By Sheila
Lennon
Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
January 21, 2005, 7:04 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Weekend snow, football, food and games: Please
don't let the power go out Sunday.
Snow: One to two feet beginning Saturday night, as I write this. Forecast for
Providence, for Philadelphia,
for Pittsburgh.
Football: Atlanta at Philadelphia, 3:00 p.m. on FOX; New England at Pittsburgh,
6:30 p.m. on CBS.
Food: Playoff
party recipes,
updated.
Games:Two new ones:
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At Harvard, Blogging,
Journalism & Credibility catches up. I've been intermittently
listening to this conference as it streams on the Web.
Jill Abramson, managing editor of the New York Times, confirmed that the
New York Times is seeking a refund for the election-day exit-poll results.
(A Times
story Wednesday had actually broken this news, but it hadn't apparently
gotten around.)
Earlier in the conference, someone suggested that the first journalist to
treat a blog as an inlet for information from readers will soar. Fortunately,
someone else pointed out that Dan Gillmor (and others of us, but Dan's in the
room) have already done that. (The Station
Fire blog got a lot of attention
for doing exactly that two years ago -- emails from readers with a piece of
the story were the meat of that blog.)
Dan left the San Jose Mercury News, where he covered tech for the paper and
blogged on its website, at the end of the year to start a grass-roots
journalism effort, which suggests this was not as groundbreaking an idea
as its advocate believes.
Coincidentally, today I finished an email interview with a reporter for a
journalism magazine. I think, without scooping the interviewer, it's safe to
include a paraphrase of some of what I told him that intersects with what they're
discussing at Harvard:
I think we'll eventually use software that makes each news story a separate
file, and anyone may write a reaction, clarification or addition to the story
below it.... instant feedback from readers and bloggers who will interact
with both stories and reporters will make the walls between creator and consumer
permeable. News sites will be ad hoc journalism schools. Everyone will be
reading the story and the reactions on literally the same web page. Evolving
stories are inevitable as news-gathering continues till every drop of information
is included.
Abramson of the Times also spoke of future reader participation, of including
the expertise of the community in the conversation. Unspoken was a desire to
invite
the experts and leave the trolls outside.
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eBay
to introduce "best offer" for fixed-price listings:
This often-requested feature will give sellers more flexibility when listing
items in the Fixed Price format, giving them the ability to accept price-based
offers from buyers before a listing ends...
When a seller chooses to accept offers on a listing, a “Submit Best
Offer” link will appear below the Buy It Now button on the item page.
After you click the link, you will be able to enter your offer price on the
next page.
This could be useful when the item is otherwise likely to expire without being
bought.
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Two Powells leaving: The upcoming resignation
of Michael Powell as chair of the FCC was
announced today on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. If that
sentence does not seem strange to you, you might want to read it again:
The
bad news is that we are told that Michael Powell, one of Washington's better
bureaucrats, is calling it quits today after four years at the helm of the
Federal Communications Commission. You read it here first. The good news
is that his exit affords the Bush Administration an opportunity to re-evaluate
its stepchild treatment of telecom policy.
Jeff Jarvis and Jon Bonne of MSNBC
are both at a Harvard conference, and Jarvis
blogs Bonne's reaction in an email sent from four seats away:
isn't it amazing that the Powell news broke on the WSJ ed page? the WSJ
ed page folks are certainly intrepid journalists in their own right, but
i interpret this as a signal from the Bush corps that breaking news can easily
be routed around the newsroom and straight to their fellow ideological counterparts.
The Washington Post this afternoon reported the
same news online, with an anonymous FCC staffer as source:
Powell, 41, the son of outgoing Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, said
he will likely leave in March. He informed his bureau heads this morning
of his decision, which he said was not spurred by another job offer, according
to an FCC source who asked not to be identified.
His term was to run until 2007.
Finally, the FCC has posted a statement by Powell himself. (pdf)
It is tempting to speculate that both Powells have cleared the deck for a
future Powell & Son, Inc., since his dad, outgoing Secretary of State Colin
Powell, has announced no plans for the future.
Despite drawing much criticism for his willingness to let one or two big media
organizations own whatever they can scoop up, at the expense of diversity and
competition, and praise for permitting the Do Not Call List and supporting
broadband development and Internet telephony Powell's legacy is likely to be
Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during halftime at last year's
Super Bowl.
Radio shock jock Howard Stern is jubilant, of course. "Thank God he's
gone," he said. "This is a great day in broadcasting."
Viacom agreed in November to pay $3.5 million in indecency fines for transgressions
at its radio stations -- including Stern's.
Howardstern.com has
posted an altered photo of
a smiling Chairman Powell with fangs and horns.
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Wal-Mart
won't advertise, but wants free PR from small papers:
The president of the National Newspaper Association,t Mike Buffington, has
sent a letter to Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott to protest what many newspapers
consider an arrogant ploy by the firm for some free PR....
I was contacted yesterday by Jack Newton of the Hill & Knowlton PR firm
in Atlanta.
Mr. Newton advised me that Wal-Mart representatives were "available
for interviews" about the firms nationwide campaign to "set the
record straight about the facts about Wal-Mart."... Wal-Mart has a fairly
standard policy of doing little to no local newspaper advertising.
But now, when under fire from various critics, you turn to us to help you
fight back. Adding insult to injury, you expect us to give you free space
to do that with PR solicitations such as the one I received from Hill & Knowlton.
... If Wal-Mart wants to communicate valuable information about itself to
our readers, then you can purchase our valuable advertising space to do it.
Good for Mike. So many local businesses have gone under because Wal-Mart moves
to town and replaces everything else. Despite the temptation to take the money
and run, these editors are turning their backs on the big buy.
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Eye
of Science photography: Great stuff. Crystals, zoology, medicine
and more, on a human scale.. Above is a capillary; the blood cells are
the red things.
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Sen.
Clinton urges use of faith-based initiatives: The Globe reports,
On the eve of the presidential inauguration, US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton
last night embraced an issue some pundits say helped seal a second term for
George W. Bush: acceptance of the role of faith in addressing social ills....
She said there must be room for religious people to "live out their
faith in the public square."
But what happens when living out their faith clashes with another group's
faith? God Wars in the public square?
The founders were careful to center our public life on what we have in common,
not what divides us. My God vs. your God could get mighty ugly.
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January 20, 2005, 2:10 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Heinz Field: The huge stadium scoreboard is flanked by two giant neon Heinz
Ketchup bottles which virtually "pour" onto the screen whenever the
home team drives into the "Heinz Red Zone" -- the area between the
20-yard line and the goal line. -- About.com:
Football Fan's Guide to Heinz Field
John Kerry won't be at Heinz Field Sunday: The Senator
from Boston is married to the philanthropist from Pittsburgh, but their loyalties
won't be on display when the Patriots play the Steelers Sunday in the AFC championship
game, says a spokesman in the Senator's Boston office.
I posed the question two days ago, after wondering if Kerry and his wife,
Teresa Heinz Kerry, would be there rooting for different teams. (As part of
a 20 year partnership with the H.J. Heinz Company, the Steelers stadium, which
opened in August 2001, was named Heinz Field. Mrs. Kerry's late husband, Sen.
John Heinz, was an heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune.)
Today, the word came down that the Senator won't be among the diehard fans
braving the worst of January. (Weather prediction: 50 percent chance of snow
showers, temps around 20, wind chill near zero.) Kerry will be rooting for
the Pats, though, wherever he is.
The spokesman did not presume to speak for Mrs. Heinz Kerry.
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Here's the microphone. What will you do with it?
OUTSIDE THE TENT
Gossip
Would Do L.A. and The Times Good
By Mickey Kaus, Mickey Kaus writes the kausfiles blog for Slate.com.
An experimental column in which the Los Angeles Times invites outside
critics to take their best shot at Southern California's heaviest newspaper.
Did you know that Mayor James Hahn's marriage had collapsed? And the
kids are living with him, not his wife? I didn't know that. When I tell
people I run into, they're surprised too — surprised they didn't
know. Why don't they know? Because these people read the Los Angeles Times!
And The Times, in the year and a half since the mayor announced his separation,
has mentioned Hahn's marital situation exactly three times, by my count.
Only once — a piece in the Calendar section six months ago — was
it discussed for more than four sentences....
Now imagine what would happen if a mayor of New York announced that he
was separating from his wife....
The idea of guest critics is interesting. And Kaus's ode to juicy details
is sure to get read. But nope, can't see that happening here, either.
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January 19, 2005, 6:25 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
JibJab comes out with an Inaugural video:
To the tune of "She'll be coming round the mountain..."
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Flash
game: Motherload. Blogger Andrew
Woolridge raves about this one:
Warning! If you find yourself hopelessly addicted to great web games sometimes,
then you should steer clear of this game immediately! Wow, the room really
cleared out there. Well, for those of you still hanging around, this is a game
that is simply quite addictive. All you do is pilot a tiny driller down into
tunnels under the surface of Mars, bring back the minerals you collect, cash
them in, and upgrade your driller (plus get fuel). It seems quite monotonous,
but in fact its not only fun, it sucks you in to go drill down deeper and get
more lucrative minerals to harvest. This is a shinging example of gameplay
over graphics.
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Picasa 'Googles'
photos on your own computer: Google bought Picasa, which makes
digital-photo management software of the same name. You can download the
program free at the
link on the headline. Here's the blurb:
A free software download from Google.
Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the
pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates
all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual
albums organized by date with folder names you know. You can drag and drop
to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes
sure your pictures are always organized.
Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and
powerful effects at your fingertips. And Picasa makes it a snap to share
your pictures – you can email, print at home, make gift CDs, instantly
share via Hello™, and even put pictures on your own blog.
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Inauguration protests:
Counter-Inaugural.org
Counter-Inaugural
Demonstration
Not One
Damn Dime Day
Turn Your Back on Bush
Code
Pink Counter Inauguration actions
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More later...
January 18, 2005, 8:03 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Music
from Fort Thunder: Once upon a time, there was a building at Eagle
Square where artists lived and made art and music -- the former Valley
Worsted mill at 25 Eagle St., aka the Americana Flea Market, and Fort Thunder.
Now it's a shopping development.
The
scene moved to a corner warehouse at 244 Oak St. and 71 Troy St. in Olneyville,
and a year ago the city discovered the artists were living in illegal spaces,
from which they were evicted in the name of safety.
At group blog Metafilter.com,
antimagnet -- someone who knew it all well -- posts a wonderful history in
links, including one to 10 CDs of music from nights at both places.
Great post. Comments at the link, whose real title is, this
music is meant to be played LOUD.
If you
have heard of the bands Lightning Bolt, Arab
on Radar or Forcefield,
chances are you've heard of the legendary space known as Fort Thunder -
an artists collective in
an otherwise neglected part of Providence known as Olneyville -where
roughly 100 artists and musicians lived, worked, and held underground
music shows. After the demolition of
Fort Thunder in 2001,
a number of those artists began again in a different space known simply as
Oak & Troy. One year ago this month, on one of the coldest days on record,
the residents of that fertile creative
space were also evicted,
this time with just two weeks' notice. But where there is innovative
music there are dedicated audiophiles, and last week one of the former
residents of Oak & Troy released a 10-CD
compilation of some of the best music to happen in those amazing spaces.
See if you can pick out the extracurricular projects of members (or former
members) of AoR, ff, Dropdead, thee
Hydrogen Terrors and Olneyville
Sound Station
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Salam
in the open: At Zed, a video interview with Salam
Pax, the original Baghdad
Blogger.
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Animation
director improves Polar Express characters: BoingBoing notes,
Ward Jenkins is an animation director in Atlanta, Ga. On his blog called The
Ward-O-Matic, he wrote a couple of lengthy posts about The Polar Express,
in which he included some of his Photoshop tweaked fixes to the famously zombie-like
characters in the movie. He says that folks from Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks,
Vinton Studios, and other sites are commenting on his work.
Ward refers to an earlier post, The
Polar Express: A Virtual Train Wreck
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Nonsense statistics: Seat
Belts, Air Bags, Other Features Have Saved 329,000 Lives, Government Says.
Life is terminal. Everybody dies. No lives are saved. Those who don't die
one way die another.
DETROIT (AP) - Seat belts, air bags and other vehicle safety features have
saved 329,000 lives since 1960, according to a report released Tuesday by
the U.S. Department of Transportation.
..."Thousands of our friends, neighbors and family members are alive
today because of these safety innovations," Transportation Secretary
Norman Mineta said.
According to the study, the number of lives saved annually from safety devices
increased from 115 per year in 1960 to 25,000 per year in 2002.
Are those 329,000 still alive? The lead says they were "saved."
Nothing "saves lives," although some lives may be extended until
the next dangerous moment that brings another sort of death.
And, the National Motorists Association points out, air
bags kill people, too.
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Vintage
iPods Club: Blogger Paolo Valdemarin:
Really cool people belong to the iPod Vintage Club, the very restricted
group who bought the first undersized, underfeatured and expensive Apple
toy.
Since the iPod was first announced on October 23, 2001, we can apparently
now go from vintage to cutting-edge in just under 3.25 years.
Prehistoric begins around when I was 30, apparently.
via Dave Winer
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Five
questions the CBS 60 Minutes panel didn't answer: By Mark Lasswell
at Broadcasting & Cable
1 Who really wrote the documents?
2 How did the CBS News president keep his job?
3 Why do the National Guard story in the first place?
4 Will the people who were forced out ever work in the news business again?
5 How can CBS restore its credibility—and what will be the overall
impact of this episode on the news business
Finally, someone else is focusing on this first one:
1 Who really wrote the documents? Despite the investigative panel's
exhaustive fact-gathering, Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi did not even
attempt to answer the biggest question of all in this matter....
...As with the best political black ops, it's not obvious which side might
have generated the documents. If they were manufactured with enough mistakes
embedded to guarantee that they would be revealed as bogus, then suspicion
turns to supporters of President Bush: he was essentially inoculated against
further inquiries into this National Guard service after the CBS debacle.
But if the documents were fashioned in the hope that they'd sail unchallenged
into the permanent public record—and who could have predicted the unprecedented
blogoscopy they were subjected to—then they benefited the Kerry campaign.
One thing is certain: there's a National Magazine Award or a Pulitzer for
the journalist who solves this mystery.
The pity is that, if Mapes hadn't become so obsessed with proving the latest
little wrinkle in Bush's military record—in other words, trying to
put a little polish on old news—the producer would have recognized
that she had a hell of a story to cover: who ginned up the phony papers and
why.
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January 17, 2005, 7:10 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Related: If you must... here's the Colts
message board at the Indy
Star. I just read a message there which I'll quote in its entirety:
"The strength of the wolf is in the pack" -Bill Bellechick, Football
Deity.
(Pssst... If you're Googling Belichick, <-- spell it like this.)
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The
Non-Expert: When in Manhattan...: At the Morning
News, Non-Expert Rosecrans Baldwin "uses a thousand links to address
the most frequently sent letter in the Non-Expert’s mailbag: I’m
coming to New York City, please help!"
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Everything
you wanted to know about literary agents...: When a reader asks author Neil
Gaiman about literary agents, he demurs and defers to blogger Teresa
Nielsen Hayden, who's also an editor at Tor
Books.
Her advice begins,
1. If you're writing fiction, the True Secret Answer is "get an offer." If
you've got an offer, you can get an agent. If you don't have an offer, you
don't want the kind of agent you're likely to get.
a. If you're good enough to get published, having an agent may prove helpful.
If you aren't (yet), you definitely don't want the kind of agent you're going
to get.
i. There is no substitute for writing a book that people want to buy and
read. If you can do that, you can get published. If you can't, no clever
workaround will help, because we can't force people to buy and
read books they don't like.
b. Some ways you might get an agent without getting an offer: Be obviously
and extraordinarily good. Sell a lot of short stories. Have some other seriously
hot credentials.
Teresa doesn't repeat what she calls her infodump to Neil on her own blog,
but she goes
beyond it, nailing something that has always bothered me:
Contemplating this universe of bad advice makes me feel at once curmudgeonly
and appalled. It makes me want to put out a book called The Oppressively
Real Guide to Writing and Publishing. Sample chapter titles:
...
Ever Wonder Why They Call It Submission?
...
Bingo. Over the years I've fought the word "submit," but there aren't
good alternatives.
Lots of comments on TNH's post, as well.
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ET
Visitors: Scientists See High Likelihood: At Space.com:
...Pick up any good science magazine and you’re sure to see the latest
in head-scratching ideas about superstring
theory, wormholes, or the stretching of spacetime itself. Meanwhile,
extrasolar planetary detection is on the verge of becoming mundane.
"We are in the curious situation today that our best modern physics
and astrophysics theories predict that we should be experiencing extraterrestrial
visitation, yet any possible evidence of such lurking in the UFO phenomenon
is scoffed at within our scientific community," contends astrophysicist
Bernard Haisch.
Haisch along with physicists James Deardorff, Bruce Maccabee and Harold
Puthoff make their case in the JBIS (Journal of the British
Interplanetary Society) article: "Inflation-Theory Implications
for Extraterrestrial Visitation".
The scientists point to two key discoveries made by Australian astronomers
and reported last year that there is a "galactic habitable zone" in
our Milky Way Galaxy. And more importantly that Earth’s own star, the
Sun, is relatively young in comparison to the average star in this zone --
by as much as a billion years.
Therefore,
the researchers explain in their JBIS article that an average alien civilization
would be far more advanced and have long since discovered Earth. Additionally,
other research work on the supposition underlying the Big Bang -- known as
the theory of inflation -- shores up the prospect, they advise, that our
world is immersed in a much larger extraterrestrial civilization....
Related: The
European Space Agency site, where you'll find images and sounds from
Titan, the moon of Saturn hosting an explorer from Earth, Cassini-Huygens.
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