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Archive for January, 2009

Dispatches from the Culture11 Wars

Published by William Beutler on January 29, 2009 in Beltway media, Bloggingheads.tv, Conservative movement, Journalism, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Startups and William Beutler. 8 Comments


Some events come as a shock to the system, even as they don’t especially surprise. (Wait, that’s how I began yesterday’s post. Well, this one also mentions Josh Treviño, and here at Blog P.I. we are all about serendipity.) The shuttering of Culture11, billed as kind of a center-right Slate, is one of them.

The website debuted in late summer 2008 and mostly featured writers about my age and no more than one or two degrees of Kevin Bacon away, writing mostly about whatever they wanted. I thought the project had merit: as someone of a center-right disposition who listens to college music, watches art films and reads literary fiction, I wanted it to succeed. The best explanation for why Culture11 was important, I thought, was delivered last November by features editor Conor Friedersdorf on Bloggingheads.tv. However, just because I wanted it to succeed did not mean that I thought that it did, or even that I read it very much.

Likewise, the name was a definite stumbling block.* I’m not sure what Culture11 was supposed to mean, but it had the unfortunate connotation for me of 9/11, which in turn made me think the site was supposed to be or comment upon something like “a cultural 9/11″ and I just didn’t understand. At least something like “Slate” or “Salon” conjures something: a place for writing and a place for talking, respectively. And while “culture” is interesting, it always seems less so when one calls it that. I don’t know why, but let me know if you do.

While it’s hardly the only journalism concern cutting back or going under this week, it is probably attracting the most discussion of any right now. Which means it’s high time for a roundup:

First off, Culture11 founder David Kuo, in his farewell post:

We raised a certain amount of money last year predicated on the assumption we would raise more money last year. Then the Fall’s fall occurred and we stretched money as long and far as we could without incurring any debts. With no new money in the door the board decided the most prudent thing to do was suspend business operations.

From NYC-based Patrol Magazine:

There were “signs,” says one source who spoke to a Culture11 editor yesterday, but the announcement was a shock. The financial backers lost money in the downturn, and suddenly decided the expensive Culture11 needed to be profitable. (The site has, in its five months of operation, only occasionally displayed small ads.) How things proceeded to an overnight shutdown, we don’t know. If you worked at C11 or know more, feel free to share.

One-off contributor and Culture11 fan Will Collins:

Culture11 was a pretty special publication. The editors gave new writers a shot, published authors from across the ideological spectrum, and provided something of a one-stop shop for great blogging. But beyond all that, I felt close to the writers, who always did their level best to respond to interesting comments, reply to our emails, and even solicit reader submissions. So much of this new media bullshit is hype and snake oil salesmanship, but at Culture11, technology actually enhanced the relationship between publication and audience.

Another dedicated reader, blogging under the name Freddie:

If you Google “Culture11″ you’ll find a ton of entries that say “My article at Culture11″. That’s because, in addition to tons of content from established (and David Brooks approved!) writers, the editors went out of their way to find young or undiscovered talent and give them a forum to write in. It made for a much livelier and more complete discussion, and was a real credit to the imagination of the architects of the site and to the willingness of the editors to let quality rule and give whoever was honest and well-spoken a shot.

The man who defies political categorization, Andrew Sullivan:

I have a feeling that Culture 11 will one be remembered in the same way that Seven Days, the briefly brilliant New York City magazine that Adam Moss edited in the late 80s, is now remembered. One day, a conservative journal will emerge that is able to break from the stifling, clammy orthodoxy of today’s post-Buckley National Review and the often unhinged neocon catechism of the Weekly Standard. When it does, its editors will be able to look back and say that Culture 11 opened up the frontier.

And the aforementioned Josh Treviño:

Culture11’s subject matter was perfect for, say, summer 2000: heavy on pop and principles, light on policy and prescriptions. But it launched in summer 2008, when the national conversation was focused on war and economics. In that sense, it was marginalized from the start, and stayed that way: today, for example, the single largest item on its front page concerns the Culture11 “American Idol Watch Party.” This may be good fun, but it’s not particularly in touch with the national zeigeist — nor even the zeitgeist of those who read online publications like Culture11. All this said, it’s reasonable to assume that in the fullness of time, those zeigeists would come around: perhaps in spring 2010, the national mood will be ready to reflect upon the conservatism of reality television.

This probably explains a lot why I didn’t read the site much. And there are bigger problems with the project as undertaken, which Mike Riggs at the City Paper explains at some length.

It’s always seemed to me that a center-right pop culture website would have to be incidentally so, just as Slate doesn’t usually make a point of being center-left. Which brings me back to my old lament about the state of conservative journalism.

A change of culture, ironically, will have to take place for that to happen, and I don’t see that just yet.

P.S. In a post at the still slightly active Culture11 blog, Joe Carter graciously notes my comment on the name of the site and explains to my satisfaction just what the name was all about.


___
*Prior to launch, I had suggested an alternate name to an editor I didn’t know too well. The original name was originally titled “Liberty Wire”, which sounds like an Associated Press for Ron Paul voters; my idea was “Redhead”, a nod to its espoused conservative, intellectual and cultural inclinations. Someone later pointed out the dot com for that name went to a porn site (a claim I cannot verify this morning, although I promise I have tried).

Could Going to the Blogs Save the New York Times from Going to the Dogs?

Published by William Beutler on January 28, 2009 in Asymmetrical Media, Conservative movement, Newspaper Columnists, Newspapers, Rightosphere and William Beutler. 4 Comments

Some events come as a shock to the system, even as they don’t especially surprise. Bill Kristol’s unceremonious sacking — “This is William Kristol’s last column.” — was such an event. Sure, Memeorandum filled up with commentary in the 24 hours after said last column was published, but this came as no surprise. Even Kristol himself had telegraphed indifference about whether his one-year contract would be renewed.

And so begins another search for another voice somewhere to the right of at least David Brooks.* That is, assuming the Times even chooses to do so: the Times had no self-identified conservative columnist for a number of years before hiring Brooks and it’s not necessarily a given that another will be hired on. Libertarian John Tierney himself spent a few months on the op-ed page before deciding he’d rather write about science anyway. If we’re judging by Kristol’s tour, the Times needs to scratch a bit deeper and find a voice from someone not standing in line for the Acela Express.

I’m reminded of the Times’ decision a few years back to move its opinion columnists behind a pay wall, an experiment called TimesSelect that proved to be mercifully brief. I suppose the idea was that because Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd et. al. were the Times’ most familiar faces they were therefore its the most valuable asset, which people would pay for. They assumed wrong, and in fact got it exactly backward. Newsgathering and reporting is still newspapers’ “killer app” and if anything, the Times should have been charging for that**; meanwhile, the value of opinion journalism has been in free fall since approximately 2001. There are many pundits who arose in the blogosphere, without first working in journalism (although some were later acquired). Kevin Drum, Ed Morrissey, Bob Somerby, Rick Moran, Jim Henley, Megan McArdle, Glenn Greenwald and Steven Den Beste come to mind.

So maybe the New York Times should be looking out into the blogosphere for its next columnist. Aziz Poonwalla, himself a veteran blogger, had the same idea already and has put a recommendation to it:

I am of course biased because he is my friend, but I think that Joshua Treviño meets and exceeds the criteria above and would in fact be the ideal advocate for the conservative movement in the Obama era. Josh was a speechwriter for the Bush Administration, served in the Army, and had a brief stint at the Pacific Research Institute, a mid-level conservative think tank. Josh was one of the original conservative bloggers, including founding RedState.com (though no longer associated with them). He currently is running his own media consultant firm, and has had numerous media appearances on television and guest columns at National Review.

Seriously, why not? Although I should note that I count myself as a friend of Treviño’s as well, I think this is an excellent suggestion. Poonwalla mentions Treviño as “one of the original conservative bloggers” but doesn’t elaborate, so I will. Treviño was the proprietor of Tacitus.org, an intellectually conservative-minded blog that somehow managed to attract a left-leaning readership. I’d think the New York Times would have to consider that a real advantage. He is not widely known at present, sure, but that can be chalked up as merely an accident of him not writing for the New York Times. Not yet, anyway.

To those who say: “Who cares about the New York Times?” I say: I’m sure it feels good to say, but that’s no reason to abandon a chance to tell your story. And to those who say the Times is doomed anyway, I say: there are other things the New York Times can learn from the web, but those will have to wait for another post.

*And it would be perhaps uncharitable of me to note that I found Brooks rather more interesting in The Atlantic and Weekly Standard, where he had freedom to devote more time and resources to a topic, but I don’t mean to be uncharitable.

**I forget who suggested a temporary pay wall for news, such that corporate and institutional subscribers would pay to get the news first and then all the rest of us free riders could read it later, but it made sense. Reporting is expensive, so get a return on it.

How I Spent Inauguration Day

Published by William Beutler on January 25, 2009 in Barack Obama, District Politics, George W. Bush, Hotline, Television, Twitter, White House '08 and William Beutler. 3 Comments

Four years ago when I was writing for The Hotline, I both had to work on Inauguration Day and also got out early to try attending the event itself. This year I did neither, thanks to no longer having to write against a daily deadline (while this post may be a few days late, that doesn’t mean it is in fact “late”) and my experience of getting caught in a massive, immovable crowd several blocks from the Mall and never even came close to seeing or hearing anything more memorable than a bunch of International ANSWER people waving homemade “BUSH = HITLER” signs.

Though I had successive waves of friends in town this year both to cover the crazy scene around the Inauguration Weekend and to participate in it, I myself decided to play the part of a jaded Washingtonian familiar with big crowds on the Mall and especially in the Metro, and took up a comfortable spot in front of my 65″ DLP and behind my 17″ MBP open to TweetDeck. Here are two representative shots, and the reason this post even exists.

     

This is the part where I think I am supposed to say something inspiring about the interconnectedness that results from the speed and ingenuity of modern technology, and how this has been said for a long time but with Twitter going mainstream and digital/HD television becoming the norm now the difference of degree almost itself becomes a difference of kind, well, I’m not sure I have the wherewithal to describe this as intricately as I would like. But you can give it your best shot in the comments.

Andrew Sullivan Finally Moves to the Left

Published by William Beutler on January 14, 2009 in Barack Obama, Beltway media, Internecine Battles, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Seriously, Warblogging and William Beutler. 15 Comments

The buzz-elect is all about Barack Obama’s various meetings with various groups of Beltway intellectuals in the past 24 hours: Last night he dined with conservative writers at George Will’s house, and today he met with the liberals. Here’s the post as it headlined Marc Ambinder’s blog at The Atlantic earlier this afternoon:

Wait a minute, who was that first name on the list? Could that really be Andrew Sullivan? As in “conservatism of doubt” Andrew Sullivan? Author of “The Conservative Soul” Andrew Sullivan? The same Andrew Sullivan whose strident advocacy for the Iraq war made him one of the most influential voices among the online conservative commentariat?

Who among us could ever have imagined the day would come when Andrew Sullivan would break with his ideological compatriots and move to the left? I find it hard to believe myself, but if there’s one source we should be able to trust for the ideological affiliation of a blogger at The Atlantic, shoouldn’t it be a reporter at The Atlantic?

Barack Obama and Wikipedia are More Alike Than You Think

Published by William Beutler on January 12, 2009 in Barack Obama, E-mail, Mitt Romney, Online Fundraising, Swag, Tech Blogosphere, Website Design, White House '08, White House '12, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 15 Comments

I don’t know if most readers here would think that Wikipedia’s best-covered politician and Google’s best-listed website are all that similar, but I don’t think you can write it off entirely.

My reason for thinking so began after Mickey Kaus checked his e-mail inbox late last week, and asked:

Will Obama ever stop asking me for money? Or is it all fundraising, all the way out? … Not only is he still milking his supporters for money, he’s doing it in an obnoxious way, no? “Join us at the inauguration” turns out to mean “pay for other people to party at the inauguration you’re not going to”!

He’s got a point there. I’ve been on Obama’s list for more than a year now — my first post of 2008 was about how Obama’s campaign sent the year’s first campaign e-mail that New Years Day wee morning hours — and I’ve been getting (and half-paying attention to) them ever since. Here is my unofficial count (and anyone is welcome to do a recount) of the e-mails “Paid for by Obama for America” I have received in 2009, followed by that ubiquitous red button:

  • Join us at the Inauguration, Jan. 3, Obama for America
  • Our first guest, Jan. 6, Michelle Obama
  • Be there for history, Jan. 7, Bill Clinton
  • Deadline: Midnight, Jan. 8, Barack Obama
  • Re: Midnight deadline, Jan. 8, David Plouffe
  • Your call to service, Jan. 12, Michelle Obama

It’s a permanent campaign, all right.

He’s not President of the United States yet, I’ll give him that. But you would tend to think his fundraising goals have been satisfied — especially since his campaign let departing staffers have an extra month’s paycheck, plus their laptops and BlackBerrys (and a tip of the hat to Research in Motion’s PR department for getting reporters following AP style to not spell it “Blackberries”).

And you know what this reminds me of, as it might not remind most inside the Beltway? It’s not altogether unlike Wikipedia’s constant fundraising. As recently as December, Valleywag criticized the Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales-led on-site (always a banner across the top) fundraising drive mostly for being annoying and evidentiary of Wales being a poor leader of the website with the most comprehensive description of Regional variations of barbecue.

By early January, however, it turned out that Wikipedia had beaten its 2008 fundraising goals to the tune of $6.2 million. In the interests of disclosure as well as narrative, I’ll say that I donated as much to the Wikimedia Foundation this winter as I’ve donated in any one instance since Hurricane Katrina. So with that said, as I’ve been editing Wikipedia recently, I have often noticed this banner at the top of each article:

And what happens when you click on it? You come to a page with a letter of thanks from Wales. It looks like this:

Okay, so maybe Valleywag has a point about Wales as the public face of the website with the most informative biography of Portland, Oregon home furnishings salesman and television pitchman Tom Peterson.

And then, your eye drifts down the page to see this:

The permanent campaign, indeed.

P.S. I haven’t even mentioned that also this afternoon, Mitt Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC was asking $100 for this:

Don’t even get me started.

The SoapBlox Network: Only Sleeping?

Published by William Beutler on January 9, 2009 in 50 State Strategy, Netroots, Tech Blogosphere, Website Design and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Forty-eight hours after the big meltdown, the blogs of SoapBlox are far from dead. In fact, of the sites Blog P.I. reported being offline on Wednesday morning, all are back online, archives seemingly intact.

As it turns out, the only website that seems any different is SoapBlox itself. Gone, for the moment, is the lengthy blogroll of mostly state-based liberal (and one conservative) blogs, as well as the archives. That’s too bad, because they provided some insight to the haphazard operation of Paul “pacified” Preston. One of the last posts in December featured a harried Preston threatening to shut down the blogs of any site operators more than two months behind on their bills. No word on if he followed through, and unfortunately the last year of SoapBlox is unfortunately missing from the Wayback Machine.

Instead, the most recent post is itself now twenty-four hours old — a press release from Preston not quite admitting he’d overreacted but sounding altogether more rational than midweek. Here’s an excerpt:

At this time, all services are returned to normal.

We have many wonderful people now volunteering to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Clean servers are being created, and existing sites will be migrated shortly on to these more secure servers.

Discussions are currently underway on how to best provide the SoapBlox service, continually improve it, and keep it funded in a way that keeps everything running smoothly. Soon we will be establishing a way for you to help provide whatever you are willing to keep SoapBlox–and a large chunk of the progressive blogosphere–safe, secure and constantly improving.

Please monitor SoapBlox.net for future announcements, and feel free to contact us at soapblox@gmail.com with any ideas or suggestions you might have. Everything is on the table.

I apologize with all of my heart for the events of the past two days–from the lack of proper communication, to not seeking help that so many of you are willing to give earlier.

And what of the rumors that site passwords across the network had been compromised?
Beats me. I could be wrong, or they could be pressing ahead regardless. If I hear anything more definitive, Blog P.I. will cover it.

P.S. Thanks to Owen Thomas at Valleywag/Gawker for the link. He closes his post on the subject with this:

I suspect [liberal bloggers'] built-in biases against market mechanisms played a role. SoapBlox’s customers never bothered to ask whether Preston really had the financial resources to support it. That’s far too capitalist a question for the left-wing blogosphere to have pondered.

I don’t think I would chalk this up to antipathy to capitalism. I’d say it’s more a combination of deficiency of savvy and casual clubbiness. To paraphrase Hannibal Lecter, how do we learn to blog? We learn to blog from what we read every day. Paul Preston is no Buffalo Bill, but it would behoove bloggers to look more closely at whom they’re trusting with the very websites that makes them bloggers.

The Day the SoapBlox Network Died

Published by William Beutler on January 7, 2009 in 50 State Strategy, Netroots, Website Design and William Beutler. 10 Comments

SoapBlox is one of the more important but less heralded platforms in the progressive blogosphere’s infrastructure. Or, it was. If you visit the main SoapBlox website today, you will see this post at the very top:

SoapBlox is Dead
by: pacified
January 07, 2009 at 08:15:46 MST

It was a good ride, but it’s over.

Thanks for all the fish.

All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don’t have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it.

So I hope the Hackers are happy.

If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.

Consider this the “We’re Out of Business” post.

Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox’s ISP then takes the servers off line.

We do not know when they will come back online.

We do not know if they will come back online.

This is unprecedented, I think. TypePad suffered a particularly nasty DDOS attack in 2006, but it lived to tell the tale, and is none the worse for it as far as I’m aware. And normally I don’t quote blog posts in full, but from the tone of the message, I wouldn’t count on it remaining up for long.

SoapBlox, for the uninitated, is two things: community blogging software and a weblog hosting company. Right now, any blog hosted by the company is down and is not coming back, at least until the owners migrate their sites to a new content management system, such as Scoop (on which SoapBlox was based and had largely replaced) or the widely-used, open-source WordPress.

Some of the sites offline already are among the most prominent in state-level blogospheres, including Blue Hampshire, Blue Jersey, Blue Mass Group, and Left in the West. Also down is Pam’s House Blend, which has a national audience.

Blogs using SoapBlox but hosted elsewhere are, for the moment, still up. However, I’m hearing that the software has been irretrievably hacked: security can no longer be guaranteed, for anyone. If true, this means that hackers have private information — including passwords and IP addresses — from supposedly anonymous accounts on some or all of the blogs using the software.

Among the sites still up but presumably compromised are Burnt Orange Report, Square State, The Albany Project, and nationally-read netroots blogs including My Left Wing and Open Left.

What happens next? One expects that the more popular SoapBlox websites will go temporarily offline as they transition to new software. In the short term, they may change appearance dramatically (layouts are specific to blogging software) and lose their archives. Less active sites, or those run by people with fewer time and money resources, may not survive.

But what does this mean for the netroots, or the blogosphere writ large? That will be very interesting to see.

Update: Ben Smith at The Politico, himself the proprietor of a state blog, writes:

The attack is a reminder of how little redundancy there is in big portions of the rapidly-expanding Internet, and how fragile the systems that manage content can be.

I presume that most, if not all, of the text from these sites is already cached by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. So for contributors now scrambling to back up their essays, this may prove a useful resource. But it doesn’t save images consistently, and those files may be gone for good.

Update 2: Some of the sites listed above have returned, at least for the moment. Pam Spaulding, whose site is back temporarily, writes:

Around 10PM last night, I found out Soapblox.net, the service that hosts many of the state blogs, has been hacked. I reported it on a couple of listservs and put an email in to Soapblox.

Pam’s House Blend, RadicalRuss.net, American Liberalism, BeThink.org are some of the sites affected, but many more went down later. I didn’t go through down the whole Soapblox blogroll but it seems most of the state blogs were not affected. The hack is restricted to only one server, but once they got in, other servers were compromised. …

Well, as you can imagine, there were a lot of unhappy bloggers losing their minds; in my case 3 years of my blog is on that platform, and it wasn’t clear what data was recoverable or when I would see it.

At some point later this morning the site is up. Now I have to get my content off of here and as of this moment, I don’t have FTP access to copy it down.

So enjoy the Blend while you can in this location.

And Eric B. of Michigan Liberal writes:

So far, it appears that Michigan Liberal’s servers haven’t been effected. Who knows…

What I do know is that a post on the SoapBlox site said that they are out of business. I have no idea what specifically that means. I am keeping a very close eye on the situation.

If you come back, and the place is dark, then you’ll know that we’ve lost our server.

Clearly, the fallout from this disaster is not yet known because it is not yet even understood. On the other hand, it’s providing a major opportunity for another company to step into the breach. One possibility: Markos Moulitsas, who has spent his own money customizing the old Scoop platform, could license it to others. I wouldn’t count on it, but a lot of people are in dire need of a solution right now.

Update 3: My NMS colleague Simon Owens of Bloggasm posts an e-mail making the rounds this morning. Here’s what it says:

My sincere apologies for posting this to several lists all at once, but this is a serious issue:

We are so goddamned screwed right now.

I spoke to Paul Preston a little while ago on the phone, and SoapBlox, according to him, is dead. Hacked, not worth resuscitating, and would cost too much money to restore with his ISP. We need to stop this from happening — if it turns out to be a matter of money to at least get the dead sites back up so we can archive them until we can move them all to another platform, then I would personally and on behalf of the other bloggers who are TOTALLY SCREWED RIGHT NOW appreciate it if the folks receiving this message who are interested in the continued existence of easily-built-and-maintained state-level community blogs could commit to making this happen.

Again, only if that proves to be the issue. But several of us are in true DEFCON 1 freakout mode here, and there’s not a whole lot else we can do.

Thanks for your consideration.

Update 4: The showrunner at SoapBlox, who blogs as “pacified”, has removed the post I led with and replaced it with one titled “SoapBlox is a Phoenix?”, which reads:

I am nothing but a dramatic person. I am sorry for that.

SoapBlox needs help. From all of you. How do we salvage this. How do we keep this going?

When you create something that becomes larger than yourself.

I apologize for being so dramatic. Again, I have a knack for that.

Giving up the fight may itself have been an overreaction, but it sounds like the software still has very serious problems. No matter what happens, it won’t be an easy dig out.

Update 5: Of course, it didn’t take long — just the third comment on the SoapBlox post — for this kind of speculation to emerge:

Maybe it was not such a good idea to have so many liberal websites at one ISP. The hackers, of course, are anonymous, but I smell a Rove-like rat out there.

The first point is a very good one. The latter, more like a natural defense mechanism.

N.B. Yes, it’s a weak headline. At least I didn’t go with “Ablogalypse Now”.

Obama’s Twitter Account Hacked

Published by William Beutler on January 5, 2009 in Barack Obama, Spam, Twitter and William Beutler. 12 Comments

As TechCrunch reported this morning, someone has been hacking into high-profile Twitter accounts and posting amusingly defamatory tweets. But here’s one they missed:

This tweet stayed up longer than the others. I learned about it just after noon today (hat tip: Brad Levinson) and finally was pulled shortly after I started writing this post. I’m of two minds on whether this is the same culprit: On one hand, the content of the tweet is much different — less mischievous, more promotional. On the other hand, that would be some coincidence, and Twitter’s recent phishing problems could be a bigger headache than its previous spamming problems.

The link behind the TinyURL is still available [Update: Apparently not anymore; if you really want to see it, just drop me a line], and it goes to a site owned by a company called Top Notch Media, Inc. that would very much like your e-mail address and some information about you while you’re at it. And hey, what do you know, it turns out Top Notch Media has been the subject of numerous complaints to Internet fraud watch sites. This is probably the last of it, although Exxon-Mobil may like to know that their logo is being used there, unless they already do, in which case somebody might want to alert Daily Kos.

Oh well, at least we know that Obama’s transition team is still aware that their Twitter account exists.