Mar 17th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 3 Comments
Anil Dash of Six Apart has an interesting post up in which he proposes that instead of simply linking to or quoting from blog posts, bloggers could actually embed a segment of the post they are citing — in much the same way that people embed YouTube videos etc. by inserting some Javascript. I’ve included an excerpt of the post here as an experiment, in part because I’m wondering whether this idea (which I found via a Twitter post from Steve Rubel) makes any sense or not.
Like Anil, part of me finds this kind of thing appealing — but is it just the geek part of me? It’s elegant in a way, but I wonder whether it’s more trouble than is really necessary (Piers Fawkes at PSFK has written about it as well, and Anil has commented on that post). After all, I can quote from Anil’s post by simply cutting and pasting text, like this:
I want you to place the text of this blog post on your own site. But I don’t want you to do it just by copying and pasting it into your own blogging tool. I think there might be a different way to do it.
What benefits does using Anil’s method have? It includes a link to the comments on the post, which is nice (although it could get unwieldy if there were too many), but I’m not sure it’s a killer feature. And it has a nice colored border, of course. I experimented with Clipmarks.com as a way of doing something similar — since it allows you to clip and save a blog or web-page excerpt and then paste it into your blog automatically — but in the end it seemed too cumbersome.
Nov 26th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Like my friend, the charming and multi-talented Rachel Sklar of Huffington Post’s Eat The Press I think it’s great that blogger Nikki Finke of LA Weekly is getting her moment in the spotlight — courtesy of the U.S. Writers Guild strike, which Nikki has been covering like white on rice. Both the New York Times and Bloomberg have positive pieces about the blogger and her coverage of the strike.
Deadline Hollywood Daily didn’t just show up yesterday. It’s a daily online version of Ms. Finke’s LA Weekly column, and she’s been writing it since March of last year. It’s published by the Village Voice, which hosts the site and pays her to write it. It’s also interesting to note that the NYT story was written by Brian Stelter, whose TVNewser blog brought him fame and fortune while he was still a student, at which point the NYT hired him as one of their media reporters.
Jun 12th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Anyone who read the profile in the New York Times in November probably remembers the incredible story of Brian Stelter, a 21-year-old college student at tiny Townson University near Baltimore, who started a blog about the TV news business called — fittingly — TVNewser. In much the same way that Harry Knowles created Ain’t It Cool News and turned it into the go-to spot for movie industry news and rumours, Brian’s blog quickly became the destination for TV news junkies, including many senior executives (Rex has another example here). As the NYT story put it:
“I’ve heard people joke that when TVNewser is dormant, the kid had a final or a big family dinner that he couldn’t get out of,” said Brian Williams, the NBC news anchor and a TVNewser devotee. “People from entry level to high and mighty check in on it.”
Well, TVNewser gained such a following that Brian got hired by Mediabistro, and now he has been hired by the New York Times itself, and will be part of building a new media “vertical” for the newspaper online, along with media editor (and Canadian ex-pat) Bruce Headlam. Jeff Jarvis — who initially advised Brian not to move to Mediabistro, but later changed his mind — has some thoughts on the latest move here. And Poynter has an interview with the man himself done by (what else) instant messaging.
May 22nd, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
My friend Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has a great post up about why he thinks that every newspaper journalist should have a blog — and one of the great things about having a blog is actually illustrated in Scott’s post, since he modifies and updates it based on input and criticism from both a commenter and a journalist/blogger (Brad at Union Square Ventures has some thoughts here on how editing on the Web begins after publishing).
And no, I’m not praising Scott’s post just because he mentions me 
In a comment, John Roberts notes that journalists should always let their employers know about their blogs (wise advice), and in his own post, a journalist/blogger — Bobbie Johnson of The Guardian, who I have a lot of time for — argues that a journalist’s duty is to the story, and to his or her paper first, and that not everyone is going to want to blog, or be good at it.
Those are fair points (particularly the latter), but I would agree with Scott that the vision of journalism Bobbie is advocating is a little like black-and-white television was in the 1960s: quaint and admirable in a way, but definitely on its way out. And I think that the kind of back-and-forth that the Web allows — and that Scott engages in — will produce (or at least is capable of producing) better journalism, “scoops” aside.
Apr 24th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
Another flash fire seems to have flared up in the blogosphere over interviews with reporters: Jason Calacanis says he won’t do an interview with Wired unless they can do it by email, and says this is ironic (in an Alanis Morrisette kind of way, I’m assuming). Dave Winer says he likes to do interviews via his blog because it’s too easy to be misquoted.
Mike Arrington, meanwhile, seems more than a little bemused to be the spark for this little journalistic contretemps, which apparently started with some interviews for a story involving him, and figures Wired probably won’t do the story now. And Wired makes fun of the whole “ironic” thing in a blog post, pointing out that it plans to get some pneumatic tubes installed so it can be more hip. Some people, including James Robertson and Dan Gillmor, don’t think Wired’s response was too funny.
Funny or not, the thing I can’t get my head around is why the writer didn’t want to do an email interview. I love it when people want to do email interviews, because it’s a lot faster, and you know you’re going to get what you want without as much potential for misunderstanding . And I can see why certain people — like Mark Cuban, for example — like to do it that way, so that they don’t have their words twisted (yes, that occasionally happens in journalism).
Ian Betteridge makes a good point in his post, which is that a phone interview can produce something different than an email interview because the discussion can go in different directions. And that is definitely true. But there’s a lot to be said for the speed and accuracy that email brings too.
