Slashdot Mirror
When Blog Networks Make News, Silence Abounds
1sockchuck writes "It's been a bad week for transparency and disclosure in the blogosphere, demonstrating that once blogging starts making money, the rules change. Nick Douglas was dismissed from ValleyWag, Jason Calacanis bolts from AOL, and co-founder Duncan Riley abruptly departs from b5media. Where do we get the real story? From The New York Times, or not at all. If we've come to expect honesty and straight talk from blogging icons, it's because so many blogospheric leaders have told us we should. And now suddenly we're getting the snarky insider accounts of blogospheric dirt from The New York Times?"
You're laughably naive if you thought it would be any other way. The media (including blogs) is only answerable to other media. They keep each other honest. This is why you see papers like the Times printing lots of stories about themselves when they catch a reporter plagarizing; because when you out yourself, you get to keep a little face. People give you a little credit, even though you screwed 'em, when you own up to it and try to make amends.
But mostly, and by mostly I mean 99% of the reason, is because you do not ever ever want to give that kind of ammo to your competition. You will be found out and when you are, they will make you pay...Remember the Bush papers?
This is a prime example. The Times breaks it, but everyone and their dog will jump on the bandwagon about how the oh-so-transparent Blogs are perfectly willing to bury information when it comes to themselves. Can you really trust them? Is it just a passing fad? News at 11:00.
This is a good lesson for them. It's not easy to gain credibility, but it's easy as pie to lose it, and when people catch you in a single omission, they'll wonder how many omissions they failed to catch, and no amount of assurance will convince them that the answer is zero.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The only thing I trust is anonymous cowards. Transparency indeed. (insert 19th Century Victorian *hmph*).
.. are you saying that MySpace and Livejournal aren't reliable sources of information?
If we've come to expect honesty and straight talk from blogging icons, it's because so many blogospheric leaders have told us we should.
Huh? Wha? I have no idea what or who you're talking about here. Are you telling me that your criteria for whether or not a person is honest is if they tell you they are? If so, please use the pronoun "I". Where on earth did you get "we" from?
Alaska Jack
...for the main reason that I've never seen a blog worth anything that requires you register with some dumb pointless "Elmer Fudd at 90210" registration just to be able to read it like the NYT does.
Where were you when the voynix came?
This just serves to illustrate that we should never blindly trust what people tell us, and that critical thinking skills can't be dispensed with just because we think some author somewhere is above reproach.
But don't just take my word for it.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
The rules didn't change because blogs started making money. Rather, now bloggers have something to lose, and they don't want to lose it. And worse than losing something would be throwing it away by pointing out your own problems to the world. People's first instinct is hide, not voice, their own problems. Unlike traditional news sources, blogs haven't had the longevity to know that transparency is the best policy.
And Novak and Judy (chalabi war hype) were not on the take as well as
lots of other journalists paid by the government and corporations.
As well as corporate sponsors of research: drug co. tobacco co, chemical co, oil co....
The NYT also likes to cite 'blogghorea" as well .
There's some truth to this, because bloggers have a "can't get no respect" problem that often gives them an attitude that opposes 'legitimate' journalists. 'Legitimate' journalists, in turn, decry bloggers.
At some point, bloggers are useful and convey good information, if not aligned with both legal and journalistic principles. Now journalists are becoming bloggers, and the distinctions are becoming exceedingly blurred.
What we wanted is truth, or opinion, but clear distinctions between the two, and referential rather than specious information. The quality of both journalists and bloggers is now emerging, and there's a price tag for that quality-- and we're willing to pay for it, because we need the truth, we need opinion, and we need referential integrity.
It's all natural.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The vast, overwhelming majority of blogs, at least 99.999% of them, belong to Emo kids whining about adolescent nothings.
Even the very best of them (all two-and-a-half or so) are worth nothing more than a cursory glance, if that.
And how many are even seen by anybody besides the blog's own "writer"? Not even their mothers care.
The whole blog "culture" is insanely overhyped by blog wannabe-writers and journalists desperate for some credibility.
Blogs are going down the toilet, you say? Oops, too late. It was obver before it begun. Thankfully.
Anyone else nearly vomit seeing the word "blog" that many times?
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
What a total misunderstanding of both blogs and mass media. The only reason any media outlets, however interactive, publish stories about each other is competition among them, and defense from such competition. Blogs publish stories only because they're interesting to the blogger. Bloggers aren't so much in competition with each other yet. And blogs' personalities aren't the main interest yet, compared to newspaper writers. So stories about those bloggers changing publishers is just "insider baseball", not even interesting enough for practically any blogger to cover.
Although I note that we're discussing those stories in Slashdot, a (ginormous) blog.
The story made it to this blog once it became interesting enough to the blogger, the submitter, and the publisher, Slashdot's "author", that it got written (in 3 minutes) and published (typically <30s). It got covered by the NYT, because the NYT is threatened in its power as its circulation further declines, and it transforms into a mainly online publication. It's in competition with AOL, and struggles to exert power over the influence of those name brand bloggers.
The age where an editorial board of a mass (one-way) publication like the NYT controls the definition of "what's news" is drawing to a close. If you think an event is news, blog it, or get a popular blogger to blog it. If that's not a good enough system for you, produce or contribute to a project that produces another layer, like a weighting system for an RSS aggregator that can amplify tiny blog stories (and cache/loadbalance them) that do cover these events, when they're interesting to you and people like you.
The new age of P2P journalism is here. Since it was built with the tools of the old centralized journalism, it will resemble the old regime at first. But its agendas, the way its agendas are served, "what's news", and how it becomes "news", not just "new", are a quantum leap from the old regime. In what directions has yet to be seen. It's still up to us.
--
make install -not war
technological advancements don't change fundamental human behavior, whether good (for those who believe the internet would be a utopia) or bad (for those who believe playing video games makes people murder)
news at 11
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
VallyWag from Gawker was, according to this site http://www.spot-on.com/nolan/ was a copy to begin with. Is this correct? I have no idea. It just shows that the hysterical tone of the original post was based on little or no information. Was it a troll for karma (as I post as A Coward)?
I remember a racing video game from my youth that was on an Amiga/Atari/Commodore or similar. It was an overhead-view racing game that contained the entire track in one screen. Vehicles included a dragster (with functioning parachute), a tank (with working artillery), a Sinclair c5, a superbike and others. Anyone know what game this was and on what platform? Gotta be late eighties or early nineties.
Excuse me if I don't get it, but this story seems to be about the fact that some bloggers I never heard of got fired and some other blogger I never heard of thinks that some unnamed additional bloggers should have blogged about it before the NYT reported on it, and we know this because....
...he said so in his blog.
Ok, maybe I'm different from most blog readers, but I:
Other than the fact that this item seems to fit the "blog related flamebait" template, I frankly don't see the point of it. Does anyone really expect that blogs will give them complete and accurate behind the scenes information about the blogging carriers of every blogger on the planet? Does anyone seriously want them to? (Other than this guy who obviously cared enough blog about it I mean.)
--MarkusQ
At least when I read Instapundit or Daily Kos, they openly acknowledge their biases. The New York Times still pretends they're objective, when anyone to the right of Nancy Pelosi can tell they're not. Maybe that's why their stock prices continues to decline, even outpassing the declines in other newspaper stocks.
I now await the usual Slashdot downmodding of non-liberal political posts.
Crow T. Trollbot
"NYT is primarly print, while blogs are strictly web based. Sort of comparing apples to oranges (I get my news from blogs and print)."
I was referring to the NYT web site, not to the newspaper.
Where were you when the voynix came?
There is this charming piece there, written a long, long time ago, concerning a "researcher" that spent all of his time reading and re-interpreting the writings of other "researchers". There was a statement to the effect that going and looking at original sources was too much trouble and way too difficult. Besides, all the real work had already beend one once, why simply repeat that?
Well folks, we are pretty much there. Journalists now spend probably equal amounts of time covering each other, gossipping and relying in innuendo and hearsay rather than facts. Little wonder we have the sort of news media we have today with this.
And the "internet journalists" are probably the worst. We have "aggregator sites" on the web which simply dish out stories rehashed from other web sites. We have bloggers writing stuff about aggregated news sites and other bloggers.
Read the bit about the "Old Empire" in Foundation and see if you think it is happening here now.
This isn't news. Nobody has heard of these guys. Nobody cares. Least of all the readership of major outlets. ZOMG the AP and Rueters didn't dispatch a horde of reporters because some nobody on the internet has been outed as - suprise! - a faker. You are mistaking your interest in this story for a general interest on the part of the entire freakin' country. They are not the same. The only reason the NYT writes about bloggers nobody cares about is to discredit blogging in general, which they rightly percieve as a group with no accountability that is in direct competition with themselves. If these guys had done something amazing the NYT could not possibly care less.
I want to punch whoever came up with that term, it makes me cringe every time I see it.
Some, but not all of it. There are also the people who care deeply about a subject, and for whom the facts matter much more than the personalities. A year or so ago I decided to try my hand at cheese making. A little bit of google led me to a cheese makers blog, in which I found several years of detailed first hand accounts of his efforts at amature cheese making, along with interesting comments, questions, and (in a few cases) differing opinions from his readers.
This is where bogs really shine. Care about SCO v. IBM? Or the Plame outing and coverup? Interested in making your own Victorian christmas ornaments? Or a trebuchet? There's a blog out there for you. Ditto if you're dealing with some strange (to you) illness, trying to learn a new language, or planning a vacation off the beaten path.
Yes, there are a lot of bloggers whose sole topic seems to be "Look at me ma, I'm a blogger!" but they are easy to ignore. Don't cast out the interesting ones along with the loudmouths who have nothing to say.
--MarkusQ
I seriously question whether these groups do in fact keep each other honest. If you have multiple groups lying, and each accusing the others of lying, that doesn't help anyone find the truth, because the accusations may be lies as well.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Blogging icons?
Blogospheric leaders?
Blogosphere?
wtf?
I never got it. I still don't.
It's peoples words on people's websites.
There's a word for it now? It has leaders and icons?
and these icons say something, and we're suddenly supposed to take their word for it, and treat it as something greater than text on a webpage? All while continually mocking the live journal/myspace/whatever crowd, which essentially amounts to the same thing, minus the fucking pretentious "iconic blogosphere leader" bullshit.
This is far, far beyond both naivety and ridiculousless. It needs to stop.
You're speaking as though The NY Times is some sort of moral beacon. If we ignore for the moment the number of mainstream journalists who were found to have... ummm... improvised the facts, the NYT is still one of the most jaundiced media outlets. The would be just slightly more believable if they changed the upper left front to read "All the news that fits, we print".
Nothing for you to see^H^H^H, er, um, ah, hear here.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The only thing missing really are archives that last. The Waybackmachine just doesn't hack it.
Guess what, neither are the archives that are in Foundation...
Say "blog" again. SAY "BLOG" AGAIN. I dare you, I double-dare you, motherfucker. Say "blog" one more goddamn time!
Who are all these people, and why do I care that they were fired or moved on?
CIA Industries - Running the world for fun and profit
...and that is that the only people who ever thought blog news was legitimate, worthwhile, or revolutionary in the first place -- are people who have blogs.
that New York Times reporters try their best to report factually and objectively despite their personal biases, while bloggers like Instapundit and DailyKos write to defend and trumpet their personal biases.
And if we're going to play "own your bias," the first place you might want to look is in a mirror:
The "anything to hurt Bush" reporting that has increasingly come to characterize the paper in the last four years...I now await the usual Slashdot downmodding of non-liberal political posts.
I'm not exactly seeing a lot of independently verifiable facts in your post.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If this was another sotry made up in the back room? Times done it before.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
The big "blogging" case in Canada that's in the news (or was, until it fizzled) is that (former) Conservative Party backbencher Garth Turner was very efficiently booted from the party, because he was being to open on his blog about the goings-on in government.
He pretty much took it in stride, called their bluff, and became a proud Independent MP (fairly rare in Canada, due to election financing rules). This past Tuesday he held a press conference where he revealed many of the problems with party politics, including how he did more in the last two weeks as an Independent MP than in two years as a backbencher of the ruling party.
What I get out of this is that if it pisses off the large companies and the traditional power structures, blogging must be good (teens on myspace aside).
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
if you read it in the times, it really happened, and you got it straight.
bloggers are basically loose cannons rolling across the public landscape with zillions of their own agendas.
there will be no "blogs of record" when the next chapter of history is put to bed.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
And yet they're still more trustworthy than the mainstream media. That's how bad the far-right-wing Fox News and the barely-to-the-left-of-Fox-News CNN are.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I think one problem is that people keep fooling themselves about what blogs really are. Make no mistake, blogs are, of course, a great way for people to communicate - for example, for managers to communicate with their employees, or people to communicate with relatives in other countries -, or to cover rapidly changing topics. Further advantages are that you don't need significant amounts of money to reach an audience, and that blogs are easily accessible and always readily available. Blogs are good (even though they started out as an annoying buzzword).
But what blogs are not, even though some people just won't stop claiming it, is some sort of radically new media that solves most of the problems of traditional media. Blogs aren't really news outlets - 99% of them get their news from other sources, e.g. the established organisations that they decry as the "old media". 99% of blogs don't give you any new facts, they simply pass on facts that they have picked up elsewhere. And some blogs deliberately spread misinformation. After all, it only takes very little to create a good-looking blog, so a reputable writer will look just as serious as a complete charlatan.
At the end of the day, blogs are basically nothing other than your good old-fashioned soap box brought into the 21st century - or maybe I should say, soapbox 2.0. Blogs might give everyone a chance to make his voice heard, might be a great solution to the problem of censorship, might be great to spark a good debate in the comments, might be a lot better for diversity of thought and opinion, and blogs might be a really convenient way of publishing things - but blogs are NOT by definition more reputable than "old media". Perhaps even less so. At the end of the day, if you want a balanced opinion, there is no one source of information you can use. You still need to get as many views on issues as you can, consider your sources objectively, and make up your own mind. And no new trend or technological advance on the web is going to change that.
I think if people took a moment to think about it and understand this, they wouldn't be so surprised when stories such as this one come up.
Basilisk Digital
as soon as any medium goes commericial -- I.E. -- "has a payroll, makes money, etc." it enters the same realm of censoring and forced ignorance as the rest of them. Mainly because people go into a self preservation mode to protect their ability to keep "getting paid" or "staying out of jail".
BIG web sites and blogging services are the latest victim of this effect.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
See post
here.
Excerpt:
It's traditional for an exiting Gawker Media editor to write a farewell post. I don't have anything to get across, other than that I'm free for lunch and gig offers for the next few weeks, so I'll just thank the people who, as my friend Paul put it, "write Valleywag for free."
Whether you're listening to an overpaid talking head on CNN, at the NYT, or "in the blogosphere", of course, the same mechanisms are at work about how these people make tradeoffs between money, popularity, access, and influence.
Diversify your blog reading and you'll get a better picture.
It was about a year ago and a quick scan through my bookmarks failed to turn up a link, though I did find bookmarks to a few things he had linked to here and here which should help you get started. I'll post back if I come across the blog itself.
Cheese making, from the little I dabbled in it, seems to be quite fun. Be prepared to make some mistakes (I'd recommend --MarkusQ
It was about a year ago and a quick scan through my bookmarks failed to turn up a link, though I did find bookmarks to a few things he had linked to here and here which should help you get started. I'll post back if I come across the blog itself.
Cheese making, from the little I dabbled in it, seems to be quite fun. Be prepared to make some mistakes (I'd recommend < 1/2 liter batches to start) and to share your successes with friends while they're fresh.
--MarkusQ
And Disdains blogs and the power of the individual...
You think the New York Times doesn't pay its writers? You think they aren't a bunch of liberal biased journalists? They say so themselves. Wake up, slashdot. You hate the blogs and love the old media liberal crap. You are 180 degrees out of phase with "nerds". Why don't you end the charade...?
Maybe in the navel-gaze-o-sphere, it is. But not in the real world.
sulli
RTFJ.
I feel that various threads here are scrambling some of the issues.
... they can cheaply upgrade to some scary capacity. But the blogger's fundamental costs of living have to be dealt with.
"Old Line" news had a fundamental fixed cost problem to overcome. "The cost of the building plus salaries plus publish equipment plus secondary costs" had to be dealt with before the first month's paper sales were completed.
Rent is a seller's market. "Awww. You couldn't pay your rent. I guess I have to evict you." (With varying grace periods.) Cash flow in is also the Seller's market. 80% of people's integrity is shot when their actions SERIOUSLY threaten their living situation. Employers complain back about lazy employees, and there's a whole world in between. Survival is a zero effort fixed cost, requiring effort to generate the money to stay ahead. Ask an expert on entropy where that leads.
If someone is a professional news reporter, if abusive financiers threaten that reporter's income, of course said reporter will eventually knuckle under. You can only resign in disgust so many times until the mortgage is due. Now we get to blogs, because these start out as 1-person operations *subsidized by an unrelated primary job*. This both enables freedom of reportage, but it also means the blogger will run out of resources and cannot produce the quantities of reportage that a pro news outfit can.
The *good* news is that *webspace* is a *buyer's market*. Anyone can start off with a free web space, and should they be so lucky as to need server capacity to survive a SlashDotting,
I essentially challenge anyone in the world to finance a blogger they believe in. (Can't afford it? Get a consortium or such going.) The fundamental point is that zero censorship can be tolerated. This means putting up with a "yellow blog" with an overemphasis on emotion. (In case you forgot, all papers have these: they are called editorial pages. The bloggers may simply forget to remove them to the editorial page.)
Then it's a matter of viewers. Left to themselves, it's a bit of a challenge to attract viewers. But should a group with money settle on a blogger they believe in, then a 1 year campaign can make them famous.
So at worst it's an unknown little blog in the middle of nowhere. But it's there should *you* decide it's interesting.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine