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Meet Joe Blog

Posted by michael on from the ego-stroking dept.

theodp writes "According to the new issue of Time, we may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. Amateur scribblers posting on the Web are becoming the tails that wag the media, says Time, citing an underperforming undergraduate at a small Christian college in Michigan as an example." Hey, if Circuits can discover USB, I don't see why Time can't discover weblogs.

2 of 343 comments (clear)

  1. Time magazine and blogs by dpille · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm not sure how to express why I think it's so odd that Time featured that piece, so let me spit out the background of what's got me thinking about it:

    Sometime in early 2003 a journalist goes to to northern Iraq ("Iraqi Kurdistan") working for Time. He doesn't seem to get anything published. He asks for and apparently receives permission from his editors to leave things on his blog, which he then sets up and starts contributing to. Somebody in the mainstream press discovers it (Boston Globe?), thinks it's interesting and reports on it, and the guys at Time say 'holy shit, quit posting'.

    This seems a very different situation than Time would have us believe from the Andrew Sullivan quote in the piece:"Because we're not trying to sell magazines or papers, we can afford to assail our readers," says Andrew Sullivan, a contributor to TIME and the editor of andrewsullivan.com. "I don't have the pressure of an advertising executive telling me to lay off. It's incredibly liberating." Unless, I guess, your boss tells you to lay off entirely.

    I also wonder why they might publish such a 'little guys push big media' article without examining _at all_ what media giants do to control that area, particularly in light of the above.

  2. you can always get... by zogger · · Score: 5, Informative

    Fake "news" videos produced by the government using actors instead. Much more credible then "real" people actually reporting stuff. Nope, the US government doesn't "embed" propoganda, it's all those other furrin countries that have funny sounding names who are slap fulla "tarists" that do that.