Bloggasm

It has been two weeks since the US military announced it would release AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who was held by the military for two years without charges. The military had launched vague terrorism accusations at the journalist but provided no evidence for this — instead it released anonymous leaks to various right-wing partisan bloggers (led by Michelle Malkin). Unfortunately, these bloggers went to every extreme in amplifying these accusations with multiple posts saying the AP was associated with terrorists.

But after Hussein was ordered released (by an Iraqi judicial panel, with the US military saying, “he no longer presents an imperative threat to security”), many of those bloggers who had spent thousands of words smearing both him and the AP barely issued a peep. Those who gave brief statement refused to apologize and said that because Bilal was ordered released under an “amnesty law” (a law none of them read so could know nothing about its content) then it wasn’t proof of his innocence. But other than those few brief posts, only cricket chirping.

Eric Boehlert has a great article at Media Matters that gives a comprehensive background of the bloggers’ shameful reporting and their silence in the aftermath of his release. After reading it I couldn’t help but be depressed at the thought that these bloggers still have thousands of readers that are subjected to their writing. For some, there is no justice.

I am constantly astonished by how many bloggers out there do not provide basic contact info, i.e. a simple email address, on their blogs.

It’s absolutely silly. I mean, I would guess that most blogs are out there because they’re meant to be read, and I bet many bloggers dream of having huge audiences. Why then, are you hindering yourself by not providing an effective way for your readership to contact you?

For instance, I am an avid news tipper. If I’m reading something that I think will fit into your niche, I’ll actually take a few moments to drop you an email and point you to it. There have been dozens of times when I’ve wanted to provide a news tip to a blogger only to not be able to find his contact info.

One could say that this is one of my main blogging pet peeves.

Science blogger Greg Laden has an interesting post about the effects of pseudonymous blogging. As the blogosphere becomes increasingly powerful, I think this is an issue that will become more and more prevalent. I plan on writing a feature article about it one of these days, but given how slow I am in researching my feature articles, I don’t know how long it will be before I get around to publishing it.

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.

The New York Times has managed to find three bloggers recently who have either suffered or died of heart attacks and concluded (in an open ended wishy washy way) that full-time blogging is so stressful that it’s deadly. It then goes on to quote TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington:

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

As someone who tries to exercise regularly, I don’t understand it when people who work from home say that their health has gotten worse because of it. The reason that I’m not able to exercise more often and eat healthier is because I often, as a newspaper reporter, work late into the night covering meetings, meaning on those nights I can’t work out and I end up eating fast food. If I were able to work from home, my health would improve, not worsen, because I could take time out of my day to cook, exercise, or go on a walk.

Arrington has several bloggers working for him. If he’s so worried about someone scooping him during the night (and btw, how many tech deals happen in the middle of the night? In the article it makes it sound that by not being up at 2 a.m. he’s going to miss out on some Microsoft merger), then why doesn’t he just hire someone to work a night shift? Some of the other tech blogs do this.

This is just one of the NY Times famous “trend setter” stories. Where they form a thesis, and then move forward with the research based on the assumption that the thesis is true, that it’s a trend.

If I were to list my top 10 blogging pet peeves, bloggers that respond to and criticize other online writers without linking to them would be at the top of the list. There are few things that are more childish and inexcusable in the blogosphere.

This tends to happen most often in political blogs. For instance, in 2006 conservative blogger Michelle Malkin wrote a hit piece accusing the NY Times of needlessly endangering the life of Donald Rumsfeld by publishing pictures of his house. It wasn’t long before several bloggers tore her argument to shreds by showing that just about everything she had asserted was demonstratively false. At one point it even came to light that the NY Times photographer had received permission from Rumsfeld for taking the photo. Eventually, Malkin was pressured to write a follow-up post so that she could respond to her critics.

The result? A post that went to every length to never link to the blogs that destroyed her arguments. Instead, she sets up strawman after strawman and then knocks them down with a back-sliding flourish of intellectual dishonesty, a whirlwind of arm thrashing and punches in the dark.

The wonderful thing about the internet is that it’s easy to provide context. The mainstream media is often criticized for providing out-of-context sound-bites. But when I’m criticizing an article, say, in the New York Times, I have the benefit of not only providing choice quote soundbites, but also linking to the article so that skeptical readers can read it in full. I can have my cake and eat it too.

Which brings me to a recent email exchange I had with a writer for the National Review.

I had been skimming through its Media Blog when I came across a post titled “Metrics for Success” In the post, Kevin D. Williamson provides a throw-away criticism of an article on LewRockwell.com.

As you can probably predict, Williamson criticized the article without ever linking to it, an action that annoyed me enough that I shot him an email:

Kevin,

I’m curious; you wrote about an article on leerockwell.com but didn’t link to it. Why? Don’t you think that if a blogger is critical of an article that appears online, that he should link to it so that his readers can read it in its entirety if they want to weigh the merits of his criticism?

–Simon

His flip response that arrived a few minutes later was entirely predictable:

I don’t always link to everything I mention, especially if I don’t think the item worth reading. I believe everybody knows that they can find lewrockwell.com articles at lewrockwell.com, if they are so inclined.

Thanks for writing.

Yours,
Kevin

To which I responded:

Somehow I think that if the tables were turned and another blogger started criticizing one of your posts by cherry-picking quotes from it and not linking to it you would be quite annoyed.

And sure, I could criticize something at nytimes.com and assume that if a reader really wanted to he could visit the website and do an archive search, but those assumptions are silly considering I can take the five extra seconds to link to it.

You say that it’s not an item worth reading, and yet it’s an item worth responding to?

–simon

You see, Williamson. Even though your blog post violated one of my biggest pet peeves — and would therefore qualify as a post “not worth reading,” as you put it — I still linked to it anyway. You know why? Because I have respect for my readers and allow them to read your post in full to get context.

Given that you’re writing for a “media blog,” I shouldn’t have to give you lessons in Blogging 101.