including the young, want news.
The challenge, however, is to deliver that news in ways consumers want to receive it. Before we can apply our competitive advantages, we have to free our minds of our prejudices and predispositions, and start thinking like our newest consumers. In short, we have to answer this fundamental question: What do we – a bunch of digital immigrants -- need to do to be relevant to the digital natives?
He says these new natives want news on demand, they want news to be relevant, they want a point of view (hello, FoxNews), they want news that affects their lives, they want the option to get more information and points of view, and they want to join in the debate. Make "they" "we." d3d9.dll aoe III trial

He talks about Fox and FoxNews and the tabloidization of British papers as responses to audience demand. He doesn't make the further point that I think needs to be made: That FoxNews, with its new way to turn news into conversation and rely less on expensive produced pieces, represented an economic restructuring of the TV news business and (a) that ain't over and (b) the print news business needs just that sort of restructuring. He also says that newspapers need to be destinations; I disagree and think they need to be waystations, starting points, perhaps. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And then he goes to the blogs:

But our internet site will have to do still more to be competitive. For some, it may have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy -- chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve. So long as our readers understand the distinction between bloggers and our journalists, and so long as proper safeguards are utilized, this might be an idea worth exploring. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

To carry this one step further, some digital natives do even more than blog with text – they are blogging with audio, specifically through the rise of podcasting – and to remain fully competitive, some may want to consider providing a place for that as well. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And with the growing proliferation of broadband, the emphasis online is shifting from text only to text with video. The future is soon upon us in this regard.

Next, he turns to advertising:
Someone whom I respect a great deal, Bill Gates, said recently that the Internet would attract $30 billion in advertising revenue annually within the next five years. To give you some perspective, this would equal the entire advertising revenue currently generated each year by the newspaper industry as a whole.
He acknowledges the lasting decline in classifieds and says that newspaper companies have to come up with new ways to better target advertising (no more one-size-fits-all, in other words). d3d9.dll aoe III trial

He says that technology isn't the problem. Attitude is.

What I worry about much more is our ability to make the necessary cultural changes to meet the new demands of the digital native. I said earlier, what is required is a complete transformation of the way we think about our product and the Internet itself. Unfortunately, however, I believe too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers. Too often, the question we ask is “Do we have the story?” rather than “Does anyone want the story?”d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And the data support this unpleasant truth. Studies show we’re in an odd position: We’re more trusted by the people who aren’t reading us. And when you ask journalists what they think about their readers, the picture grows darker. According to one recent study, the percentage of national journalists who have a great deal of confidence in the ability of the American public to make good decisions has declined by more than 20 points since 1999. Perhaps this reflects their personal politics and personal prejudices more than anything else, but it is disturbing.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This is a polite way of saying that reporters and editors think their readers are stupid. ...d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Newspapers whose employees look down on their readers can have no hope of ever succeeding as a business.

The next question will be: Who's listening?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Here's E&P's coverage. The FT's coverage (behind a damned pay wall). From Australia's The Age. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Here's the full text of the speech. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Push advertising is toast

: Ad Age (NOT ONLINE, DAMN THEM) reports that:

The do-not-call list, now 87 million numbers strong, has had surprisingly little impact on the marketers who dreaded it and spent more than $80 billion a year on telemarketing...
Call centers don't intrude; they now handle customer relations. And the result:
Man contend they've found the shift in sales tactics has resulted in results as good -- or even better than -- telemarketing.
Well, duh. Well, double-duh. It's a surprise that bothering people at home is a bad way to market? Seth Godin is right: Permission marketing is where all marketing will go. And Fred Wilson was right when he said that push advertising is toast. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

That's hot

: Paris Hilton is going to podcast leading up to the release of her movie House of Wax. The fun starts April 29: "Join Paris and friends as she shops, parties, poses and publicizes..." Warner Brothers is even putting out a custom podcatcher (though I'm not sure why... these people are mad to brand anything). Anyway, if you didn't think podcasts were hot before, they're officially hot now. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Ad Age (NOT ONLINE, DAMN THEM, NOT EVEN FOR A LOYAL SUBSCRIBER LIKE ME) that Superman Returns will also have a podcast. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Anybody want to start the pool for the date of the first podcast-backlash story?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

American women have no nipples (before 10 p.m.)

: Pamela Anderson, appearing on Howard Stern this morning to plug her new Fox show Stacked, said that the network censors have come on the set and ordered that her nippled be "taped down" because you can't have nipples before 10 p.m.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This shows the absurd lengths to which regulatory puritanism has gone: Now American women can't have nipples, at least not before the "safe harbor," when, apparently, nipples are suddenly, magically allowed to pop out again. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I say that the NOW should be storming the FCC with protest over this: Because of the chill (which, yes, ironically, would have the undesired effect on nipples) they have imposed, we are now at the point where a woman's clothed anatomy is deemed to be injurious to children. That's childish itself; it's absurd; it's sexist; it's more offensive than any nipple, even Janet Jackson's. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Free the nipples!d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 12, 2005

Speaking of scale

: The American Society of Newspaper Editors just reported that the number of newspaper journalists in America fell from 56,393 to 54,134 over the last four years. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In the last year, the number of bloggers roughly doubled to more than 8 million. OK, so say that only half of them are active. That's 4 million. Then say that only -- pick a number -- 10 percent of them even write about anything involving news. That would be 400,000. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

If the news business can harnass the efforts of some of that number -- helping to support them with training, content, promotion, revenue -- imagine how news could grow. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Yes, Iraq is working

: Today Andrew Sullivan eats a few crow feathers on Iraq:

It behooves me to write that I'm chastened - and extremely heartened - by the progress we're making in Iraq. The elections were obviously the key - and they should have been scheduled at least a year before they were. But it's equally true that the constancy of our amazing troops, and the magic of democracy, are turning this long hard slog into a long hard slog with an end in sight. The criticisms of the past endure. But the fundamental objective seems to be within sight. The right decision - to remove Saddam - is no longer being stymied by wrong decisions. I feared the worst. I was wrong.
Good for Sullivan. I still say it was the right thing to do. I still say it's working. I also still say we could have done things better -- hell, one always can -- and so I'm not sure I'm ready to echo Sullivan there. But it is nice seeing people who had complaints -- Sullivan or Maher -- come forward honorably to say it's working. Because right now, it is starting to work. Let's hope it continues to improve. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

yum.my

: Del.icio.us gets funding from a great bunch, led by Union Square Ventures (Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham). [via Joi]d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Scale doesn't scale

: Scale doesn't scale anymore. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The old days of big players in the economy collecting consumers, audience, distribution, manufacturing efficiency, buying power, or capital in the grip of centralized control are waning. That used to be the way to find efficiency and size. That used to be the way to scale. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But they are being foiled by our new distributed world. And they are being replaced by a more efficient means of finding size and efficiency.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Aggregation is the new scale. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Read the post below about the decentralized, distributed future of job classifieds. Now consider how this same model of decentralization -- of control at the fringes -- can, should, and will hit other industries: d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: News: As a producer, why depend on the 300 (expensive, snarky, recalcitrant) reporters you pay for when you could have 3,000 aggregated reporters to get more news less expensively than ever before. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

As a consumer, why depend on one or two sources of news a day when you can aggregate the best of 200? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Media: As a distributor, when you can no longer use your stranglehold on channels to guarantee you an audience, you will have to aggregate audiences to reach scale. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

As a creator, you're going to have to establish your own direct relationship with your audience: You have to do your own aggregating. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

As a member of the audience, why adjust your schedule and taste to the distributor when you can aggregate your own entertainment from anywhere, anytime?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Advertising: They simply won't have the easy and inefficient option to buy network soon; they will have to aggregate niches of consumers to create a new and more efficient scale -- with far better targeting, better advertising, better service, better sales. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Retail: Why settle for the same crap that's in every mall everywhere in the world (even on once-hip lower Broadway) when you can aggregate the unique stuff of an eBay? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And, for that matter, why bother with all those bricks when you can aggregate a more efficient customer base online? (See: Amazon.) d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Customer service: Smart technology companies have been taking advantage of the greatest gift of the distributed but connected world by turning customers into customer service representatives: I get a helluva lot better service on TreoCentral than I get from Sprint and Sprint saves the cost, real and psychic, of me sitting on hold and then yelling. It's free money. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Consumer products: Customized Barbies are about aggregating a customer base of one. I'll be that car consumers will revolt against having premium packages shoved down their throats. Imagine how this could work even with Coke, which has to fight and pay for shelf space for all its many products trying to attract ever more tastes. If the let me go online and order what I want -- caffeine-free C2 cola in bottles -- I'd order a few cases and Coke would have a loyal customer and save shelving and even marketing costs... and also learn what consumers would want if they could control product design. Aggregate me, baby. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Telecommunications: Dead. Next. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Insurance: In New Jersey, folks fed up with expensive insurance created their own not-for-profit insurance companies for cars and now malpractice: They aggregated the underserved. Oh, how I would kill for that with my health insurance.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Financial services: Will the wisdom of the crowds beat the wisdom of the brokers and analysts? Surely, yes. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Education: How much better to be able to aggregate teaching, to select my teachers instead of having to throw my lot with one bunch or another. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Labor: If you don't need your employees to be in one place, on one old assembly line, how much more efficient it is to employ them wherever they are, whether that's at home in the 'burbs or at home in Bagalore. You aggregate the work instead of the workers. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Politics: One-size-fits-all messages won't work anymore as voters are able to find (or lobby for or create) a politician's stand on any issue or any piece of legislation imaginable. Winning office will be like forming cabinets in Israel. Either the special interests that win might just be the special interests of the voters.... or politicians will be too scared to ever take a stand and only the pretty will win. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Pity every industry that has to adjust to the decentralized future. Money will be destroyed (on one side, but saved on the other) and the upheaval will make the business restructuring of the '80s look like a garden party. But pity more the industries that are bound to atoms -- airlines, home-building, shipping, and health care, say -- that will have a hard time finding the efficiencies of aggregation, the new scale. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: See Fred Wilson:

You cannot collect all the pieces of a marketplace in a centralized way and control all of it. The technology won't allow that to happen. You can't "get to scale" that way.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

You must be open to others owning pieces of the equation. You must let the users get the value of scale however the choose to create that scale. You must facilitate the creation of virtual scale.

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The future of classifieds

: Blogging VC Fred Wilson posted a job listing on his site the other day and I left a comment saying this is the future of classifieds... and of headhunting: A member of a community posts a job not in some marketplace -- whether that's a paper or Monster or even Craigs List -- but on his own site, speaking to his own network. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It gets better. Fred then sent me to a link on a search from Indeed.com, the specialized jobs aggregator and search engine that scrapes many job sites: Fred's job listing was there. Now, in fact, Fred tipped them off to his listing and so they added it. But it's not hard at all to see that they could have scraped blogs or other sites and found that listing -- especially if the listing had some tag or tags that made it easy and reliable to identify. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I've been saying for a few years now that this is the future of job classifieds. Monster and Craig are merely waystations -- disruptive and cheap new marketplaces competing with big, old marketplaces -- on the way to a distributed future when there are no marketplaces, when buyer and seller (employer and employee) list their information anywhere on the internet and they are put together by aggregators and search engines. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And the aggregators aren't all computers. See also Rafat Ali's great listing of digital jobs at PaidContent.org. It's not only a collection of jobs, it's also a great source of industry intelligence I read and quote often to see what companies are up to. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So what used to be advertising is now just data... and community... and content. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This is the new distributed world. I don't know how anybody makes money in it but I do see how many people save money. As has been cited too often now, Craig destroyed -- did not transfer but destroyed -- an estimated $65 million in classified revenue in San Francisco alone. But Craig still charges for listing jobs. Indeed doesn't; it merely finds them. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Aggregation is cheap. Aggregation is efficient. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

If I were a headhunter, I'd start looking for a new career. And I wouldn't make it real estate.
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April 11, 2005

Paneled

: Jay Rosen writes a great post suggesting that he, Wonkette, and I be fired from panels. He has some great nominees as replacements. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I'll take it one step further: Stop the blogging panels. There's nothing more to say that hasn't been said (believe me). And the problem with these performances is that, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, they make us into monkeys. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Jay's quite right that what matters more is talking about ways this will (or won't) work as a business. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Actually the same can be said of the news business these days. In fact, it could be argued, that's a more urgent discussion since the big guys have lots to lose and the little guys have everything to gain. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

There are real questions to answer but I'm not hearing folks ask them. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I sat at the last Harvard confab -- where we actually did, at last, get down to talking about new business models for news -- and thought this should be the topic for the forseeable future: Let's stop blathering and start building. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This weekend, I spoke with a guy who was helping someone with a presentation about the future of the news biz and we agreed it should include a clarion call to ask the tough questions. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And then, when it's time to look for answers, start with Jay's list of the people worth listening to. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: LATER: Rory O'Connor says in the LA Times:

Rather than fruitlessly debating whether bloggers are journalists, we should ponder how our newly transformed news environment can best function. Newspapers have a huge stake in this debate. Young people no longer get their news exclusively from the morning papers, evening network newscasts or other traditional outlets. Increasingly, they go online to find news — and read bloggers that professional journalists deem so dangerous.
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Whereabouts

: I'm at a meeting in D.C. going over more than 200 proposals for the New Voices grants. Blogging later. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The network no one owns

: Broacasting & Cable's blog reports that the number of online streamers who watched pope coverage on MSNBC far outnumbered those who watched on big, old TV:

Earlier this week, MSNBC said there had been 850,000 accesses of Pope-related streamed video on its Web site, msnbc.com. By Friday, it said, that number had jumped to almost four million (3,989,000)....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Now, some of those hits are certainly repeat customers, but it is still an impressive number, particularly given that in March, MSNBC averaged 336,000 viewers per day to its cable channel.

Imagine how much bigger it would be if the audience didn't have to stream and could watch anytime, anywhere... if MSNBC provided downloads the audience could distribute. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I'll take any excuse to repeat my favorite stats: Jon Stewart's Crossfiricide got a few hundred thousand views on big, old CNN but 7 million on iFilm and untold millions on Bittorrent.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Now look at how Ian Schwartz, Trey Jackson, and others are making a name for themselves recording segments off TV and putting them up online. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Uh, hello, networks, you should be doing this (too). You should be putting up all your stories with permalinks so they can join the conversation. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

If you did, you'd grow your audiences, improve your branding, add to ad revenue (if you attached ads to the videos), and build a new relationship with the audience. Simple. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Media reform?

: Next month, there's a National Conference for Media Reform with all sorts of odd bedfellows: FCC censor-freaks Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, Al Franken, Seattle Times owner Frank Blethen, David Brock of Media Matters, folks from Fair and the Newspaper Guild and Consumers Union, and so on. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This is the left-wing media-haters club, not to be confused with the right-wing media-haters club. The right-wing club hates the media because they think it's left-wing; the left-wing hates media because they think it's corporate (and thus right-wing). d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Here's the dangerous part about this one: They want to "increase informed public participation in crucial media policy debates, and to generate policies that will produce a more competitive and public interest-oriented media system with a strong nonprofit and noncommercial sector."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The keyword there: "policies." Policies come from government. Government media policies equal government media control. I hate that. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

First Amendment, you know: "Congress shall make now law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Government media policies are all about government regulating media. It's dangerous when government tries to regulate what we say or who can own what. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Don't forget that media is now us: If you want government to regulate that media you open the door for government to regulate this media. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Why does who hate whom?

: The American Society of Newspaper Editors is meeting in D.C. this week. A few panel topics:
: "The bias question: the news of affirmation vs. verification" with Eric Alterman, Gerald Boyd, Kathryn Lopez of NRO, and Tom Rosenstiel. I don't understand even the title.
: "Vigilant Editor: Identifying and surviving ethical controversies in your newsroom." Fill in punchline here.
: And my favorite: "Why do they hate us? Perspectives on the evolution of hostile attitudes toward the United States" with David Ignatius of The Washington Post, Hafez Al-Mirazi of Al-Jazeera TV (who appears on more panels than I do), author Irshad Manji, and others. Or should that be: Why We Hate Us? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 10, 2005

Tagline

: The German Trend Tag (Trend Day) in Hamburg in June features a keynote by Howard Rheingold; a talk by someone at the new Gore Network, Current.TV, about "Meta Teens -- how the internet and other new technologies have transformed the way teens are teens;" and a session by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales with the best tagline for a talk I've seen yet ("We don’t need a business model, we’re just doing it")
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April 09, 2005

Open-minded

: You have to give Bill Maher points -- yes, you have to -- when he shows an open-mindedness. Sometimes -- when I disagree with him -- he can drive me nuts; he makes a sport and a career of it. But sometimes, he swims against the liberal tide. On this week's show, after having Richard Perle on -- displaying his own balls for coming on this show, by the way -- Maher says tells his panel that they have to acknowledge that a government has been formed in Iraq and progress has been made: "For all their bullshit and lying and f'ing it up, it still could work." He then challenges his panel: "Come on, if in three years there are four democracies in the Middle East, you won't give them that." When Arianna Huffing complains about the deaths, Maher says, "7,000 died building the Panama Canal." d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Citizen photojournalists

: Two new efforts to get citizens to take and submit photos:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The Guardian has an election-related Flickr gallery called the Blair Watch Project for Brit cits' pix. And meanwhile, in the stix...d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Augusta.com has golf fans sending in pix. [via Rex and Smartmobs]
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Trees rejoice

: Newspaper circulation gloom. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Meanwhile, across the pond, Simon Waldman of The Guardian reports online job classified revenue there:

Some classified ad revenue figures for 2004 from the Advertising Association:
: Online recruitment revenues for online specialists in 2004: £80m (up 56%)
: Online recruitment revenues for regional newspapers in 2004: £33m (up 38%)
: Online recruitment revenues for national newspapers in 2004: £7m (up 61%).
I wonder whether Craig is a major factor there yet.
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Media chaos

: The On The Media audio version of Bob Garfield's very good Ad Age print story on the coming chaos in media is now available for your listening pleasure. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

How many blogs?

: We'd found some consistency in the number of blogs: Technorati, Pew, and PubSub are all around 8 million. But note in the post below that Perseus found 20 million. Doesn't much matter. The real answer is: Lots. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Bcastblog

: Broadcasting & Cable has a blog and I didn't even know it. It's good and added to my RSS. Now if only they -- and Ad Age -- would put more of their stories online so we can link to them. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The death of /.?

: No, of course, it's not the death of Slashdot, but in a good exploration of the Slashdot v. BoingBoing v. blog effect on traffic (which is to say, news), the WSJ's Jeremy Wagstaff says (in, regrettably, not a free link) that the /. effect is fizzling -- or more accurately, I think, is being overtaken:

When Jeff Henning, who runs an online survey service, Perseus Development, did a survey in late 2003 he found more than four million blogs. Earlier this year he found nearly 20 million. And while the vast majority don't survive, quite a few that do are becoming more and more popular. The daily traffic to just one blog hosting company, TypePad, overtook that of Slashdot last August. The point? Well, I believe the blogosphere -- and the Internet as a whole -- is maturing into a place where information finds its way from the fringes to the center. This is because the links between all these disparate sources of information are reaching critical mass.
: Find much more on this on Wagstaff's blog. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

A comment

: Ahmad from IraqiExpat leaves a wonderful comment in the Reporters Without Borders post below:

I was talking to an Iraqi anti-American once, and I asked him, do you want the Americans to leave, he said no that would be disasterous; then I said do you support their attacker, he said yes!!! He supported what he thought was resistance, yet at the same time he wanted Americans to stay!!! Can someone explain this?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

True story.

: Speaking of comments, I'm having fun in the thread unspooling in the conference spam post below. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

A link

: Bloggers often get email asking for a link. And the usual, proper, and logical bloggers' response is: Sorry, no, but I link to the things I want to talk about not the people who happen to email me. If we all put up the links of those who merely emailed us, we'd merely be a link exchange. And that business didn't go very far. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But today I got email I could resist berating and cajoling me for not noticing his blog and adding it to my blogroll. (I haven't added anybody to my blogroll in many months; I actually need to take a day off just to clean up the blogroll and the page and I can't afford to do that right now). He, of course, played to my ego, saying he reads me, even though we don't always agree, and saying that he leaves comments. OK, OK. So I read his blog and enjoyed it. So I'll break the rule and link to Egyptian Sand Monkey: "Be forewarned: The writer of this blog is an extremely cynical, snarky, pro-US, secular, libertarian, disgruntled sandmonkey. If this is your cup of tea, please enjoy your stay here. If not, please sod off."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 08, 2005

Conference spam

: I agreed to be a part of another frigging panel next week, giving some damned conference organizer free content. OK, I know the deal. But I just got email from the organizers -- at VNU -- acting like they were doing me some f'ing favor introducing me to some f'ing vendor who is there. Yeah, like I'm dying to talk to a yellow pages vendor. Let me at 'em. I sent email to the bozo who sent me this human conference spam and told him to stop spamming me. He had the balls to send back email not apologizing but saying, "The purpose wasn't to spam you but rather to facilitate matching between attendees at the DMC and the various other vendors there..." To which I replied with one word: "Bull." d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Handshakes

: For MSNBC's Connected, I'm pointing to blogs commenting on Israeli President Mosche Katsav's historic -- we hope -- handshakes with Syrian President Bashar Assad and Iranian President Mohammed Khatami at the pope's funeral. Katsav was born in Iran and he and Khatami spoke in Persian for an hour, some reports said. Links:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Jeff Perin at Opinionmeister says:

It does not mean that they are friendly, but it is a sign of progress, no matter how small. In the past, leaders of Arab states still at war with Israel and of Iran would not appear in the same room as a high Israeli official, much less extend a hand to be shaken. It is amazing that whoever arranged the seating allowed the presidents of Israel and Syria to be seated so close together. If nothing else, it shows that the heads of Syria and Iran are worried enough about the Bush Doctrine that they want good PR in the West.
Outside the Beltway is pessimistic: "My guess is that the net effect on Middle East peace of this encounter will approximate zero."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Spinbad says:

A non-event, but a huge non-event in the context of the history of Arab-Israel conflict, and a heart-warming tribute to the outreach and conciliation efforts of Pope John Paul II, may he rest in peace.
: QandO has a note of hope:
Its another in a long list of occurrances and happenings unthinkable 2 years ago which can't help but give the rest of the world hope that there will indeed be peace, stability and democracy in the Middle East's future.
: And the Passionate Pilgrim said this brought tears to her eyes: "If they are half as sincere as they seem to be, John Paul’s death may be the sign of the peace to come in our lifetime. Salam. Shalom. Amen."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: ANOTHER HANDSHAKE: Through an amusing big of miscommunication, I at first went looking for posts about another handshake -- between Prince Charles and Mugabe. Not nearly as earthshaking but, as all things Princely, amusing:d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: SJHoward, a British blog says:

Considering his luck lately, the poor fellow was bound to make some diplomatic gaffe, and if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it properly....
So, for once, I’m going to stick up for Charles on this issue, since I think he probably did the only thing he could in the circumstances. Whether the circumstance should have been allowed to rise is another matter, but surely not one for the Prince.
: Blogophile is a blog devoted to Prince Charles news. Its latest news says that Charles shook hands with Mugabe. And in earlier Prince Charles news: "Charles repents adultery."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Ian Schwartz has the video.
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Media on media

: Will be on MSNBC's Connected at 5 to point to blogs reacting to the historic -- we hope -- handshakes between Israeli President Moshe Katsav and Syria's Assad and Iran's Khatami. Also other blogs. Will post links later....
: See the handshake posts above. I also plan to mention the prison blogs, below, the launch of Sploid, the amusing backpedaling happening over the Schiavo memo (see Kaus on one end, Malkin on the other... since I was late to this story, I won't even try to summarize it badly), and the Reporters Without Borders freedom awards, below.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Ian Schwartz has the video. Not my best performance. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Trey Jackson has video, too. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Blogging behind bars

: Well, this may be a first: An inmate blogger. PrisonPete doesn't reveal his real name or his crimes but says:

I am currently an inmate in a prison in New York State. I have spent the last eight years of my life living in various federally and state funded gated communities. I was a computer programmer before my career change to living off the taxpayers.
He blogs through someone on the outside who occasionally speaks as his editor and insists he's real and says it's up to us whether we want to believe that. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

He talks about cooking spaghetti, his prison dorm, his appeals, his "hack" counselor....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The funniest thing about it is the ads Google puts on for the incarcerated demographic: Correctional furnishings and "Find Inmates for Dating."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: MORE: Well, he certainly isn't the first. There's a trend in prison blogging. Thanks to Aaron in the comments, we read "English Shaun" at the once-pseudonymous blog JonsJailJournal. He writes from the infamous Maricopa County prison in Arizona (the one where the warden dresses men in pink underwear and subjects them to cams and more). Here's a BBC story about him.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Jeralyn Merritt and TalkLeft just wrote about Meet Vernon, written (via mail) by a death-row inmate. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Any more?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

You won't see this on Drudge

: Sploid's take on the pope's funeral:

Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law — who resigned in total disgrace barely two years ago for aggressively protecting a gang of amoral pervert priests who answered only to him — is one of just nine lucky ducks chosen to preside over John Paul II’s funeral.
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Fill the damned hole

: The NY Post's Steve Cuozzo has, more than anyone in New York media, kept pushing officials to keep moving on building the new World Trade Center. Yesterday, the paper gave over its editorial pages to a sharp poke in the eye of politicians and bureaucrats who have let the process grind to a shameful halt.

While all eyes were turned to the fight over the West Side stadium, redevelopment at the far more vital World Trade Center site crawled to a virtual halt....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

More than 31/2 years since 9/11, all the various projects for which designs have been approved and publicized appear bogged down to different degrees. The need to "start filling the damned hole" — as one very involved, very exasperated executive put it — has fallen subordinate to turf battles and bean-counting on all sides....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Now, insiders privately doubt that the tower can be completed by its announced 2009 target (itself a quiet retreat from the 2008 date that Pataki promised two years ago).d3d9.dll aoe III trial

At this rate, if history is any guide, the city's skyline will still have a void where the Twin Towers used to be, 10 years after the attack — and maybe 15.

Just the day before, I came through the PATH station, as I often do, and I shook my head at the lack of activity there and at the scar of the Deutsche Bank Building carcas still standing. The only good news there has been the reopening of PATH and the building of WTC 7, which is now the bright and shining exception.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

What liberal media?

: Reporters Without Borders nominates 60 blogs for freedom awards, among them many good bloggers and good friends. But I note that the only Iraqi blog they select is the anti-American Riverbend. Now if they want to nominate her, that's fine; I get it. But then for Reporters Without Borders to not nominate the many bloggers who have actually reported news in Iraq -- but aren't so anti-Ameerican -- is ridiculous... and revealing. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And from this side of the world, this would be my nominee. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Transplant successful

: The other day, the LA Times quoted the head of Comcast saying that he was considering taking Howard Stern's show off E! to suck up to legislators and regulators.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

On Stern's show this morning, they said that panicked calls were made from Comcast to E! to Stern Inc. denying this. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Well, good. Comcast officially gets its balls back. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Disney, on the other hand, has no balls. Mickey is a eunuch. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It's a cultural thing

: Is it just because I'm an American WASP that I can't get used to applause and cheers at a funeral? Are we the only ones who are silent and solemn at death? It's a cultural thing. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 07, 2005

Pope pix

: The other day, I wrote about how I thought it was odd, people snapping pix of the pope's corpse as it passed by. Thanks to a commenter below, I see that the BBC has picked up the question:

They have come to pay their final respects, so is taking a mobile phone picture of the Pope's body disrespectful or just a sign of how times changed during his 26-year papacy?
: BY the way, a quick Flickr check reveals no pope corpse snapshots. I'm surprised. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

We interrupt this feed with...

: Dave Morgan is now a believer in RSS advertising. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Wha?

: I could swear I just heard Chris Matthews say from the Vatican on MSNBC that "even the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was not this kind of event."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Hot on the wire

: Digital Media Jobs has two listings that show how much attention the news wires are paying to new media: one from Reuters -- "Responsible for the Reuters Consumer Services for the US News audience ("World Citizens"), delivered through online, mobile and interactive TV mechanisms..." (and, no I don't know what "World Citizens" means) -- and one from the AP: "The Online Editor leads AP's news coverage for the online market, working with all news departments and directing the AP Digital news staff of editors, producers, designers and video editors."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The problem with life

: Dontja just hate it when life gets in the way of blogging? I've been too busy to blog much the last few days and because of the speed of this medium, it means that I miss stories: If you don't get on the bus right away, it just keeps driving. So I missed the CampusJ's correction of the NY Times and I missed Captain's Quarters rattling Canadian authorities (here's The Times' story). d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: LATER: I also hadn't following the DeLay messes, but Slate kindly does a stink wrap-up.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Fun with Polls III: Did they have to ask?

: MSNBC just reported a poll on attitudes toward Michael Jackson: 5% are positive, 72% are negative. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Fun with Polls II: Oops

: The WSJ/NBC poll below asked Americans whether they gained or lost respect for various institutions in the Schaivo story. In every case, more lost respect than gained:
Media -- 51% lost respect
Congress -- 50%
Courts -- 46%
Bush -- 35%
Religious leaders -- 26%d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Fun with polls I

: Today's Wall Street Journal poll (free link) reveals splits among Republicans. Yes, I know, we'll hear from the GOP how this demonstrates their big tent. But I think it shows that the party's leadership is out of touch with its membership and though support for Bush remains strong, the theo-moralistic-meddling fringe has jumped the shark:

The Schiavo case has opened another rift. Though Mr. Bush and Republican congressional leaders acted to maximize the opportunity for reinserting Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube, 39% of Republicans said removing the tube was "the right thing to do," while 48% said it was wrong. ...d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"It's a story that splits our party," says Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducts the Journal/NBC survey with his Democratic counterpart Peter Hart. A similar split on Social Security, he adds, will make it "hard, but not impossible" for Mr. Bush to accomplish the centerpiece of his second-term agenda....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Nearly two-thirds of Republicans say Congress shouldn't pass legislation affecting families in cases such as Ms. Schiavo's, though some Republicans on Capitol Hill aim to do just that. By 50%-37%, Republicans say the federal government should be "less active" on social and moral issues; on gay marriage Republicans split evenly, with 48% saying Congress should pass legislation and 47% saying it shouldn't.

Let's put that in bold and italics: "By 50%-37%, Republicans say the federal government should be less active' on social and moral issues." Among all voters, that's 54-35%. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So butt out, bozos. Build roads. Fight wars. Print money. But stay out of our lives. Got the message?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Blogging freedom

: Michael J. Totten and Jim Hake are in Beirut, blogging the citizens' movement there and raising money to help support their vigil.

A sign taped to the elevator doors in my hotel lobby: "Due to the security situation we no longer allow food deliveries from outside the hotel. Thank you for understanding." And thanks for making me feel so much better.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

But being here is not as scary as you might think....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

On the contrary, the post-Hariri car bombs are more like those Europeans have come to expect from the Irish Republican Army and the Basque ETA. They seem deliberately planted so they won't kill anyone. What's happening here is an old school terrorist campaign, markedly unlike Al Qaeda's new mass-murdering terrorist onslaughts. The attacks seem cleverly calibrated to frighten people into submission without provoking yet another, stronger, anti-Syrian backlash.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"If the Syrians kill people with car bombs," one Lebanese told me, "they will be lynched in the streets."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The siege is, most likely, Syrian psychological warfare.

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April 06, 2005

Castrated cable

: The LA Times reports a frightening bit of gutlessness -- no, balllessness -- from the cable industry:

But in an attempt to avoid anti-indecency backlash, sources say, [Comcast Corp. CEO Brian] Roberts may move to take some of Comcast's raciest programming off the air.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Sources said that Roberts was considering not renewing "The Howard Stern Show" — the videotaped version of the shock jock's rant-filled radio program — when the contract expires this spring. The show, which helped put the E channel on the map, is still a ratings winner. But Roberts is worried that Stern, who has racked up more than $2 million in indecency fines for the nation's radio stations, could provoke unwanted scrutiny from Washington, especially if he gets even raunchier once he moves to satellite radio in January.

This is particularly ballless because what cable is trying to avoid is a push to allow consumers to get a la carte channels, which many consumers say they want and which would solve the problem of getting and paying for channels you don't want in your home (as opposed to blocking them but paying for them anyway). He's willing to throw out the First Amendment -- not to mention customer service -- for that. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

What's doubly appalling about this is that it is the result of Congress and the FCC enforcing a law they haven't even enforced yet. They are pressuring cable to get rid of the shows they don't like -- and we do -- with the mere threat of legislation.... legislation that surely will be found to be unconstitutional in any case. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This is an abuse of power. Cable should be standing up to it. It should be squealing like a stuck Ted Stevens pig. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So let's add Roberts to the ballless hall of fame with Disney, which invited censorship of cable to avoid a la carte pricing. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And let's contrast that with Johnathan Rogers, a respected TV exec and a good guy I men when he was at CBS. Rogers has balls:

If a compromise cannot be reached, cable executives here warn, some of America's most-watched shows could become targets, including such "basic" cable offerings as "Nip/Tuck" on News Corp.'s FX and Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants," which some critics allege promotes a gay lifestyle. Premium cable channels, such as HBO and Showtime, could also face restrictions.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"Viewers are in jeopardy of losing some of their favorite programming unless they speak up," said Johnathan Rodgers, a longtime television executive who is now chief executive of TV One, a cable channel aimed at African Americans. The 5 million people who watch FX's "The Shield," for example, "should let their congressmen know, because other people are labeling it indecent," he said. "That's a judgment call."

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The impossible had happened

: I am blathered out. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I spent last night on a panel about -- of course -- journalism and blogging at Reuters (and it was fun). Today I met with mucketies at two news organizations about -- what else? -- blogging and journalism. Too many smart people saying smart things in too short a time. Blog OD. Blogs oozing from pores. Sweating blogs. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

So how am I going to recover? I'll sit on the couch tonight -- warning: with cabernet -- and blog. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

STOP THE PRESS(ES)! Denton v. Drudge!

: Nick Denton launches his newest site today: News with attitude. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Sploid will go live at midday with BIG HEADLINES! and TOP NEWS! and WEIRD NEWS! and a TABLOID MENTALITY -- which is to say, honest news judgment that gets to the point of the story. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Its take on John Paul II: "POPE LEFT SECRET LETTER." On Peter Jennings: "JENNINGS FEARS LOSING ANCHOR HAIR." On politics: "DELAY'S FAMILY EARNED BIT $$$ FROM LOBBYISTS."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

It delivers the headlines worth talking about, like Drudge. But it looks better -- like a cheesy German tabloid. And it puts the top news on top, where it should be. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And it won't spare Drudge's sacred cows. Denton says Sploid's politics are "anarcho-capitalist" -- think libertarian without the wacky shit. They'll go after the stupid and slothful on the left and the right and won't be afraid -- unlike Drudge -- to call media on its fawning over the pope.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Sploid is being written/edited/spat out by Choire Sicha, former Gawker... and by Ken Layne, everybody's favorite blogger and a founder of the lost and lamented online Tabloid who hasn't blogged in too f'ing long... and Henry Seltzer, a Gawker Media stalwart. This is an incredible team.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: See also Joe Hagan's story in the Observer about Drudge v. Sploid v. Huffington. Drudge is being very huffy about his new competitors. He sounds just like big media when he came along. Well, of course, he is big media now. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 05, 2005

Nucking futs!

: Just when you think this indecency fetish in Washington can't get sicker, another legislator with a stick up his ass opens his mouth (and the stick protrudes):

The chairman of one of the entertainment industry's most important congressional committees says he wants to take the enforcement of broadcast decency standards into the realm of criminal prosecution.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner III, R-Wis., told cable industry executives attending the National Cable & Telecommunications Assn. conference here on Monday that criminal prosecution would be a more efficient way to enforce the indecency regulations.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"I'd prefer using the criminal process rather than the regulatory process," Sensenbrenner told the executives.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The current system -- in which the FCC fines a licensee for violating the regulations -- casts too wide a net, he said, trapping those who are attempting to reign in smut on TV and those who are not.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"People who are in flagrant disregard should face a criminal process rather than a regulator process," Sensenbrenner said. "That is the way to go. Aim the cannon specifically at the people committing the offenses, rather than the blunderbuss approach that gets the good actors.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"The people who are trying to do the right thing end up being penalized the same way as the people who are doing the wrong thing."

At last week's Freedom to Connect, when I interviewed First Amendment attorney Bob Corn-Revere, he reminded the crowd that indecency is already a criminal matter; it's not enforced that way. Now someone wants to. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Say, if I were on TV -- and soon, if some have their way, on cable or satellite... or the internet -- I could not only be fined up to $3 million a day under new legislation if I said "fuck Sensenbrenner," he would now have me go to jail. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Well, fuck Sensenbrenner. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

No sex, please, they're British

: An erotic festival in Manchester closed for lack of interest. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The chaos scenario

: Bob Garfield has a major piece of analysis and reporting on the future of media in this week's Ad Age, sadly without links online. He will also have a piece on this in this weekend's On the Media). It is the perfect bookend, from the advertising and business perspective, to Merrill Brown's piece in the Carnegie Report, which explores the media chaos scenario from the audience and content perspective. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Garfield draws a picture of the future -- nearer than you think -- in which audiences shrink severely in broadcast, mass media before new niche media are ready with the content and stuff to serve them and the advertisers who want to reach them.

Yesiree, by George, it's a brave and exciting new world that the near future holds, a democratized, consumer-empowered, bottom-up, pull-not-push, lean forward and lean back universe that will improve the quantity and quality of entertainment options, create hitherto unimaginable marketing opportunities and efficiencies and, not incidentally, generate wealth that will make the current $250 billion domestic ad market seem like pin money.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Alas, the future -- near or not -- doesn't happen until later....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Because revolutions by their nature are neither seamless nor smooth.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Because there is no reason to believe the collapse of the old media model will yield a plug-and-play new one

Bob quotes two of the smartest people I know in this arena: Om Malik and Rishad Tobaccowala of Starcom, the giant media buying agency. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I wish I could quote more -- enticing you to go out and buy a copy of Ad Age -- but, alas and damnit, they do not put the story online, even for us subcribers. What were they saying about dinosaur media?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In the air

: Satellite radio gets quite the valentine on the front page of today's NY Times. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Corpse

: On the front page of The New York Times today is a picture of pilgrims/tourists/mourners with their cameras aloft to get snapshots of the pope's body as it passes by. I don't get it. It's a cultural thing. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

All these pictures of the pope's corpse brought back memories of seeing Pope John, who died in 1963, when I was 9. I was haunted, even freaked by all the pictures and TV images of a dead person. I'd never seen a dead person. I hadn't been to a funeral and even if I had, my family doesn't do open caskets. When you're dead you're gone. Dead bodies are scary. That's how I was raised. As I said, it's just a cultural thing. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I also remember how we were struck by the people applauding a dead man. Death was a silent thing, all somber and mournful where I grew up. It's a cultural thing. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 04, 2005

Pope OD

: We've long since passed the point of too much with the pope story. The world has not stopped. But media has. Here's the evidence:

Major news media around the world devoted 10 times as many stories to Pope John Paul II's death as they did to the re-election of President Bush, according to an analysis released Monday.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The Global Language Monitor, which scans the Internet for the use of specific words or phrases using Roman characters, found 35,000 new stories on the pope in the 24 hours after his death Saturday.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

That compares with about 3,500 new stories on Bush within a day of his re-election and 1,000 new stories on former President Reagan within a day of his death last year.

More from their site:
Preliminary numbers from the Global Language Monitor's daily Internet and media analysis suggest that in the 24 hours since the pontiff's death, there have been some 35,000 major news stories, and more than 3.5 million internet citations. In comparison, for the entire preceding year there were only 28.000 major new stories and 1.5 million Internet citations about John Paul II.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

According to Paul JJ Payack, President of The Global Language Monitor, "The word historic is associated with the pontiff over 1,000,000 times, while conservative is associated some 300,000 times, and loved or beloved about a quarter million times in the first 24 hours since John Paul's passing."

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Current.tv

: Al Gore and Joel Hyatt announced their new network and new name at last. It's Current.tv. It's supposed to be TV by, about, and for the people and if it turns out to be that, it could be exciting and new. We'll see... this fall. You can see samples of the people's videos on the home page (I liked the second prize better than the first). Here's my brief report after I met Hyatt at his HQ a year ago. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Tracking

: Take a look at this neat new Blogrunner site tracking every story and writer in The Times. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

A year ago at E-Tech, Jay Rosen told Technorati's Dave Sifry that he could guarantee getting blogs attention and respect by creating a cosmos page for every writer on every paper. Ego would drive them to see what people were saying about them and their stories. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

The Blogrunner site -- sent to us by Steve Rubel -- tries to do that. It's a bit ungainly but still cool. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I just got email from Robert Scoble saying he still has a soft spot for Memeorandum because it tracks blog comment on multiple media outlets. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

They're all headed in the right direction, but none has arrived yet. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Blogging for governor

: Now two leading candidates for NJ governor -- Corzine and Schundler -- have blogs and Joe Territo is asking both of them a question and suggesting more voters do the same. I think that's a good idea: So far, candidates' blogs have still been one way the wrong way: It's another stump for speeches. I'll be impressed when I see candidates use the medium to listen. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: I messed up and forgot the Schundler link when I first put this up and GOP Bloggers is seeing vast-middle-wing conspiracies!!!! Sad. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Freedom to connect

: Susan Crawford just put up her opening remarks at last week's Freedom to Connect meeting. She says we should be very careful asking for government help on the one hand because it could lead to government regulation on the other hand. She, like me, goes against the flow on the question of government regulation of media ownership.

The reality of the internet simply does not depend on the FCC, and the internet's health doesn't depend on the telecom act of 2006. We should thank the FCC for allowing competing modems, for which we're really very grateful, and slap a big gold star on their forehead -- and move on. Freeing carriage -- net neutrality rules -- and regulating media ownership don't go together. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

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It seems to me, in fact, that regulating media ownership is inconsistent with insisting on freeing carriage. And dinosaurs need to clump together to avoid the cold winds of change -- so consolidation may protect them while not harming us. All commercial regulation leads to the risk that government will be pushed by industries of various kinds to do their bidding....

Similarly:
Running to the government to ask for filters to be taken off implies that they have the power to ask for filters (of various kinds, for various purposes) to be installed. If we're free, and I think that we are, then we shouldn't ask for help but should find other routes to do what we want to do.
When the conference was organized, I suggested that the organizing principle should be to ask: What if we had no FCC? When I said that at the conference, introducing First Amendment guru Bob Corn-Revere, I got a few wistful chortles -- as if I'd said: What if we still had free sex? In her remarks, Susan does list a few things we do need -- antitrust enforcement, for example. But we do not need government regulating speech; the founding fathers specifically said government should not do that and for good reason. But we've lost sight of that as we've acted as if technology is an exception.
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Take that

: Walter Kirn's deftly devastating review of Jonathan Safran Foer's book -- the latest 9/11 novel, one that appears to want to be the cute one -- was most entertaining:

Its title is ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,'' but it will also be known, inevitably, perhaps primarily, and surely intentionally, as that new Sept. 11 novel whose last pages include a little flip-book of video stills arranged in reverse order to create a fleeting, blurry movie of an actual human being careering upward through the sky toward the top of the fiery doomed tower from which (softheaded moralists will note, to the bafflement of hardened aesthetes) the flesh-and-blood person on the film was - in undoctored, forward-rushing fact - jumping or falling to his death.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Does a novel with such a high-concept visual kicker (and sensational book-club conversation starter) even need a title at all?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Does it even need text? ...d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And so it begins, and doesn't ever stop - a rain of truisms, aphorisms, nuggets of wisdom and deep thoughts tossed off by Oskar and the other characters as if they were trying to corner a market in ironic existentialist greeting cards. ''It's better to lose than never to have had.'' ''You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.'' ''Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.'' ...d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Once they've cracked open this overstuffed fortune cookie and pondered the symmetries, allusions and truths on the tightly coiled strip of paper, it will dawn on some readers that today's neo-experimental novels are not necessarily any better suited to get inside, or around, today's realities than your average Hardy Boys mystery.

I'm taking that one off my Amazon wishlist!d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Speaking of deft, I also enjoyed Kit Seelye's lead in her followup on the latest new New York magazine. She lets Adam Moss paint his own self-portrait... or rather, self-parody:

There was no other word for it. Adam Moss was just gushing.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"I love magazines," he was saying in his corner office in Midtown Manhattan last week. "I love them. And when I read them, I get very excited. They are emotional things for me."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Mr. Moss has just clocked a year as editor in chief of New York magazine, and he was holding one of his lovelies, the April 4 issue. In the cover story, Bernard Kerik talks for the first time about his brief and disastrous nomination as head of the Department of Homeland Security.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"When you are transported into Kerik's home, for the first time, as he turns down the job of homeland security chief and starts to cry because of the decision he has made, that to me is hugely pleasurable," Mr. Moss said with a grin. "It gives you the pleasure of a great novel or a great nonfiction narrative book."

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April 03, 2005

The Reformation, still

: The death of John Paul II is reminding me of an essential difference in worldviews -- and the tension among them -- that affects so much today -- more than we recognize -- and that stretches back to the Reformation.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Last night, I went to the middle school's performance of 1776 (heckuva John Adams, by the way) and, you know me, I'll celebrate anything that celebrates democracy. While I sat there, hours after the pope had died, I had this fleeting thought: Is it time to democratize the Catholic church? Shouldn't the people be electing their pope? If we democracy advocates are demanding popular control and transparency of every nation -- not to mention political, media, and marketing institutions -- can't we advocate that for the church?d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Obviously that's an absurd notion; it is by definition of the Catholic church impossible: The pope is elected by the college of cardinals in a process of annointing a man who is then seen as a direct link to God, even His infallible agent, in a line that continues straight back to Peter and Christ. This is the heiarchy of the Catholic church; there is no more purely heirarchical institution I can name. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Of course, that was what Martin Luther rejected when he argued that the people can talk directly with God, without priests as their agents; and when he translated the Bible into the vulgate, the people's language; and when he created a church that rejected that one-way heirarchy. The populist movement he sparked went even further, of course, when the Presbyterians created a governing structure based on representative democracy that has been the basis for governments since; when the Congregationalists went yet further with a structure that gives the congregation control over any decision, even theology; and, in another direction, when the Bapists and other fundamentalists proclaimed the the Bible as their sole authority, not clergy. Obviously, this is an oversimplification, but the point is that we end up today with three world views that I see around me (apart from Asian and other religions):d3d9.dll aoe III trial

There is the heiararchical worldview of the Catholics that places authority in the pope and his priests. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

There is the fundamentalist worldview that puts authority in the Word and strict interpretation of it. This, I'll argue, is the view not only of Protestant fundamentalists but even moreso of Muslims, who believe the word is not only the authority but the embodiment of God. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And then there is the Protestant reformed worldview -- in this context, I'd say that Congregationalism is the clearest exhibit -- that says man must grapple with the word and the word made whole in Christ to discern the will of God. I'd also argue that this is similar to the worldview of Judaism, in which man takes the law of God and tries to interpret it, via the Talmud and study, to decide how to live under that law. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

These are three fundamentally different ways to look at the world and we see this reflected not only in religious institutions and arguments about religion but also, simply, in the inability of people of one worldview to understand those of another. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I was raised Presbyterian and I am now a Congregationalist (not of the UCC stripe). It is the perfect fit for -- and probably the origin of -- my populist view and my incessant indecision. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I hear others look at my tradition and judge it to be too humanistic -- giving too much authority to man -- and even relativistic, a charge that is often snarled: Fundamentalists think that we adjust moral standards for convenience, while we believe that right and wrong cannot be found in a particular sentence (or a particular person) but must be found in prayer, deliberation, education, and practice. The heirarchical think we do not have a respect for authority when we believe that the authority of the powerful is derived from the authority of the people, which is derived from the freedom given us by God. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And, in turn, people from my worldview can think that fundamentalists are inflexible when they are devout and that those who put their trust in a hierarchy are sheep when they are respectful. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

When we disagree about religion and morals and ethics and issues, the root of that is often more fundamental than a clash of opinions but instead a basic divergence of worldviews that goes back to the Reformation.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I think we saw this profound disconnect of worldviews in the Schiavo case, where some saw what to them was a clear rule of God that was being trampled by the opinions of man and courts, while others saw an ethical issue of individual God-given freedom. I make no judgment about either here but mean instead to say that there is a misunderstanding that goes back to the Reformation. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

This is reflected in more than religion. It is reflected in much of the rest of life. And I believe that whether you are religious or not, your views of many things are likely to consistent within your own worldview, your own tradition. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In politics, there are those who see things through heirarchy and established power and others who see thing through the political orthodoxy and "correctness" and yet others who see things via the authority of the people. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

In business and the academe you can see parallels as well.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

And what would a post from me be without bringing even this to a view of media and, yes, citizens' media. Some see journalism through heirarchy: Journalists so often believe they are the priests who intepret and communicate from on high; hell, Dan Rather thought he was the pope of news. Others see in journalism an orothodoxy of rules and standards: professionalism, they usually call it. And others -- yes, the bloggers pounding their theses on the door -- see journalism as a process that can now be written by the people in the vulgate. Jay Rosen has written about journalism as a theology and journalists as its priests. The reference to the Reformation is quite apt. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

No doubt, some will try to read criticism of one religious (or journalistic) worldview versus another in this; that's not what I intended. Instead, I'm merely saying that it's important to recognize these worldviews and the distances among them. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: LATER: I keep telling Andrew Tyndall tha the should be blogging not only because he's smart and witty and has a lot to say but simply because his comments are too good not to blog. His comment on this post:

My ancestor, William Tyndale, was the first to translate the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew into English. Tyndale smuggled New Testaments into England from Antwerp and feuded with Tomas More, before being burned at the stake for heresy.

Arguing with a Roman prelate, Tyndale famously said (according to Foxe's Book of Martyrs): d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life, ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth a plough shall know more of the scripture than thou dost."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Tyndale's testaments were printed in miniature format, like today's paperbacks, so that they could be more easily smuggled--and also fit into that ploughhand's pocket.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

My father, Timothy Tyndall, is fond of saying that Tyndale, if he were alive in these times, would have used the Internet rather than the printing press to spread the word.

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Popevision, continued

: John Hinderaker thinks the press isn't saying enough nice things about the pope. Dave Winer says they're saying too many nice things in "an endless infomercial for the Catholic Church." d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: I just got off the phone with my sister, the Rev. Jarvis, and she and I both bemoaned Franklin Graham appearing on TV as the representative of Protestants. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Not only is he not a spokesman for Protestants, he's a bad one. On Today yesterday, after he cooed about the pope, he was asked about the pope's opposition to the war in Iraq. Graham said he does not know a minister on earth who is for war. So every minister opposed, say, World War II? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: More on media treatment of the pope below. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

April 02, 2005

The pope has died

: Word came before 3p ET, said MSNBC.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: I'll continue to add links in the posts below -- the first general links, the second about media coverage. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Pope links

: The Pope Blog, which had gone dormant, is back alive now as its bloggers are taking shifts to cover the news. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: MSNBC.com started a pope news blog with news tidbits and a citizens' journlist page with people emailing in their brushes with the papacy. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The Learning Company puts up downloads of two free lectures on papal elections. [via Dave Taylor]d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: We're also seeing pope press releases: A music company is releasing free material for church services when the pope dies. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: And getaloada this press release: This one says that San Francisco singer Tricia Greenwood took her song "In Heaven," which she previously rewrote as "In Heaven (911)," and now rededicates it to the death of the pope. I'm surprised there wasn't a Schaivo version in the middle. To quote the flackery: "Tricia says, 'God told me to write this song and I obeyed him.'" And then He told her to send out a press release, apparently. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Cable news' tone in this story is, of course, ever-reverent. On MSNBC just now, it was good to hear Jim Maseda at least list the controversies that have surrounded this pope. He had to then get back to reverence. But it's good to keep some journalistic perspective in these stories. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

On blogs, of course, that balance is achieved via different perspectives, some blunt in a way that reverent TV coverage can't be. Most blogs mentioning the pope are also reverent but edstrong, a "radical left" blog, quotes at length from an indymedia blast at the pope:

A picture emerges of a man gripped with hatred for condoms but in practice equivocal about paedophilia. Homosexuality is to him "an objective disorder" and "intrinsically evil", but the rape of kidnapped boys is no bar to Sainthood.
: Tempus Fugit says:
Now that Pope John Paul II has had a feeding tube inserted, the “oh my gosh, it’s just like Terri, Michael Schiavo is going to try to kill the pope!” people are coming out of the woodwork. Come on… that’s just not nice. No matter how brain-dead you think some of his positions are, you shouldn’t compare the Pope to someone with no cerebral function.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Wednesday’s episode of South Park just might have the best summation of the Schiavo issue so far: one side is right for all the wrong reasons, and the other side is wrong for all the right reasons. Wow. Don’t you hate it when foul-mouthed cartoon characters make you think?

: The other night, I got all confused -- not being Catholic -- about whether the networks were confused about whether the pope had received last rights. A library blog quotes Wikipedia to clear it up:
Currently on the home page: Pope John Paul II reportedly receives the Anointing of the Sick following a serious urinary tract infection.. And the anointing of the sick page explains The former name Extreme Unction was used in the Western (Roman) part of the Catholic Church from the end of the twelfth century until the Second Vatican Council, and was never popular in the Eastern (Orthodox) part. Last Rites is a common but misleading term."
: Via a comment to the post below, Josh Marshall gives us a personal recollection and a political analysis of the pope. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Rhiel World View does some research on papal succession in a very good post that brings it all together with this tidbit I never knew:

The camerlengo gently raps the pontiff's forehead with a silver mallet and calls the pope by his birth name three times. With no answer after the third time, the Pope is officially pronounced dead in the eyes of the church; however, prior to this, the Pope's personal physician has already pronounced him dead.
: SILVER HAMMER UPDATE: The Guardian has a correction saying that the silver hammer story is a myth. [via Snopes]d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Nonetheless, I haven't been able to get Maxwell's Silver Hammer out of my head. Dan Herzlich helpfully gives us the lyrics in the comments on this post. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Publius Pundit, who has quickly become the leading freedom blogger, gives a tribute to John Paul that seems universal:

Pope John Paul II has been to myself and countless others the spiritual revolutionary that gutted the Soviet Union in its Godless, empty soul. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for the unmatched contribution he made toward securing us a freer world than the one he was born to. Thomas Jefferson once said, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” making Pope John Paul II one of His most humble servants.
: Catholic Pages has its explanation of the ritual of succession. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The Polling Report quotes an ABC/Post poll showing a growing approval rating for the pope over the years. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The Rev. Thomas Reece, editor of the Catholic weekly America, has a papal FAQ here. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The Ignatius Press Insight Scoop blog has many good updates. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Detroit Funk puts up pictures of yellow-and-white flags hoisted outside churchs to mark open prayer. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Here's a Podcasting priest at the Vatican. Roderick Vonhögen is a Catholic priest in Utrecht, The Netherlands. [via Baggas]d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Pirates wants the next pope to come from China: "Since right now China is the biggest threat to world freedom. No, they’re not terrorists, which is what we are currently cleaning up around the world. They are the biggest totalitarian government." Captain's Quarters is writing about the persecution of Chinese Catholics. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Outside the Beltway says the ppe gets too much credit for toppling communism in Europe. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: FreeBible.com sends out a press release saying it's giving free Bibles in honor of the pope. Except the site is already called FreeBible, no? And they charge you a handling fee of $5.99. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

LINKS AFTER THE POPE'S DEATH...d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Among the first links coming after the pope died are press releases -- one from the Family Research Council and one from Domino's founder Tom Monaghan:

I will always remember the first time I received communion from him in his private chapel. I'll never forget when his blue eyes met mine just before receiving communion ... In fact, within hours of this encounter, I received the inspiration to found Legatus, an organization for Catholic business leaders with the mission to study, live and spread the Faith.
But enough about the pope. What about me? d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The Pope Blog gives us the quotes of the moment:

Vere Papa mortuus estd3d9.dll aoe III trial

In Latin, "The Pope has truly died," are the words that the Cardinal Camerlengo Eduardo Martinez Somalo pronounces to verify the death of Pope John Paul II.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Psalm 130 is also recited by the Camerlengo: "Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD. ..."d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Any prelates present with the Pope when he dies join together in saying, "Subvénite, Sancti Dei; occúrrite, Angeli Domini: Suscipientes animam eius. Offerentes eam in conspectu Altissimi." ("Come to his aid, Saints of God; race to meet him, Angels of the Lord: Receive his soul and present it in the presence of the Most High.") ...d3d9.dll aoe III trial

"The angels welcome you," Vatican TV said after the announcement came from papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls.

: The Vatican announced -- and the AP learned about -- the death of the pope via email!d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: A sometimes-Catholic, Chris Gonyea, remembers a sports trip to Rome and St. Peters:

I will be the first to admit, I’m not exactly a model when it comes to being religious. I have attended only a few masses in the past decade. I rarely pray (single digits as well in the past decade probably). When I do attend mass, I often have no clue on what is going on outside of a hazy memory of going to church when I was growing up and in Sunday school....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I quickly worked my way through the crowd and while I never saw the Pope, I did see what I thought was the top of his head. I was maybe 50 feet away, but it seemed like I was touched personally by him being there. Later that day, I watched the Pope speak from his window overlooking St. Peter’s square. In my pictures, all you could see is a white dot that was his hat. Just seeing something like that was extremely special and I’ll always remember it.

: Michelle Malkin is updating with lots of links. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: The Lone Star Times reminds us that al Qaeda also targeted John Paul II. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: A Lebanese blogger, Element, echoes what many say: They may not have agreed with him but they respected him:

Although I never agreed with many of the things that this man stood for in his life. I truly respect him and consider him a great and brave religious leader. He devoted his life to God and to his followers.... i did not agree with most of what this man stood for since i see myself as a progressive liberal catholic, but this man was truly a messenger of peace and love. Rest in peace John Paul II. We will always remember you.
: Similarly, Flaschenpost says:
An unexpected sadness about his imminent passing despite the fact that I don't agree with his conservatism on birth control, women in the church, and homosexuality. I figure I must just like the man. He comes from Poland, not far from where I'm from, his history linked closely to what I think of my history (the history of my family, my region, my country). His vigour, studiousness, smile, gusto, and approachability impressed me. His stance against communism.
: And still in a similar vein, here is a very nice post from a Polish blogger, Kinuk:
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There is a hush over the country. It's as if everyone is walking a little softer and moving a little gentler. When I went to bed last night just around 2am, there were still a lot of lights on in the apartment blocks next to ours. We all held our vigils in some way. I didn't want to talk to anybody, I didn't really want to go to church, I just wanted to sit in front of the television and watch. Almost every single Polish channel carried films, news, recollections and photographs of the Pope. There were reporters in most large churches across the country, talking to bishops and archbishops and the faithful. Men got teary on national cameras and some women wept openly. We know he's dying and that breaks our hearts....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I'm probably not the right person for this commentary. My opinions differ dramatically from those of the Catholic Church. I disagree with their stance on women's rights, reproductive rights and homosexuality. I disagree strongly. But, when it comes to the Pope, the man who cements these views and beliefs in the Church, I cannot help myself.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

I tell myself that it must be his Polishness and his incredible pull on my fellow Poles. I tell myself that I value him and his work because of his large role in bringing down the Communist regime. I tell myself that he has travelled so much around the world and brought happiness to so many. But I think my outpouring of emotions are rooted in a simpler reason: a good man is dying. It's that simple.

: Here is the Religion News Service obituary. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Here is the official Vatican bulletin...

popebulletin.jpg
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: Arthur Chrenkoff writes his tribute. d3d9.dll aoe III trial

: Tom Watson writes a very neat post about John Paul II as the blogging pope -- or at least the networked pope:

Poet, author, diarist, commentator, reader, writer. Karol Wojtyla of Poland was a blogger at heart. And his Papacy earned early adopter status amidst the cobwebs and Latin scrolls of the Church. Hidebound to tradition in many ways, progressive in many others, Pope John Paul II embraced new technology to the fullest, and used the Internet as a tool for evangelism from its earliest days of consumer adoption. Not only was he the most traveled Pope, he was the most wired Pope, and he understood the power of the worldwide network of digital information and opinion.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Very early on, the Church became a strong Internet player under John Paul II. It understood the intrinsic value of its vast collections of art and texts, and gradually made much of it available online - thereby drawing in Catholics and non-Catholics. Almost immediately, the Holy See created versions of its Website in many languages and was among the first major worldwide institutions to use database-and-object technology online to publish, moving quickly away from the flat html pages of the mid-90s.d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Moreover, the Pope understood the power of networked communication, especially for the young. He pushed the Church to adopt technology, to open communications. Here's a quote from one official statement on World Communications Day (2002):d3d9.dll aoe III trial

For the Church the new world of cyberspace is a summons to the great adventure of using its potential to proclaim the gospel message...I dare to summon the whole Church bravely to cross this new threshold, to put out deeply into the Net....d3d9.dll aoe III trial

Note the humor in the pun. The Blogging Friar Jack calls John Paul "the most media-savvy pope ever." As late as last year, in failing health,