Bloggasm

This is my first night getting home at a reasonable hour since Monday. I start nights like these with an overly ambitious to-do list and then it’s three hours later and I’m watching Youtube videos while eating oatmeal. So much for productivity.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. Romenesko gets the award for quote of the week: “”60 Minutes” creator Don Hewitt told a lunch crowd in Seattle that he once told Dan Rather to sock Abraham Zapruder in the mouth, “grab his film” recording the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, make a copy, apologize to him and then give it back. Hewitt said he called Rather back to nix the plan.”

2. Hypocrite sighting. Fox promotes a new film that is sympathetic to the immigrant experience and in the preview makes several jabs at CNN’s Lou Dobbs for his anti-illegal immigrant stance. But given that Fox News is a right-wing breeding ground of immigrant hatred, I’m surprised that they didn’t take the opportunity to engage in some cross promotion.

3. Maxim publisher, Felix Dennis, told a journalist that he once killed a man. But after reading about a thousand words of the profile you begin to trust this assertion less and less. Every journalist interviews someone like this once in awhile; a man so hyped on his own amazingness that he’ll shoot out every bullshit claim imaginable to try to shock and awe.

4. Remember the Craigslist hoax that resulted in an entire house being illegally looted? Well, the police nabbed the perpetrators by tracing the IP addresses through Craigslist. The internet wins again.

5. Here’s the first person account of a citizen journalism news room. While some might read this and feel inspired about the future of journalism, I react with a feeling of “bleh.” To me, this account boils down to “convince a bunch of amateurs to write mediocre copy for free and let you profit off it.” Why can’t citizen journalism result in all those amateurs starting their own individual blogs and creating the content themselves?

6. Venture Capitalists are apparently distraught because they can’t find enough websites to dump millions of dollars into. For some reason they’re upset they don’t get to create a new tech bubble of over-valued Web 2.0 companies.

7. Given my latest problems with Google, I’ve been of course thinking a lot about web traffic lately. Given that the internet is a form of media that is more measurable than any other, it’s odd that those measurements are so unscientific. Maybe this sheds light on how idiotic Nielsen and subscription numbers really are for other forms of media.