Thursday, August 21, 2003

I’m scheduled to be a guest on the Spires & Krantz radio show tomorrow afternoon on Charlotte’s WBT, 1110 AM. 3:08:52 PM    comment []

The Bush campaign is using a news feed to spoon feed information to sympathetic bloggers. “The Web site also includes a feature designed specifically for “bloggers.” Supportive bloggers can place a unique news feed box on their Web site that instantly posts news items onto their weblog the moment GeorgeWBush.com is updated.” I told you the Republicans would figure this out quickly. 3:04:09 PM    comment []

Greensboro’s downtown stadium project looks to be in serious peril. A vote tied to the October primary presents the baseball boys with some daunting math. About 8,000 people signed the petition to renovate War Memorial, which was really a petition to stop the downtown stadium. Some signers were misled, but if only half of them turn out to vote it could mean disaster for the Bellemeade project. Fewer than 10,000 people turned out for the 2001 primary election. Baseball should bring more out this time, but who, and how many? The mayoral race is a dud, and the interesting races for council involve anti-stadium candidates. A "no" bloc 4,000 voters strong would have a huge impact given any imaginable turnout. Maybe Action Greensboro has a dazzling ad campaign set for September, backed up by a serious get-out-the-vote effort for stadium proponents. If not, the downtown stadium will probably never go up at the chosen location. No matter what the vested rights of the project may be, it will be hard to build it if the vote is negative. But they can still put it here on South Elm Street and Lee where it belongs… 2:51:46 PM    comment []

Hey, I haven't gotten a bunch of spam attachement SoBig emails in the last few hours -- is the storm over? 2:30:15 PM    comment []

Yesterday I did Dallas. Wait, that doesn’t sound right. Yesterday I went to Dallas for my day job. Fun stuff, actually, about which more later. It was one of those first-flight-out, last-flight-home days that we all love so well. DFW’s E terminal is a tatty hellhole, and I couldn’t find a kid-sized Cowboys shirt for my kid-sized Cowboys fan. Bill Parcells will fix that kind of thing, you wait and see. On the  flight home a line of thunderstorms was visible in the dusk, huge lightning-charged anvil-shaped clouds pouring onto the dark ground below, but our ride was smooth and my beer was almost cold, so I just enjoyed the show. 11:49:00 AM    comment []

Thoughts on editing newspaper bloggers, inspired by this interesting Tim Porter post, to which Lex Alexander steered me. Anyone who blogs under a corporate banner is agreeing to be edited unless it is specifically agreed otherwise, and probably even then. Just as reporters face different editing standards than columnists, branded webloggers and their editors might evolve editorial standards of their own, perhaps closer to the rules for columnists than for news reporters. As a columnist, I would expect to be expected to conform to some standards, if not every standard pertaining to a print writer, and I would write to those standards as often as I possibly could, not least so that when a time came that I felt it important to breach them I would be on firmer ground. I think I could do this without compromising my weblog. A newspaper weblog will require some planning and an understanding of what each of a newspaper's blogs mean to be, e.g. a news column with analysis or an opinion column or a real estate tip sheet etc.  Sports coverage by the way is a natural niche for local weblogs, and newspapers should thrive in that arena. A (well-done) blog from the News & Record, written by the ACC basketball beat writer and/or columnist Ed Hardin, could be huge. The guys on press row see so much that the fans can't see, and only a limited amount of that material can ever make the paper. From October through March I'd obsessively visit a UNC hoops blog, and I'd notice and appreciate any ads. Note to editors: if you add a blog to someone's workload, please pay them for it.   As to the question of whether journalism can be journalism if it’s unedited, the answer is of course it can. Otherwise live broadcasts, to choose one example, aren't journalism. And bloggers do edit themselves. Some are sloppy editors, some are very very good. The key is that the blogger makes the editorial decision. Newspaper blogs that get this – even while imposing some degree of brand discipline – will be the ones worth reading. 11:29:25 AM    comment []