Bloggasm

Two related pieces of bad news:

Dozens Laid Off At CondeNet

Conde Nast has laid off dozens of people today from CondeNet, the company’s internet division. We hear from one source that 60 people were let go this morning, most in tech, some in marketing. We also hear that an additional 20 staffers were fired from “Conde Connect,” the company’s internal intranet division. Conde itself hasn’t released specific numbers, but these are part of the 5% across-the-board cuts the company ordered two weeks ago.

And:

Digital dealmaker and a dozen others out at Wired:

A quarter of the 50-something employees in Wired.com’s San Francisco newsroom are gone, a source tells us — and with them, the bubbly delusion that Wired would not just report on the transformation of media by technology, but be a part of the revolution as well. The cuts hit Wired’s tech team heavily, though some writers and editors also got pink slips. (CNET reports that 3 out of 28 editorial staffers are gone, but a Wired insider says that the actual number of edit jobs cut is at least six.)

I’ve been pretty apathetic about most the announced cuts in the journalism industry, but it sucks when a company you admire has to go through it. Plus I guess many of us probably hoped that Wired was a publication that had “figured it out” and may lead the way to journalism’s salvation.

It must be incredibly difficult to write a magazine profile about a guy who writes for arguably the best and most prestigious magazine in the country. Jason Zengerle does a pretty good job.

…that Bill Kristol might be out of a job at the New York Times. I need to catch up on my Romenesko reading, obviously.

There’s this thing called The Google, and if you’re going to write a boasting column saying “I told you so” about some cunning prediction you made that eventually turned out to be true, it’s not hard for us to go back through archives and find out that you predicted just the opposite.

Not a single conservative has explained on what basis the LA Times should break the journalist/source privilege by releasing a video they agreed they wouldn’t release. A journalist is supposed to be willing to go to jail in order to protect a confidential source and meet the pre-interview agreements.

So if a journalist isn’t supposed to break that privilege at risk of going to jail, how have conservatives somehow convinced themselves that the LA Times should cave under the weight of their shrieking demands?

They’ve put up rewards for the video as high as $200,000. If the person who shot it wants to come forward with it, then let him or her. I wouldn’t mind seeing the video myself, not that I think it would change my mind on who I’m voting for. But to spend your time beating down on the Times as somehow suppressing the video — when in fact they were the ones that reported on its contents — indicates that said shriekers have no respect or understanding for what journalism is.

The cool thing about election seasons is the fact that during every one the web plucks out a few extraordinary individuals who have used innovation and intelligence to rise above the Web 2.0. noise and become citizen journalist superstars. One such example has been Mayhill Fowler, the unpaid Huffington Post blogger who has managed to break two major campaign stories this year armed with little more than a tape recorder.

Another big winner to emerge from this election is Nate Silver, the statistician behind Fivethirtyeight.com. The Chicago Tribune has a profile of his rags to riches story over here.

It came after reading this from Power Line:

But the mainstream media–which is to say, most reporters and editors who work for “mainstream” news organizations–have no honor and are not interested in truth. They are, as Card says, “the public relations machine of the Democratic Party.” It’s time to accept that fact and move on. Our existing news organizations–the New York Times, the Associated Press, NBC, CNN, CBS, and so on–can’t be reformed, they can only be ignored. It is time for conservatives, libertarians, moderates, and normal citizens who are interested in straightforward reporting of the news to build their own news organizations in competition with the corrupt ones that now exist.

To get an idea of what these clowns consider “real journalism,” go and read this