Time magazine’s decision to name confidential sources
Time magazine’s decision to name confidential sources unnerves other journalism outlets.
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kottke.org posts about journalism
George Weller was the first foreign reporter
George Weller was the first foreign reporter to visit Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped. For the first time, these are his reports from there, which at the time were censored by the US military.
Hossein Derakhshan, founding father of the influential
Hossein Derakhshan, founding father of the influential Iranian blogging movement, is visiting Iran and needs your financial support. He’s going to cover the trip as a citizen journalist but warns that he may be detained, questioned, thrown in jail, be forced to make false statements, etc.
Some good thoughts from Paul Ford on
Some good thoughts from Paul Ford on the recent announcement from the NY Times about their TimesSelect offering. “The web should serve the needs of its users, not the needs of a few hundred advertisers. If that ends up costing money, so be it; this medium is not inherently free.”
Newspaper coverage of the Mount St Helens eruption, 25 years later
Newspaper coverage of the Mount St Helens eruption, 25 years later.
John Battelle has some interesting thoughts on
John Battelle has some interesting thoughts on the NYTimes’ move to charge for some of its content. “The Times stated reason for doing this is to diversify its revenue mix, and I buy that logic. It’s scary to be totally leveraged over advertising.”
Internal NY Times report recommends the creation
Internal NY Times report recommends the creation of a NY Times blog.
NYPD: web sites are not eligible for working press credentials
NYPD: web sites are not eligible for working press credentials. Wait, doesn’t the NY Times have a web site?
Comparing newspapers’ online “circulation” (# of blog links)
Comparing newspapers’ online “circulation” (# of blog links) with their offline circulation. The Christian Science Monitor had the highest ratio by far, with the Wall Street Journal being almost invisible on the web (which will eventually affect their influence, I think).
“Get over yourself and drop the ‘MSM’ bullshit, please”
“Get over yourself and drop the ‘MSM’ bullshit, please”. “If you use the term ‘MSM’ in a unironic way to denote the ‘Mainstream Media’ I will write you off as a quack, unsubscribe from your RSS, and stop reading your blog.”
Interface Culture
How well does the 6 year-old analysis of how we use and will use information technology contained in the pages of Interface Culture hold up? Not too bad, actually. Consider the following paragraph from the “Windows” chapter on what metaforms the Web might be capable of supporting (paragraph breaks and links mine):
Over the next decade, this stitching together of different news and opinion sources will slowly become a type of journalism in its own right, a new form of reporting that synthesizes and digests the great mass of information disseminated online everyday. (Clipping services have occupied a comparable niche for years, though their use is largely limited to corporate executives and other journalists.)
Total News gives us a glimpse of what these new information filters will look like, but the site neglects the defining element of a successful metaform, which is an actual editorial or evaluative sensibility. Total News simply repackages the major online news services indiscriminately; it may be a more convenient format, but it adds nothing to the actual content of the information. More advanced news “browsers” will include a genuine critical temperament, a perspective on the world, an editorial sensibility that governs the decisions about which stories to repackage. The possibilities are endless: a filter for left-leaning economic and political stories; a filter for sports coverage that emphasizes the psychological dimension of professional athletics; a filter that focuses exclusively on independent film news and commentary.
The beautiful thing about this new meta-journalism is that it doesn’t require a massive distribution channel or extravagant licensing fees. A single user with a Web connection and only the most rudimentary HTML skills can upload his or her overview of the day’s news. If the editorial sensibility is sharp enough, this kind of metajournalism could easily find enough of an audience to be commercially sustainable, given the limited overhead required to run such a service.
When the whole blog thing blew up huge and then people like Rafat Ali, Andrew Sullivan, and Nick Denton started making money off of them, Johnson must have danced around the apartment in his underpants (perhaps like Tom Cruise in Risky Business) shouting, “I told you so, I told you so, I called the hell out of that one! In your face!”
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