Sunday, June 01, 2003

Times-bashing and the assault on objective journalism are the subjects of my newspaper column this morning. I like writing my opinion column and a weblog, but I know the difference between those things and a straight news story. Not everyone does, and some that do have an interest in blurring the distinction.   3:16:59 PM    comment []

Camilo is making a presentation on weblogs to his CIO, and Anil Dash comments with some advice. 10:45:28 AM    comment []

Was the Salam Pax backlash just ideological bashing? 10:43:09 AM    comment []

Academics with weblogs get a write-up in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s a decent if limited introduction to the topic.   Take the chronology of one story’s impact on a weblog – the Howard Coble/Japanese-American internment dust-up and Eric Muller’s IsThatLegal blog. Great stuff, but the Chronicle doesn’t quite get the big picture – it portrays the weblog world as self-contained, without much considering the relationship between weblogs and the traditional media.   In this case, Muller’s weblog became a critical resource for me and other print journalists here in Coble’s district – by posting original documents and writing with scholarly authority, he allowed us to understand the historical facts involved and move quickly to present them in the News & Record, the dominant newspaper in Coble’s district.   Muller’s bump in traffic was noteworthy, and the links from widely-read bloggers helped take the Coble story national. But as with the Tara Grubb/P2P phenomenon, Howard Coble had to pay more attention to the N & R than he did to national media, including weblogs.   The either-or fallacy is one of the most persistent analytical flaws in understanding the relationship between weblogs and the traditional media. A critical role for weblogs is feeding facts and ideas to newspapers -- as I wrote in my newspaper column this morning, "Weblogs...have assumed a key role as idea-generators at the top of the media flowchart." 10:31:59 AM    comment []