Thursday, February 12, 2004

Times Exec Not Calling "Trail" a Blog But he says you can... Cyberjournalis.net's Jon Dube interviewed NewYorkTimes.com chief Len Apcar about the bloglike Times on the Trail campaign page and the possibility of other weblogging at the paper. Says Apcar, referring to his visit to Bloggercon at Harvard, I talked to a lot of bloggers. I went to a bloggers' conference. And I came away from them and I said, there's a concept here we could use... But this whole business of whether a blog should be edited I thought was a red herring. The whole question of whether a newspaper could blog I thought was a red herring. So my view was, if you want to call it a blog, you can call it a blog. I'm not calling it a blog because I don't think it's a blog. It's an updated news service. The site is off to a good start, he said, but still has room to evolve, have a little more of a "voice" and be a little more fun. Unlike most weblogs, "The Trail" does not encourage "opinion" items and is a feature edited by the newsroom staff, "not something that was just dashed off and published on a Web page," Apcar said.  Like blogs, it offers short-form information, features continuous updating, and links to other sites, even competing newspapers, which Apcar said he knew from the start was "required in this kind of a page." We knew that there is plenty of other very good reporting out there. And we knew that to have crediblity with the reader we couldn't just say, well, here's what The Times is reporting and ignore everybody else. He said The Times may go on to create not-quite-a-blog pages on "other areas of common interest," such as (his examples) opera or theater. OK, so the rest of us might have suggested techno-culture, pop music and film, but maybe he just wants to fool the competition into thinking The Times can't see the forest of popular culture beyond the trees of Broadway and Carnegie Hall. See the full interview. My previous The-Trail-related blogging [1] and [2]. 2:22:56 PM    comment [] World Editors Begin to Blog Want to listen to the world's "establishment press" talking to itself about blogging? Bertrand Pecquerie, director of the World Editors Forum, promises to make editorsweblog.org "a cooperative weblog and a real international forum" full of "practical issues and real solutions for working editors and senior newsroom executives." The formal launch is March 1. Pecquerie says the Editors Weblog should be a cooperative blog, which "implies the participation of the World Editors Forum Board members. All of them are editors or deputy editors of major daily newspapers in the world: New York Times, The Times, El Pais, La Stampa, Aftenposten, Yomiuri Shimbun." So far, he's doing a great job on the prototype, mining European, American, Japanese, South African and Australian sources for blog entries that include observations like, "every minute dedicated to home entertainment (Playstation, Ipod...) is a minute lost for reading newspapers." One of the blog's running topics is Is blogging journalism? How newspapers use the bloggers, while others range from the print-oriented "Tabloid versus broadsheet" and "Making newspapers easier to read" to the abstract, "Ethics and press freedom." ---------------------------- Former Presidents Begin to Blog Well, OK, one former president. And it's more of a special-event travel-journal, with detailed letters of 800 words or more, not the usual blog briefs. But former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has been filing regular reports on his trip to West Africa this month, and the Carter Center is calling it a blog. Carter and his wife Rosalynn travelled to Mali, Ghana and Togo and met with Carter Center, UNICEF and World Health Organization officials. In part, their trip was to help launch an anti-poverty program in Mali and to draw attention to efforts to fight Guinea worm disease. Among the details are candid reflections from a former president, including critical comments on the adverse effect of some U.S. policies on African farmers, and some light personal moments (emphasis added): We attended a formal dinner with President Toure and a large assembly of other officials. Almost all such affairs are tiresome and boring, but this one was delightful. The orchestra, consisting of some ancient Malian instruments, played an impressive array of different music, the most popular being American jazz and blues. We had a good time interpreting the lyrics for President Toure and his wife. At another point in his travelogue, Carter mentions that back in the U.S. he was "warned strenuously about the new terrorist dangers," but decided to "take a chance." Later, at a meeting with representatives of a dozen agencies in Bamako, the capitol of Mali, Carter asked, "if any of them had any evidence of increased violence in the area or terrorist threats. The unanimous response was laughter." 1:17:18 PM    comment []

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