Sunday, January 22, 2006



And what did I amount to, once the official version gained ground? An edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with. Why couldn’t they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-suffering as I had been? That was the line they took, the singers, the yarn-spinners. Don’t follow my example, I wanted to scream in your ear – yes, yours. But when I try to scream I sound like an owl.
- Penelope, in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

Why bloggers sometimes find news before journalists, and why journalists should use bloggers; comment by Digby; note comparison to I.F. Stone.... For my money if I was trying to marry a blog with a newsroom that's where I'd start -- I'm constantly amazed that with all the access to information now available the big news bureaus don't have a deeper pool of researchers to be the adjunct memories of people who spend their time in the development of external news sources. We deal in illusions, man: Contextualizing

The Blog, The Press, The Media: So You Think of Your Blog as a Blog or a Website?
I’ve been thinking of what I am -- about what any media person in the digital age is -- since having coffee last week with a 30-something newspaper editor who bemoaned the fact that newspapers keep on setting up blogs as these separate, exotic add-ons to their Web sites, instead of integrating blogging into their usual newsgathering operations. There’s simply no good reason to segregate the functions, he insisted.

OK, you might argue, blogging is aesthetically a different beast -- it’s instantaneous media.


Why Blogging vs. Traditional Media Has Been Oversold [Internet users quick to judge Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds ; Latest report from Reporters sans Frontieres... Journalists killed, attacked in 2005]
• · AdSense pays publishers 78.5 cents on the dollar, according to NYTimes ; It was the best of years, it was the worst...aw hell Blogs provide almost no new information. They’re frequently inaccurate. They contribute to the hysterical polarization of our nation’s political discourse. And they’re often written by people who can’t, you know, write. So naturally marketers have flocked associate their brands with them The Best & Worst Marketing Ideas of 2005
• · · The State of the News Media, 2005 from Columbia's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The State of the News Media 200; Heads up the Blog, a new copy editors blog
• · · Great links for background on religion from Shirl Kennedy at Resourceshelf; See what people are searching for right now. You can get it filtered or unfiltered SearchSpy from Dogpile
• · · · Media Matters' 'Misinformer of the Year': Chris Matthews ; To blog or not to blog ?
• · · · Cyberslacking could be eating up as much as a quarter of the time employees spend online, according to a Monash University pilot study. Study probes web habits of office slackers ; Media Dragon today reported record results for its fourth quarter ended December 31, 2005. Revenues for Q4 2005 were $8.64 up 176% compared to $3.08 in Q4 2004 and up 27.3% sequentially vs. Q3 2005. Earnings before expenses, which management believes are the most cynical results we can think of, were also up 176%. Record Q4 Revenues ; Political patronage helped build Kerry Packer’s media empire. Can his son follow suit KERRY PACKER Only one in a lifetime
• · · · · Google is continuing to expand its advertising capabilities beyond the online world, agreeing to buy a company that automatically connects advertisers with radio stations. The price could top $US1.2 billion Is Google radio next? ; Challenge the Idea; not the Individual
• · · · · · Blog Herald on the auction block ; Tips on doing PR work experience