November 30, 2004
Blog Party
The GTA Bloggers and the Toronto Area Photoblogs are throwing a party. Should be good times...
Posted by Samantha Israel at 12:35 AM | Comments (3)
November 29, 2004
More journalists join the blog scene
Last week Maclean's Steve Maich started All Business, a blog about money. His first blog got me hooked.
The Star's Tyler Hamilton started his technology blog a few days later. His first blog asks if blogs are here to stay.
Is it just me or are most MSM bloggers business and technology folks?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 03:49 PM | Comments (1)
November 27, 2004
Spam
I just deleted 44 comments from poker sites. What's up with that?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 06:37 PM | Comments (6)
Help
So my editor sent me his comments on my first draft today. It seems it's not as good as I thought it was. Oy.
We need to hear more about the advantages of a blog for journalists, what the journalist bloggers have learned from the experience and whether blogs are a real threat or just CB radio. You need to take a more thorough and tougher analytical look at this subject.
So what do you journalist bloggers out there think? Colby? David? Paul? Andrew? Kelly? Aaron? Elaine? Tony? Mark? Mathew? Andrea? Pete? etc. I'm looking in your direction here.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 06:08 PM | Comments (4)
The blogging story of the year
J. Kelly Nestruck's blogging about blogs again.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 05:04 PM | Comments (1)
November 26, 2004
Blogs go mainstream
Posted by Samantha Israel at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)
Are you serious?
Stuart McLean's blog hasn't been updated in a year! Maybe I shouldn't feel so paralyzed with guilt when I miss a day.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)
November 25, 2004
Cool Stats
Technorati, a site that claims to be the world's largest blog index, tracks over four million blogs, up from 100,000 two years ago, but a Pew Internet study estimates that only 11 per cent of Internet users are regular blog readers.
Still, a new blog is created every 5.8 seconds, an average of 15,000 new blogs every day, but Cyberjournalist lists only 500 U.S. journalist's blogs.
Although Canada is number two behind South Korea with the highest broadband penetration rate of any country in the world, Blogs Canada lists only 9,000 blog sites with only 75 under the news and media category.
Are these numbers bigger than I'm giving them credit for?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 12:25 AM | Comments (2)
November 24, 2004
A history lesson
Some say the first blog was the first website, created by Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor, in 1990. In 1992, Berners-Lee started keeping track of all new sites, linking to them as they came online.
In 1993, The National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Netscape expanded Berners-Lee's idea with "What's New" sites, but the term web log wasn't coined until 1997 by Robot Wisdom blogger Jorn Barger.
Jesse James Garrett, Infosift editor, began compiling a list of sites like his in 1998, and Cameron Barrett published the first list of web log sites on Camworld later that year.
The first known news web log, Dispatches from along the Coast, started in 1998 with news from North Carolina's Hurricane Bonnie. That same year, Matt Drudge broke the Clinton-Lewinsky affair.
In early 1999, a blogger named Peter Merholtz announced he had started pronouncing web log "we blog," and the blog was born.
Blog documentarian Chuck Olsen has cool view of it all. He says blogs started much much earlier with Samuel Pepys in 1660. Pepys documented the political turmoil of 17th Century England in a diary that combined political observations with details from his personal life.
A century later, political pundits like Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams picked up their pens to influence politics. It's clear, Olsen says in this quicktime clip, that our democracy was born on personal political writing. When mass media took over for the voice of the people, the active public was reduced to a passive audience. But blogs are returning democracy to its rightful owners.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2004
I know, old news, but I still can't believe it
If George Stroumboulopoulos can leave Much for, What? Say again, CBC's Newsworld, can't a blogger get just a little respect?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 01:34 AM | Comments (0)
Citizen journalists make the news
Elaine O'Connor's blog, Press Gallery, links to an interesting online journalism review article about community papers written by community members, not journalists.
Rob Washburn told me about the Northwest Voice when I saw him in Belleville last week and I was enthralled. Citizen journalists write the stories, trained journalists edit them and a paper is born. Who else can really write about the ins and outs of a small community but the community members themselves? They're the news gatherers and journalists the gatekeepers, so why do they even need us?
But does having an editor read the copy make it legitimate?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 12:17 AM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2004
Akin on me
Posted by Samantha Israel at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)
November 18, 2004
Home Sweet Home
Just got back from a Darin Barney lecture on innovative technologies at Trent University. Although he didn't touch on blogs, we had an animated roundtable discussion with Robert Washburn, David Glassco, Tyrone Warner and some anonymous Trent University students before the lecture and he had some interesting things to say then.
The key question is if this media can generate those people that are not depoliticized. They're great for a small community that's already politicized, but the problem is politicizing people who haven't yet been politicized but have a want to be.There's been 200 years of technological innovation and it seems there's no link between education and politicization.
Investing too much in instruments without soberly assessing the game leads to 1) disappointment which can sap the energy of democratic activists and 2) distract democratic attention away from the more important questions.
I'd say more but no time. I'm on my way to promote the RRJ fundraising party on Q107.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 10:54 PM | Comments (1)
Belleville's where it's at
I'm sitting in at Loyalist College today. Their e-journalism program rocks compared to Ryerson's one online journalism class where we learned the basics - how to repurpose, use dreamweaver and update breaking news. This is so different. The profs, and Rob Washburn in particular, are so enthusiastic about what they do. He's so chilled out, smiling from ear to ear at 9 in the a.m. Way too early for me after going to sleep at 2:30 waking up at 6:30 and driving for almost 3 hours to get here.
But enough about me. Washburn teaches blogging in the classroom because he sees a vision of the future that most of us ignore.
When I'm in an old folks home eating porridge, this is what you'll be doing. We're not used to communicating on a heartfelt level with people we don't know, but the internet is teaching us how.
He teaches his students how to tell a story in an age where the possibilities are endless.
We have 250 years of people banging away at this, creating forms for us to use - like the inverted triangle or hourglass model. It's like the evolution from Ms. Pacman to Halo 2. We tell stories in a much richer way now, engaging our audience like never before.
He spoke of blogs as a powerful democratic tool, a topic that will be up for discussion tonight when I go to Trent University to hear Darin Barney, Prometheus Wired author, speak.
What a great tool they are. No longer are we the elite. We trust the wisdom of the people. They have questions and they want answers, so we help them ask their questions. We're being journalists and helping the democratic process at the same time.
More to come...
Posted by Samantha Israel at 12:32 PM | Comments (1)
November 17, 2004
True or False?
The more mainstream journalists write about blogs, bringing them to the masses, the more their readers are exposed to them. The more readers are exposed to blogs and read them, the more mainstream journalists are expected to join the trend and adapt to the blog environment.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 09:48 PM | Comments (4)
November 16, 2004
My Pal Dave
David Akin calls himself a computer geek.
Aren't we all?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 05:58 PM | Comments (2)
November 15, 2004
M.I. the blog guy
Mathew Ingram, Globe and Mail business writer and Ryerson Journalism grad, is different from most MSM bloggers out there. Why, you ask? Because he has, count em, four blogs. Althogh identical, he has two versions of his personal blog, one on typepad and one on blogware. He also has two blogs on the Globe site - geek watch and how does free sound - developed when his online column could be read by subscription readers only. What a guy.
He says he spends "too much" time blogging - duh - but that only adds up to a little more than an hour writing his own plus another hour or more reading others. That's not enough to tire him out though.
It'll take up as much time as you want to give it. Some people find it sucks up all of their available time because theoretically there's no end to the number of things you can post or the number of links you can link to. You don't have the problem of running out of room like you do in a newspaper. It's up to you and you alone to say that's enough for today...Bloggers are journalists. Some are drawn to it because it's an outlet for writing period. They appeal to the type of person who is a journalist. It's a different way of writing, a different style, a different outlet, that you just don't find in the mainstream media...
People are always looking for more sources of information and if the mainstream media isn't doing it, they'll find it someplace else...
If people are interested in TV or cooking or biology or whatever, eventually they'll come across a blog. They may not even define is as a blog as such or even know what a blog is, but blogs will form their information gathering about that thing...
The election gave blogs momentum but even if they do slow down now that it's over, the ideology won't go away. The popularity of the term might disappear but the symbols behind it go deeper than that.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)
AP on blogs
Tom Curley, CEO of The Associated Press, delivered a speech at last Friday's Online News Association conference in Hollywood. An Associated Press article had this to say:
Curley also touched on Internet users who disseminate news and ideas through Web logs, citing one recent estimate that there are 4 million "bloggers" making 400,000 posts per day."That works out to roughly 16,000 posts an hour, or about as many stories as the AP sends out in an entire day," he said. "It will get even tougher to be heard above the roar of the Internet crowd, and the business bets will have to be for greater stakes."
Still, Curley predicted current news giants will survive.
"The bloggers need a baseline of facts and professional analysis on which to base their work," he said. "Imagine Drudge without somebody to link to, or Wonkette without somebody to poke fun at."
Special thanks to Tony Walsh for the link.
More on Wonkette at the conference here and on Bill Doskoch's blog - here.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 04:05 PM | Comments (0)
November 14, 2004
Blogorama
Trying to write about blogs is harder than I thought. How can you describe the phenomenon concisely in just 2500 words?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 09:05 PM | Comments (0)
November 13, 2004
An afternoon in zine land
Hal Niedzviecki and Marc Ngui of the Broken Pencil team drew quite a crowd today at the Maria A. Shchuka branch of the Toronto Public Library.
Why do people read zines? For the same reasons they read blogs, it seems. Niedzviecki had this to say:
People read zines to get a completely different perspective from that of the mainstream media. They're unfiltered - there are no editors worried about changing the content to reflect a positive marketing environment...Society doesn't encourage independent creativity. Experts and the media disseminate information and we're supposed to be passive observers. Our culture doesn't encourage free thought. No matter what a zine is about, poutine or politics, it challenges this...If you're here to ascend the ranks of publishing and make a lot of money, you're in the wrong place...
Not every zine is good. Often you read one and you're like, this is dumb or this is an inferior product I don't want to waste my time on. But at least it's a new perspective. An individual's life, feelings and opinions are more fun to read than the same boring way the mainstream media covers a story.
Blogs are similar in that they break through the barriers of the idea that only experts can write and share with readers. The mundane, weird, not so important facts can sometimes be interesting and sometimes boring...but it's important they're there.
My hypothesis proves true - blogs are indeed the new zine.
But sitting there in the audience I felt attacked in a way I never have in the blogosphere. I'm not even really part of the mainstream media but I felt guilty nonetheless. The mainstream media isn't all bad, is it?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2004
Marky Mark
Spoke to Mark Evans today - National Post writer and blogger extraordinaire.
He says the biggest problem with blogs is that there's so many out there but no way to pinpoint the best ones.
There's great content out there but they're hard to find...There should be a search engine for blogs with a quality rating. If blogging evolves, organizations and groups will point people in the right direction. Right now there's an equal playing field and no way to get the attention you need or deserve.
But who decides which blogs deserve higher quality ratings than others? What makes one blog better than another?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 01:40 PM | Comments (2)
Colby Cosh is the man
There's no way I could miss Eric Engberg's CBS news article, Blogging As Typing, Not Journalism. It's unbelieveable how many blogs link to it.
Colby Cosh says:
Obviously some journalists are threatened by bloggers...The buzz surrounding blogs must be infuriating when you see this medium recycle your stories and then get all the heat. Bloggers are largely parasitic, and without question that's got to be annoying to journalists. Especially to those journalists who are intimidated by the net or don't understand it. They've only seen the worst side of it and have made up their minds.But Eric Engberg's outrage is unfounded...Saying we're free of expertise is ridiculous. When I write about the U2 Spy Plane, the one the band's named after, I immediately receive letters from people who've worked with the plane, security specialists, military personnel, pilots who have actually flown the thing. I get instant feedback from experts without calling anyone.
As for the blog forum I've been hoping for, Colby can't believe some of the great journo-bloggers I've asked would rather comment on my site than do a real-time discussion on MSN.
They don't want you to find out the fuckers can't spell. If it was a TV appearance they'd be handing over their right arms.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 12:27 PM | Comments (2)
November 11, 2004
The Boys II
Best quotes of the evening:
I piss away a good hour to hour and a half on my blog every day and at least that much time reading other people's blogs. It's worth it right now, but I don't think I'll be doing it in say ten years from now. You've gotta have the time and the energy to keep it up, so young people are going at it more than someone who has a wife and a mortgage to worry about. The impact is overblown.
Just because blogs are cool in New York or L.A. doesn't mean they're cool everywhere. Let's not overestimate the importance of these things...The best blogs will keep going as long as they're lucrative and readership stays up but I don't think it's anybody's primary focus in life...No one's stopped reading the New York Times in favour of Gawker. I'd say the opposite is true. There's no original reporting on blogs.
I swear a lot on my blog and don't in print...Blogs aren't just for techno-geeks. I know the internet and I read. I'm just literate.
Nestruck: MOST OF THIS HE SAID SARCASTICALLY - VERY SARCASTICALLY
I don't know why I'm writing it anymore. Rather than half-formulating an idea, I'd rather spend some real time on them. It seems half-assed to me - I wish I could do it all-out or not at all.
When I was peeing, I decided what's wrong with my blog. It's gotten too big for me to write whatever I want but it's not big enough for me to feel, with all this energy I'm spending on it, that it's worth it.
I'm tired of the blogs are saving the universe hype. I'm worried it'll be enshrined in history.
One thing I liked about blogging in University was making fun of the mainstream media, and now I know them and feel bad. I stopped doing it and now it's my readers who suffer.
Blogs are good for irrational, loud, angry people.
Every time I think of plagarizing I only don't because of other bloggers. It's not like my editors would catch it, but bloggers would.
I think you should just do a profile on me.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 01:36 PM | Comments (1)
November 10, 2004
The Boys
Just got back from dinner and drinks with Aaron Pop Wherry and Jalalabad Kelly Nestruck. Who gets tipsy after just two beers? More to come...
Posted by Samantha Israel at 11:24 PM | Comments (4)
Spin
Ira Basen is in the midst of writing a book about Spin - originally defined by William Safire as the deliberate shading of news perception. The first spin cycle, he says, was at the beginning of the 20th Century with the independence of newspapers and the start of public relations. The second was in the late 70s and early 80s when TV became the dominant information source. And we may be on the verge of the third cycle right now with the blog boom.
Basen talks of PR groups and the press as part of the spundustry - printing stories that newsmakers want them to print. Because there are so few gatekeepers, he says, it's easy for someone like Dalton McGuinty, for example, to get the press to print whatever he leaks to them. PR companies and the mainstream are trying to get the story out first, not giving any thought to the fact that it may not be a real story to begin with.
Blogs are expanding the number of gatekeepers and authorized knowers, raising the possibility that as more people work against it, spin will be less effective. Blogs, he says, in their disorganized and unruly way, offer a counter-spin strategy and serve better as gatekeepers than the mainstrem media.
Bloggers are a powerful bunch, aren't they?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)
November 09, 2004
Get an A in Blogging
Robert Washburn teaches e-journalism at Loyalist College in Belleville. He teaches blogging as a key skill, a new and sustained trend, but just a year ago he didn't know what a blog was. He does now and he loves em.
What a dynamic and beautiful way to deliver the news! Blogs are humanizing. They create a bridge that we just didn't have before. It's an exciting new world that offers a new and interesting perspective.
The e-journalism program is a centre of innovation, created due to the lack of research and development of new forms and tools of storytelling.
Still, Washburn says, blogs haven't caught on in Canada as much as they have in the States because Canadians are more conservative in our approach to journalism. We don't have a Canadian version of Poynter to promote an innovative spirit. Even CAR - computer-assisted research - hasn't really caught on up here.
Rick Broadhead, a cool Canadian internet guru, says Canada just doesn't have that American fever surrounding politics.
This isn't a reflection on our enthusiasm or technology or education. Blogs are politically motivated and we just don't have the same political climate in Canada.
Whatever the reason, compared to the U.S. Canadian bloggers, especially MSM bloggers, are few and far between. We'll catch up though, won't we?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 05:33 PM | Comments (4)
Regret the Error
I had a nice long chat with Regret the Error editor Craig Silverman yesterday. The site's only been around for a month, yet it's already generated all sorts of interest from bloggers and journalists alike.
Because Regret the Error is built on reporting mistakes made in North American media, Silverman makes sure to post his own corrections under the heading We Crunked. "I'd be a hypocrite otherwise," he says. Like Slate, Silverman posts Regret the Error mistakes every Friday. And like other bloggers, he doesn't post again until Monday morning so that the last and most important post of the week is clearly visible all weekend long.
There's no point in posting on the weekends, he says, when his audience, mostly consisting of media types, check out the blog scene daily at the office but take a break from their computers on the weekends.
Even I noticed that readership was down on my blog this weekend, and I was surprised. Media-types may not be at their desks, but what of other audiences aside from family, friends and web-surfers? Are there other audiences? Do bloggers even care who reads their stuff?
Silverman says that although Canada is #2 behind South Korea with the highest broadband penetration rate of any country in the world, the average Canadian has trouble checking their email. "I'd be surprised if 20 per cent of Canadians know what a blog is," he said.
But I think they will soon. Early adaptors, like high-profile-tech-savvy David Akin, are bringing blogs into the mainstream. The more articles written about them and front pages devoted to them will create more interest in them. How ironic that the blogosphere must judge its success in the mainstream by the mainstream coverage it's given.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)
RRJ Fundraising Bash
Just got back from DNA Lounge - a real cool joint where the Ryerson Review of Journalism will be hosting our fundraising bash on Thursday November 25. It's sick. It'll definitely be an awesome party @ 328 Adelaide Street West between John and Peter. $10 at the door or $8 in advance November 15-25 at Ryerson's Rogers Communication Centre - 80 Gould Street. Featuring DJ Bacchus, raffles for great prizes and drunken journalists galore. Doors open @ 9. Be there or be square.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 12:03 AM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2004
hmmm
My blog is fucked. It keeps changing without me changing anything. How is this happening? I've been trying to get this blog up for literally 3 hours. The fact that I'm still trying at almost 4 a.m. tells me I've been bitten by the blog bug. But I'm giving this one more chance and if it doesn't work I might give up blogging forever. Isn't this supposed to be really really user friendly?
On to more important things. How is it that I've been researching blogs for a month without realizing, until today, that a blog convention was taking place - um - TODAY. I had heard the event was to take place in December and contacted Rebecca MacKinnon, ex-CNN chick, for details. Didn't hear back. Should've checked her blog. Shit.
The Ryerson Review would have been more than happy to pay my way and I would've been able to get one of those scenes I've been meaning to get one of these days. But I didn't know about the blog convention.
You wanna know why? Because I'm an outsider trying to get in. I came at this a month ago never knowing what a blog was. Never even hearing the word before. Knowing nothing of the community that lies beneath my screen. Now knowing more than I did then, I'm surprised at how many people look at me blankly when I tell them I'm doing a story on blogs. My friends are an intelligent bunch and very web-aware. They research on the net, read news on the net, play on the net, live on the net. But, aside from a handful of journalists and my techno-keen boyfriend and little brother, not one had heard of a blog before I came along. Why is the blog world hidden from the mainstream?
Even though I missed it, I can watch BlogConIII live, well, almost live, on the site's webcast. If another blog event is going on soon, please please please let me know.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 02:17 AM | Comments (5)
November 06, 2004
Post writer gone bad
I found a Canadian example of blogger triumphalism in the Globe today.
Tart Cider ousted National Post weekly columnist Elizabeth Nickson for plagarizing National Review Online writer Jonah Goldberg. She was fired yesterday, maintaining that "failure to attribute the passage was inadvertent."
Posted by Samantha Israel at 07:08 PM | Comments (0)
November 05, 2004
Are blogs the new zine?
The Toronto Public Library is hosting an interesting event next weekend...
An Afternoon in Zine Land with the Broken Pencil Team, including Hal Niedzviecki and Marc Ngui.Join a trio of self-publishing experts from Broken Pencil and learn the creative, theoretical and practical aspects of putting together your own independently created, handmade periodical, also known as a zine.
Using forms as diverse as comics, collage, autobiography, essay and poetry, the zine crosses the lines between journalism and free expression.
For youth (But I think I'll go anyway)
Registration required - Call 416-394-1052
Saturday, Nov. 13, 1-3 p.m.
Maria A. Shchuka Branch
1745 Eglinton Ave.
Remember Zines? I didn't know they were still around (although I have seen some e-zines but they're just not the same).
When I was in high school, everyone was into them. With a little arts and crafts know-how and some cutting and pasting, creating your own magazine was as easy as one-two-three. They were always anti-establishment. Anarchistic even. The kids in black eye make-up and bright lipstick would hand them out to the smokers during breaks. They were anything but mainstream.
Are blogs of the twenty-first century an extention of this nineties phenomenon?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 02:29 PM | Comments (1)
November 04, 2004
He must be reading my blog
Ira Basen, CBC Radio dude, had this to say.
There is a greater need than ever before for Big Media outlets to be at the top of their game when it comes to breaking important stories, dissecting spin, and highlighting the issues that matter to voters. But it has been a long time since Big Media has been at the top of its game. It has been riding on its reputation for too long.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)
The death of the blog
From Andrew Sullivan's Blog:
I'm off to the West Coast for the season finale of Bill Maher's Real Time on HBO this Friday night. I'm on with comedian D.L. Hughley and Noam Chomsky. God help me. Thanks also for the incredible readership over the past two days. Our previous traffic high was around 150,000 daily visits. Yesterday, we hit 330,000, and today something in the same ball-park. I remember blogging the last election (yes, I was blogging before it was so cool) and was thrilled to get 10,000 visits. I'd still be thrilled to get 10,000. But thirty times that number is sweet. Blogging really comes alive at times like these - because we're all going through these things together in real time. Thanks for being there. As someone once remarked, it makes it all ress ronery.
Which got me thinking...Is the blog hype doomed to die down now that the election is over? Will blogs maintain their traffic now that the feeding frenzy is done?
It's not that I think blogs will diappear any time soon. They may change gears a little in the future, like the website giving way to the blog, but they're far from dying in my mind. Wells, on the other hand, may disagree. He told me that blogs are ephemeral, the CB radio of the twenty-first century. Are they just a fad or indeed a lasting trend?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 01:24 AM | Comments (6)
November 03, 2004
Can't we all just get along?
From exposing Dan Rather's sloppy research ("Rather should be fired for that sort of misconduct" - Professor Joseph Campbell) to uncovering Senator Trent Lott's ties to Strom Thurmond's support for racial segregation, bloggers are the kings and queens of keeping journalists on their toes. (Any Canadian examples of Blogger Triumphalism?)
When the mainstream media ignores an important story, bloggers perform the invaluable function of forcing the story out to the masses. Journalists of all people should embrace being watched, but they shun the blogosphere instead. They feel at odds with the very people who are simply trying to get at the truth.
Ivor Shapiro, Ryerson Journalism professor and writer of November's Walrus cover story, came to my class last week to discuss fact-checking. His enormous box of notes was intimidating to say the least, but when colleagues find mistakes in his stories, Ivor swallows his pride and thanks them profusely.
Although Canadian news outlets are pretty blog-friendly, American media conglomerates, like CNN and the New York Times, are so anti-blogs they straight-up ban their writers from blogging. Olympians weren't even allowed to keep blogs this year to prevent breaking a story before the MSM did.
We should be indebted to the bloggers that out our mistakes instead of giving them the cold shoulder. Don't hate.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 11:18 PM | Comments (3)
What makes a bad blog?
Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media, told me that most journalists are wary of blogs because of a) lack of accountabilty b) lack of standard practices like editing and c) organizations don't want to compete with themselves online.
Gillmor says that people who dismiss editors entirely are wrong for doing so. Editing is more than just fact-checking, he says, and readers don't often correct typos or stylistic problems. (Still, his own blog editors rarely read his entries before they're posted - the only time he'll run an entry by an editor is if he has real doubts about its quality.)
Andrew Coyne, on the other hand, is a big fan of what he calls "Horizontal Editing," where you post a blog and readers let you know if there are any mistakes in the piece.
Although blogs may be missing out on the traditional editorial process, the collective process allows for a spontaneity and informality readers love to see.
Ted Sturgeon, American science fiction writer, said 90% of everything is crap. Blogs included. But it's not the lack of editing that makes them crappy. How did editors help un-crap Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass? They may have made the lies sound better, but what real good did that do in the long run?
Posted by Samantha Israel at 06:02 PM | Comments (4)
November 02, 2004
Election Day
From Paul Wells's Blog...
O Mighty Ship of State
It's coming from the sorrow on the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of G-d in the desert here
and the desert far away;
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
...
It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
...
I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean;
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Leonard Cohen, 1992
Posted by Samantha Israel at 05:03 PM | Comments (2)
Is objectivity lost?
Last week I spoke to Jim Carroll, Canadian internet trends expert. He was pretty harsh on blogs.
Blogs are almost masturbatory. Bloggers live in this enclosed universe where they talk about themselves and anyone from the outside world can't understand what's going on. It's egotistical.Blogs are not journalism. They're so one-sided. There's no objectivity, no independence, no integrity. The blog world is all op-ed stuff - you can see by the first sentence if it's a Republican blog or a Democratic one. There's no balance. Like Fox News. Anyone with half a brain is losing any respect they once had for any form of journalism because of this imbalance.
Like Jon Stewart said on Crossfire, those unbound to news organizations have no responsibility to objectivity.
How can journalists maintain their values in the opinionated realm of the blog?
Please don't send Carroll hate mail. He's really a great guy.
Posted by Samantha Israel at 01:04 AM | Comments (9)
November 01, 2004
Come one, come all
Welcome to Blog on Blog - the blog where bloggers blog about nothing but blogs. Well, blogs and journalism that is.
Do you think blogs are unplugged versions of columns? Does horizontal editing float your boat? Do you think the old media is a dying breed? Do you wonder if blogs are a threat to the mainstream media? Are you itching for a rant about arrogant bloggers?
Then this is the place for you. A place where you can share your thoughts on the blogosphere and help a journalism student iron out her own. This dialogue will work as the foundation for my article that will appear in the spring issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.
All that and more! Expect guest appearances by Canadian journalist-bloggers David Akin, Andrew Coyne, Paul Wells, Colby Cosh, Elaine O'Connor, Aaron Wherry and J. Kelly Nestruck.
Blog away...
Posted by Samantha Israel at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)