Bloggasm

Popular SF blogger John Scalzi has been receiving a flood of odd requests lately: those asking him to remove old comments of theirs from his blog posts. His answer? No.

Philosophically, I’m of the opinion that people need to own their words, and yes, that includes the words that they toss off in a comment section of a blog. I’m also of the opinion that people need to realize that barring some horrible catastrophe that will mean we all have bigger problems, the Internet is forever, and anything you display on it will be archived in one form or another, until the end of time and/or electricity.

Personally, for me it’d depend on what kind of mood I was in when the person emailed me. I’m notoriously bad about answering emails from my readers, so the chances that I’d take the two or three minutes to locate the post and delete it are slim.

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After one infusion of fresh capital, Huffington was heard internally telling staff that everyone’s lives would be greatly improved “once we get the jet.”

–How Arianna Huffington, Critic of ‘Excess,’ Lusts for Private Jets [The Rich]

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Andrew Sullivan has a built-in arsenal with his 100k+ readers a day on his blog, and last week he deployed it, arguing that The Atlantic had taken a risk by putting his open letter to George Bush on the cover.

“The MSM has largely moved on from this issue. The Atlantic hasn’t, because it’s one of the few magazines left that makes major editorial decisions that may not make sense commercially,” he wrote. “In this economic climate, especially with old media in crisis, a decision like that is understandably making some general interest magazines an endangered species.”

He made a plea for readers to reward the magazine by subscribing to its print edition, and the New York Times reports that it worked: “Within two days after last Monday’s post, Mr. Sullivan’s appeal pulled in 75 percent of the subscriptions that the Web site draws in a typical month, the magazine’s publisher, Jay Lauf, said. The Atlantic expects this month’s subscription orders to be double an average month’s.”

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In this Atlantic piece, Mark Bowden can’t seem to make up his mind. He spends the first quarter of the piece bemoaning the death of investigative journalism, suggesting that well paid political operatives with an agenda are doing all the digging that leads to today’s scandals, and then after nicely tying up his introduction, decides to introduce us to one of these hitmen.

And who is it? An unpaid conservative blogger who receives around 30 readers a day.

Morgen Richmond, for one—the man who actually found the snippets used to attack Sotomayor. He is a partner in a computer-consulting business in Orange County, California, a father of two, and a native of Canada, who defines himself, in part, as a political conservative. He spends some of his time most nights in a second-floor bedroom/office in his home, after his children and wife have gone to bed, cruising the Internet looking for ideas and information for his blogging. “It’s more of a hobby than anything else,” he says. His primary outlet is a Web site called VerumSerum.com, which was co-founded by his friend John Sexton. Sexton is a Christian conservative who was working at the time for an organization called Reasons to Believe, which strives, in part, to reconcile scientific discovery and theory with the apparent whoppers told in the Bible. Sexton is, like Richmond, a young father, living in Huntington Beach. He is working toward a master’s degree at Biola University (formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), and is a man of opinion. He says that even as a youth, long before the Internet, he would corner his friends and make them listen to his most recent essay. For both Sexton and Richmond, Verum Serum is a labor of love, a chance for them to flex their desire to report and comment, to add their two cents to the national debate.

Bowden gives backhanded compliments to Richmond, commending him on doing the investigative work to dig up the controversial comments from the Supreme Court nominee but not having the journalistic pressure to provide balanced context to it. But as Richmond Richmond’s co-blogger says in his blog:

Blogging is more like hell. Get it. Get it out. Get it right the best you can. Get it to your friends at other blogs if you want it to be seen. And check your own damn spelling (often not very well in my case). That’s just text. If you want to use video, well you’re the video editor too. Pull the clips. Find some music. Add the titles. Need a picture? Find it yourself. And it’s not just one story a day, but 2 or 3 if you want to keep your readers, much less grow your site. Finding the complete context of every story just isn’t possible at this level. We’re doing the best we can with limited time and no money.

Is it perfect. Not by a long shot. But like Morgen, I trust the openness of blogging. Sunlight is the best disinfectant but it’s also what makes things grow. Put the information out. If it’s wrong, you’ll hear about it. If it’s right, people will notice that too. As it’s passed along, friendly hands will add nuance and value. Opponents find the weak links or undercut the statements that just don’t hold up. It’s open source journalism. The first amendment is a beautiful thing.

Richmond, unlike most mainstream journalists who reported on the controversy, was actually able to link to the entire video, allowing his readers to follow those links and watch it in his entirety. In that sense, he provided a context that nobody else on cable news ever could. This, in effect, kills Bowden’s thesis and gives more credence to the blogosphere as an investigative arm of the media.

Good job, Richmond. You and I might not politically agree on your conclusions that you reached after your investigative work, but you deserve any recognition that comes your way.

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Earlier today, NPR’s David Folkenflik filed a report detailing GQ’s efforts to bury and hide a feature-length article critical of Vladimir Putin. Titled “Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power,” it’s the result of war journalist Scott Anderson’s research into several bombings that ended with hundreds of deaths in 1999 in Russia. It quotes an anonymous KGB official connecting Putin to the bombings.

“But instead of trumpeting his reporting,” Folkenflik reported. “GQ’s corporate owners went to extraordinary lengths to try to ensure no Russians will ever see it.”

This includes keeping the article off GQ’s website, neglecting to mention it on the cover, and, perhaps most shockingly, “no copies of the American edition of the magazine could be sent to Russia or shown in any country to Russian government officials, journalists or advertisers. Additionally, the piece could not be published in other Conde Nast magazines abroad, nor publicized in any way.”

Unfortunately for GQ, Gawker got wind of the story, and the media blog plans to publish a Russian translation version of the story on the web.

“We are working to get a Russian translation of the story posted here, even if it just means running the text through Google Translate,” wrote Gawker’s Gabriel Snyder. “Far better would be a Russian speaker who can help us translate Anderson’s story. You can either leave translations in comments or email me directly.”

I spoke to Gawker owner Nick Denton after the post hit the web. I first asked him whether there were any concerns that the blog would be violating GQ’s copyright by reprinting the piece.

“We’ll deal with that issue when we come to it,” Denton said. “It’s not as if we’re cutting into GQ’s Russian audience: Conde Nast wasn’t planning to publish the piece in Moscow.”

Why did he think Conde Nast was going to such great lengths to bury the story?

“I assume concern for the commercial prospects of their Russian titles,” he said. “And remember that the punishment of disobedient journalists can go beyond the impromptu tax audit. Paul Klebnikov of Forbes was killed.”

Gawker has never been one to back down when republishing controversial documents. When the Church of Scientology tried to get the media company to take down leaked video of Tom Cruise’s evangelizing several months ago, the media company refused.

“I’ve always thought that a site like Gawker — though we try to seek out corruption and hypocrisy in New York — would serve a clearer public purpose in Moscow, Beijing or Riyadh,” Denton said.

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That’s the question I try to answer in my latest PBS MediaShift piece

Paul Testa recently checked his voicemail and listened to a message from a hospice worker who lives in a conservative district of Ohio. He’d never met or spoken to this person before, but the worker reached out because Testa seemed like the right person to receive some important, inside information about the healthcare system.

Testa doesn’t work for a health department, nor is he an investigative reporter. He and Joanne Kenen write theNew Health Dialogue Blog for the New America Foundation, a think tank.

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Yesterday, Gawker published some disturbing photos of private contractors employed by ArmorGroup who guard State Department employees in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Today, we find out that the State Department is launching a full investigation into the contractor.

So, was Gawker publishing the pics a motivating factor behind the State Dept’s quick response? Hard to say. Clearly that letter and those photos (which POGO also sent to the State Dept.) would have resulted some sort of reaction, though apparently the contractor ArmorGroup has been under some sort of investigation due to its behavior since 2007. But, much like the shots out of Abu Ghraib, the pictures Gawker first pubbed are upsetting, utterly damning, and impossible to ignore, and they’ve now been seen very quickly by a whole lot of people (though not as many as saw McSteamy!).

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