Bloggasm

For my latest article at PBS’ MediaShift, I interviewed activists from Firedoglake and Daily Kos to explore the various ways netroots bloggers are influencing Occupy Wall Street:

But though the decentralized structure of OWS has helped its public perception, its sluggish decision-making has made it ill-prepared for one major obstacle: winter. As the protests stretch on into December, many of the northern locations will be plunged into below-freezing temperatures. NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already predicted OWS will peter out with winter, and unless the protesters adequately prepare for the next few months, the cold will likely pose a significant challenge. Yet because of an inefficient mass-voting system, it’s difficult for any particular encampment to make the kind of executive decisions needed to purchase the expensive supplies that would shield protesters from the chill.

Jane Hamsher initially addressed this problem by purchasing supplies out of her own pocket. Hamsher, founder of the popular progressive blog Firedoglake, had been attending Occupy DC protests when she realized that the protesters didn’t seem to have a contingency plan in place.

Hey Arianna (and Dear Patch): We won’t be taking you up on that kind invitation to work free for your large corporation … I would add that Fridley is my hometown, and I wholeheartedly agree with Arianna’s assessment that it’s a great place that’s very worthy of serious news coverage. But relying on volunteers isn’t enough. Many times, as a young reporter working at community newspapers in the Twin Cities and elsewhere, I would look around and realize I was the last non-elected person left in a public meeting room. People care about what’s happening in their communities, but working families can’t always devote the time to stay at a school board or city council meeting until 9 , 10 or 11 p.m. at night to catch all the debate and a final vote. That’s why it’s so important to have professional journalists, including freelancers who are paid enough that they don’t have to hold down second and third jobs.

Sincerely,

Sara Steffens

Local Voices: A Note From Arianna Huffington

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In my latest article for Harvard’s Nieman Lab, I profiled DC’s Homicide Watch, explaining how they fill in the gaps in local crime coverage by following the motto, “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.”

Comments like this continue to flow in as residents of the D.C. area gravitate to Homicide Watch, a blog that has filled a vacuum in media coverage since it was launched in September 2010. (The Lab wrote about the project after the pair entered it in the Knight News Challenge in 2009.) Laura and Chris, who married last summer, have spent many days and nights since that launch fulfilling its main mission, outlined under its title: “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.” This is a task that up until now has remained largely unfulfilled by D.C.’s traditional media outlets; unless a murder is particularly notable, news organizations generally run little more than a rewritten press release from the police department noting a murder, arrest, or a conviction. Late last year, Homicide Watch published a stunning post revealing that in 2010 there were several murders that hadn’t been reported at all. But given that Laura is devoting all her working hours to writing for Homicide Watch without pay — and that Chris must balance his work on the site with a full-time job at NPR — can the two create a sustainable long-term model to fill in the gaps of D.C.’s homicide coverage? And, if so, can that model be emulated in other cities?

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The BBC is reporting this morning that Bradley Manning, the soldier targeted in the WikiLeaks scandal who has been held in isolation at Fort Leavenworth, has been cleared to be held as a medium-security prisoner. According to Fort Leavenworth Commandant Lt. Col. Dawn Hilton, Manning will be treated like any other prisoner … Now, Manning will be allowed visitors, mail and three hours of recreation per day–some outdoors and some at the prison library.

Report: Bradley Manning Cleared To Leave Isolation Cell

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In an extremely Kafkaesque interview with Paid Content, Jonathan Tasini, who somehow woke up one day and realized Arianna Huffington hadn’t been paying for his blogging for the past five years and decided to sue her, was asked about the legal precedent a successful lawsuit would set for other platforms. “What about other sites, like Facebook or YouTube, where the value of the business has been enhanced by content contributed by users?” Paid Content asked. “If you were successful, wouldn’t this open a kind of Pandora’s box where every site could be asked to make payouts to its users?”

Tasini responded:

We should separate places like a social-networking site from a commercial site that’s about creating content. Facebook is not the same thing in my mind as The Huffington Post. We’re mixing apples and oranges.

A social-networking site like Facebook isn’t a “commercial site?” People don’t create content on Facebook and YouTube?

Earlier in the interview, he asserts, “People were misled about the nature of The Huffington Post. A lot of people were shocked by the notion that once sold, everything we wrote was [owned by HuffPo].” Here, his statements are outright lies. The “nature” of the Huffington Post, both as a platform for unpaid writers and a profit-driven company, has been well-publicized from the beginning, and unless he produces private emails that say otherwise, he’s lying. As for everything being “owned” by HuffPo, he’s lying on two points: 1. The rights HuffPo requires for its free writers is non-exclusive, meaning they can publish elsewhere. 2. There was no “sunset” agreement for when blog posts would be removed from the site.

I use a very charged word when describing Tasini’s rhetoric: “lie.” It’s a word that denotes not only untruth, but deliberate untruth. While it’s impossible to get inside the litigant’s head, the intellectual dishonesty in his words is so distinct that I feel comfortable using that word.

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Update below

Jeff Bercovici reports at Forbes that a group of Huffington Post bloggers are filing a lawsuit against the Huffington Post, claiming they deserved to be paid for their work. This lawsuit follows a proposed boycott from the Newspaper Guild, who urged HuffPo’s bloggers to stop writing for the AOL-owned site.

Bercovici shows absolutely no skepticism and fails to even mention the body of criticism that has been launched against such arguments. One could make a valid argument that writers shouldn’t write for free, but make no mistake: Huffington has always been completely transparent in her approach of not paying these writers. She provided a technology platform and audience — The Huffington Post — in exchange for these free blog posts. Whether you think this is a fair transaction is irrelevant to the law suit. If these writers were to succeed in their class-action lawsuit, then it would open the doors to further lawsuits to Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, Daily Kos, and virtually every other technology platform for which people contribute content. Should Google start handing out checks to everyone who writes on its Blogspot accounts?

But Bercovici doesn’t appear to be interested in such arguments; he merely wishes to engage in stenography.

UPDATE: Perhaps I was too hasty in criticizing Bercovici’s lack of criticism of the HuffPo lawsuit.

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When I heard that Lizz Winstead, the co-creator of the Daily Show, would appear on a blogger “snark” panel at this year’s Netroots Nation, I wondered if the group would address the elephant in the room. It had just been a little over a month since Jezebel — owned by Gawker Media, one of the most well-known purveyors of “snark” — had published a piece called “The Daily Show’s Woman Problem,” which supported the claim that Jon Stewart was sexist by using several sources that were either anonymous or who had never worked on the show. This was followed by an open letter signed by over 30 Daily Show women harshly criticizing the Jezebel piece (without naming it). Or, as Sarah Palin would say, the Daily Show writers “refudiated” Jezebel’s claims.

But the entire hour-long panel went by nary a mention of the episode — at least until the QandA period. Sady Doyle, who writes for the feminist blog Tiger Beatdown, mentioned it — seemingly apropos of nothing — when describing the most effective uses of snark:

“For me I think so much that we make fun of rests on a foundation of either intellectual dishonesty or just a profoundly strange and faulty grasp on the world,” said Doyle. “And for me what’s always funny …. is if you just actually type out what they’re actually saying, like if you remove all the politeness from it. Not to be weird around present company” — here she was referring to co-panelist Lizz Winstead — “but the Daily Show’s letter from women on the staff. What was alleged was that they had two female writers, two female correspondents, and had hired a new one after a 7-year gap with no new correspondents, and they wrote this letter that was like, ‘We are not sexists. We have women. They’re accountants, and also some of them do makeup. Like, that’s great…”

Doyle didn’t get any further before Winstead interrupted her:

“Wait, wait, wait a sec,” Winstead said. “I think there’s intellectual dishonesty with an article called ‘The Daily Show’s Woman Problem’ when nobody understands how the Daily Show is actually made. There are two women writers on the show. They rewrite submissions blind. There are no names on writing submissions to the Daily Show, because they have to pick people who are full part historians, brilliant, who pay attention to the media, and are equal parts hilarious. And people don’t really quit the Daily Show that often. But there are also the field producers who work there. Like somebody slammed — and maybe it was you or someone” — here she was referring to Doyle — “who wrote a blog post saying, ‘someone is called co-executive producer, who doesn’t really have a creative role in the show.’ And they were referring to someone who started out as a field producer. The field producers there write the material for the talent. But the people in the field aren’t called writers, they’re called field producers. Segment producers are segment producers because they write segments. [Co-Executive Producer Kahane Cooperman] taught me how to produce in the field. She’s a very talented person. And I get really frustrated when people claim that the Daily Show is sexist when I’ve worked with Jon Stewart on four separate projects and he is the least sexist person ever. They’re not trying to not hire women, they’re trying to hire the best possible people for the show. You can call it a boy’s club, it’s not. It’s a nerd club. And I challenge anybody who has submitted to the Daily Show, who if she didn’t get hired as a writer, who actually thought, ‘ok I didn’t get hired on this shot. What I’m going to do is I’m going to start a blog that has a focus and tone like the Daily Show, so they can see the kind of work I do, so they can see there are women out there trying to do that.’ I haven’t seen that blog. When I first launched that show, I got 150 writer submissions. Three were from women. Three, that’s it.”

I wondered if this would lead to an actual debate, but Doyle remained silent. For a moment it looked as if Amanda Marcotte, another feminist on the panel who had previously advanced the same argument as Doyle, would respond: “It’s an endemic problem,” she began. “I certainly think that the intentions… we should not get into all that. Does anyone else have any questions from the audience?”

To be honest, after watching everyone on the panel pat themselves on the back about how funny they were and how their snark was saving democracy, I wish a debate had broken out. Yes, most of the panelists were funny — two of them write for Sadly, No!, one of my favorite blogs that has actually made me laugh out loud at times — but here was an instance where we could have viewed the other side of snark: The target. Several audience members tried to address this during the QandA by bringing up the negative aspects of a snark-riddled web — the harassment, the potential for unfounded cruelty — but the panelists seemed to brush it aside without giving it serious thought. And here we had someone insinuating Jon Stewart was sexist (Doyle) and one of Stewart’s good friends (Winstead) a few feet away.

Shortly after the Jezebel/Daily Show fiasco, Emily Gould wrote a piece in Slate accusing feminist blogs of using snark-filled faux outrage to “gin up pageviews.” I was reminded of this earlier in the panel when Doyle weighed the use of snark versus more serious discussion:

“I’ve had this happen around the time of the Daily Show controversy,” she said. “I wrote this really snarky post and I got like 20 comments about what an irresponsible dick I was and 80 more comments about how I was funny and great. And then I wrote a more serious post, and the comments were like ‘I agree with you, thanks for spelling out your ideas so clearly.’ But there were way fewer comments.”

Way fewer comments on a post that was serious and substantive? The horror.

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