As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Principles of Consumption”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)
Chapter 1: Principles of “Consumption”
2008
These Anonymous Critics ARE Cowards:
The AP reports, “Palin derides anonymous critics on Fox as cowards,” a reference to a recent Fox News segment in which a correspondent relayed a variety of negative attacks from, he said, members of the McCain campaign staff against Sarah Palin. more…
Greeks Bearing Blogs, and Brickbats:
Traditional journalists, and traditional journalism educators, remain pretty suspicious of blogging in lots of places. But if what I heard in two days of conferencing in Athens and Thessaloniki (the latter is Greece’s second-largest city) is an indication of the overall situation, there’s a larger-than-usual gulf between older and newer media in the land where inquiry and reason helped shape Western culture. more…
It’s Gambling, not Gaming, and the NY Times Gets That Right
In a long investigative piece on John McCain and the gambling industry – “For McCain and Team, a Host of Ties to Gambling” — the New York Times has done something noteworthy beyond excellent reporting. It doesn’t adopt the misleading word “gaming” that the gambling industry prefers to use in describing itself. more…
Crowdsourcing Parliament Debates
Take a look at the great “Video speech matching” project at TheyWorkForYou.com. They’re combining BBC video of the British House of Commons and official text transcripts, and asking people to match keywords and phrases with the videos, to create a time-stamped archive of important debates. more…
April Fools and News Credibility
At a conversation site where I spend some time, someone noted a Twitter posting from earlier today — well worth repeating:
What I like about April Fool’s Day: one day a year we’re asking whether news stories are true. It should be all 365.
2007
Digital Libraries
I’m at the Digital Library Federation’s Fall Forum in Philadelphia, giving a keynote talk this afternoon. These folks are doing important work to bring us into a digital future in ways that honor traditional library values and practices. more…
Media Literacy Lesson: TripAdvisor
The Wall Street Journal does a service this weekend with “Deconstructing TripAdvisor,” a long article (unfortunately behind the newspaper’s pay-wall) that helps explain the popularity — and the flaws — of TripAdvisor, which for many people (including me) more…
Missing the Point Department
Time Magazine’s Richard Schickel, riffing off a New York Times story about literary bloggers that ran several weeks ago, goes berserk in “Not everybody’s a critic,” an LA Times op-ed piece that adds to the amazingly uninformed backlash against citizen media more…
How Press Failed on Iraq
If you missed the live program, as I did, you can watch “Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War” — a brilliant documentary that everyone who cares about the future of American journalism should see. more…
Gaming the Ratings, Net Style
The Personal Democracy Forum’s techPresident site reports convincingly in “YouTube Gets Pwned: Obama’s Numbers Don’t Add Up” that the viewership numbers for an Obama campaign video are being inflated by people gaming the system. more…
Food and Loathing
Sites like Yelp are inherently untrustworthy when it comes to individual postings. They gain a bit of credibility when the weight of the comments runs strongly in one direction or another — though not all that much, because of the anonymity and, one suspects, the way comment-driven sites may be gamed by determined nay-sayers or people who try to artificially pump up an establishment’s rating with the equivalent of spam. more…
Some Lessons from the “Big Sister” Anti-Clinton Video
Amazingly, the man who concocted the anti-Hillary remix of the old Apple 1984 commercial is proud of himself. more…
Be Nice, Now, Says White House Press Corps
The White House correspondents were embarrassed last year when Stephen Colbert had the temerity to challenge — with biting wit — the arrogance of the Bush administration and the docile non-performance of the press corps that, almost without exception, has served as a secretarial pool instead of watchdogs of the public interest. more…
When Pigs Fly
Look. Every single news organization sale in the past several years has included assurances from the new management that there would be little or no staff cuts. Each time — without exception, as far as I can tell — precisely the opposite has happened. more…
They Take it Seriously? Oh, Sure
Several weeks ago, UCLA acknowledged that some of its computers had been hacked. Obeying a state law, it notified more than 800,000 people that their personal data, including Social Security numbers, might have ended up in the wrong hands. more…
2006
When Broadcasts are Suitable Only for Children
The blue-noses of America want to turn broadcasting into a medium suitable only for children, and they’re having good luck with this campaign. To achieve their ends, they’ve turned the Federal Censorship, uh, Communications Commission into an agency whose job is frequently to assess big fines against broadcasters for all kinds of alleged violations of decency. Broadcasters, at long last, have begun to fight back, but late in the game. more…
Debunking Ridiculous Numbers
Carl Bialik at the Wall Street Journal, aka, The Numbers Guy, torpedos the nutty claims about a video that a marketing firm estimated had been viewed 900 million times more…
Trusting Who, Exactly?
Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters, gave a speech called “Trust in the Age of Citizen Journalism” — much to ponder here. Some of it is indisputable; some is definitely not so, such as his claim that “There is no local” in the Internet age. more…
News Organizations’ Inept Tactics and PR
As I write this, scores of employees at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, are sitting by their phones at home. They’re waiting to learn, as pre-announced layoffs loom, whether they still have jobs. more…
Department of Imprecision
This Washington Post story, “Slain Journalist’s Family Files $20 Million Lawsuit,” repeats a too-common failing: citing the amount demanded by lawyers who’ve filed a lawsuit as if the number means anything at all. It means basically zip. Lawsuits can ask for any amount of money. more…
Praising Deception
Wired Magazine’s article about the YouTube “lonelygirl” phenomenon, “The Secret World of Lonelygirl,” is full of revealing detail. But in the end it’s a paean to deception — the hoodwinking of folks as part of a business plan. more…
Manipulating Search Engines for Political Advantage
This phenomenon is about the nature of Google as much as the nature of politics. Pious “wish they wouldn’t” statements from the company don’t carry much weight when Google itself makes such things possible. more…
Skepticism Must Define Modern Media Literacy
My friend David Weinberger, an author and deep thinker, once updated the famous Andy Warhol line for the era of the blog. Weinberger said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people.” more…
Latest Online Ruse Shows Need for Caution
The entertainment industry is not known for its ethical behavior. This is just one more example. more…
Apparent PR Sleaze
The Wall Street Journal asks, “Where Did That Video Spoofing Gore’s Film Come From? The answer, it appears, is a PR firm that also represents Exxon Mobil more…
Traditional Media’s Latest Credibility Hits
After its ridiculous cover headline claiming that Digg.com’s founder has “made $60 million” — based on valuations, not cashed in for real money, by unnamed people “in the know” — Business Week is still refusing to acknowledge its goof, as Scott Rosenberg’s notes in a trenchant post more…
*Accountability is a Reader’s Choice, Too
Several misunderstandings are contained in this piece. First, the NYT doesn’t always “take action” — though it’s gotten much better in that regard in recent years. more…
A Shameless CEO Ducks a Journalist’s Questions
One of the memorable moments during the excellent Fortune Brainstorm 2006 conference (probably the best organized such gathering I’ve ever attended) came this morning during a panel about corporate America’s deservedly troubled image. And one reason that this was such a good session was that a journalist rose to the occasion. more…
Is It Journalism? Does it Pretend to Be?
The question here is whether YourHub — operated by the Rocky Mountain News — is giving people a way to disguise advertising as journalism. It’s a serious issue, because how the site answers the question will help determine its future credibility. more…
Anonymity, Attacks and Credibility
No one can defend the slimy trolls who take such pleasure in polluting cyberspace. But we can resolve to ignore them unless they cross the line into outright libel. A thick skin goes with this territory. more…
Department of Growing a Thicker Skin
In “Blog Rage“, Jim Brady, editor of the Washington Post’s online operations, asks, “How did it feel to be mugged by the blogosphere?” Not good, he reports. more…
2005
‘Blogger Relations’ — or More Spin?
Issue Dynamics has done some excellent work over the years. But it also recently made news — though not enough — for one of the ways it works on behalf of at least some clients. As eWeek reported in February, a subsidiary of the firm issued a report denouncing municipal wireless installations without making clear that big telecom firms, which vehemently oppose municipal wireless systems, are among the firm’s chief funders. (See also Glenn Fleishman’s “sock puppets” piece about this.) more…
Thin Skins in the Blog World, Too
Mainstream journalists are congenitally thin-skinned; insecurity seems almost a precondition to employment in a big-city newsroom. This has always been a notable irony, given that the journalism business routinely shoots people off their pedestals (often after putting them there in the first place). more…