yelvington.com - blogging

Can we finally bury the "bloggers only comment, don't report" canard?

yelvington — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:59:14 +0000

Now that Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo political blog has won a George Polk Award for legal reporting, can we please officially bury the tired old nonsense about blogging not being real journalism? Editor and Publisher quotes the announcement: "His site, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led the news media coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country. Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall (with staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration's bidding."

Politics and citizen media

yelvington — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:38:30 +0000

All journalism has political implications, and we're seeing that play out in the citizen media space.

Kevin Anderson describes how Google/YouTube has muzzled Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, who has been posting videos of torture and official violence in Egypt.

Asia Times Online describes the role played by bloggers in Malaysia where it says "independent news websites and blogs have enjoyed a surge in popularity on the back of two huge demonstrations and retaliatory government crackdowns in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, which the mainstream media arguably failed to report accurately or adequately.

(Kevin and I taught last summer at an Ifra citizen media workshop in Kuala Lumpur that was attended by mainstream journalists from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and India.)

The diverse, open platform provided by the Internet has perforated the ability of autocrats and bureaucrats to control information. But messages need audiences. Centralized systems like YouTube can provide those audiences, but at a cost of creating a centralized point of control that may be manipulated by governmental pressure.

Both Google and Yahoo have shown repeatedly that when the chips are down, their commercial interests will trump social responsibilities.

Hype it with the facts

yelvington — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:13:29 +0000

Mark Potts criticizes breathless misreporting by journalist-bloggers:

We hold bloggers to somewhat different standards than journalists, because the vast majority of them aren't, well, journalists. But is it too much to ask that journalist-bloggers retain a modicum of professional ethics about what they post and how they post it? Everybody who's been involved in stories that get caught up in the media blogosphere vortex seems to have a horror tale about a journalist-blogger posting something without checking facts or asking for comment—or jumping to conclusions based on personal biases. It happens way too often, and it's just sloppy. And when it comes from a journalist-blogger writing under the imprimatur of a journalism site, it's inexcusable.

There's a great line from All the President's Men that applies perfectly here, as it does to all journalism: "If you're going to hype it, hype it with the facts."

Mudslide in Ohio

yelvington — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 18:45:33 +0000

Tuesday I'm in Pickerington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, to lead a daylong "citizen journalism" training workshop. Undoubtedly the meltdown at the Plain Dealer will be one of the topics of conversation. Noteworthy links:

Wide Open blog bumps up against journalistic ethics: Cleveland Reader Rep Ted Diadiun explains how "The Plain Dealer got itself spattered by some primordial ooze last week" and concludes with "You can't contribute to a political candidate and then write about his or her campaign, either as an employee or as a paid free-lancer for The Plain Dealer, on paper or online. Period."

Jeff Jarvis responds: "The problem, in my view, is that Diadiun isn’t listening and learning. That, you’d think, would be the fundamental qualification for his job. ... Diadiun just defends the paper against an accusation of buckling to political pressure and lashes out at the bloggers as aliens to the newspaper ways."

Jay Rosen says:"If you’re caught up in a situation that appears to pit journalists with ethics against bloggers who ain’t got none, you may actually be facing a conflict between one ethic and another, and it would be good to find out what the “other” is before deciding what to do."

My favorite, though, is a buried comment on Jarvis' site from Jill Miller Zimon observing that she's written Plain Dealer op-ed pieces many times, and never has been asked whether she has donated to anyone's political campaigns, or advised of any policy against it.

Related items: MSNBC's list of journalists who have contributed to candidates and a rundown of varying policies regarding political activity.

Straw man bites Andrew Keen

yelvington — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:18:09 +0000

In my book Andrew Keen is a pompous fraud and I wouldn't cross the street to put him out if he were on fire, so I particularly enjoyed seeing Markos Moulitsas expose Keen's sloppy "professionalism."

Moulitsas (aka Kos) quotes Keen's book...

It is not surprising then that these prominent bloggers have no professional training in the collection of news. After all, who needs a degree in journalism to post a hyperlink on a Web site? Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, for example, the founder of Daily Kos, a left-leaning site, came to political blogging via the technology industry and the military.

... and then points out that he (Kos) has a degree in journalism (as well as several others), served as editor of his college newspaper, freelanced several years for the Chicago Tribune and has written for the Guardian. (Thanks to Martin Stabe.)

Keen is not a journalist but rather a professional self-promoter. Nevertheless, his straw-man dismissal of blogging is a position still held by too many in journalism.

Across the pond in the UK, there's a bit of a revolt against the National Union of Journalists over luddite positions being taken by the union. Suw and Kevin take a swing, and Neil McIntosh offers some suggestions as to how the NUJ could make itself useful.

The sports power struggle

yelvington — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:45:57 +0000

Writing for followthemedia.com, Philip Stone has a good roundup of the blooming power struggle between sports sanctioning organizations and the media.

At the other end of the spectrum, Steve Klein notes that the National Hockey League is setting up a "blog box" -- a special area for live bloggers -- at some of its venues.

What's going on? Is the NHL enlightened and the rest of the sports world stuck in the dark ages?

I don't think so. This is fairly simple: It's all about power. The strike-weakened NHL needs all the attention it can get. Other sanctioning bodies are feeling secure, and they're going to grab for what they can.

CNN does the right thing

yelvington — Sun, 06 May 2007 13:44:34 +0000

The blogs are abuzz this morning with the news that CNN has decided to allow unrestricted reuse of the televised New Hampshire presidential primary debates. It's the right thing to do for all sorts of reasons. Much of the commentary repeats the claim that CNN is releasing the video under a Creative Commons license, but the announcement makes no such claim, rather using the language "without restrictions."

Both John Edwards and Barack Obama previously had asked that future debates be licensed under a Creative Commons license, apparently reacting to (MS)NBC's hoarding of video from the South Carolina debate of Democratic contenders.

The problem with Creative Commons is that it isn't a license, but rather a confusing family of related licenses, some of which have ill-defined restrictions -- notably "noncommercial." In this world in which everyone can be a publisher, and everyone can paste ad-network code into a website template, what is commercial and what is not? "No restrictions" is much a better policy for the debate video.

The blogging phenomenon

yelvington — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 23:21:11 +0000

JD points out that blogging is 10 years old this month. Today I was on a webinar panel, organized by Brian Anderson of PR/Newswire, discussing blogging. There were something like 3,000 people registered to listen and ask questions. Holy cow. For several years the number of active blogs has doubled every six months. That growth has slowed, according to the Technorati folks, but no one should doubt this: The world has changed. There is a new global conversation under way. There's no going back.

The baby and the bathwater

yelvington — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 20:39:28 +0000

One of my favorite blogs is Creating Passionate Users, where Kathy Sierra's diagrams are as thought-provoking as her posts. Not long ago, some jackass posted threats in the comments on her website. She went public and the resulting uproar about cyber-bullying led Tim O'Reilly to call for a blogger code of conduct. Now Jimmy Wales has set up a wiki to develop that code.

This territory is at once dangerous and silly. Dangerous because claiming to adhere to a published code could place a blogger at legal risk that otherwise might not exist. Silly because it's not going to solve any problems.

No matter how many codes of conduct or ethical guidelines or terms-of-service documents we amass, some people are just going to be jackasses. The sort of person who threatened Kathy Sierra isn't going to be deterred by a code of conduct.

And some of the proposed solutions in the draft I see today would throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm specifically talking about "We do not allow anonymous comments," a provision that would require verified email addresses before anyone could comment on a blog post, and "We encourage blog hosts to enforce more vigorously their terms of service," a provision that suggests that Internet service providers should perform some sort of police function.

Don't get me wrong. Codes, guidelines and contract language all have roles to play, as do aspirational/mission statements. I've used all of them, and I certainly support the development of "safe places" where civil conversation can flourish.

But we're not talking about private developments or gated communities here. This is being pitched as a universal ruleset for the blogosphere. We need to keep in mind that freedom and order often act as opposing forces, and sometimes solving one problem can create many new ones.

See also: Dan Gillmor, who warns "they're creating a bit of a monster," Jeff Jarvis, who snarls, "I don’t need anyone lecturing me and telling me not to be disagreeable," and Ryan Sholin, who growls, "Keep your code of conduct out of my communication medium, thank you kindly."

Being interactive

yelvington — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 13:36:28 +0000

Continuing my riff on the four keys to a great news website:

I stumbled across a great quote from the late Douglas Adams, who noted that we think everything invented before we were born is normal, everything invented before we were 30 is exciting, and everything invented after that is an offense against the natural order of things.

"This subjective view plays odd tricks on us, of course. For instance, 'interactivity' is one of those neologisms that Mr [John] Humphrys [BBC news presenter] likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport -- the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head."

I admit I never thought of "interactive" as a neologism, but that explains why there's been so much confusion. For years it's galled me to see "interactive" glued onto the names of organizations utterly opposed to interactivity, as in "Daily Bugle Interactive." Newspaper associations hand out awards in "interactive" categories to websites that glue flashy bling-bling onto old-media, linear, one-way news lectures.

Americans, who pretty much owned the 20th century, are particularly affected by this temporal myopia.

Several years ago my wife and I traveled through Ireland, staying at farmhouses and country homes, eating lamb stew at country inns, and staying up late at little Irish pubs.

We have Irish pubs in America where fake Irish bands set up on low stages, turn on amplifiers, and play for us. In Ireland what I witnessed was entirely different. People wandered into the bar carrying instruments, took over a centrally located table, and just began playing, apparently for free beer. More arrived, some dropped out and circulated. It was hard to tell where band left off and audience began, as the audience might be playing along with silverware and glasses, and singing. It was participatory music.

William Gibson says the future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed. So also the past is still here, and unevenly distributed. If we just look around us we can see that the "normal" human condition just might be a bit different than we assume.

I don't know why "interactivity" is so confusing. "Inter" and "active" are pretty straightforward. "Inter" is about connection. "Active" is about doing. What do people do on your website? Does it have to do with connecting with other people?

The social isolation and disconnection that is the legacy of 20th century mass media is one of the poisons that is behind the steady decline of newspaper readership since 1970. Robert Putnam has documented this decline and has some ideas about how to counter it.

I think one thing newspapers can do is to embrace this concept of interaction. We need to become convenors of community, facilitators of civic conversation, builders of social capital. This is about the actions we take in our geographical communities, not about the technology we deploy on our websites.

It's in our social interests and in our strategic interests. The good news is that it also works in the short term: people love it, respond to it, join in it. Participative components significantly increase the frequency numbers (visits per user per month) of a news website.