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Meet Joe Blog
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Friendster, Blogging - get on the shelf next to Geocities (everyone will have a webpage by 1998!).
Most Blogs are uber-forgettable ego stroking crap, but the truth in this statement - "some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician" - can been seen in tons of places. A prime example of the influence a joe-nobody can weild is Harry Knowles. Check him out Here. Maybe not technically a blog, but the concept is the same, and this guy has ended up on the list of the 100 most influential people in Hollywood.
I'm not a blogger, and I don't read any blogs. I don't understand how the blog thing works.
Do people just sit around and read other people's blogs? How do they know which ones to read? If everyone is blogging then it seems like there would be so much useless crap out there that you wouldn't know what to look at. Who would waste time sifting through it all? Doesn't seem very useful to me. Good thoughts would go unnoticed and the sewer would spew forth. There's no focal point.
What am I missing?
The ratio of people to cake is too big
As far as the general public is concerned, the vast majority of bloggers don't matter.
After all, who is Joe Public going to trust the most, a fully professional New York Times employed scribe, or "Zergrush_7" ranting on his Livejournal.
no, it's that the journalists are on the same level as these college hacks
It's good that Blogs will get some kind of ranking.
Categories of blogs would be nice, too, so that we're not overwhelmed by Pop Culture, Sports, Movies, One Micron Deep Political Commentary, Etc. We might even divide these categories into groups, something like comp.os.linux.x and so on:)
Popularity might be a good measure of Blog site after it gets discovered and gets a bunch of hits and links to it.
The problem is that brute force popularity metrics will miss new, emerging Blogs that might have high quality writing, insightful analysis, but only a slowly-growing audience.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I know that there are many types of blogging. There's the 'personal' type, where people write about their daily happenings for friends and such to read. My site is one of those. Then there's those (and many, I may add) that focus on a particular area or subject, eg. technical or scientific news (like Slashdot) or certain lawsuits (Groklaw). There has been a trend of the mainstream media citing blogs as sources and reporting on that, and maybe they should search around and be able to present two opposing views, or what not. I read blogs (type two) to learn about things; it's always nice to know both sides of an issue. Many type one blogs center around communities such as Xanga or Blogger. I suppose their goal is to promote the sense of being a community, while also conveniently creating the feeling of exclusiveness by limiting it to members only, even though the service is free... So, can blogging be seen as merely exercising free speech? If "one user in his underwear" can change/skew the media, well, maybe they should do more research first. Too bad the media isn't entirely objective, though. But then again, it's impossible to present everything pertaining to an issue.
You are correct. If Time is reporting on it, you can be sure it is a dying fad. Time reports on something at the very top or very bottom.
A good way to invest is to look at the cover of Time magazine, and do the opposite. Time touting record low interest rates? Short bonds. Time lamenting a bear market? Buy! Buy! Buy!
Are you seriously suggesting that bloggers have more journalistic "credibility"? Many (not all) blogs I've read tend to be unabashedly biased rants and take extreme positions- or do nothing more than mindlessly link to other stories.
While a few news outlets have credibility problems, they're far from worthless, and there are tens of thousands of excellent reporters who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of reporting, and actually have degrees in journalism. It is almost sickening to hear you equate them with bloggers, who have so little dedication, 95% of them stop blogging after a month or so.
Just because you watch FOX news and read USA Today doesn't mean journalism is dead, and it certainly doesn't mean that we should be turning to bloggers.
Please help metamoderate.
There are a few legitimate journalists around. But when most major media outlets are owned by the very companies they are reporting on, legitimate objectivity is impossible.
Step one to taking back America: No more than one media outlet owned at a time, and "content producers" (ie, cartels) cannot own news outlets.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Most of what's out there is regurgitated AP and Reuters news. It's good stuff, mostly. But it's also very incomplete, and too easily controlled. You can pay for press releases to be put out on the wire, and aren't even directly flagged as such by the time they're posted by many newspapers and news sites.
As someone who writes for 7+ blogs, I certainly don't want to sound as if I'm putting down the trend of self-publishing. But it's hard for people who make little or nothing from blogging to have the time or resources to deliver good reliable news and analysis over a period of time. True, adsense/google ads provide some sort of revenue for A-list bloggers, but that's more the exception rather than the rule. Full time writers may have corporate responsibilities/biases, but at least they have more time to do what they love doing.
One heartening trend is that big media is now adding blogs to their websites (and are presumably paying these writers to blog). It would be nice if employers could recognize the value of blogging so that blogging wouldn't have to be done so surreptitiously.
The biggest worry I have is that the Time's and New York Times will start casting off full time journalists and switch to the slashdot/ALD format that basically poaches off the content from other publications.
To repeat: bloggers do good important work. But at some point writers need resources and infrastructure and collaborators (and a paycheck) to do a good job consistently.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Although its true that blogs can be very biased, so can mainstream TV news services. Fortunately, we have the same option with a blog as we have with TV, whereas you can choose NOT to turn on a certain news channel, or don't view a certain blog.
Too bad you're completely unqualified to make a statement like that.
What do you know of the field of journalism? What do you know about writing, freelancing, working for a news company? What do you know of integrity?
The very fact that Jayson Blair (and others like him) are found, fired, and publicly condemned for unethical journalism is proof that the industry does not tolerate such practices.
But you, the random nobody on someone else's blog site, happen to know the dark and dirty secrets of journalism. You don't need the facts -- you have the truth! All journalists suck because they're biased! Just like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore and Gordon Liddy and Ken Brown and Darl McBride and Al Franken know the truth in spite of the facts. Journalists, despite your bleak and uneducated assessment, are people obsessed with the facts regardless of what the drooling, feebly tutored folk-minds believe based on their faiths and fantasies.
Is your life so boring that you need to invent conspiracy theories to make it more interesting? Why don't you try using your imagination for more active purposes?
-Jem
It seems to me that this is an example of what people are talking about when they start to wax poetic about the power of "what the Internet could be".
We live in a world where the land, money, and power are becoming more and more concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The evening news only reports on stories and opinions that have pre-approved by corporate-mentality politically-correct editors, who only hire corporate mentality politically-correct writers and reporters in the first place.
Part of the reason behind the Internet's popularity and open-source fanaticism is the fact that it puts small amounts of power back in the hands of individuals. People can distribute thoughts, information, and opinions to millions of people, unstoppably, without the possibility of censorship, with virtually no cost.
The general absence of publishers and editors means an absence of filters. It may allow amateurish writing to make it to your browser, but it also allows you to read the views that the New York Times won't print merely because it's against the owners' political views or economic interest.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to put on my tin-foil hat.
Well, I don't think blogging is going to replace Time magazine, CBS nightly news or the New York Times next week, but it DOES impact these institutions. Specifically, it raises the bar substantially on what readers will PAY for in their reading habits.
I used to get a daily paper, subscribe to several news magazines and watch the nightly news, well, nightly.
These days almost all the news that's fit to print has been all over the internet before you can get it in printed form. I know this by talking to non-internet news junkies. They'll start by saying "Did you hear about Bush falling off his bike..." and I'll interrupt to tell them more than they already know on the subject. Print media won't die next week, but the Internet has done much more to hurt print media than television ever did. There really is very little reason for printed publications these days other than those people who still don't use the Internet regularly, and I suspect the ratios will eventually put many of the print -only publication out of business unless they adapt to the Internet.
Getting the story first will still be important for news publications, including TV based ones. But the story they will drive to get first will be the one that breaks on the Net, while they will strive to offer more in-depth coverage than their competitors for the print edition (while it exists).
More importantly, blogging "commoditizes" opinion. Who needs Andy Rooney when there are thousands of bloggers our there that are just as funny, and in many cases more insightful too? News anchor people might eventually learn that we are not interested in the "spin" they put on stories. When you can read entire transcripts of hearing, do string searches, or even view almost all of the world in action Dan Rather and the like can't afford to spin so much or they lose their credibility (well they already have for me at least). C-SPAN started this trend, and watching our government in action taught me how bad the reporting really was. Getting news on the Net has multipled that affect many times over and I think that as a new Net savvy generation takes over there will be fewer and fewer "media giants" who can manipulate the news for their own agenda.
Getting there will be good. The ride will be bumpy though.
haha - yeah because the left wing media never does that. Oh wait, there is no left wing media, they are the mainsteam because they're entirely truthful and righteous. They would never do something like plug a left wing attack book disguised as a hard hitting interview *cough* 60 Minutes *cough*
Here is a news flash - the media, be they liberal or conservative, are all corporatist whores. That's why Fox TV shows can be completely sex and scandal driven, while their news side can be so conservative. They do whatever sells.
Just like that fatass Limbaugh - he's an infotainer. He'll probably be on decrying gay marriage a day after he announced his own third divorce. And Michael Moore and the liberals are no different - Mike is out to make a buck. Period. That fatass rides around in SUVs and flies on nice private jets all they time. You are dumb as hell if you take any of those infotainers on either side seriously - they say what their audience wants to hear.
Also blame lazy readers/listeners/viewers who don't actually read enough to distinguish between rubbish and truth. e.g. When Richard Clarke, the gut at the hub of the CSG wheel, says the Whitehouse flubbed the war on terror, are you going to believe him or some hack who says Clarke lacks any credibility because he as an axe to grind?
The right wing media has been taking advantadge of lazy journalists for years. For those of you who don't know, the "right wing media" -- Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, 700 Club, Hanity & Colms, Ann Coulter etc -- What they do is come up with terribly biased or completely false stories supporting the conservative agenda (status quo) and of course everybody dismisses the stories because the source is biased media! But lazy copy writers for legit news orgs pick up the stories, don't research them, and run with them! Then they *BECOME* "true".
Also refered to as Factoids by someone in the past, "Factoid: Something repeated often enough it becomes accepted as true."
A trained mind, skilled in critical thinking is harder for propaganda to overcome. This is why it's important to read as much about history as you can, starting with an open mind and questioning the veracity of everything you read. (This included!)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My blog exists for one simple reason: websites don't hyperlink.
I started it two years ago because rense.com had interesting stories, about half of which are verifiable (i.e. about 80% of the non-UFO stories). The problem is it took quite a bit of time for me to research Rense's stories to figure out which ones were true. And to not let that go to waste, I started dumping my results into a blog -- all with hyperlinks to either mainstream news sites or to "original" web documents from government, scholastic, or non-profit organization websites.
In the meantime, providing such links became de rigueur for the myriad of blogs that have popped up over the past two years -- in order to provide credibility. The result is that Rense.com now provides hyperlinks a lot more frequently now due to the new competition.
Rense.com has changed its ways, but newspaper sites still have not yet clued into the mystery of Tim Berners-Lee. Newspaper websites currently just duplicate the newsprint onto the computer screen. They refer to pending legislation without linking to the legislation. They refer to charters, press releases, products, budgets, etc. without linking to them. Or, sure, some have some newspapaper site have software that automatically goes through and creates links for popular keywords such as company names and people's names, but that's about it. Blogs, such as mine, provide deep links directly to the crucial material at hand, so that readers can assess the original material for themselves.
Sites like wired.com and salon.com are a bit more with it. Sites run by "Old Print" are going to have to adapt or die.
When we start seeing mainstream popular news sites with deep links to relevant material -- i.e. when newspapers embrace the web -- then maybe I can retire my website.
Mod anything funny up as Underrated until the /. devs repair the mod system, or dont mod up funny at all. See Journal.
/. journal of yours, what is that? Some sort of web log?
This
do not read this line twice.
The right wing media has been taking advantadge of lazy journalists for years.
Oh yes, and the left-wing media never does any of that! What they say is all 100% God-given truth with no bias, hidden agendas, or outright lies at all!
The beginning of political maturity is realizing that some people you disagree with lie. The middle is realizing that some people you agree with lie too. I'll let you know what the end is when I get there.
Two words: "Jason Blair". (And mind you, that's just one convenient high-profile example, not the sum total of my point.) "Your" "side" has lazy people who like comfortable lies, too, and you're a chump or a useful idiot if you think otherwise. (And if you insist on measuring the positions based on those people, you won't mind that I return the favor, right?)
"The very fact that Jayson Blair (and others like him) are found, fired, and publicly condemned for unethical journalism is proof that the industry does not tolerate such practices."
The fact that it took so long to find him out shows that the industry's editors believe anything and aren't doing their jobs.
However, we're not talking about people falsifying reports. The inability to use logic and accurately report multiple sides of the story are characteristic of modern journalism (if you've researched multiple sides of the story, you'll almost always find that one of them is horribly misrepresented every time - which side it is varies by the journalist).
Engineering and the Ultimate
What, you think bloggers are impartial conveyors of information? If anything, blogs are 1% news items and 99% political commentary. Even Slashdot, as a collective blog, has its own political bent, evident from the slant delivered by the article poster and the editor comments, to the posts that follow, to moderation and even M2 of those comments.
Did I say anything about bloggers being rocks of impartiality? I just found it rather amusing the poster was bashing bloggers for being unprofessional and potentially biased, given the state of the news media today.
The power of the blog comes from the acknowledgement that blogs are openly biased, unedited sources. This invites more interaction and thought than newspapers which try to pose as authoritative sources.
When you look at the way people behave in life, they really don't imbibe a piece of news until they start discussing it. The human infallabiliy of blogs invites such interaction, while the supposed objectivity of journalists repels open interaction.
Of course, we still need quality authoritative sources that produce just facts. Blogs need to co-evolve with unbiased, dry sources of information such as county records, meeting minutes or other dry sources of information.
The very fact that Jayson Blair (and others like him) are found, fired, and publicly condemned for unethical journalism is proof that the industry does not tolerate such practices.
Since I was 8 years old, it's been obvious to me that an "iceberg principle" is at work in all corners of life. What percentage of rapes go unreported? How many reported felonies result in a conviction? If J Blair was caught, how much of this happens that we don't know about?
The scary thing is, the tip of the iceberg is, oh... let's say 10%. And with as many political scandals as there are in any given month, think of how many slipped through! (Assuming that political scandals also obey such a principle).
What, you think bloggers are impartial conveyors of information? If anything, blogs are 1% news items and 99% political commentary.
You just described the three major twenty four hour "news" outlets: CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. The only way to get information from them a lot of the time anymore seems to be to put the TV on mute and watch the blurbs scrolling on the bottom of the screen.
The point that the original poster was trying to make was that the media are just a bunch of hyenas looking to further their own careers. If that means slanting stories to the popular opinion - so be it. If that means slanting the stories to incite the TV equivalent of a flamewar - so be it. You touched on Slashdot. Well, /. has ads to sell, so if slanting the stories and having the editors make snide comments keeps people coming back that's what they'll do.
If all of the sources - blogs, journalists, talking heads, etc. are all on the same crappy level, what difference does it make which one you pick? They may all be full of shit, but at least the bloggers are interesting.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
You're totally unqualified to assess a profession in which you have zero experience.
As long as we're making general statements here, I'd say that his experience as a subject of journalism counts for more than yours does as a reporter.
What he said is absolutely true in my experience. Whenever I've been personally involved with the subject of a news or magazine story -- whether it's an event, a person of note, or a technical topic reported in the lay press -- the "facts" as related by the journalist rarely bear a resemblance to my own experience. (Well, OK, the Antlers American captioned one of my science-fair award photos correctly back in the eighth grade, but that's about it.)
The truth is that reality is boring most of the time, and boring doesn't sell soap. (The other, complementary side of that particular truth is that most journalists don't want to be Edward R. Murrow when they grow up... they want to be Tom Clancy.)
I am a journalist, and there IS no story if the facts are wrong. Anyone who publishes a story they know to be false or even have doubts about is behaving unethically and this sort of practice is not the rule but the exception in the industry.
Sorry, but my experience as both a consumer of, and participant in, journalism is completely contrary to that.
Perhaps you haven't been around long enough to make that call on behalf of your entire industry. I'm afraid that I have been.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.