Wednesday, October 26, 2005

If Fox News Had Been Around Throughout History 8:13:11 PM   permalink   comment []

Matt Williams, a fine journalist and blogger, is off to fly jets for Uncle Sam. He did some innovative stuff in Greensboro as an early professional-journalst adopter of blogging, including this use of audio to better cover a hot local issue. Good luck, Matt. Blog your experiences for us if you can. Be safe. 8:00:26 PM   permalink   comment []

Vid-blogging made easier: Typepad is integrating a publishing product from VideoEgg into its blog software. This is the kind of stuff that will push video into the blogging mainstream. 5:21:42 PM   permalink   comment []

Antonella Napolitano posts her report on ConvergeSouth. 2:48:07 PM   permalink   comment []

Google seems to be preparing a move into classified ads and online auctions. 2:45:09 PM   permalink   comment []

Caution: this is unconfirmed news based on an anonymous source. Raw Story says Fitzgerald has asked for indictments of Libby, Rove, and "others." According to Raw Story, Rove and Libby both face "charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, [say] lawyers close to the investigation...Fitzgerald has also asked the jury to indict Libby on a second charge: knowingly outing a covert operative, the lawyers said. They said the prosecutor believes that Libby violated a 1982 law that made it illegal to unmask an undercover CIA agent." If this is true, and if the grand jury indicts, the immediate spin will be that perjury and obstruction of justice are ginned up charges not worthy of our concern. It's already started. This flip-flop by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is another nice example: in 1999 she said, "[S]omething needs to be said that is a clear message that our rule of law is intact and the standards for perjury and obstruction of justice are not gray...I don't want there to be any lessening of the standard. Because our system of criminal justice depends on people telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That is the lynch pin of our criminal justice system and I don't want it to be faded in any way." Now? Not so much: "[I]f there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime." 2:40:50 PM   permalink   comment []

John Robinson explains the N&R's front-page feature on 2,000 US dead in Iraq: "Newspapers -- people -- have to seize on numerical markers; we can't put a story about the death of a soldier or Marine on the front page every time one dies. People would become numb to the sacrifice. Yet, 2,000 deaths in our country's service is not something to let pass unnoticed. These are real people who served and died. It is an insult to consider them only a number; the package of stories and photos tries to convey their humanity." 8:48:14 AM   permalink   comment []

Registration is open for PodcasterCon 2006, Chapel Hill, January 7. 8:43:16 AM   permalink   comment []

Dave Slusher interviews Persepolis author and artist Marjane Satrapi, who deals with the same problems as Hoder when she enters the U.S. Our immigration officials seem confused. 8:38:45 AM   permalink   comment []

NYT's Claudia Deutsch on the latest doings of the man who owns Burlington Industries and Cone Mills: "Lots of people call Wilbur L. Ross Jr. a vulture investor. He finds that ridiculous. If one must liken him to a bird, he says, then make it the phoenix, the mythical creature that repeatedly rises from its own ashes." 8:31:40 AM   permalink   comment []

DarkTimes: Dowd writes under the prize-worthy hed, "Dick at the Heart of Darkness." "It's exactly what we thought was going on, but we never thought we'd actually hear the lurid details: Cheney and Rummy, the two old compadres from the Nixon and Ford days, in a cabal running the country and the world into the ground, driven by their poisonous obsession with Iraq, while Junior is out of the loop, playing in the gym or on his mountain bike... "...[Cheney's] been flushed out as the heart of darkness: all sulfurous strands lead back to the man W. aptly nicknamed Vice." Friedman ("Living Hand to Mouth") says China's rapid economic growth is causing severe environmental problems. He quotes China Daily columnist Zou Hanru, who says China is going through "45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year, or 1.66 million cubic meters of timber, or 25 million full-grown trees." China's leaders can't afford an economic slowdown, but environmental problems are also making people angry.  He concludes that "the economic, environmental and national security issue of our day" is getting the U.S. and China bring together "business, government and N.G.O.'s..to produce a more sustainable form of development." 8:18:09 AM   permalink   comment []