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When Blog Networks Make News, Silence Abounds

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the catching-up-with-the-'real'-outlets dept.

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?"

4 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Duh by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, in my opinion, most media these days plays too fast and loose with the truth *cough* television *cough cough* and Blogs are really just more of the same. No one really holds them accountable, so while Blog A) may be honest and fair Blog B) could just be a complete partisan shill, lying his ass off, knowing no one can prove he's definitely wrong.

    I think pretty much any story that doesn't include solid research into publicly available documents or primary sources who are willing to go on the record, is worthless, and this includes most Blogs, most television news, and not a few print news sources as well.

    --
    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  2. The difference between NYT and Bloggers... by Cr0w+T.+Trollbot · · Score: 1, Interesting
    ...is that bloggers are usually much more open about their political biases than The New York Times. The "anything to hurt Bush" reporting that has increasingly come to characterize the paper in the last four years. Before that their liberal bias was also pronounced (how many front page stories do New York readers really want to read about Augusta National Golf Course's membership rules?), but in the last few years it's come to infect such places as the Theater, Architecture, and Fashion (!) sections.

    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

  3. Re:to bring it back to apples and apples by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Meh. The print media business is pretty conservative by nature, even if their views run the spectrum. The "internets" are a little more than a decade in the public consciousness, and print media rightly fears what they represent in terms of their long term business strategy.

    My personal viewpoint (speaking as a guy who does tech for a print newspaper) is that the death of actual "paper" is the best thing that could ever happen to print media, because almost all the heartache and stress of the industry revolves around the creation of the paper product, and the distribution of said product to the world, and an all digital product would allow them a HUGE amount of freedom.

    However they haven't come up with a "good" way of working out compensation yet, and that prompts them to stupid measures like this.

    --
    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  4. The brighter side of blogging by MarkusQ · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The blogosphere is all about collective jerking off to their own made up sense of how famous and good they are.

    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