I experienced one of the sweetest birthdays in my life at McSweeney's ... Mal and I caught the tide that lifts bohemian yachts on their passage to India ;-)
Reporting from the blogosphere has already changed the face of politics, journalism and even publishing. Bloggers Strike Back
The lesson is clear: bully bloggers at your own risk. It seems like a lot of people are trying to shut up bloggers all of a sudden. It also doesn't seem to be working very well. Trouble Not the Blogger in his Lair
The Blog, The Press, The Media: In Praise of Investigative Reporting
An article in praise of investigative reporting: It’s not only important, it’s also good business.
You didn't have to attend last week's ASNE convention in Seattle to know that the newspaper business is riddled with angst.
Its all-too-familiar problems, coupled with the explosion of the Internet, has led to all manner of speculation about the future of newspapers, if any.
Much of the current thinking focuses on ways for newspaper companies to make better and more creative use of the Web. And that makes sense.
But it's also critically important for newspapers to find ways to make their old-school print products as well as their Web sites essential to their communities.
• No better friend [The system works John Quiggin Factoid check ; I believe the puffed-up, wanky, hubristic and self-serving way La Albrechtsen regrets ]
• · Alan Ramsey eulogises his friend and colleague, Richard Carleton. Oh, how he loved to reel them in ; Steve Rubel is having fun with Google Trends ; Microsoft is planning to map the world and is slowly refashioning itself as a media powerhouse: Let's Make More Deals ; In a few short years, Google has turned from a simple and popular company into a complicated and controversial one.
• · · Guy Rundle on blogs; Hardly a day goes by without some intellectual or journalist or other member of the only-our-opinion-counts brigade writing something about how awful, stupid, passe, dumb, rude, uninteresting or otherwise unacceptable blogs are Blog whining fatigue; How to avoid a Blog War: Some words of advice for the MSM. Right-wing pundits under attack by left-leaning bloggers, meanwhile, experience blogswarms, not blog wars
• · · · Chat room participants with female usernames received 25 times more threatening and/or sexually explicit private messages than those with male or ambiguous usernames IRC and users with female names.; A look at how more pressure is on reporters to name sources The Constitution doesn't give the press any more of a right to withhold evidence than any one of us has
• · · · · It wasn’t exactly a recycled party—the artist formerly known as J. Lo didn’t return—but it bore certain resemblances. Off the Record ; Let the quibbling begin; and with a televised Question Time, Americans would have a regular, dramatic way to follow what their President and Congress were doing To Enliven Politics, Ask a Few Questions
• · · · · · Think you know where your campaign dollars go? Think again, sucker. Political image-makers skim off percentages that would make Exxon execs envious -- and the public never knows about it. The greedy truth about media consultants; Seven for Seven as Jozef Imrich makes history on Google - In a few short years, Google has turned from a simple and popular company into a complicated and controversial one. With its presumptuous humour, its mathematical obsessions, its easy, arrogant belief that it is the natural home for geniuses, the billboard spoke of a company that thinks it has taken its rightful place as the leader of the technology industry, a position occupied for the past 15 years by Microsoft. Fuzzy maths: googley media dragons ; The enzyme that won If it's cool, it's probably Web 2.0