When Blog Networks Make News, Silence Abounds 100
1sockchuck writes "It's been a bad week for transparency and disclosure in the blogosphere, demonstrating that once blogging starts making money, the rules change. Nick Douglas was dismissed from ValleyWag, Jason Calacanis bolts from AOL, and co-founder Duncan Riley abruptly departs from b5media. Where do we get the real story? From The New York Times, or not at all. If we've come to expect honesty and straight talk from blogging icons, it's because so many blogospheric leaders have told us we should. And now suddenly we're getting the snarky insider accounts of blogospheric dirt from The New York Times?"
Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
But mostly, and by mostly I mean 99% of the reason, is because you do not ever ever want to give that kind of ammo to your competition. You will be found out and when you are, they will make you pay...Remember the Bush papers?
This is a prime example. The Times breaks it, but everyone and their dog will jump on the bandwagon about how the oh-so-transparent Blogs are perfectly willing to bury information when it comes to themselves. Can you really trust them? Is it just a passing fad? News at 11:00.
This is a good lesson for them. It's not easy to gain credibility, but it's easy as pie to lose it, and when people catch you in a single omission, they'll wonder how many omissions they failed to catch, and no amount of assurance will convince them that the answer is zero.
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and if just one person believes it, there can be a lawsuit claiming libel.
If there is a reasonable chance that one or more people may believe it.... there can be a lawsuit.
People like to sue, ya know?
Quick easy money..
*sigh*
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
I could claim, "Joe Lieberman today failed to deny reports that he was an affectionado of child pornography" without even asking him the question, and I could say he did deny it, as of course he would if someone asked him, then I could crop out anything except the sound bite of him saying, "I do not watch child porn!" and play it over and over and over again until "Lieberman" and "Child Porn" are forever linked in your brain.
It's a dirty dirty world, and there is a lot of stuff you can do that's not quite libelous or slanderous that is nonetheless dirty as hell. Any half competent blogger should be able to skirt that line with no trouble at all...But don't try it with non-public figures! The standard there is a hell of a lot lower.
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"Opinion is a defense recognized in nearly every jurisdiction. If the person makes a statement of opinion rather than a statement of fact, defamation claims usually cannot be brought because opinions are inherently not falsifiable. Some jurisdictions have eliminated the distinction between fact and opinion, and allow any statements suggesting a factual basis to
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Also works with question marks. [youtube.com]
Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)
I think pretty much any story that doesn't include solid research into publicly available documents or primary sources who are willing to go on the record, is worthless, and this includes most Blogs, most television news, and not a few print news sources as well.
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I write on my blog about bloggers saying stupid things all of the time - yet I'm statistically invisible because I only have about 400 eyes [assuming no cyclops] reading my site a day. Unless a pair of those eyes is from CNN, a big-blogger, or the government, my impac
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
More than personal accounts, many blogs are deeper analysis than mainstream media provides. Look at what Groklaw has done to educate the masses on some legal topics. Plus today some mainstream media supplement their news with blog posts from editors and reporters. That has the opportunity to offer more insight than just an news article.
And even if blogs are nothing more than personal accounts, who to better tell a story than a person who was there? I'd rather read blog posts from debating House Representatives than a news article that merely summarizes it. I sometimes read the blog of a former pharmaceutical CEO because his analysis of that industry and its political influence is far more informative than any news reporter.
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I think it would be rather interesting.
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He has his own blog now. http://peterrost.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
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and the masses are aware of Groklaw? in the numbers that are drawn to the New York Times, CNN, Court TV, etc? the name itself screams Geek.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, yeah, right. That's why the Times was all over Judith Miller and Armstrong Williams and their conflicts of interest when they were acting as shills for the White House and uncritically publishing their lies as fact... Oh, wait. They weren't.
It was the blogs that reported on these developments honestly and incisively. The Times has an Imperial assload to answer for.
Schwab
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correspondent who posted him as a Radical:--"While he was writing
the first word, the middle, dotting his i's, crossing his t's, and
punching his period, he knew he was concocting a sentence that was
saturated with infamy and reeking with falsehood."--Exchange.
I was told by the physician that a Southern climate would improve my
health, and so I went down to Tennessee, and got a berth on the Morning
Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop as associate
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This tells me Nick Denton has a surprisingly limited faith in the power of openness - one that's not shared by the rest of the blog-o-sphere.
The only thing I trust... (Score:1)
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Wait a second... (Score:5, Funny)
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Speak for yourself (Score:4, Insightful)
If we've come to expect honesty and straight talk from blogging icons, it's because so many blogospheric leaders have told us we should.
Huh? Wha? I have no idea what or who you're talking about here. Are you telling me that your criteria for whether or not a person is honest is if they tell you they are? If so, please use the pronoun "I". Where on earth did you get "we" from?
Alaska Jack
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Obese hacks living in their parent's basements UNITE!!
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Re:Speak for yourself (Score:4, Informative)
Well, that's where the "if" comes from. It's also possible that the pronoun "we" refers not to all of us, but rather the subset of us that has come to expect honesty and straight talk.
As for me, I expect as much honesty and straight talk from a blog as much as I expect the same from any politician at the state or national level... not at all.
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That is a cut and past from TFB. that said blog seems to be a blog, about the blogging community (I refuse to use that stupid word), by the blogging community, thus "we".
As for the rest of it.
I dono, possibly I am just to tired to really get what is going on, but WTH is this about?
Some (possibly) large names in the blogging community left/got booted from their respective companies, and none of the bloggers reported on it, but the NYT did.
so?
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then we're idiots. Critical thinking should apply to all forms of communication - including "blogs".
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Hell, I don't know who any of these people are!
Nick Douglas? Jason Calacanis? Duncan Riley? Why do these people matter?
I guess I've been living under an Internet connected rock...
I prefer blogs to the NYT (Score:3, Insightful)
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to bring it back to apples and apples (Score:2)
I was referring to the NYT web site, not to the newspaper.
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My personal viewpoint (speaking as a guy who does tech for a print newspaper) is that the death of actual "paper" is the best thing that could ever happen to print media, because almost all the heartache and stress of the industry revolv
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Yeah that whole sell-adspace-next-to-text thing must be hard for them to figure out.
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As the paid reporters shrink, the number of reporters doing it for the mere love of reporting in the alternative/new media soars. As a result, we're finding out more about our governments and our societies than we EVER did when the news was limited to just the output of a few "professional" re
Blind Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
But don't just take my word for it.
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Butterflies in the skyyyyyy, I can go twice as higgggghhhhhh.....
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I think it serves to illustrate that, no matter how we use are critical thinking, we're dependant on second-hand interpretations from people we believe to be trustworthy authorities. We have no choice to trust the mainstream media unless there's someone else explaining how we're being "duped". We trust that "someone else" until the mainstream media tells us that they're just as crooked.
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I've often found that the terms in which a discussion is framed, and what is omitted, is at least as important as what is directly stated.
It doesn't have to be about the money (Score:4, Insightful)
Journalism meets Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
There's some truth to this, because bloggers have a "can't get no respect" problem that often gives them an attitude that opposes 'legitimate' journalists. 'Legitimate' journalists, in turn, decry bloggers.
At some point, bloggers are useful and convey good information, if not aligned with both legal and journalistic principles. Now journalists are becoming bloggers, and the distinctions are becoming exceedingly blurred.
What we wanted is truth, or opinion, but clear distinctions between the two, and referential rather than specious information. The quality of both journalists and bloggers is now emerging, and there's a price tag for that quality-- and we're willing to pay for it, because we need the truth, we need opinion, and we need referential integrity.
It's all natural.
blogosphere, blog this, blog that... (Score:2, Funny)
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http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=b
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I Heard Something (Score:4, Insightful)
Although I note that we're discussing those stories in Slashdot, a (ginormous) blog.
The story made it to this blog once it became interesting enough to the blogger, the submitter, and the publisher, Slashdot's "author", that it got written (in 3 minutes) and published (typically <30s). It got covered by the NYT, because the NYT is threatened in its power as its circulation further declines, and it transforms into a mainly online publication. It's in competition with AOL, and struggles to exert power over the influence of those name brand bloggers.
The age where an editorial board of a mass (one-way) publication like the NYT controls the definition of "what's news" is drawing to a close. If you think an event is news, blog it, or get a popular blogger to blog it. If that's not a good enough system for you, produce or contribute to a project that produces another layer, like a weighting system for an RSS aggregator that can amplify tiny blog stories (and cache/loadbalance them) that do cover these events, when they're interesting to you and people like you.
The new age of P2P journalism is here. Since it was built with the tools of the old centralized journalism, it will resemble the old regime at first. But its agendas, the way its agendas are served, "what's news", and how it becomes "news", not just "new", are a quantum leap from the old regime. In what directions has yet to be seen. It's still up to us.
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I'm not so sure of that.
On any given day, look at Slashdot's front page, and I guarantee most of the news stories will have first been reported by professional journalists. Most of the blogs most of us read are likewise not full of original reporting. They may be original commentary, but that's a different animal. What we see a lot of currently is free commentary on, or just links to, original reporting produced by pretty conventional methods, and this is an impendi
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Consider the case of
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I meant what I said "literally" (pun appreciated
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In less time than it takes to find the poll, you can Google the topic of your choice instead and have better information from the blogs than that "story" will yield next week.
CBS News picked up those 3 topics from blogs, they will further 'research' the winning topic from blogs, and then ask viewers to discuss the topic further on thei
Re: Phenomenal exposure advantages of blogs (Score:1)
"Old Line" news had a fundamental fixed cost problem to overcome. "The cost of the building plus salaries plus publish equipment plus secondary costs" had to be dealt with before the first month's paper sales were completed.
Rent is a seller's market. "Awww. You couldn't pay your rent. I guess I have to evict you." (With varying grace periods.) Cash flow in is also the Seller's market. 80% of people's integrity is shot when their actions SERI
hey folks (Score:2)
news at 11
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Who are these people, and why should I care (Score:5, Insightful)
Excuse me if I don't get it, but this story seems to be about the fact that some bloggers I never heard of got fired and some other blogger I never heard of thinks that some unnamed additional bloggers should have blogged about it before the NYT reported on it, and we know this because....
...he said so in his blog.
Ok, maybe I'm different from most blog readers, but I:
Other than the fact that this item seems to fit the "blog related flamebait" template, I frankly don't see the point of it. Does anyone really expect that blogs will give them complete and accurate behind the scenes information about the blogging carriers of every blogger on the planet? Does anyone seriously want them to? (Other than this guy who obviously cared enough blog about it I mean.)
--MarkusQ
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The blogosphere is all about collective jerking off to their own made up sense of how famous and good they are. Closest relative is the phenomen of real life documentary people living in a house for 30 days coming out as
The brighter side of blogging (Score:4, Interesting)
Some, but not all of it. There are also the people who care deeply about a subject, and for whom the facts matter much more than the personalities. A year or so ago I decided to try my hand at cheese making. A little bit of google led me to a cheese makers blog, in which I found several years of detailed first hand accounts of his efforts at amature cheese making, along with interesting comments, questions, and (in a few cases) differing opinions from his readers.
This is where bogs really shine. Care about SCO v. IBM? Or the Plame outing and coverup? Interested in making your own Victorian christmas ornaments? Or a trebuchet? There's a blog out there for you. Ditto if you're dealing with some strange (to you) illness, trying to learn a new language, or planning a vacation off the beaten path.
Yes, there are a lot of bloggers whose sole topic seems to be "Look at me ma, I'm a blogger!" but they are easy to ignore. Don't cast out the interesting ones along with the loudmouths who have nothing to say.
--MarkusQ
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I've been wanting to try cheese making lately- can you post a link to the blog you found?
Thanks.
</-1 OffTopic>
OT: In answer to your question (Score:2)
It was about a year ago and a quick scan through my bookmarks failed to turn up a link, though I did find bookmarks to a few things he had linked to here [uc.edu] and here [countrylife.net] which should help you get started. I'll post back if I come across the blog itself.
Cheese making, from the little I dabbled in it, seems to be quite fun. Be prepared to make some mistakes (I'd recommend --MarkusQ
OT: In response to your question (Score:1)
It was about a year ago and a quick scan through my bookmarks failed to turn up a link, though I did find bookmarks to a few things he had linked to here [uc.edu] and here [countrylife.net] which should help you get started. I'll post back if I come across the blog itself.
Cheese making, from the little I dabbled in it, seems to be quite fun. Be prepared to make some mistakes (I'd recommend < 1/2 liter batches to start) and to share your successes with friends while they're fresh.
--MarkusQ
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The difference between NYT and Bloggers... (Score:1, Interesting)
At l
No. The real difference is... (Score:1, Troll)
And if we're going to play "own your bias," the first place you might want to look is in a mirror:
The "anything to hurt Bush" reporting that has increasingly come to characterize the paper in the last four years...I now await the usual Slashdot downmodding of non-liberal political posts.
I'm not exactly s
Anyone read Foundation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well folks, we are pretty much there. Journalists now spend probably equal amounts of time covering each other, gossipping and relying in innuendo and hearsay rather than facts. Little wonder we have the sort of news media we have today with this.
And the "internet journalists" are probably the worst. We have "aggregator sites" on the web which simply dish out stories rehashed from other web sites. We have bloggers writing stuff about aggregated news sites and other bloggers.
Read the bit about the "Old Empire" in Foundation and see if you think it is happening here now.
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Mutually Assured Deconstruction (Score:2, Insightful)
I seriously question whether these groups do in fact keep each other honest. If you have multiple groups lying, and each accusing the others of lying, that doesn't help anyone find the truth, because the accusations may be lies as well.
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Newspaper leaders?
News Around the World?
wtf?
I never got it. I still don't
It's people's words on people's paper.
There's a word for it now? It has reporters and editors?
and these reporters say something and we're suddenly supposed to take their word for it, and treat it as something greater than ink on paper? All the while continually mocking the newsletter/church bulletin/whatever crowd, which is essentially amounts to the same thing, minus the fucking pretentious "ace news reporter"
Nothing for you to see^H^H^H hear here (Score:1)
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uhm (Score:1)
I wonder (Score:1)
Politics, too (Score:1)
He pretty much took it in stride, called their bluff, and became a proud Independent MP (fairly rare in Canada, due to election financing rules). This past Tuesday he held a press conference where he revealed many of the problems with party politics, i
THAT's what makes The Times a "paper of record." (Score:2)
bloggers are basically loose cannons rolling across the public landscape with zillions of their own agendas.
there will be no "blogs of record" when the next chapter of history is put to bed.
Blogs have an identity crisis. (Score:3, Insightful)
But what blogs are not, even though some people just won't stop claiming it, is some sort of radically new media that solves most of the problems of traditional media. Blogs aren't really news outlets - 99% of them get their news from other sources, e.g. the established organisations that they decry as the "old media". 99% of blogs don't give you any new facts, they simply pass on facts that they have picked up elsewhere. And some blogs deliberately spread misinformation. After all, it only takes very little to create a good-looking blog, so a reputable writer will look just as serious as a complete charlatan.
At the end of the day, blogs are basically nothing other than your good old-fashioned soap box brought into the 21st century - or maybe I should say, soapbox 2.0. Blogs might give everyone a chance to make his voice heard, might be a great solution to the problem of censorship, might be great to spark a good debate in the comments, might be a lot better for diversity of thought and opinion, and blogs might be a really convenient way of publishing things - but blogs are NOT by definition more reputable than "old media". Perhaps even less so. At the end of the day, if you want a balanced opinion, there is no one source of information you can use. You still need to get as many views on issues as you can, consider your sources objectively, and make up your own mind. And no new trend or technological advance on the web is going to change that.
I think if people took a moment to think about it and understand this, they wouldn't be so surprised when stories such as this one come up.
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So this differentiates said blogs from the so-called "real journalists" because they pick the facts from elsewhere(s) with names like Reuters, AP, etc? And just because these "elsewheres" sell their facts to anyone willing to pay for it, make up the news then? I don't think so. They pick up their facts from elsewhere as well - only difference, they pay for the fact-gathering while many bloggers do their
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To cut a long story short: A (well-written and -researched) Blog does no
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Back to my point, or the point I was trying to make, that is: A blog does not differ from any other online-publication, there are gems and there is tr
As soon as.... (Score:2)
BIG web sites and blogging services are the latest victim of this effect.
Douglas DID announce his departure (Score:3)
here [valleywag.com].
Excerpt:
It's traditional for an exiting Gawker Media editor to write a farewell post. I don't have anything to get across, other than that I'm free for lunch and gig offers for the next few weeks, so I'll just thank the people who, as my friend Paul put it, "write Valleywag for free."
cut off the top (Score:2)
Diversify your blog reading and you'll get a better picture.
No (Score:2)
Maybe in the navel-gaze-o-sphere, it is. But not in the real world.