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By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
July 1, 2002 • Last
week's weblog
Vacation weblog: I'm on vacation after today until July 15, and
it's an opportunity for an experiment. I'll be blogging on my fledgling
personal site at lennon2.com.
We're not going anywhere (people come to Rhode island to vacation!),
so I expect to be writing at odd hours, updating several times a day without
having to file to an editor and wait for the blog to go up. The "voice"
will probably change somewhat and the topics I cover will include some
of my obscure personal interests. See
you at my house...
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JD Lasica's on a roll: Slashdot
broke some news of its own when it pointed to JD Lasica's long
piece on registration at online news sites at Online
Journalism Review. The immensely popular tech blog considers NY Times'
easy registration "grandfathered in," but otherwise will not
link to stories on sites that require registration.
Others have pointed out that the Times' relaxed attitude toward registration
includes tolerating the NYT
Random Login Generator and blogs
that link to Times stories and supply a password.
Lasica also takes on a newsroom culture that says, "Everyone is
subject to editing," and calls for discussion:"Should
newspaper bloggers be subjected to the editing filter?"
"I'll kick off the discussion by suggesting that they should not.
Perhaps the chief appeal and attraction of weblogs are their free-form,
unfiltered nature. You get to hear people in their natural dialect,
writing from their gut (complete with feelings, warts and all -- including
typos), saying things that wouldn't normally make it through the newsroom
editing machine. It would show journalists as human beings with opinions,
emotions, and personal lives.
"I suspect the effort will not be worth it if the city editor
or features editor has to sign off on every journalist's weblog. Talk
about self-censorship. If that becomes the standard, newspapers shouldn't
bother, because the more interesting blogs will be done by journalists
on their personal sites in their off hours."
And that's part of what I'm putting to the test in the next couple of
weeks!
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Nearly last words: Billboard Magazine editor Timothy
White died suddenly June 27, one hour after filing his last column,
"Like
A 'Rolling Stone': How It Feels." The Rolling Stone alum was
responding to the upcoming makeover of that onetime towering giant of
a read:
"Whatever the future may hold for Rolling Stone, my years there
(1978-82) as an editor were never dull or boring; the staff was exuberant
and impassioned to a fault, all of us encouraging and arguing with each
other—Wenner included, who was, after all, a contemporary and just
as opinionated and mercurial. Twice a month we made a magazine based
on what we jointly felt was absorbing and worthwhile, untrammeled by
focus groups, the undue influence of publicists, or the tug of market
forces. And we never sought to imitate anything else. It was a vessel
of journalistic voices, constantly in the messy process of becoming
itself."
Rest in peace, Mr. White, and thanks for being part of my youth.
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com
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