Bloggasm

Vanity Fair has an interesting article about a war currently going on in the liberal blogosphere — a war that is most visible at Daily Kos because it has so many writers. I’m speaking, of course, of the war between Clinton supporters and Obama supporters. And since we all know the success stories of Obama’s online campaign, it isn’t too hard to guess which side is outshouting the other.

The weekend is so close I can taste it. Despite the fact that I did almost no internet surfing today, I somehow have managed to amass quite a number of links. I must have been a web junkie yesterday. Here is some media-related news for your amusement:

1. Apparently back in 2006, Senator Joe Lieberman accused his Democratic challenger Ned Lamont of hacking his website. Well, it turns out the FBI has known for almost two years that this claim was complete BS.

2. A NY Times reporter embedded in Iraq gives his first-hand account of what it’s like to be held up at the purgatory-like checkpoints and the paranoia that journalists over there face every day.

3. Want to hear something bizarre? Rush Limbaugh’s fans listen to his ads more often than they listen to him. Of course, sometimes they’re doing both at the same time, since talk radio hosts often do mini-infomercials themselves. Does anybody else find it funny when they do this? It’s hilarious to hear Limbaugh puff up his manly war chest during his show, only to become a company’s bitch two minutes later so he can shill for its product.

4. Is it wrong to get off on pornography that uses the Holocaust for titillation? “In early-1960s Israel pornographic, possibly anti-Semitic novels that detailed sensational tales of the torture and rape of male concentration camp prisoners by curvaceous female Nazi guards rapidly rose from marginal pulp reading to mass-market popularity.”

5. Possibly some good news. Bilal Hussein, the AP photographer who was detained and held without charges by the US government for two years, may soon be released. An Iraqi judicial committee made the order. Predictably, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin isn’t happy after she spent so much time being used as a propaganda mouthpiece to try to frame him as a terrorist in the public eye. Malkin should really deduce that when the military resorts to anonymously feeding information to a right-wing hack, they really don’t have a leg to stand on.

6. Not long ago I went off on a rant about how PR people are terrible at their jobs, and based it on my own experience dealing with them. Since writing that post, for some reason my dealings with PR people have improved greatly. I don’t know if it’s because they read the post or because I’m starting to attract a higher caliber of marketers. Media Shift talks about the Web 2.0 version of a press release and how journalists and bloggers are becoming unneeded now that PR newswires can shoot your press release directly into Google News and other news aggregators like Techmeme.

This is my first Sunday that I have almost completely to myself (most weekends I travel to see my girlfriend an hour away) and I’ve taken the opportunity to do some house cleaning, both figuratively and literally. Part of that house cleaning involves shooing these media-related links out the door.

1. Have you ever wondered the difference between marketing, advertising, PR, and branding? Well, now you have this hilarious illustration to spell it out for you.

2. For weeks now, Tor Books has been giving away free ebooks of its print titles. Every week a new ebook is sent out to their mailing list. What’s most interesting (to me) about these mailings is that some of the authors are posting updates on their book sales and how giving away free ebooks affected their print sales. Tobias Buckell, whose novel Crystal Rain was recently given away in the mailing, posts graphs that show a recent spike in sales after the giveaway.

3. On a slightly related note, remember how Google has completely fucked me over in its recent indexing? Well, to find my Bloggasm article linked above about Tor’s ebooks, I Googled the words “Bloggasm” and “tor books” assuming that that post would come up first. I ended up having to skip through two or three pages of search results before I found it. Fucking ridiculous. And you know what showed up first in the search results before the actual article? All the dozens of blog posts that linked to the article.

4. This article makes me extremely jealous. It’s about a newspaper media critic who took a buyout and now runs a media website full time. My pipe dreams have become this guy’s reality.

5. More and more social networking scandals are breaking every week, these sites are likely going to create a whole new field of study for sociologists. This week’s scandal comes to us via New York, an article about school systems struggling to respond to libelous teacher attacks on Facebook.

6. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald tries his hand at satire by summarizing a recent AP profile on Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

I actually got a chance today to comb through my RSS feeds at length, so for once you might find some of these links to not be a week out of date. Either way, here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. I’ve long said that the reporting on the demise of the newspaper industry rarely contains any real context because it tends to ignore the journalism industry as a whole. Though newspapers are laying off reporters, we’re seeing an increase in the number of journalists who either blog full-time or write for other online venues for a living. Gawker has published a chart of newspaper revenue over the last few decades and as you’ll see it adds even more context to the equation. Chris Anderson explains the chart at length.

2. Here is a brilliant account of the tension and parasitic relationship that website owners have with Google. Considering I’m experiencing my own falling out period with Google right now, the piece rang especially true for me. I’ll probably have a longer post on this later.

3. I’ve noticed that hard-core Digg users have formed odd, cyclical alliances with certain political figures or themes. At first, you couldn’t visit the social bookmarking site without coming across a pro- Ron Paul story. Then it was nonstop pro- Obama articles. Now, on a slightly related and perhaps more bizarre note, we’re seeing intense anti-Clinton articles making it to the front page. Here is a good example. How do these trends begin, and why do they suddenly end for a new tide of political stories?

4. I don’t find Maureen Dowd funny at all, but this post explaining her writing sure made me laugh.

5. It’s kind of neat when every now and then we get to see a Gawker Media blogger go and bite the hand that feeds him by attacking his own boss on the blog. You don’t see things like that in traditional media outlets. Look here to see a Valleywag contributor complain and viciously attack his boss for a new round of pay cuts.

6. There have been a number of news stories showing that CNN has been winning the ratings game against Fox News, something that would have been unthinkable two years ago. I have a love/hate relationship with cable news, but when I do tune in I usually stick with MSNBC.

7. A South Carolina senator is proposing a tax surcharge on purchased pornography, saying that the money should go toward managing sex offenders. Because we all know the completely made up connections between looking at porn and going on to become a sex offender.

I’m certainly not the first one to ask this question: If either Obama or Clinton had claimed — on four separate occasions — that Shiite-led Iran was taking in and training Sunni-led Al Qaeda, wouldn’t it be played out over and over on an endless loop in mainstream media outlets?

Yet when McCain does this, not only does the media barely cover it, the reporters start making excuses for him when they do mention it. This is absolutely sickening, especially as the press — who don’t even try to hide the fact that they’ve been courting McCain — paints him as a foreign policy expert.

It’s a light list today, but here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. After months of rumors that it was going to happen, Tucker Carlson gets the ax.

2. How internet alt porn turned into a big business.

3. Clinton’s campaign sends out a negative press release attacking Obama. Then Obama’s campaign uses a clever way to respond to it.

4. Black reporter and cameraman show up and report the news and racist rednecks attack them while shouting racial slurs.

Every now and then I’ll receive an email at my Bloggasm account with a “this is off the record” thrown into it. So far I haven’t actually reprinted any of these emails, but I’ve always been annoyed with the person’s blatant disregard for what the statement “off the record” actually means.

Placing something off the record is not a one-way street. It is a mutual agreement between journalist and interview subject, and in best case scenarios should be avoided at all costs. In fact, there was at least one instance that I was working on an article for Bloggasm and I knew the interview subject I was interviewing might try to take parts of his reply email off the record. To see how I prevented this, here are some excerpts from the email I sent him:

Hey [redacted],

My name is Simon Owens and I write for bloggasm.com, a site that covers online media. I’m working on a piece about [redacted], and I was wondering if you’d go on the record with some questions about it

And then later in the email:

Please keep any answers on the record.

Thanks for any input you can give.

–Simon

By doing this, I wouldn’t have felt the slightest bit of guilt had I reprinted anything the person had announced was off the record.

I’m writing about this because Obama advisor Samantha Power just resigned because she was quoted in The Scotsman for calling Hillary Clinton a “monstor,” a quote that she tried to retroactively take off the record. But since there had been no mutual agreement Gerri Peev, the journalist, refused her request and printed it anyway.

The most shocking thing out of the entire incident is that when Peev went onto Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show, Carlson spent the entire interview lecturing the British journalist over ethics:

CARLSON: What — she wanted it off the record. Typically, the arrangement is if someone you’re interviewing wants a quote off the record, you give it to them off the record. Why didn’t you do that?

To which Peev responded:

PEEV: Are you really that acquiescent in the United States? In the United Kingdom, journalists believe that on or off the record is a principle that’s decided ahead of the interview.

And then later:

PEEV: If this is the first time that candid remarks have been published about what one campaign team thinks of the other candidate, then I would argue that your journalists aren’t doing a very good job of getting to the truth. Now I did not go out of my way in any way, shape or form to hurt Miss Power. I believe she’s an intelligent and perfectly affable woman. In fact, she’s — she is incredibly intelligent so she — who knows she may have known what she was doing.

She regretted it. She probably acted with integrity. It’s not for me to decide one way or the other whether she did the right thing. But I did not go out and try to end her career.

I must say, Carlson really showed his true colors in that interview. It really is silly how much effort American journalists will go to to protect their government sources. This is why it’s almost impossible to do any real journalism without using anonymous sources, something which brings in its own truckload of problems when done too often.

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Related posts:
1. So long Mitt Romney
2. When a CNN correspondent writes you email