We’re starting out this week not with a blog but with an article on blogging in the Online Journalism Review entitled “Can Newspapers Do Blogs Right?” Written by OJR editor Robert Niles, the article was inspired by two recent blogging train wrecks in major newspapers, the Washington Post and the LA Times.
Within the past few weeks two of America’s leading newspapers have watched staff-written blogs blow up in their faces. First, Ben Domenech left Washingtonpost.com after outside bloggers uncovered numerous examples of plagiarism in his past work. And last week, the Los Angeles Times suspended the blog of Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Hiltzik (interviewed by OJR just before the scandal broke) after he was discovered to have posted comments under false identities on his and other blogs.
Can newspapers do blogs right? I e-mailed that question to several prominent online journalists. All have experience with “traditional” media and either blog or oversee bloggers in their work. Their edited responses follow.
The question seems irrelevant in one sense and completely extra-planetary in another.
The obvious answer to the question is “Of course.” A number of newspapers run blogs of one sort or another, and most of them work out perfectly well. The Post, for instance, runs a blog by Jeff Morley called “World Opinion Roundup” in which Morley does what the blog name suggests (most recently with Chinese coverage of president Hu’s US tour). He takes comments on his posts, he doesn’t plagiarize and as far as anyone knows he doesn’t beef up his comment count or promote his blog elsewhere under a fake name. The BBC andthe Guardian/Observer in the UK both have well trafficked, scandal free blogs. It’s not rocket science.
What was more annoying about the question, or at rather the incidents that precipitated it, is that neither Domenech’s or Hiltzik’s sins were blogger-specific. Domenech was a plagiarist who got caught, which certainly isn’t the specific province of bloggers, and Hiltzik did the same thing, only less so, as non-blogger John Lott did a few years ago.
So, yeah: newspapers can do blogs right. Even the Washington Post can do bloggers right, when they put their minds to it.
And of course lots of other people can do blogs right. Journalist and blogger Ed Cone steered us to an offering from Mike Munger, which begins with a Hunter Thompson-esqe discourse about taking down dead pines with a shotgun, and ends more contemplatively.
For my own view, let me say there is something special about answering nature’s call on a small hilltop, and being able to see at least 1/4 mile in all directions, as a gentle breeze blows through your private parts. You sit and think to yourself: MY land! This is MY land! And I am heavily armed! Or, I will be as soon as I get off this toilet seat.
Another blogger gets sued, and his tormentors are likely having second thoughts. Maine blogger Lance Dutson got on the bad side of the Maine tourism board and its PR firm when he grabbed an ad featuring a phone sex number from the board’s web site, and said some mean things about the board and the agency. In response, they’re suing him. And in response to the suit, Dutson picked secured pro bono legal representation from heavyweights Greenberg Traurig — most recently in the news as Jack Abramoff’s former employer — and the in-house counsel at the Media Bloggers Association, of which he’s a member (disclosure: I am too). He’s also picked up support from the Wall Street Journal Law Blog and a whole raft of bloggers. For the entire list of bloggers and others weighing in on his behalf, see the list at the end of his post on the suit.
As Ed Cone says, ” I would bet it is not going to end well for the agency or the state tourism board.”
On a lighter note, The Editors answer this week’s most pressing question: Why did Tony Snow get the White House press secretary’s job?
IOZ notes that diplomacy has become the province of testosterone maddened adolescent males, while journalism has fallen into the hands of teenaged girls pretending to be disgusted when they aren’t asking “are you gonna let him get away with that?”
“Iran Threatens Retaliation if Attacked.”
So reads the headline. I suppose in the anarchic schoolyard sort of world that our nation seems presently intent on creating, such phrasing reads with depressing ease as ordinary bully-bully, chest puffing: “Oh yeah? Touch me again and see what happens!” “Oh yeah? You touch me again and see what happens!” And so on through an embarrasingly impotent series of escalating pseudo-threates until such time as one boy reels off and pops the other in the nose, at which point both start crying, one from the pain and one from the sight of blood.
Of course neither boy has a nuclear bomb tucked inside his jacket, but juvenile psychology is remarkably consistent on all scales, from boys to nations, a veritable fractal geometry of felt inadequacies projected as aggression on the rest of the immediate world.
Avedon Carol pulls off her usual, physically impossible trick of reading some zillions of blogs daily and remarking on the most interesting of them. Plus “The Bra of the Week.”
And finally, Jonathon Shwartz at A Tiny Revolution says, “Let’s Just Stipulate That Everyone Is Hitler” and focus on who among us has actualized their inner Fuhrer. “I realize certain people will dispute this. I’m not surprised. That’s just what Hitler did.” Bonus Shwartz: Bill Clinton is insane.
That’s it for today. If you have suggestions about blogs we’ve unforgiveably ignored, please leave them in the comments section.
UPDATE: discerning readers will note that this post is identical to the previous one. There’s a reason for that. It has something to do with rocket science.
Is blogging rocket science? Plus, the week’s picks
We’re starting out this week not with a blog but with an article on blogging in the Online Journalism Review entitled “Can Newspapers Do Blogs Right?” Written by OJR editor Robert Niles, the article was inspired by two recent blogging train wrecks in major newspapers, the Washington Post and the LA Times.
The question seems irrelevant in one sense and completely extra-planetary in another.
The obvious answer to the question is “Of course.” A number of newspapers run blogs of one sort or another, and most of them work out perfectly well. The Post, for instance, runs a blog by Jeff Morley called “World Opinion Roundup” in which Morley does what the blog name suggests (most recently with Chinese coverage of president Hu’s US tour). He takes comments on his posts, he doesn’t plagiarize and as far as anyone knows he doesn’t beef up his comment count or promote his blog elsewhere under a fake name. The BBC andthe Guardian/Observer in the UK both have well trafficked, scandal free blogs. It’s not rocket science.
What was more annoying about the question, or at rather the incidents that precipitated it, is that neither Domenech’s or Hiltzik’s sins were blogger-specific. Domenech was a plagiarist who got caught, which certainly isn’t the specific province of bloggers, and Hiltzik did the same thing, only less so, as non-blogger John Lott did a few years ago.
So, yeah: newspapers can do blogs right. Even the Washington Post can do bloggers right, when they put their minds to it.
And of course lots of other people can do blogs right. Journalist and blogger Ed Cone steered us to an offering from Mike Munger, which begins with a Hunter Thompson-esqe discourse about taking down dead pines with a shotgun, and ends more contemplatively.
Another blogger gets sued, and his tormentors are likely having second thoughts. Maine blogger Lance Dutson got on the bad side of the Maine tourism board and its PR firm when he grabbed an ad featuring a phone sex number from the board’s web site, and said some mean things about the board and the agency. In response, they’re suing him. And in response to the suit, Dutson picked secured pro bono legal representation from heavyweights Greenberg Traurig — most recently in the news as Jack Abramoff’s former employer — and the in-house counsel at the Media Bloggers Association, of which he’s a member (disclosure: I am too). He’s also picked up support from the Wall Street Journal Law Blog and a whole raft of bloggers. For the entire list of bloggers and others weighing in on his behalf, see the list at the end of his post on the suit.
As Ed Cone says, ” I would bet it is not going to end well for the agency or the state tourism board.”
On a lighter note, The Editors answer this week’s most pressing question: Why did Tony Snow get the White House press secretary’s job?
IOZ notes that diplomacy has become the province of testosterone maddened adolescent males, while journalism has fallen into the hands of teenaged girls pretending to be disgusted when they aren’t asking “are you gonna let him get away with that?”
Avedon Carol pulls off her usual, physically impossible trick of reading some zillions of blogs daily and remarking on the most interesting of them. Plus “The Bra of the Week.”
And finally, Jonathon Shwartz at A Tiny Revolution says, “Let’s Just Stipulate That Everyone Is Hitler” and focus on who among us has actualized their inner Fuhrer. “I realize certain people will dispute this. I’m not surprised. That’s just what Hitler did.” Bonus Shwartz: Bill Clinton is insane.
That’s it for today. If you have suggestions about blogs we’ve unforgiveably ignored, please leave them in the comments section.
UPDATE: discerning readers will note that this post is identical to the previous one. There’s a reason for that. It has something to do with rocket science.