Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

On the vine

by

I’m opening the doors today on a new project — something I’m doing on the side, not affiliated with Salon — called Storyvine. It’s a themed blog, focusing on digital storytelling — the description is “the digital storytelling grapevine.” Here’s the mission statement: “I’ve got two goals for this blog: First, by providing timely news and links I hope to provide a useful service to the existing community that has formed around the idea of digital storytelling over the last decade or so, since the first Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado, in 1995. Second, I hope to help people who are curious about this phenomenon get a clearer handle on what it is, and where to find out more.”

I intend to update it as regularly as there’s news, information, links or thoughts that are of interest to the people who are interested in this subject. Come visit.

Agonist’s agony

by

As one of the many bloggers who has praised Sean-Paul Kelley’s site The Agonist for its timely feed of war news, I was disappointed to read of his admission that he reused significant quantities of material from Stratfor without attribution.

I don’t know enough about Kelley to understand why this happened. But two conclusions from this affair seem pretty obvious: The first is that, while what Kelley did could have happened on a more traditionally edited news site, the absence of any kind of editorial review before publication gave him extra rope to hang himself. The second is that the editing still happens, only after publication, and performed, as it were, by the readership. This means that blogger-journalists don’t have much of a safety net — their errors and ethical lapses will get caught not as part of a learning or mentoring process between editor and writer, but in the glare of the public spotlight, before a general readership, after they have done whatever damage they are going to do.

What I simply don’t understand is why any blogger would use unattributed material from another site and think that he could get away with it. One of the main values of blogging is the ease of linking; you can quote liberally, but always link back. If you got an idea or were made aware of a Web page or just happened to read something somewhere that sparked a posting, putting the link in is not only good ethics, it adds depth and usefulness for your readers.

There’s an old saying in the editing world, espousing the virtues of concision: “When in doubt, take it out.” (My friend Josh Kornbluth once wrote a whole song on the theme.) The bloggers’ variation on this principle ought to be, “When in doubt, link it out.”

Laurie Garrett and Davos: What do journalists really think?

by

James Grimmelmann has posted an extremely lengthy and thoughtful piece on LawMeme about the whole Laurie Garrett e-mail brouhaha. (This is the saga of a well-known Pulitzer-garlanded science journalist who attended the Davos conference this year, sent a bunch of her friends a sizable e-mail describing her experiences, and then became outraged when she discovered that somehow one of those friends had forwarded it beyond her circle, and it wound up all over the Net.)

Grimmelmann examines the controversy from so many different angles that I’m surprised he misses the one that seems most obvious to me.

I’m sure it was upsetting to Garrett to find that words she intended for a small group got broadcast online. I don’t envy her. But I think what irked a lot of people on the Net was the feeling they got that the story she told her friends was very different from the one she was likely to tell readers of her “official” work.

Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people feel that reporters know a lot more than what they actually put in their stories — that the “real story” of our times is the one that reporters tell each other over beers, and in for-private-distribution-only e-mails, rather than the one they tell in their formal stories.

The Garrett episode seemed to confirm that. Here was a journalist returning from “hobnobbing” with the global elite and announcing that “the world isn’t run by a clever cabal. It’s run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power.”

Her e-mail is a casual, unvarnished and sometimes blunt assessment of the poor state of the world (“The global economy is in very very very very bad shape”). With a little editing, it could have turned into a good magazine column. For all I know, that was Garrett’s intention. But her reaction of outrage and violation at the viral-like spread of the e-mail suggests otherwise — and reinforces readers’ hunch that they’ve just gotten a fleeting glimpse of how journalists talk to each other when they think the mike is turned off.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to blogs.

A lot of the energy in the weblog world is anger at old-line journalism for its sloppiness, its biases, but most of all, I think, its unresponsiveness. Many people who blog get justifiably excited at the prospect of presenting their own words without relying on an intermediary reporter.

In a post today labeled “Why Weblogs are cool,” Dave Winer explains why he prefers presenting his views on his blog to offering quotes to a News.com or N.Y. Times reporter: “People reading the article would not likely find out what I really think,” whereas on a blog, “I get to say what I want, and I can get it right.” And he’s absolutely right. No reporter can present an individual’s complex and changing views as faithfully as that individual himself — and now we have the technology for virtually anyone with a computer and a Net connection to do so.

Dave also happens to be an unusually honest, open and spontaneous writer: That’s one of the things that makes his blog special. But not everyone is so open. In fact, there are even people who don’t want the world to know “what they really think.” In my experience most politicians and business leaders fall into this group. I’m not enthusiastic about giving blogs to politicians because it seems to me they will use the format as another outlet for the same old spin. They won’t spontaneously reveal themselves. It requires persistence and effort to dig out “what they really think” — or at least what they really say and do — and tell it to the world.

The value journalists continue to provide in a “disintermediated,” Net-enabled world — when they are doing their jobs right, of course — is to continue to ask public figures the uncomfortable questions that they won’t choose to answer on their own.

I think that the people who stumbled upon Garrett’s e-mail felt that it provided them with an informative and interesting glimpse of what she really thought about Davos — which is a gathering of just the sort of leaders who are unlikely to say “what they really think” in public.

That is precisely what a lot of people in blog-land actually want from journalists. And instead, Garrett told them, sorry folks, you can’t have that, it’s for private consumption only. Too bad.

Rayne on blogger diversity

by

Rayne Today says, more personally, what I’ve been saying about how journalists fail to fathom the wide variety of purposes motivating bloggers: “No, hell no, bloggers are not ALL frustrated journalists. I’m certainly not. I’m just a collection of day-to-day issues in need of some airing. While some bloggers might feel otherwise, I’m not really worried about driving up my readership. Personally, my concern is finding a place to set free this stuff in my head so it’s not stagnant, not locked on paper or a hard drive.”

Weblog panel links

by

For the sake of attendees at tonight’s panel at the Berkeley Journalism School, and anyone else interested, I’m posting some links to previous Salon articles on the subject — because I’ve sort of said my piece on the subject of “blogging and journalists” already:

Much Ado About Blogging (May 10, 2002): Is it the end of journalism as we know it? Or just 6 zillion writers in search of an editor? Key points: Typically, the debate about blogs today is framed as a duel to the death between old and new journalism. Many bloggers see themselves as a Web-borne vanguard, striking blows for truth- telling authenticity against the media-monopoly empire. Many newsroom journalists see bloggers as wannabe amateurs badly in need of some skills and some editors. This debate is stupidly reductive… The professional journalist can still accomplish things that, so far at least, no blogger has managed…. But blogs can do some things the pros can’t…. The editorial process of the blogs takes place between and among bloggers, in public, in real time, with fully annotated cross-links. This carries pluses and minuses: At worst, it creates a lot of excess verbiage that only the most fanatically interested reader would want to wade through. At best, it creates a dramatic and dynamic exchange of information and ideas.Is there any doubt that, on balance, we come out ahead?
Fear of Links (May 28, 1999): While professional journalists turn up their noses, weblog pioneers invent a new, personal way to organize the Web’s chaos. Key points: On the Web, with its unspannable abundance of chaotic and ill-organized information, pointing people to good links is a fundamental service — a combination of giving directions to strangers and sharing one’s discoveries with friends. All of which explains why a phenomenon known as the weblog is one of the fastest-growing and most fertile creative areas on the Web today… Weblogs, typically, are personal Web sites operated by individuals who compile chronological lists of links to stuff that interests them, interspersed with information, editorializing and personal asides. A good weblog is updated often, in a kind of real-time improvisation, with pointers to interesting events, pages, stories and happenings elsewhere on the Web. New stuff piles on top of the page; older stuff sinks to the bottom.
Baring Your Soul to the Web (July 3, 1998): This was a Salon cover story by Simon Firth about the pre-blog phenomenon of Web diaries — an art that, interestingly, some leading practitioners felt in 1998 was already “over,” done, tired. Provides a little perspective on the cyclical nature of enthusiasm for Web innovation, and on the way we keep reinventing the wheel every couple of years — but with better tools, dammit!

Syndication perturbation

by

Salon blogger J.H. Farr was upset to find that the entire current contents of his blog were mirrored on another site that picked up the RSS syndication feed from Radio and reposted the contents.

I understand where he’s coming from: He’s a writer trying to build a career, trying to get people to pay for his stuff some of the time, and I think he feels like he’s being ripped off. (We contacted that other site — I’m not linking to them because I don’t particularly like their approach either — and they’ve removed Farr’s stuff.)

RSS syndication of blog postings is mostly used by Radio and other blogging software tools as an alternate distribution of your material — Radio collects these in its “news aggregator,” and that’s what lets you grab a post from another blogger and, with one click, repost it with your own comments. It’s one of the backbones of this new Web publishing model and in general, I think, it’s a great thing. (Here’s Dave Winer’s explanation of how it works and why it’s a good thing.)

I also think that, legally and morally, it falls in the category of “fair use” — which means that it becomes increasingly more problematic when others take and reuse more and more material. In the case of Farr and other blogs that are reposted on this other site, the postings are resupplied by a third party without any value added — there are no new comments from the site’s proprietor — and in fact with value subtracted, since many of the features of the original blogger’s site (layout, comments, whatever else the blogger has done to personalize the page) are gone.

Radio lets you turn this syndication on and off, so it’s ultimately up to each blogger how to deal with this issue. (I’m also pretty sure that you can reduce the amount of content in your syndication feed under “Prefs: RSS Configuration.) I tend to feel that the Net is pretty good at self-correcting these kinds of problems. The site in question is, in truth, not a particularly great one. I doubt it gets a lot of traffic and I don’t think it will have much impact on anyone’s life.

PS If you want to keep your RSS feed going with Radio but want to truncate the posts (providing only the first sentence) there’s some instructions here.