Bloggasm

Seeing as how this is a blog that regularly covers the journalism industry, one would think that I’d provide some links to criticism of last night’s travesty of a presidential debate — particularly criticism launched at ABC. But since I don’t have cable or even basic network television right now I didn’t actually watch the debate and so I will instead be thankful that I wasn’t planted in front of my TV screen fighting the urge to throw a household appliance through it.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. Of course ABC can’t take all the flak for having no journalistic integrity. After all, NBC’s Today Show has decided to allow First Lady Laura Bush to co-host it.

2. A lot of bloggers complain about how spam blogs scrape their content and publish it without permission. I could honestly care less if they do this to me, unless it starts hurting my search engine rankings. But I still hate spam blogs because they clutter up blog search results. Whenever I conduct Bloggasm research I constantly use both Google Blog Search and Technorati, and nothing is more tedious and annoying than having to spend 25 seconds trying to figure out if the blog you’re reading is legitimate or just ripping off someone else. Luckily, Wired has posted a how-to wiki on how to fight back and battle spam blogs.

3. It was announced recently that a company called Buzznet would purchase two very popular music blogs. Today we find out that it bought those blogs using money from Universal Music Group, with possible plans for the blogs to be turned into the music company’s promotional vehicles. I’ve developed theories over the past year about the future of journalistic content and I think this kind of deal — though rife with conflicts-of-interest — might be the future of profitable journalism. Maybe one day I’ll get around to writing a post about this.

4. Not long ago I blogged about how Gawker bloggers were fortunate that they can use Gawker Media blogs to criticize their own company and actually get away with it. Well it turns out they can’t get away with it after all. A Valleywag blogger who had gone after his company got fired shortly after.

5. Speaking of Valleywag, they give us some insight on how much Youtube partners are making in revenue share. It looks like so far the video giant isn’t bringing in the cash.

6. So remember when comScore said that Google’s paid clicks were on the decline, which led to predictions about decreased revenue? I don’t know if I ever said this publicly, but though I believed comScore was probably right about the fewer clicks, this had very little to do with revenue. After all, Google works in mysterious ways and to me it was just a sign that they were making their advertising program more efficient. Well, as has been widely reported, it turns out I was right. And as a result of comScore’s jumping to conclusions, its stock took a noticeable dip recently after the Google earning news broke.

(Updated below)

Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin is pretty much the slime of the blogosphere, right up there with Perez Hilton. And I’m not just saying this just because of her political views, which are often nasty. Some of her blog posts, especially the ones that have lots of updates, are almost completely unreadable. She doesn’t comprehend that to understand the update we have to know what the post is about — she throws them in haphazardly and then sprinkles the post with links without giving indication of where they’re leading. I am utterly perplexed as to how she has become a popular blogger and can only conclude that she benefits from her frequent appearances in mainstream media outlets like Fox and the echo-chamber quality of the conservative blogosphere.

Given this, I’m seriously confused as to why possibly the best magazine publishing today, The New Yorker, wanted to write a profile on her. Granted, I don’t doubt for a second that the magazine would have taken plenty of swipes at her — possibly even shredding her to bits — but why even give her the satisfaction of devoting 10,000 words about her so that she can go run to her fellow bloggers and whine about her unfair treatment. Here’s an email exchange between her and staff writer Rebecca Mead:

Dear Michelle Malkin,

I’m a staff writer at the New Yorker, and I’m eager to write a profile of you for the magazine. I’ve been reading and watching with interest your commentary on the election, and — particularly with McCain rising — I think this could be a great time to look at your work and career and influence. I’d hope to come and spend some time talking with you, and watching you do what you do. Is there a number at which I could reach you to talk about this further? You can email me at this address or call me at [redacted].

Looking forward to speaking with you,

Rebecca Mead

*

Dear Patricia Jackson,

I’m a staff writer at the New Yorker and am trying to get in touch with Michelle Malkin, with a view to writing a profile of her for the magazine. Can you let me know the best way to reach her, or put me in touch with her?

Thanks,

Rebecca Mead
[phone number redacted]

*

I’ve got a mssg from Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker looking for your # — is there one I should give her?

– Mark Cunningham
Oped editor
NYPost
[phone number redacted]

*

Dear Michelle Malkin,

I am the editor of The New Yorker magazine, and I believe that you have
received some sort of contact from our office, but I just wanted to assure
you that our desire to write about you is serious and genuine. I can be
reached through email above or [phone number redacted].

Best regards,
David Remnick

*

On 2/16/08, Michelle Malkin wrote:

Thanks.

*

Dear Ms. Malkin, “Thanks…” but can we talk? I am at home at [phone number redacted]. Best, David Remnick

*

Dear Mr. Remnick,

Again, thank you for your reassurance that your magazine’s “desire to write about” my work “is serious and genuine.” I have no doubt that your writer is serious and that your interest in printing some sort of profile for your audience is genuine.

The question is: Toward what end?

No disrespect to you and your august publication (of which my beloved in-laws are longtime subscribers), but I have neither the time nor inclination to sit down with your staff Jane Goodall and serve as an anthropological specimen for The New Yorker’s readership. If I want to play ape for amusement, I’ll do it for my kids.

Best,
Michelle

I find it especially funny that she tries to take swipes at Mead, even though she’s not half the journalist Mead is. It’s because she knows that Mead will actually ask her hard questions, unlike the folks who wrote a puff profile piece about her at The Baltimore Sun.

Oh well, it’s not like this should actually cause Mead to abandon writing a profile — she can just do a write-around. This would be great because write-arounds are often much more harsh and blunt on the profile subject.

UPDATE: Note to Michelle Malkin. If you put quotes around a word, for instance, the word “scoop,” it’s usually a good idea to make sure that the person you’re targeting actually said the word. Otherwise it pretty much ruins the entire premise of your blog post. I find it also funny that she insinuates that I was “ripping off emails” by posting them and not providing a link. I find this funny because I found out about those emails through this post where she heavily block quotes a Politico story while expressly refusing to link to it. Better luck next time.

UPDATE 2: Below you’ll find a screen shot of what Malkin would call “blogging.” Yes, that’s the subject line of her blog post. No, Malkin doesn’t understand the basic concept of readability.

This isn’t a caption you see every day:

People in rural areas send in hunting photos like this all the time to local papers. I find it a little grotesque. I’m sure some PETA members experienced some schadenfreude after seeing this.

Rather than posting here I should be working on my state taxes (I finished federal taxes last night) but I just don’t have the energy for it tonight. Speaking of taxes, the IRS website is incredibly shitty — I know that government websites are known to be terrible but you’d think they’d take extra care with that one, considering it’s the nation’s money-maker.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. May 1 is RSS Awareness Day, which is certainly something I can support. I knew what an RSS feed was long before I actually started using them. There’s just this odd inertia that keeps you from actually getting on the bandwagon, but once you do you immediately realize it’s worth it. Signing up for RSS feeds relieves some pressure on bloggers to post around the clock because an RSS worldview doesn’t involve you having to check a website over and over again to see if it has been updated. There are some sites I subscribe to that barely ever update, and without the RSS feed I would probably never know when something new has been posted. Rather than explaining what an RSS feed is on my own terms, here’s a handy dandy link to the Wikipedia entry.

2. “Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge.” The description says it all.

3. Jeff Jarvis explores the true value of his blog. Rather than focusing solely on what the blog brings in through direct advertising revenue, he also adds in the money that comes in indirectly — speaking fees, book deals, other gigs — and determines that the blog is worth over a million dollars. Not bad for a site that averages only a few thousand hits a day.

4. This is pretty huge. Gawker Media has sold off three of its blogs, including Wonkette. Gawker founder Nick Denton references the coming online advertising decline, saying he’s dumping his less profitable sites in order to ride out the storm. I still find it weird, though, that they would get rid of Wonkette, which has become some sort of symbol for the rise of the blogosphere as a powerful media outlet — it was often cited in mainstream media stories about the power of blogs. It’s especially a weird move given that it’s a contentious presidential season that has resulted in rising traffic for most major political blogs.

5. It looks like we’re seeing a new use for POD: computer generated books. That New York Times article doesn’t do a great job of explaining how the guy’s company works, but I wouldn’t be able to point to more representative example of the long-tail benefits of Print On Demand.

6. It looks like AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who was jailed for two years without charges, is definitely going to be released. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who led the smear campaign against Bilal, has remained mostly silent on this issue.

Daily Show correspondent John Oliver went to town the other night on Fox News, creating a mini-documentary that highlights the hypocrisy of many of its personalities.

The documentary is embedded in two videos below:

Part one:

and part two:

“Crowd sourcing” is a buzz phrase often employed in conversations about new media. In theory, online media outlets will be able to utilize the wisdom of the crowd (i.e. their readers) to find out first-hand information about certain subjects. One of the most famous examples of this is the blog Talking Points Memo utilizing its readership to uncover the U.S. Attorney firings scandal.

Lately, though, I’ve seen a number of stories highlighting another way of using online crowd wisdom: Crime solving.

The latest example of this appears in a New York Times article. Two thieves pull up to a car dealership and take a relatively rare car on a “test drive.” They never return with the car, and not long afterwards the dealer posts a note on an online forum giving the details of the theft. After multiple sightings of the car, the implementation of both Google Maps and Facebook, and several camera phone pictures of the thief, the guy was nabbed and the dealer got his car back.

The NY Times article has dubbed this tactic “open source crime solving.” Now if only someone could create a website specifically for this specific kind of crowd sourcing.