Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category

The Printed Blog was the ultimate contrarian maneuver – a newspaper that test the idea that more people would read blogs if they had them on a printed page. The answer was no. It never got off the ground: U.S. News & World Report says they only delivered a total of 80,000 papers, mostly in Chicago.

This looked like a total waste of time. Propping up an outdated business model and giving it an unfair advantage over more nimble competitors is unnecessary and simply prolongs the pain. Let’s let the market work.

I’m creating a new category for Local News Organizations (LNOs) that will include any local news gathering operations.

This plays into my ongoing skepticism regarding the viability of amateur journalism sites. By itself it doesn’t mean much, but it’s a straw in the wind.

Citizen journalism site to shut down

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet WriterThu Jul 12, 4:43 PM ET

A news site that has allowed its users to write and submit their own articles is shutting down, citing unspecified “business issues.”

Backfence Inc. had “hyperlocal” sites serving 13 communities in the Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Chicago areas. Residents were allowed to write on any topic, including event announcements and neighborhood traffic congestion, without the meddling of editors.

The idea was to get readers and viewers more involved in news production with the help of the Internet, camera phones and other technologies.

“We hope we have provided you with a valuable local forum,” Backfence told its readers. “Unfortunately, business issues are forcing us to close our doors and shut down the site.”

Backfence never drew much traffic. Its 13 operations collectively haven’t received enough visitors in a month to reach the threshold needed for comScore Media Metrix to properly measure. Normally, comScore needs at least 50,000 to 100,000 visitors.

Mark Potts, the site’s co-founder, refused to comment on the reasons behind the closure, saying they are proprietary. He acknowledged the company wasn’t successful, but said people shouldn’t dismiss the concept of citizen journalism.

“Along with our investors, we remain very enthusiastic about the potential for user-generated hyperlocal information and citizen journalism,” Potts wrote in an e-mail. “Backfence was a pioneer in that area.”

Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor, said others can now learn from Backfence’s failure.

“The first attempt, if it has some good ideas in it and some dubious ones are exposed, will make future projects easier and raise our chances for success,” Rosen said. “Backfence may have succeeded brilliantly in evolutionary terms.”

Many traditional media outlets along with standalone startups have been pushing citizen journalism as a way to expand their offerings, particularly for community developments that may appeal to a relatively small number of people but are very important to those few affected.

Last year, Backfence acquired another pioneer in citizen journalism, the San Francisco area’s Bayosphere, which was created by former newspaper columnist Dan Gillmor.

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I’ve been conflicted for years about online postings and bulletin boards. As a lifelong First Amendment advocate and occasional operator of my own bulletin boards, I’ve always seen them as a powerful way for people to interact on a generally level playing field. On the other hand, the ability to post anonymously creates an incredible temptation. There have always been players posting under multiple personalities. As long as it’s just a game, that’s fairly harmless. But when you can go online under a pseudonym and trash a competitor you’re eventually going to try to buy, it’s an entirely different story. In the public relations industry, this has traditionally been referred to as “corrupting the channels of communication.”

PR Biz Update

Whole Foods CEO’s Anonymous Chatroom Posts Bashing Competitor Wild Oats Could Hamper Organic Grocer’s Acquisition Hopes

The chief executive of Whole Foods posted messages on a Yahoo chat forum under an alias for years, talking up his own company while predicting a bleak future for Wild Oats—the rival it has since sought to acquire. Company CEO John Mackey posted messages on a Yahoo financial forum under the user name “rahodeb,” according to a court document filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and postings on Yahoo, Reuters reports.

Mackey’s messages painted a bright future for Whole Foods, the largest U.S. natural and organic grocer, and downplayed the threat posed by competitors. “The writing is on the wall. The end game is now underway for (Wild Oats) …. Whole Foods is systematically destroying their viability as a business—market by market, city by city,” Mackey wrote in a March 28, 2006 posting, reports Reuters scribe Peter Kaplan.

It was cited by the FTC as part of a lawsuit aimed at blocking Whole Foods’ planned $565 million acquisition of Wild Oats on grounds the deal would hobble competition and increase prices to consumers. “Bankruptcy remains a distinct possibility (for Wild Oats) IMO if the business isn’t sold within the next few years,” rahodeb said in another March 29, 2006 posting on Yahoo.

Whole Foods confirmed Mackey had made the “rahodeb” postings between 1999 and 2006. It said references to those comments were among millions of documents the company provided to the FTC as part of the agency’s antitrust lawsuit.

In a statement, the company said Mackey posted comments under an alias “to avoid having his comments associated with the company and to avoid others placing too much emphasis on his remarks. The ‘rahodeb’ postings are the personal postings of Mr. Mackey and not those of the company,” Whole Foods said.

In separate comments posted on Whole Foods’ website, Mackey said he “posted on Yahoo! under a pseudonym because I had fun doing it. Many people post on bulletin boards using pseudonyms. The views articulated by rahodeb sometimes represent what I actually believed and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes I simply played ‘devil’s advocate’ for the sheer fun of arguing,” Mackey said on the site.

Whole Foods announced plans to buy Wild Oats in February. The companies have said the merger should be allowed to proceed in light of fierce competition in the overall grocery business. But in some postings, rahodeb downplayed other supermarkets as potential competitors that could hurt Whole Foods. “If you are waiting for Trader Joe’s or Wegmans to slow down the Whole Foods express train you’re going to be waiting the rest of your life. It ain’t (going to) happen,” rahodeb said in a September 28, 2005 posting in response to another participant.

On his personal blog, Mackey has accused the FTC of distorting his private statements in order to portray him as excessively aggressive and bent on eliminating healthy competition.

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Is it just my failure to pay attention, or has the “participatory journalism” hype hit an air pocket? Just a couple of months ago, it seemed impossible to escape the hysterical prophecies that amateur bloggers would become the eyes and ears to our entire society, calling into question the value of professional journalists in mainstream news organizations.

At its peak, it felt a little like a blow-off to me — one of those occasional points where we seem to overload on a theme to the point where we all suddenly lose interest. Not unlike a night of booze-induced puking that leads to a period of abstinence. We’ve seen a bunch of blow-offs lately. The Da Vinci Code mania that disappeared overnight once the movie came out. The American Idol ravings that became muted by a mediocre lineup and, I suspect, some hype fatigue. Don’t be surprised if even the obsession with our drunken pop princesses (Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Nicole and the like) vaporizes soon. And unless I miss my guess, the fanatics will get their iPhones and disappear from the sidewalk lines and we’ll hear little about Steve Jobs’ new gadget. Sure, there will be a lot of reviews, but the mystery will be gone. And let’s face it — there’s not much left to feed the frenzy.

Even though things are quiet on the blogging/YouTube front, I’m nowhere near ready to pronounce the citizen journalism thing dead. People are still writing blogs and shooting amateur videos, but the mainstream media are paying less attention. (Side point: What does it say that the amateur news blogs depend upon the mainstream media to ensure their role?) Another factor is that we haven’t had much in the way of YouTube scoops like the Michael Richards video. Or maybe we have but don’t know it because the mainstream media have quit following the amateurs around. The networks ran a lot of amateur video from April’s Virginia Tech massacre, but it didn’t really show much. If it had been shot by their own cameras, they wouldn’t have even aired it.

As always, I have to return to my drumbeat that only professional journalists in real news organizations have the time, the resources, the money and the expertise to do the kind of reporting that makes our democracy function effectively. This week’s incredible Washington Post series on Vice President Cheney shows the kind of reporting that can’t be compared to a lucky cell phone video shot. The same is true of  Sy Hersh article in last week’s New Yorker about the general who investigated the Abu Ghraib outrages.

Sometimes the more junk food you eat, the more you want the real thing. And I’ve been really hungry lately.

For a while, I’ve been returning to the theme that media must find an economic model that allows major news organizations to spend the time and money pursuing major stories that “citizen journalists” lack the time, money and expertise to report.

The New York Times brought us an excellent piece of “big bucks” reporting over the weekend, when reporters David Barboza and Alexei Barrioneuvo interviewed Chinese scrap dealers who have been selling leftover melamine to producers of grains for pet and livestock feeds. While melamine has no nutritional value, it fools the current tests into thinking it’s protien, allowing the companies to pass off possibly fatal wheat gluten laced with a scrap chemical. Further, the story made it clear that this stuff is going into feeds for farm animals, putting it in the human food chain.

Realistically, I don’t know of many blogs who would send a reporter to Zhangqiu, China to interview scrap dealers. Those who are celebrating the decline of the old media need to ask themselves who’s going to fill that gap. If the answer is independent bloggers and college students taking cell phone videos and posting them on YouTube, they need to find a different brand of whatever they’re smoking.

Good editing is one of the casualties of the current environment. Every writer needs an editor — not just to fix commas, but to ask hard questions and make sure the story meets the standards of good reporting. The “brave new world” everybody’s so excited about has copy editors in Singapore — or nowhere — and (untrained or poorly trained) writers posting to the web.

I inadvertently made that point last week with a horrendous typo in a headline. We can’t go back, but we need to figure out how to go forward better.

The Vanishing Copy Editor – Editors Weblog

The Vanishing Copy Editor
Poynter writer Leann Frola reports on the annual American Copy Editors Society convention. Among the main issues, what is happening to the role of copy editors, whose numbers seem to be thinning out of the newsroom – at a time when they are even more important?

As breaking news gets published online immediately and copy editors’ jobs get outsourced to India, China and the Phillipines, the future appears to be gloomy for copy editors.

“A lot of reporters are filing directly to the Web, without anyone editing a story,” said Detroit Free Press recruiting and development editor Joe Grimm at the convention.

“That gets the material out fast, but it has mistakes in it.”

This poses an obvious threat to newspapers’ credibility and accuracy, which is one of their remaining assets over other media.

“We’re disrespecting online readers by not giving them the same level of editing,” said Chris Wienandt, ACES president and business copy-desk chief at The Dallas Morning News.

“I think people expect a newspaper site to be an extension of the newspaper, so I think the quality of the editing and thoroughness of the editing on the Web site should match the thoroughness of the editing that you get in the newspaper.”

The biggest problem comes from newspaper blogs, which are often submitted to even lesser control by copy editors than the online edition.

“I wish we had enough people to edit all that stuff, but we don’t. But I’d rather see typos there than in the paper,” said Kathy Schenck, assistant managing editor for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Perhaps it seems more ‘acceptable’ to have a typo in a blog than in a printed headline, but that notion is tied to an antiquated view of the newspaper. In fact, the accuracy and spell-checking of a newspaper blog should be just about as high as the printed editions, as they are all now part of the same offering.

So newspapers still need copy editors. And as reminded by many copy editors at the convention, the larger amount of text now available online and in blogs should make copy editors’ role even more essential – and not the opposite.

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Here’s another “straw in the wind” demonstrating the problems we will have to eventually address in a world where everybody becomes a journalist and publisher. The old checks and balances are gone. As stodgy and slow as traditional news organizations are, they have upheld minimum standards of quality, accuracy and fairness. Citizen journalists with no training, no editors and no accountability can and will go off the deep end.

Curbing bad behavior on the blogs | News.blog | CNET News.com

In the wake of a tempest in the blogosphere that devolved even to the point of reported death threats to author Kathy Sierra, a few bloggers have decided that the tech industry is getting enough of a black eye, and have called for a “code of conduct” to govern polite behavior.The code, posted by publisher Tim O’Reilly, is apparently designed for bloggers who are lacking in even the most basic of manners and who need helpful tips in conducting a polite conversation without resorting to name-calling.

Bloggers who sign on to the code agree to follow principles such as these: don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t call people names, and ignore them if they call you names–all excellent principles that my kindergartener has just about mastered. Good to see the bloggers reaching that level of sophisticated behavior.

However, more than a few bloggers have declared that they don’t need no stinking rules, and are expressing reservations about the code.

Here’s a “slice of life” from the darker side of a wiki world in which anybody can put something in front of the world. We’re seeing problems like this in all the major venues that invite contributions — Wikipedia, YouTube, Ebay, MySpace, you name it. Caveat emptor.

The home wrecker’s ad on Craigslist | News.blog | CNET News.com

The craigslist ad said “Please help yourself to anything on the property.” And some people did. You can go see for yourself if you’re in Tacoma. What’s left is strewn around the house on east 46th Avenue.

Today we learn Craigslist has released all the information the website has on the ad. Now we know the ad didn’t last very long on craigslist, maybe two hours. It was removed because so many users flagged it. But that was long enough. Craigslist CEO, Jim Buckmaster, said the IP and email address involved with posting the ad were given to the owner. She, in turn, gave it to the Tacoma Police.

People showed up and took the kitchen sink, front door, water heater and even a vinyl window. Rubble litters the garage and yard.

What’s the back story? The owner says she evicted the tenants last month. Those tenants were the owner’s two sisters. Neighbors say the house was long the scene of wild parties, noise and fights.

Now what? The owner doesn’t recognize the email address used to post the phoney ad. Police are not sure what to do even if they find the perps. It’s not clear the people who took things from the house can be charged. What about the person(s) who posted the ad? They’re in slightly new legal territory according to Tacoma Police. We do know it was an off-duty cop who noticed the ad while it lasted on craigslist and then made the connection when a burglary was reported at the same address. Clearly there may be other connections still to come.

To understand how the current media shifts will affect us, we have to understand a few fundamental concepts. With all the hype surrounding the blogging phenomenon, we have to remember that we have two kinds of journalism — original and derivative.

Original journalism is what the professionals do. They go out and interview people. They sit through the boring parts of meetings and trials to catch the interesting stuff when it happens and pass it on to us. They go down to City Hall and the Courthouse and other places to filter through public records to make sure our elected officials are doing their jobs right. They investigate and quell rumors, and when there’s substance, they write stories that are reviewed by editors (and, increasingly, fact checkers) before they see the light of day.

These people who do the grunt work of reporting have to eat. So do their editors and the many production people who bring us their products, however they are delivered. I was thinking about this Sunday when I read Max Frankel’s fine article in the New York Times Magazine about Washington‘s “back channels. Frankel spent months on the very fine piece, interviewing scores of people. It is original journalism at its best. But in the long run, great reporting has to happen within a business model that operates at a profit. Otherwise, people have to make a living some other way and don’t have the time and resources for the hard work.

The news blogs, on the other hand, are derivative. They feed off the work of people like Frankel and the thousands of other working journalists who do the grunt work. They can – and do – play an important role. It was a loosely knit team of bloggers that showed CBS had been duped by fake documents about President Bush’s National Guard service. But even that was derivative, in that it came in response to the work (albeit flawed) of the working press. The blogs also offer important commentary and analysis. They bring insights from places reporters rarely go. So they’re making an important contribution.

Original and derivative. Two different things.