Jon Keller may have written the nastiest commentary I’ve ever seen about former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld. Keller: “The man is either a world-class liar or in a pathological state of denial.” Whoa! I’d better get my hand off the stove.
Category: Uncategorized
Ooh. Ah.
Unfortunately, this is only available through Cingular and costs $500.
Comment reconsideration
After reading your public comments and private e-mails, I’ve decided not to do anything about comments to Media Nation in the immediate future. I’ve seen several good reasons not to require people to register with Blogger, including:
- At least one correspondent whose judgment I respect thinks Blogger’s terms of service are a legal nightmare. I’ve decided not to worry about it, but I know others may differ.
- Another tells me that requiring registration won’t even eliminate blog spam — a big incentive for making the change.
- At least one third-party solution that I briefly investigated, Haloscan, doesn’t seem to do much.
Now that the semester has begun, I’ll probably let things continue unchanged until spring. After that, I plan to investigate a real third-party solution or possibly a switch to WordPress, which apparently has better comment tools.
Talk preservation societies
You wouldn’t think anyone would want to preserve WRKO Radio (AM 680) as we know it, but three conservative bloggers — Brian Maloney of the Radio Equalizer and Matt and Aaron Margolis of Hub Politics — have started a Web site called Save WRKO.
They write: “Without any apparent business-related reason, … WRKO as we know it is now facing sudden extinction.” Uh, boys. The “business reason” would be that no one listens to WRKO anymore. But don’t worry — Howie Carr’s almost certainly safe. And possible new morning guy Tom Finneran’s a lot more conservative than you seem to think. (Via the Herald’s Messenger Blog.)
Meanwhile, some liberal bloggers have banded together to bring back “Boston’s Progressive Talk.” Never mind that Clear Channel has already changed the programming at AM 1200 and 1430 to Spanish-language shows. This would appear to be a case of the horse long since having exited the barn.
Too funny
Gregg Jackson of Pundit Review recently posted a ponderous item comparing democracy in the United States to that in ancient Athens. Jackson’s so-called point is that we are deteriorating pretty much the way Athens did, as outlined by some 18th-century Scottish historian.
Well, folks, it doesn’t get much better than this: Charles Swift reports that Jackson’s entire item was based on an urban legend that’s been circulating around the Internet. So credulous was Jackson that he didn’t even bother to notice that he’d made it appear there are only 48 states.
Muzzling Valerie Plame
The never-ending story of Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA operative who was exposed by columnist Robert Novak in the summer of 2003, has taken another odd turn.
According to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, the CIA has blocked a book that Plame wants to write on the grounds that it would endanger national security. Incredibly, Plame would not even be allowed to write that she once worked for the CIA, though hundreds, if not thousands, of journalists have reported exactly that.
No doubt the so-called Plame scandal is a big, honking mess. Originally some critics of President Bush (including me) believed the White House had leaked to Novak, Matt Cooper, Judith Miller and others in order to punish Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had proclaimed in a celebrated New York Times op-ed piece that his skeptical report on Iraq’s attempts to obtain uranium from Niger had been ignored.
That theory became less likely when we learned last August — from Isikoff and David Corn of The Nation — that the original leaker was Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state who’d been an internal opponent of the war in Iraq. Nor has it helped that Joe Wilson has proven less than credible (see these Daily Howler posts). Yes, Dick Cheney’s former chief aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, faces charges for his alleged role in outing Plame. But at this point it’s hard to believe we’ll ever get to the bottom of this.
But why censor Valerie Plame? No, a former CIA employee should not be allowed to reveal secrets if doing so would make us less safe. But this seems aimed more at stopping a book that would prove embarrassing to the Bush administration — and it calls to mind this piece of lunacy, from just a few weeks ago.
Toward less anonymity
I’m probably going to require people to register with Blogger before posting comments to Media Nation. I’ve long been uncomfortable with anonymous comments, but have held back from taking this step because most users, after all, will still be anonymous. Here’s why I’ve changed my mind:
- Having a Blogger identity at least gives you some sort of public persona — you’re not anonymous so much as you are pseudonymous. That’s a step up.
- Spammers should be completely blocked from posting. I hope.
- I shouldn’t have to screen comments — they’ll go up immediately, and it will save me time.
I’m going to do this unless I hear a good reason not to. “I don’t want to register” and “I’m afraid Google and the CIA will implant a microchip in my brain” are not good reasons. But if you have a serious objection, I’ll take it seriously.
More: I notice that Atrios, who’s on Blogger, uses Haloscan. Any thoughts?
Blogger blues
Since switching to the upgraded version of Blogger a few weeks ago, I’ve noticed that every time I go to the Dashboard, it says, “1 comment needs to be moderated.” Yet if I do, there’s nothing there. And if there are comments that need to be moderated, I’m still told that there’s one left even after I’ve cleared them out.
Beginning yesterday, it now says, “2 comments need to be moderated.” Same deal.
Has anyone else had this problem?
Please don’t tell me to switch to WordPress. I might, but there’s no way I’ll consider it until summer. Besides, I’d like to see if I can tweak Blogger to my satisfaction before giving up.
Thank God we’re a two-newspaper town*
If he pleads guilty in federal court to obstruction of justice as expected this morning, Massachusetts Biotechnology Council president Thomas M. Finneran would become a felon and could face disbarment — but could also survive as president of the state’s top life-science lobby….
Yesterday, members of the biotechnology council’s board were wrestling with how to deal with a possible guilty plea, forcing them to weigh Finneran’s clout as a leader against the public-relations cost of keeping him as chief spokesman for their industry.
Disgraced former House Speaker Tom Finneran’s expected guilty plea to obstruction of justice charges today will keep him out of jail but has jeopardized his job, pension and future as an attorney.
Sources told the Herald Finneran will leave his $500,000-a-year post at the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council as a result of his pending felony conviction. It was unclear last night whether Finneran will resign or be forced out of the post.
*With apologies, as always, to Boston Magazine, even though it hasn’t resuscitated the feature in quite some time. And thanks to Media Nation reader T.W. for the tipoff.
The “Romenesko of citizen journalism”
One of the more interesting experiments in citizen journalism had its official unveiling this week. Placeblogger, a site put together by Watertown blogger Lisa Williams, is an attempt to link to every local blog in the world, and to make some sense of this growing phenomenon.
What’s a placeblog? It’s a term coined by Williams to describe a Web site that covers a community. A leading example would be her own site, H2otown, which is devoted to all things Watertown. (I profiled Williams and H2otown for CommonWealth Magazine a year ago.)
Placeblogger, a joint project of Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media and Jay Rosen’s PressThink, is a site that offers a directory of every placeblog Williams can find (she thinks there may be as many as 1,000), as well as her own efforts to make order out of chaos. Williams has said her goal is to establish Placeblogger as the “Romenesko of citizen journalism.”
In addition to being able to search for a placeblog near you, you can check out her top 10. New Jersey’s Baristanet, logically enough, leads the list; but anyone other than Williams would have included H2otown somewhere. The left rail is given over to “Placeblogger Journal” — currently a roundup of placeblogs in the New Orleans area — and “Placeblogger Headlines,” an automated feed of the good, the bad and the ridiculous.
The middle of the screen features a blog by Williams, which right now is fronting a commentary on Kearny on the Web, a placeblog in Kearny, N.J., that posted a video of a local teacher caught denying evolution and damning his non-Christian students to hell. The right rail has tools that let you find — or add — a placeblog.
“There are really way more of these than anyone knows,” Williams said at the Center for Citizen Media’s “unconference” at Harvard last August, where the Placeblogger project was first announced.
Are placebloggers journalists? Well, yes and no. And, of course, it depends on the blog. Williams defines a placeblog as being “about the lived experience of a place.” The blog may “commit random acts of jouranlism,” she adds, but it’s not a newspaper — not even an electronic version of a newspaper.
In November, at the unveiling of the beta site at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Williams described Placeblogger as “one-stop shopping for what citizen journalism really looks like — kiss stale arguments and useless theorizing goodbye.”
Among her more intriguing ideas is to develop a standard method of “geotagging” so that it will be easier to find placeblogs. There could be a placeblog right in your city or town, but if you don’t already know about it, you could have a hard time finding it. Geotagging, in Williams’ view, could help placebloggers sell advertising as well.
Williams’ take on placeblogs sometimes seems overly modest — she is a self-described newspaper junkie, and she’s always careful to point out that she doesn’t want to see placeblogs replace newspapers.
Yet occasionally her larger hopes shine through. Last semester she spoke to my Journalism of the Web students, and talked about placeblogging as an entrepreneurial opportunity for young journalists. Why not? When I was a recent J-school graduate, friends and I talked about several ideas for launching community papers. We didn’t do so mainly because it was too expensive.
By contrast, you can launch a placeblog virtually for free, with the hope that, eventually, you can sell enough advertising to make a living. I would think that an aggressive young journalist who knows how to write, and can post photos, video and sound, could give her chain-owned community weekly fits. And there’s no need to settle for just “random acts of journalism,” either.
Placeblogger is a fascinating project, and well worth keeping a close eye on.
Photo: Lisa Williams announces the Placeblogger project at the Center for Citizen Media “unconference” last August. Photo by Steve Garfield; reproduced under a Creative Commons license.