By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros Fair and balanced, too!
November 21, 2003 6:48 p.m. -- (Last
week's weblog)
New York Rock and Roll Ensemble
To me, Michael Kamen means the New York Rock and
Roll Ensemble: Michael
Kamen died Tuesday at 55, suddenly, of a heart attack.
 He's
famous now for
scoring X-Men and many more films, but in 1968, while studying oboe
at Juilliard, Kamen founded The New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, a rock-classical
fusion band. On spring mornings, I'd wake up and play, "Hey Mr. Tree"
("do you remember me...") from that self-titled album.
It was a hoot -- classical musicians playing funky tunes -- but they
were out of place -- and panned
-- at a Detroit festival more tuned to MC5: " The concise boring
fusion of rock and Bach by the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble seemed
painfully out of place to the crazed rock fanatics of Detroit."
In 1971, they made outrageous rock on Roll
Over. There are some
clips at Amazon.
There's a condolence
message board at Kamen's
site. CommanderBond.net has a
tribute; MTV's obit headline describes Kamen as Composer
Who Worked With Metallica, Aerosmith; there's an extensive, admiring
obit
at The Telegraph, but it seems not to know about the first album on
Atco.
You might actually find out more about Kamen by cruising for sites about
his Juilliard roommate, NYRRE bandmate and fellow composer Mark
Snow (Mark Fullerman, back then) of X-Files fame.
My friend Doc gave me a cassette of that first 1968 album a couple of
years ago. This week, it's been playing at our house.
Link
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"Enough
with the Michael Jackson crap": The cover of projo.com has
a block displaying the five most recent headlines from AP. When the headline
"Jackson sought on molestation charges" arrived, another editor
called to ask if I wanted to do anything more with the story. "Yeah,
" I said, "I want to add his first name so we know it's not
Jesse. And maybe a thumbnail photo. That's it." But of course we
couldn't do either -- it's an automated feed.
CNN was not so restrained. Tom Mangan, in his Prints
the Chaff blog for editors, rants,
Yesterday CNN devoted three hours of airtime to Michael Jackson arriving
to be charged, leaving to return to Vegas, and physically returning
to Vegas.
... How much more of this idiocy are we going to impose on ourselves
before we get it into our heads: The personal lives of celebrities are
not news: they are curiosities. Three paragraphs in the "People"
column.
... News should be what affects the most people. Celebs have no impact
on my life or the lives of anybody but their friends, families and co-workers.
If Michael Jackson's arrest hurts record sales, it's a business story.
If it boosts TV ratings, it's a TV page story. If he molests little
boys, it's a crime story. Whatever kind of story it is, it's not Page
One News.
How many more times must we watch cars drive down highways before we
realize, "Jesus Christ, we're watching cars drive down highways."
What are we hoping, that Michael will jump out with a machine gun and
start gunning down the paparazzi? How many more hours of not reporting
terrorist attacks in Turkey will we have to endure before we figure
out that our celebrity worship has gotten out of hand?
Please, people, get a grip. Have some discipline. Find some real news
and leave this pulp to the experts.
It's easy to cover, but isn't anybody asking if it has news value? Or
is it a business decision -- if you can get people to watch TV for three
hours waiting for something to happen, you can show them a lot of ads.
William Rivers Pitt at Truthout
is troubled, too:
In the last two years, CNN has not devoted this much energy and coverage
to any story in the manner that is unfolding right now. Enron, the stock
market, the reasons for September 11, the nomination of Henry Kissinger
to chair the investigation into that event, the disinformation that
was pushed by the Bush administration before the attack on Iraq, the
civilian casualties during the attack on Iraq, the American troop casualties
during and after the attack on Iraq, the missing weapons of mass destruction,
the missing Osama bin Laden, the war in Afghanistan that is far from
over, the outing of a CIA agent by the Bush administration in an act
of political revenge, and about two hundred other explosive stories
did not get the attention that Michael Jackson is getting now.
... TV news viewers who think they are getting the hard truth
from the mainstream media just forgot Bush exists, forgot the hundreds
of thousands of protesters who have dogged his state visit to Britain,
forgot the attacks in Iraq, forgot the dead soldiers, forgot September
11, forgot everything except a mutant in a Bronco who lives in a place
called Neverland.
They just showed Jackson in handcuffs. The talking heads almost fainted.
God bless America.
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Dress the turkey: Frankly inspired by Worth
100's Decorate Martha Stewart's Jail Cell, we're running our own Photoshop
contest here. Here's the spiel:
 We're
looking for a new sort of turkey dressing here -- use buttons and
bows or a new suit of clothes, bubble lights or dancers' tights,
but turn that naked turkey into art.
Download one of our turkey photos below, or
find your own, then use Photoshop or another graphics or paint program
to add a background and embellish that bird.
Or you might dye or paint or clothe a grocer's
bird and take a picture of it.
The best-dressed turkey will win a holiday
gift that will make others marvel at your taste -- your selection
from our books editor's stash of pricey art and coffee-table books.
Enter as many times as you like. |
Upload
your entry by Nov. 30. / View
the entries (reg req) or email
your entry to me.
Winner will be announced here on Dec. 1.
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Challenge:
The Victorian Internet. B3ta asked readers, "What would the
Victorians have made of the interweb?" Readers rose to the occasion.
Link
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G.I.
Osama: Toys for sale in the streets of Gaza and Ramallah.
Link
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November 20, 2003 7:08 p.m. -- (Last
week's weblog)
The
annotated Blonde on Blonde: From MeFi,
the history of Bob Dylan's 1966 tour de force double album told in 40 links
to photos, narratives and rambles; readers' comments flesh it out further.
Warhol, Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Sara Dylan, Claudia Cardinale...
Here's just one paragraph. I've added the Lester Bangs link.
And then there is Sara
Lowndes -- Dylan's Playboy
bunny wife as Richard Witt described her. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
is her song. (How to impress your bride to be: make a double album and
put her very own song on one whole side.) He
did not write it in the Chelsea Hotel, by the way -- as he claimed
later in Sara from Desire. The Church
of Bob cannot accept this, however. At any rate, as Lester
Bangs observed, If he really did spend days on end sitting up in
the Chelsea sweating over lines like ''your streetcar visions which
you place on the grass'', then he is stupider than we ever gave him
credit for -- but as the link above notes, he did -- if Jacques Levy
can be believed -- make the dramatic gesture of singing it in studio
to an estranged Sara on its first take and won her back, for awhile...
Link
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Donovan
McNabb on Rush Limbaugh: NewOrleansProFootball.com
publishes an interview today with the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback.
(Limbaugh resigned from ESPN's "Sunday NFL Countdown" in September
after saying that McNabb was overrated because the media wanted to see
a black quarterback succeed.) here's the clip:
 Q:
Rush Limbaugh came back to the airwaves the other day. Did that make
any dent in your mind at all?
A: "No, I'm just trying to tune in and listen to his show to get
a hands on experience of the excitement that he provides."
Q: Is there any lasting effect from the controversy a couple of months
ago?
A: "No, not at all."
McNabb is one cool guy.
Related: NewsMax reports,
The Claremont Institute announced Wednesday that Rush Limbaugh will
not be in attendance at the Institute's annual Churchill Dinner on Friday,
Nov. 21, 2003.
Mr. Limbaugh was to receive the Claremont Institute's Statesmanship
Award at that time.
From his New York studio, Rush said: "Because I must limit my
travel for the remainder of this year, I am unable to attend the Claremont
Institute's Churchill Dinner on November 21." ...
Bill Bennett will substitute for him.
The
New York Post reports, "Rush Limbaugh yesterday claimed that
the more than $300,000 he withdrew in cash was just 'walking-around money'
..."
Link
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Fundrace
2004 Money Maps: "Here's a map that shows you where
each (presdiential) candidate's money is coming from," writes David
Weinberger. Each party and candidate has a map.
Link
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Netwoman Interview: Shelley
Powers writes,
Netwoman did
an
interview of (blogger) Jeneane
Sessum, focusing primarily on women, writing, and community. The
whole interview is quintessential Jeneane, every last bit of community,
self, and soul.
When asked about the perceived focus on male webloggers, Jeneane wrote:
Again, to me it's about what you come to blogging (reading or writing)
for. If it's to replicate the offline world, you'll seek out the blogland
versions of Hanity and Combs and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Riley who
garner the same interest and same attention as those types do in mainstream
media. If you're coming here to connect with others who are interested
in what you're interested in, who have kids that don't sleep at night
like yours, who are exploring what love is, what loss is, what joy
is, what grieving is, and maybe all of that at the same time, then
you're NOT replicating big media broadcast bullshit, and you won't
be spending a lot of time on Instapundit and Glenn Reynolds' blogs.
Because you won't get those things there.
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What
Part of No Do You Still Not Understand? Date rape in the time of Kobe,
roofies and Girls Gone Wild. It's from LA Weekly, as is an Ellen
Forney info-cartoon How
to Use Your Voice.
... In the morning, she took a shower in his bathroom, reality still
dawning on her, while Van Morrison’s “Moondance” played
on the radio, a song that to this day makes her leave the room. “I
was in incredible pain, and I confronted him and said, ‘What did
you do?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, we were both drunk.’”
She regrets that she did not storm out the door in anger. Instead, she
made him breakfast.
The next day, she saw the nurse practitioner at her college. “She
said, ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’” says
Karen. “I told her I didn’t really know. And she said it
again — ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’ And
I told her what I did know — that I’d been drunk, that someone
had sex with me while I was blacked out, and that he injured me. The
amazing thing is, I considered that my fault.
“Neither of us had words for what really happened,” Karen
says now. “I’d never heard the term ‘date rape.’
I completely assumed that because I’d gotten so drunk it was my
fault. I even thought it was my fault that I was bleeding. ...
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Curse
of Youth: Two new Dallas papers are keeping tabs on the little futhermuckers.
Eric Celeste of the Dallas Observer on newspapers' new free tabloids aimed
at young people:
If you want your newspaper to appeal to young people, you must be willing
to print the word "****."
Oh, well...
Link
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November 19, 2003 7:54 p.m. -- (Last
week's weblog)
Readers react to Mass. gay marriage ruling,
and to photo: The Providence Journal newsroom received more than three
dozen calls today from readers objecting to the
newspaper's lead photo of two men kissing at a rally at Boston's Old
South Meeting House after yesterday's Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
ruling that same-sex couples have a right to civil marriage. (Here's the
photo alone at Yahoo.)
An unknown number of additional calls were also received by other departments,
including Circulation, according to Carol Young, the paper's deputy executive
editor.
The photo was removed from the Journal website before 10 a.m., not for
its content but because projo.com has not purchased rights to reproduce
Reuters photos on its website. An Associated Press photo of the rally
was substituted.
Nevertheless, a few emails also came to projo.com. This, from reader
Frank Orlando, was typical:
Was it really necessary for your front page (nov 19) to include a photo
of two men kissing. While i harbor no prejudice towar(d)s gays, I do
resent having it thrown in my face. I only wish there were another paper
in town enabling me to cancel my subscription. I still might cancel.
At 6 p.m., a reader
poll on the site that asks "What’s your opinion on same-sex
unions?" had collected 1,319 votes (while it's not a scientific survey,
readers may only vote once from the same computer).
The results:
Same-sex couples should not be allowed to marry: 60.0% - 792 votes
Same-sex couples should be allowed to marry: 27.9% - 368 votes
Civil unions are a fair alternative: 12.1% - 159 votes
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Is
RFID Technology Easy to Foil? Wired reports,
 CAMBRIDGE,
Massachusetts -- You may need to read the following sentence twice:
Aluminum foil hats will block the signals emitted by the radio tags
that will replace bar-code labels on consumer goods.
That is, of course, if you place your tin-foil hat between the radio
tag and the device trying to read its signal.
Makers of RFID (or radio frequency identification) tags, along with
the retailers and suppliers who plan to use them, are saying the technology
they spent millions of dollars developing is too weak to threaten consumer
privacy. Metals, plastics and liquids, they say, all block radio signals
before they reach RFID reader devices.
"Any conductive material can shield the radio signals," said
Matt Reynolds, a principal at ThingMagic, which develops RFID systems.
"There are all kinds of ways to render the tags inoperable."
That means Coca-Cola, which eventually wants to put an RFID tag on
every can of soda it sells, will have a hard time getting around the
metals, plastics and liquids that block the radio signals from the tags.
Reynolds was speaking this weekend at MIT's
RFID privacy workshop (blog),
where privacy advocates squared off with companies planning to replace
bar-code labels on their goods with stamp-sized RFID tags. He was one
of several speakers downplaying the threat to consumer privacy posed
by the tags, which assign a unique identifying code to each item.
TechNewsWorld
reports, "To address that security threat, one company -- called
RSA Security -- has developed a device to block certain tagged information
so RFID scanners cannot see it. Such "blocker tags" are designed
to disrupt RFID transmissions and thus protect a person's privacy from
those who might abuse it.
Related:
How to make an "Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie": The resulting
appliance, pictured above, allegedly protects against mind control as
well as signals from inventory tags.
Link
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Copyright in virtual games: Do you own the character
you make? NYU journalism grad student Steve Bryant, of Richmond, Va.,
who attended our blogging panel Saturday at the Online News Association
conference, has a great blog called ReadMe.
ReadMe has sections -- digital culture, tech, news, e-business, net art,
media, and op-ed -- and does some original reporting on topics that interest
Bryant .
Bryant is tracking something interesting way under my radar -- copyright
issues in the world of Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG). For instance,
if a player creates a character or a sword for a virtual world of a copyrighted
game, who owns the character?
Here's his thread, arranged chronologically:
Second
Life Intrudes on First One
Linden Lab, creators of the MMOG Second
Life, now recognizes the ownership of in-world content by the subscribers
who make it.
Linden Lab, creators
of the MMOG Second
Life, announced
yesterday that they now recognize the ownership of in-world content
by the subscribers who make it. According to the press release, the
revised Terms-of-Service agreement "allows subscribers to retain
full intellectual property protection for the digital content they
create, including characters, clothing, scripts, textures, objects
and designs. In addition, Second Life has committed to exploring technologies
to make it easy for creators to license their content under Creative
Commons licenses."
More
from Linden Lab on User Ownership Rights
It's not like we conferred rights to the users, we are allowing users
to retain their rights.
Second
Life's game logs allow the game creators to identify the creation
point and objective ownership of any object in the game. If there
is ever a copyright dispute ("I built that chair, you can't sell
it in the game or anywhere offline"), LL can positively identify
the exact moment of creation and award ownership to the person directly
responsible. That's a hell of a lot more effective (and a lot simpler,
in many ways) than copyright fights in the offline world.
Julian
Dibbel on Second Life Copyrights: After interviewing the Wired contributing
editor, Steve wonders...
...whether Linden Lab's decision will effect the offline market to
a greater extent than it already has been by people eBay-ing items
from virtual worlds. Since eBaying virtual items already does a nifty
job of creating a market offline, what impact will Second Life have?
I guess we'll have to wait until someone in Second Life sells an object
from the virtual world in the real world. DriftNet can imagine a line
of furniture at Ikea based on virtual items. Polygon chic, anyone?
Good stuff.
Related: Doc Searls, blogger,
Cluetrain Manifesto
co-author and editor of The
Linux Review, blogs
some of my report below on the ONA conference, adding, "Reading
it makes me wish I had been there, even though it might have burst the
veins in my neck. "
I wish he had been there. If I can take it, he can take it.
Link
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Feds
to launch $10 million investigation of cell phones, wireless technologies:
From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel,
More than 10 years after the safety of cellular telephones was called
into question by the death of a Florida woman from a brain tumor, the
federal government is preparing to launch a multimillion dollar investigation
into potential cancer-causing or toxic effects associated with the phones.
Dr. Lief Salford, of Lund University in Sweden, who has called the
evolution of wireless phones "the largest biological experiment
in the history of the world," reported in June that cell phone
radiation damaged neurons in the brains of young rats.
The study showed cells in the parts of rats' brains that control sensation,
memory and movement died after being exposed to various cell phones
at different levels of radiation for two hours.
"The situation of the growing brain might deserve special concern,
since biological and maturational processes are particularly vulnerable,"
Salford said.
He cautioned that it is possible that after decades of daily use a
whole generation of users may suffer negative effects as early as middle
age. The paper
was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a U.S. National
Institutes of Health journal.
The summary of Salford's study suggests, "it might be time to get
serious about using your headset when talking on your mobile phone and
encouraging your family members to do the same."
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How
Not to Get Fired Because of Your Blog, from the folks who make
the Blogger blogging program.
Link
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Reflections on Rush: Talk-show host Rush
Limbaugh, when he returned to the air Monday after a stint in rehab for
Oxycontin addiction, brought back with him a rudimentary understanding
of "projection" -- seeing in others traits you dislike in yourself.
Here he applies it to liberals:
"When they accuse us of things, guess what? They're telling us
who they are," Limbaugh said. "It's a beautiful thing, my
friends. It's a new way of listening to liberals. When they start telling
us what rotten SOBs we are, just remember, they're telling us who they
are.
And he's telling us more than he realizes. Opposing mirrors reflect into
infinity, as in
this image from the Mirror
Project.
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November 18, 2003 7:50 p.m. -- (Last
week's weblog)
Mea culpa: No time today for thoughtful reflections on ONA, I'm wearing
my producer hat instead. I also promised those who came to the weblogs
panel there that I would publish my template for a html blog, so they
could experiment without having to buy hosting or a commercial weblog
program. There will be holes in the workflow this week, and I will keep
my promises when they appear.
E-voting:
E-voting: Judge to rule on Diebold cease-and-desist letters: The
case of the Diebold cease-and-desist letters against sites hosting memos
the voting machine manufacturer left on an open server was heard yesterday
in San Jose. Here's a clip from the PCWorld report:
While the DMCA (Digital
Millennium Copyright Act) was written to stop illegal file swapping
on the Internet, EFF attorney Cindy Cohn says Diebold is trying to use
it to end public criticism of the company's electronic voting systems.
"The Pentagon Papers and numerous other cases have set a precedent
for the public's right to see stolen documents" that address issues
of broad public concern, Cohn argued to Fogel.
But Diebold attorney Robert Mittelstaedt countered that the documents
outline so much of the source code, as well as the research and development,
that has gone into Diebold's election systems that competitors could
use the documents to outbid Diebold on government contracts.
Fogel's questions during the hearing hint he is leaning toward allowing
so-called "fair use" dissemination of at least part of the
archives.
"Is there any way to go through ... and decide what's fair use
and what is proprietary?" the judge asked Mittelstaedt. "Can
we distinguish the material that addresses the public question about
the systems' reliability?"
Mittelstaedt acknowledged that Diebold informally has tried to analyze
the material in that way, but decided that even a partial release would
threaten Diebold's competitive advantage. ...
David Weekly of the nonprofit ISP known as
Online Policy Group explains its side of the story in an
Instant Messenger chat with BoingBoing's
Xeni Jardin.
The judge is expected to make a ruling sometime next week. More
from AP.
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News without words: News-Images.com
hopes to catch your eye. The only text is the credit/source. No captions,
names, nothing. Perfect trivia fodder, probably hard, since some of these
folks are in the first few seconds of their fame. And some of what's not
folks is baffling.
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Listening to: Radio
VW. Billy Bragg and Wilco is doing the old Woody Guthrie tune
California
Stars. Kevn Kinney, Dirty Angels... Mark Eitzel, Stunned
and Frozen... Here's the channels
page. (One short commercial included.)
via Liz
Donovan
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Near-Extinct
'Whistling Language' Makes Comeback: From AP,
SAN SEBASTIAN, Canary Islands (AP) -- Juan Cabello takes pride in not
using a cell phone or the Internet to communicate. Instead, he puckers
up and whistles.
Cabello is a "silbador," until recently a dying breed on
tiny, mountainous La Gomera, one of Spain's Canary Islands off West
Africa. Like his father and grandfather before him, Cabello, 50, knows
"Silbo Gomero," a language that's whistled, not spoken, and
can be heard more than two miles away.
This chirpy brand of chatter is thought to have come over with early
African settlers 2,500 years ago. Now, educators are working hard to
save it from extinction by making schoolchildren study it up to age
14.
Silbo - the word comes from Spanish verb silbar, meaning to whistle
- features four "vowels" and four "consonants" that
can be strung together to form more than 4,000 words. It sounds just
like bird conversation and Cabello says it has plenty of uses. ...
You can hear
it here.
Is there a birds' dictionary? This sounds like a closely related language.
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Newspaper
Headlines That Are Double Entendres: The editor next to me wonders
why I'm chuckling. "British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands";
Iraqi Head Seeks Arms; Stolen Painting Found by Tree... And there are
more.
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Turkey
& Gravy soda: But only in Washington and Michigan. The blurb:
“We are really excited about the limited test launch of our new
flavored Turkey & Gravy beverage. This seasonal flavor allows us
to enter a new market segment, the meal replacement market. The new
flavor will also appeal to new consumers, those who prefers a savory
type flavor to the traditional soda flavors,” says Peter van Stolk,
President & C.E.O. “With consumers becoming more and more
health conscious, Jones Soda's Turkey & Gravy flavored beverage
is a zero calorie and zero carbohydrate beverage that can be served
warm or cold with a full flavor that will meet and will exceed our customer's
expectation.”
Isn't this usually called soup?
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November 17, 2003 9:15 p.m. -- (Last
week's weblog)
Photos
from ONA
Unless noted, all photos are by Sheila Lennon, projo.com
Congratulations to all the Online
Journalism Awards
winners and finalists.
|
| ESPN.com
editor-in-chief Neal Scarbrough accepts the award from Michael Parks,
director of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. |
Neal
Scarbrough, editor-in-chief of ESPN.com
was the happiest man in the Omni Orrington Saturday night. It was exciting
that the editor of the site judged best in the land is a cool black man.
Click to enlarge thumbnails. More photos are coming -- some scenes were
a bit dark, and need their levels adjusted.
(Updated Tuesday, 2:05 p.m.: Corrected a misspelling of Paul Block's name)
Jon
Dube
Conference chair
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Christine
Harvey, U. of Maryland,
Rich Gordon, Medill |
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Ron
Cariker, NewsOK.com
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John Granatino,
Belo Interactive; Sheila
Lennon, Andrea Panciera, projo.com;
Boyd Levet, Belo Interactive
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Jonathan
Hart, Dow Lohnes & Albertson |
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Mike
Briseno, the union tech who saved our net connection |
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Larger
photos (1600 pixels wide) exist. If you're in one of these and would like
a big one, just email
me. Many more ONA photos are linked from the upper right of the conference
page.
Comments
on ONA: There were those accused of being dinosaurs, and those accused
of having drunk the bloggers' Kool-Aid, but no two of us might agree who
was in which group. Video was touted, yet there were pleas for fewer bells
and whistles, less Flash and video for those with little time and slower
dial-up connections. Paid vs. free, edited vs. readers as editors. I'm still
sorting it, and tomorrow there'll be a real blog and an attempt at a thoughtful
wrapup. For
now, see ONA,
Jeff Jarvis,
Mary Hodder.
I posted
this on the participants
blog during the conference. It's still all true:
My brain's "hard drive" is overflowing
Intense, tense, at times. Jack Fuller's "nice print guy who doesn't
get it" keynote unified us, but there's also tension between those
doing traditional newsgathering they dump to the web (rather than to
press) and bloggers. (And there's some negativity about blogging, ranging
from hostility to a patronizing, "We'll see if blogs are still
big next year.")
Last night, brain burn was so intense I skipped the trip to the Trib
newsroom and instead went around the corner a coupla blocks to Bill's
Blues Bar. Dancing to Charlie Love and the Silky Smooth Blues Band was
the only way I was gonna recharge for today. (Others said they went
straight to bed.)
On our blogging panel, Denise Polverine of Cleveland Online said that
until you blog yourself, you can't know how empowering it is. Denise,
Tom Regan, Jeff Jarvis and I had very few differences among us -- we
were a team from the future, reporting on its shape.
I just asked Esther Dyson publicly, as an unaffiliated futurist, how
she thinks news and information will enter our lives after the quantum
leap, the watershed. She said she thinks Wall Street is poisonous, and
that (wealthy) citizens will have to step up to insure news can still
be gathered. (The exact quote: "I think the Wall Street culture
is poisonous ... everything is codified, risk is measured. Journalists
have courage but the people who fund them often don't.")
"News philanthropy?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, "if necessary."
You could feel the ripple go through the room.
Andrew Sullivan seemed nicer than on his blog -- he wasn't outraged
at anything. He was a good sport to face this crowd, which he said he
found intimidating. And he was a great lead-in to our panel of news
bloggers since he got everybody up to speed on transparency: We didn't
have to go there.
If the net had stayed up, this would have been smoother, but the retreat
to the old-fashioned way -- speaking our truth rather than showing it
-- was perfectly in keeping with the clash of old and new here.
There's one thing I forgot to say anywhere, so I'll say it here: The
most important story facing us now is the integrity of electronic voting.
We all know how easily one file can be uploaded to replace another.
With the stakes so high, the campaigns and our votes could be a charade
that plays out with no relation to the election results reported. Don't
let that happen.
-- Sheila Lennon, Subterranean Homepage News, projo.com
More tomorrow...
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com |
