No matter what one thinks of him, it’s becoming ever more clear that Arrington is driving a significant part of what journalism is becoming. And while I’ll decline for the moment to unpack what all of that means (I will happily do so for a modest book advance) let me point to two announcements from TechCrunch in recent months.

First, in December 2008, Arrington declared — in a post titled “Death to the Embargo” — that he would no longer honor non-exclusive news embargoes:

We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once. Today that ends. From now our new policy is to break every embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random.

Some firms will stop talking to us (yeah! less email), but we’ll find other ways to get the news. Others, who haven’t read this post because they don’t read TechCrunch, will be unpleasantly surprised. Maybe if we cause enough pain then PR firms will start to take action against those publications who break the rules.

It’s a radical idea in the world of old media, but that world is quickly ending. This is the business side of political bloggers’ dissatisfaction with the inside-the-Beltway “cocktail circuit” journalism. Those rules are under attack and those can undermine them will.

And, indeed, just this past week the Wall Street Journal announced it would no longer honor such embargoes either. If you want them to hold off on covering a story, it had better be an exclusive. This makes great sense in an age where just about anyone can (more or less plausibly) call themselves a news outlet. “Publish or perish” is a phrase long-established in academia, but it applies in journalism now more than ever.

The lastest example of TechCrunch pushing on the boundaries of journalistic piety comes this weekend from Paul Carr, sort of a Toby Young for the Web 2.0 set, declaring his intention to break from convention and reveal the names of sources whom he comes to believe have lied to him:

I’ll never trust either of my two liars again, but they’re still free to scamper off to another reporter and peddle the same bullshit with a decent chance it’ll be published, at least as a rumour.

Every technology and business reporter I’ve spoken to this week about the off the record problem has their own story to tell about bullshitting sources, and every single one says they don’t know what to do about it. They just consider it one of the risks of the game.

Well enough’s enough. The one-sided contract ends here.

From now on, if you tell me something off the record and I later discover that you’ve knowingly mislead me, our contract of anonymity is immediately void, for breach. That means that everything you’ve told me about the story becomes on the record, and fully attributable.

Here too one can see lessons for print journalism. It may not have saved Judith Miller 85 days in jail, but the notion that journalists are sworn to uphold sources even after being burned by them is a thankless task. For obvious reasons, it mostly goes unreported or is left a matter of allegation. For yet more obvious reasons, this is also much more dangerous than merely breaking an embargo. After all, the consequences for being wrong are much higher than merely breaking an embargo — where one can be, at most, “wrong.”

But the same pressures are in effect: the dissatisfaction with the old way of doing things is finally starting to change, for two reasons that are immediately apparent:

1. The recent proliferation of news outlets gives writers options to find stories elsewhere, and likewise flacks options to get coverage elsewhere; and
2. These new journalistic outlets identify with each other much less closely than the television networks or big city dailies of old.

This looser confederation of participants is already producing a more anarchic news environment — one in which someone like Arrington thrives. That means trouble for anyone who isn’t prepared, or willing, to play by the new rules. But it’s a great thing for information consumers — especially those who like some entertainment with their news.

Cross-posted from New Media Strategies.

If you haven’t read this morning’s Wall Street Journal op-ed by Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star-Ledger, “All I Wanted for Christmas Was a Newspaper”, it’s just the kind of arrogant-clueless screed by a newspaperman against the blogosphere that elicits first anger, then pity.

These opinion columns are nothing new. See David Simon’s disproportionate contempt for bloggers for an example of someone who managed to succeed after taking a buyout yet is still consumed by the subject. Such columns have long been a symptom of the industry’s steady decline, but as it slips into precipitous free fall, schadenfreude has given way to Willy Loman-esque pathos. I’ve never found Ol’ Gil from The Simpsons all that funny, in part because he was a poor replacement for Lionel Hutz, but also because it’s no fun to watch the helpless fail and flail.

Still, that does not mean the poverty of their arguments should be excused, especially because they are the squeakiest wheels in this dilapidated machine, and their erroneous conclusions may well be adopted by those watching from a short distance. So far Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit and Robert Ivan at Metaprinter have ably pointed out the many flaws in his piece, but I’d like to tackle another. Here is Mulshine making an elitist argument that is not prima facie incorrect, but is nevertheless undone by its own careless construction:

In his book, “An Army of Davids,” Mr. Reynolds heralds an era in which “[m]illions of Americans who were in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff.”

No, they can’t. Millions of American can’t even pronounce “pundit,” or spell it for that matter. On the Internet and on the other form of “alternative media,” talk radio, a disliked pundit has roughly a 50-50 chance of being derided as a “pundint,” if my eyes and ears are any indication.

The type of person who can’t even keep track of the number of times the letter “N” appears in a two-syllable word is not the type of person who is going to offer great insight into complex issues.

All right, well this question about usage of “pundit” vs. “pundint” is easily testable. Let’s go to Google BlogSearch:

• For a search on the single word pundit we find 705,874 results. Sorted for relevance, here are the top three results as of Sunday afternooon:
1. Daily Kos: Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up
2. Gateway Pundit: Israeli Gaza Strikes Called ‘Holocaust’ By Hamas …
3. Daily Pundit » Sweets for the Sour

Already we can see that Mulshine should have chosen a different word to illustrate the alleged ignorance of Internet political commentators. Thanks to those like Instapundit, the word has enjoyed a strong currency in recent years, perhaps more so than any word besides “meme”.

• For a search on pundint we find 1,320 results with the top three by relevance as follows:
1. Campaign Retrospective: Goofiest “Pun-dint” Remarks
2. Dec 18, Pundint or Pundit : Common Errors in English
3. MacBigot Cached Glances » Blog Archive » It’s PUNDIT, not PUNDINT …

Remember, these are not necessarily the savviest bloggers (let alone, strictly, bloggers), just those which (the increasingly unreliable) BlogSearch coughed up first.

As someone who tries to anticipate likely objections while writing, I can’t imagine doing as Mulshine does and simply assuming that others would willingly accept one’s personal impressions as empirical evidence. A quick Internet search reveals his example as, charitably, an exaggeration.

Not only is he wrong, even if he was right it wouldn’t be the damning evidence he thinks it is. In fact, I read a newspaper column two weeks ago that replaced the common phrase “to the … manor born” with the malaprop “to the … manner born.” A mental slip-up of this sort is indeed careless. It may mean the columnist (it was Kathleen Parker) should be scrutinized more closely, but it does not mean that newspaper columnists should be dismissed out of hand.

Smart people make common errors all the time. And Mulshine certainly seems to be among them them.

Instapundit readers 7, Blog P.I. 3: Everyone in the comments (and now Glenn, too) is right about the Shakespeare quote. I didn’t realize the phrase I knew came from the title of a British sitcom, To The Manor Born, a pun on the Shakespeare line. Would it hurt or help my cause to mention I’m an English major?

This is pretty ironic given the subject of this post, and while it certainly means one should always read me with a critical eye, it actually underscores the point about focusing on these things too much. To wit, a Google search of to the manor born returns 500,000 results, while one for to the manner born returns 52,400 results. To make another gratuitous Simpsons reference: “Show’s over, Shakespeare.”

To the list of smart people who make mental slips, one might add yours truly.

P.S. I’ve actually seen Hamlet on screen or stage at least four times, and I’m a fan, but I’ll be sure to read up on this bit now.

For 168+ hours now I’ve been working literally around the clock — to be more accurate, one revolution of the hour hand each solar day — finding and spotlighting blog posts from national and state-level media and political blogs, and running a Blogads campaign involving changes to the artwork and copy reflecting each evening’s developments (I like how it’s rendered on BuzzMachine best). I’ve also done C-SPAN TV twice, sitting on the back of my sport coat, focusing just beyond the camera lens, depending on the bug in my ear for cues, reporting on the latest buzz from the left- and rightosphere from the offices of New Media Strategies.

This week my role shifts, and in a dwindling few hours I’ll be flying to St. Paul, Minnesota for the Republican National Convention. As the NMS Blue Team returns from Denver, the Red Team will be shipping out to the metropolitan area where the Coens’ Fargo mostly took place. I travel both in my capacity as a representative of C-SPAN at the convention as well as an official, RNC-credentialed blogger, so I will do my best to share the experience with you.

This will be a new thing for Blog P.I., but a second time for me as a blogger at a GOP convo; in 2004 I was part of Hotline’s convention team in New York City, and I blogged the convention in my off-hours. Then, I took some pictures with my crummy first-ever Sprint camera phone, most of which were uploaded to a server I long since forgot to pay for. This time I’ll be blogging it here in this space, using my iPhone camera and WordPress app, available free of charge from iTunes (which by the way now is really crying out for rebranding).

For the next five days or so, I expect to be taking photos and posting them with minimal presentation, reserving most of my reporting and commentary for a widget from my Twitter account, which will appear here shortly. This is basically the opposite of what Blog P.I. has been in its two years-plus existence: whereas my blogging has primarily comprised several times-weekly essay posts (such as this one) I will instead switch to frequent, quick-hit posts that will take you inside the moment (I’m pretty sure I can do this).

If you’re going to be in the Twin Cities this week, gimme a shout (see the contact page). If you know me from e-mail or the Blogometer or Blog P.I. and want to say hello, drop me a line. If you know of a party, breakfast or similar event that’s either open-invitation or you can extend one, consider me interested. Need a mug, thumb drive or baseball cap emblazoned with the C-SPAN logo? We can probably work something out.

And but so, I’ll get back to packing a week’s worth of my least-unprofessional attire and making sure I don’t leave anything behind, with the DVR playing the Oregon Ducks’ 44-10 victory over the (Huck the) Fuskies as I close up shop here and make my way to the Lesser White North.

More coming soon.

Last week I traded a series of Twitter “@ messages” with Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor, blogger and media critic. The first one asked:

Maybe you know. Q: why doesn’t Politico have a Ben Smith for the White House? Bets on whether they’ll get one if Obama wins?

He’s got a point. The Politico lists the organization’s designated blogs on its front-page in this order:

Ben Smith on Dems, Jonathan Martin on GOP, Shenanigans on Gossip, The Scorecard on Campaigns, The Crypt on Congress, Michael Calderone on Media, James Kotecki on whatever.

The Politico is literally blogging about “whatever” but not about “the White House.” So I guessed, in fewer than 140 characters:

Smith-Martin are a package deal, covering both primaries. Politico: more campaign, less governing? But that’s a great idea.

Prof. Rosen suggested in turn:

How about a PI post? Politico columnists for the Dems, Reps, Congress, Media, Gossip, Campaign trail, but no White House?

To which I replied:

Mike Allen certainly covers the WH. But not in blog form, true. Have friends down there, so I can ask. Possible PI post indeed.

And so I did, getting in touch with a half-dozen or so current and former Politico writers, asking for their thoughts on background. I also made an effort to get VandeHarris on the record, but they did not return e-mails by my less-than-rigorously self-enforced deadline.

So here’s what I could piece together:

• When the Politico launched a little under two years ago, the presidential campaign offered the biggest opportunity first. Politico was first conceived as a newspaper to be called Capitol Leader — “Yet Another Newspaper Aimed at Capitol Hill” as the Washington Post had it. The Executive branch wasn’t even in the picture until John Harris and Jim VandeHei were.
• As noted above, the newspaper that did emerge hired the much-acclaimed, much-accosted former White House reporter for Time and WaPo, Mike Allen. He writes big stories, is in good with Drudge, and produces content on a daily basis like everyone else. The format of his output is a secondary matter.
• Most everyone I talked to seemed to assume that no matter who won the presidential election, Politico would increase their White House coverage after the election. After all, it’s the logical continuation of the campaign stories they are covering now. Some said they thought a blog would be involved, and no one volunteered the opposite.

One thing that occurs to me is that other major newspapers have blogs covering the White House as a beat, as do regional newspapers with Washington correspondents, but none of them command major audiences (even when they resort to Olympics T&A).

People care about the big stories that emanate from the White House, and they’ll get that from every newspaper and every political blog inside the Beltway, but few are looking for the day-to-day minutiae. Bush is a lame duck, interest has waned even in some of the bigger stories, and other national newspapers have moved their White House correspondents to the campaign trail.

The answer given reminds me a bit of the response I got in the summer of 2006 when I first wrote about the opening for a “Republican ActBlue”, viz., just wait. It may be worth noting, the person who did finally create one was not yet working on it at that time.

So, yes, the Politico will probably have a White House blog next year. Whether Politico writes the one that Jay Rosen is hoping for remains to be seen.

Photograph by David Boyle in DC via Flickr.

Tony Pierce, editor of the Los Angeles Times, issued an edict to the paper’s own bloggers to stay off the subject. “Because the only source has been the National Enquirer, we have decided not to cover the rumours or salacious speculations,” he wrote.

Wow! Tony Pierce, longtime writer of Tony Pierce dot com + busblog and former editor of LAist, has risen all the way to become chief editor of the fourth-largest newspaper in the United States by reported circulation? That’s incredible!

It may sound credible, but it certainly is not creditable. Pierce is a web editor at the L.A. Times, overseeing about two dozen blogs on the latimes.com website. And except for the part about working for the Times, that sounds like a pretty good job by itself.

The Times of London simply omitted the conditional “an” before “editor,” giving an inflated impression of Pierce’s role. I thought maybe there was a difference between U.S. and U.K. English usage, but after clicking around google.co.uk, I’m pretty sure it’s just a mistake.

So who is editor of the Los Angeles Times? After all the turmoil at the newspaper these past few years, I had to look it up: Russ Stanton, a 10-year veteran of the paper, who was in fact a web editor himself.

So don’t count Pierce out yet. In the meantime, at least there are now thousands of people around the world who think that he is, in fact, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times.

P.S. Another reason why Pierce has a shot? He may have been punk at one time, but from what I’ve heard of the fallout, he’s been fairly humorless about it. I suggest Tony “Keep Rockin’” Pierce as an appropriate nickname.

P.P.S. This leaked follow-up memo from L.A. Times executive editor Meredith Artley gets it right the second time. That’s one memo too late, but it still should have been leaked more widely.

Fortunately, perhaps, Google provides diagnostic tools for those curious about where the site has gone:

Alas, I don’t know enough about network security to make a diagnosis. (Dammit Jim, I’m a private eye, not a doctor.)

As of this morning, I can get the website to load in Safari but not in Firefox 3, albeit intermittently. The front page is accessible, but when I try to visit the blog, I get this instead:

In the past, Google has been accused of removing conservative-aligned content from YouTube and from Google News, but I see no evidence that this is what’s happened this time. I’m not even quite sure why Google is responsible for making this call or providing these diagnostics.

What’s most likely is the Spectator’s webmaster left a security hole unplugged and the site was taken advantage of by opportunistic spammers, which is something of a tautology.

I’ve put an e-mail in to a contact at the Spectator, and if I find out what happened, I’ll provide an update in this post.

Update: Looks like I called it. The site still isn’t working for me in Firefox, but via Safari, they offer this explanation:

We have received a number of inquiries regarding the fact that Spectator.org has been designated a “harmful site” by Google, because of outside entities attempting to use our site to distribute malicious software. We have been working with our Web hosting company to address the issue, and believe that it has been resolved and that our site is safe to visit, though there is a lag time before Google can remove the “harmful site” status. In the meantime, if you normally find us via Google, you can still visit us by typing Spectator.org directly into your browser, or by entering our site via Yahoo. Thank you for your understanding.

Early in the day I’d seen Dave Weigel’s IM message reading “Brian Beutler for Batman/Mayor” but did not understand the context. Hours later the news broke beyond his close friends, and thankfully along with it that he is hospitalized at Washington Hospital Center and should recover.

The blog tributes flowed in, bringing with it a wave of complaints about the relative safety of Northwest Washington. Megan McArdle started with “I just found out a friend of mine got shot three times in the stomach last night in my neighborhood during a mugging,” and though vowing to delete any opportunistic comments about District v. Heller, she couldn’t avoid addressing public safety:

When DC does try to “do something”, it’s something stupid and quasi-fascist like locking down neighborhoods instead of putting more cops on the beat and using the advanced police tactics that are now the norm in every other city. From what I know, Fenty seems like a better mayor than DC’s previous disasters, but the city government remains corrupt and incompetent. No one should have to spend their lives feeling this afraid.

The American Spectator’s J.P. Freire concurred:

I can only echo Megan’s thoughts about the state of crime (and crime-fighting) in this city — it reminds me of the needless and violent murder of the New York Times’s David Rosenbaum, who was left unaided, ailing on the sidewalk, ignored in his death. There’s an illusion of safety in this city, conveyed by the economic development and the swollen demographics familiar from college. But we’re not on college campuses where things feel safe (and are sometimes very much not). We’re in a city, a particularly criminal one.

John Aravosis offered more details on the neighborhood in question:

The neighborhood he was shot in, like a 5 minute walk from me, has an ongoing gang war on the very corner he was shot. It’s been going on for years. And years. And years. But DC is such an inept city, that all we hear about is how fighting crime is hard work. Sound familiar? I’ve looked at condos right next to where he was shot. $400,000 for a one bedroom. I laugh when I see places like that, because I know there’s a gang war going on about 100 feet away. And now this would be our second mugging-shooting we’ve had in the last month or so.

And I’m pretty much in agreement with all of this. I was once the victim of random violence myself, albeit of a much less serious nature: more than a year ago I was struck in the head by an unseen assailant at about 3:00 a.m. on a side-street just above Florida Avenue. It wasn’t a mugging; I just kept walking, hoping that no sudden movements would pay off, and there was no follow-up attack.

I’m pretty sure it was done on a dare or for the thrill, likely both. And it shook me from my complacency, at least for awhile. Shortly after, I moved one neighborhood over — to approximately three blocks north of where Beutler was shot on Wednesday morning.

But it wasn’t all (understandable) hand-wringing about the state of the city. Nicknaming Beutler “30 Cent” after the projectile-prone rapper, Dave Weigel reported:

Collaboration began on a lengthy list of “Brian Beutler Facts,” inspired by the (now surely played out) list of oddball stories of Chuck Norris. Sample entries: “Lance Armstrong wears a Brian Beutler bracelet.” “The active ingredient in Levitra is Brian Beutler.” “Meatloaf would do that for Brian Beutler.”

And Julian Sanchez followed up:

Brian Beutler is awesome. If you read his phenomenal reporting, count yourself lucky. If you know him, count yourself even luckier. (2) You can add your wishes for a speedy recovery at the first link. I’m not the praying sort, but if you are, it couldn’t do any harm.

I echo those sentiments.

When Beutler first moved to town a few years ago, we had a brief jocular exchange on a post at my personal blog, The Washington Canard, also titled “The Beutler Files”.

Since then I haven’t met Beutler in person, but in this small world of Washington bloggers, we share more than a few acquaintances. And as you may have already noticed, we share a last name (if not the pronunciation thereof).

There’s room in this town for the both of us, and let’s hope it stays that way for a long time to come.

Simon is probably far too busy preparing his next HBO project — “Generation Kill,” set for July — to respond this time. But if he reads this, he should know I consider his conflicted love letter to Baltimore not just better than any other television drama, but much better by far. (I am a typical white person in this regard.) I still love “The Sopranos,” but let’s face it — it’s a cartoon, and not as well-crafted.

That said, I find Simon’s smug insult of the blogosphere in a handful of recent interviews rather less enlightening. For instance, take a long e-mail interview published in the Baltimore City Paper following the series finale in early March. Asked why he didn’t include bloggers in his portrayal of the troubled newspaper industry, he volunteered this hypothetical scene:

INT. GARDEN APARTMENT/ANYWHERE – DAY

A white MALE, thirties, unshaven, sits in his underwear typing on a desktop computer. C.U. on computer screen. As he links to Baltimore Sun coverage off the newspaper’s web site, creating a link on his own blog. The MALE scratches his left testicle, then satisfied, begins typing. C.U. on the moving cursor as commentary ensues.

CUT TO: EXT. DRUG CORNER/WEST BALTIMORE – DAY

This is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but he wasn’t kidding:

The internet is skimming the froth of commentary from the first-generation news gatherers like The Sun. They have parasitically achieved immediacy and relevance by co-opting the debate, the humor, the rage, and the provocation that results from the news product–WITHOUT ACTUALLY INVESTING OR COMMITTING IN ANY SERIOUS WAY TO THE SYSTEMIC ACQUISITION OF THAT NEWS.

And the parasite is killing the host. Is the internet a marvelous tool in myriad ways? Of course. Is it the future? No doubt. But thus far it is not a responsible or viable alternative to a major metropolitan newspaper.

Criminy. This is the mirror image of the kind of blogger triumphalism that died out several years ago. Blogs aren’t killing newspapers (although Craigslist might be) and it’s not far off the misguided rant of Sam Zell, who lit into Google News for supposedly killing newspapers shortly after purchasing the media company which owns… the Baltimore Sun, Simon’s former employer.

Look, Simon is correct that many bloggers depend upon newspapers for stories to comment upon. It’s true that most of them couldn’t do this without the old media’s content. But this is not his unique insight; bloggers themselves have been dealing with this paradox for years. And they are not all sitting around in their pajamas (as another memorable slur had it). Some have set up their own news organizations: Josh Marshall’s TPM empire includes reporters as well as commentators.

Meanwhile, journalists are moving in on bloggers’ turf as well. Reporters such as Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post or my old colleague Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic do almost all of their reporting on the web. This is a genuine ecosystem with much give as well as take. Bloggers who work for free send traffic back to newspapers. And some of those bloggers have bigger audiences than the newspapers.

Of course, bloggers working for free, or very little, is part of what many perceive to be a problem. What bloggers are really doing is taking over the kind of opinion journalism — in politics, music and movies — that were traditionally the province of newspapers. If the blogosphere is killing newspapers, it’s because much of their product is easily done by amateurs who simply didn’t have a platform before the Internet and didn’t have the tools until Pyra Labs cooked up a software program called Blogger while killing time between other projects.

Moreover, Simon is also wrong to portray bloggers as adding nothing to the debate. The signature counter-example is when Republican-leaning bloggers asked questions about CBS’s reporting on President Bush’s National Guard service that major news organizations didn’t. Dan Rather is the most prominent scalp, but before that Trent Lott had to step down from his leadership position because of comments about Strom Thurmond’s legacy that Marshall kept alive.

Not all these stories are as prominent, and they don’t all end in firings. More recently, The Smoking Gun fact-checked a Los Angeles Times story fingering Sean Combs for the murder of Tupac Shakur; the story was based on documents that were easily shown to be unreliable, not unlike those CBS relied upon.

It may be that The Smoking Gun is not a blog, but now we’re just quibbling about content management systems. It is also true that TSG is owned by truTV (formerly Court TV), but it began as an independent website, as most blogs are. Speaking of which, Simon gave an interview with a similar rant to Salon — still independent against all odds — and still doing journalism and commentary on a daily basis.

And the competition has also likely caused major news organizations to look closer at their colleagues’ reporting. In the best of cases, it’s forcing news organizations to focus on what they’re best at — where their comparative advantage lies. Obviously that’s reporting, as Simon says. Newsgathering is moving away from newspapers to some extent, but commentary is moving away from newspapers at a rapid clip. In the worst of cases, people like Zell are making bonehead moves that will expedite the shakeout. And the guy scratching his balls in front of his MacBook is just a bit player in a changing media landscape.

I know David Simon isn’t the biggest fan of capitalism, but does he really think that competition is bad? I am sure he can’t really think that more speech is bad.

Image courtesy Brad Searles on Flickr.

One blog covering the controversy but not yet featured in the roundup — it takes some time and linkage to make the cut — but sure to be a staple of Memeorandum round-ups in the near future is CQ’s latest blog, opening for business today: Ground Game. It’s written by my old college buddy and current flatmate, Eric Pfeiffer (the journalist, not the furniture designer).

In addition to covering the issue of improperly-screened questioners, he discusses how much these things matter:

The real question facing Republicans today is not whether they should make use of emerging technology, but how the medium can be used to improve their communication skills.There’s a tendency in the media to overemphasize the real-world impact of online activism, but the danger to those who ignore the grassroots power of the internet is very real. … “It’s pretty remarkable that just a year after ‘Macaca’ the candidates are standing on a stage in St. Petersburg,” Grove acknowledged.

Make sure you follow those embedded links.

Meanwhile, many of the bloggers linked in the roundup pictured above are now questioning the usefulness of these YouTube debates as organized by cable news networks, or at least by the Cable News Network. But as Pfeiffer points out, that’s not the only way CNN’s YouTube partnership is outdated:

You Tube debates have already expanded to include a Mayor debate in Salt Lake City, several student council elections and campaign forums hosted by TV stations in Greece and Poland.

I probably should have known that, but it’s news to me. That’s good enough reason to bookmark and blogroll it. After you do, check this video out even though — and I really hate to do this to you — it’s all Greek to me:

Update: In an e-mail released this afternoon, RedState is calling on CNN to fire their political director. Considering the egregious and recurrent nature of this problem, I can’t say that sounds unreasonable:

Dear RedState Reader:

RedState is calling for CNN to fire Sam Feist, their political director; and David Bohrman, Senior Vice President and Executive Producer of the debate.

During last night’s debate, which CNN billed as “a Republican debate, and the goal was to let Republican voters see their candidates,” CNN either knowingly or incompetently allowed hardcore left wing activists to plant questions and Anderson Cooper willingly gave one of those activists a soapbox so he could harass the Republican candidates about military policy.

Simple googling would have revealed these left wing activists.

Had CNN done its homework, this would not have happened. They either willfully let it happen, or incompetently bungled it. Either way, heads should roll.

The RedState editors have a related post up on the site as well.

P.S. Can you just wait for the newly-announced ABC News-Facebook presidential fiasco debate?

The subject was how technology is changing politics — a mandate broad enough to take it in almost any direction. And if anything, I was the wet blanket of the panel. My opening comments focused on how the Internet is changing politics in ways not unique compared to previous technologies, techniques and politics. I didn’t get all the details out on Saturday, but the argument went something like:

Radio and blogging both gave candidates ways to bypass established media channels and speak directly to supporters and voters. Television and online video can reframe the public’s perception of political events. Direct mail then as e-mail now communicate around the media as well as solicit campaign funds from an (ideally) opt-in crowd.

Panels such as these are at their best when the most interesting comments come from the audience. One theme that emerged in discussion was how even print journalists are being asked to produce short video (and audio) segments for the Internet when reporting from the road. To some extent, each of my fellow panelists had witnessed or dealt with this issue. It’s an interesting and even logical development, as online ad revenues rise compared to the dead tree edition. One also has to also wonder how thin it stretches their already-dwindling reportorial resources. At least in the Morissettean sense, it’s ironic that the migration of news content to the web coincides with layoffs owing to competition from the web.

My friend Robert Bluey, also present, volunteered that his alma mater, Ithaca College, is now offering a course it calls “Backpack Journalism.” He explains in an interesting post at his own blog:

Students are given a backpack with a MacBook, video camera, digital camera, a recording device and other instruments to produce a story. After receiving their assignments, the students are dispatched to cover the story using multiple media.

I find this new kind of journalism fascinating. However, I also sympathize with working journalists who are primarily writers, who may now find themselves needing to acquire new skills to adapt to a changing industry. My co-panelists are among the lucky ones — I suspect they’ll learn new tricks more quickly than some of their older colleagues.

One of whom might be Michael Scully, former journalist, journalism professor and blogger (but not the writer from The Simpsons). I tend to share his fears about what “backpack journalism” will mean in some (many, most?) newsrooms:

If Backpack Journalism is about sending ONE person out into the field to report a story, than Backpack Journalism is a travesty. It’s an accountant’s dream but an editor’s nightmare. Accountants love it because you’re sending one person out into the field to produce the work of three people; it’s an editor’s nightmare because the quality of the work is diminished.

I submit that the true business model for New Media must be to send THREE people out into the field. Let one report, one produce, one shoot. Each skill is very important, each skill is very different, each skill has a professional value.

On the other hand, someone who could do all three well would be highly sought-after and accordingly compensated. If the job description caught on, it would presumably spur different kinds of students to enter journalism in the first place. Myself, I actually applied to film school out of high school, but instead pursued print journalism in-state, as I that proved more realistic. But if becoming a “backpack journalist” was an option at Allen Hall, I’d at least have given it the old college try. Heck, I might have even finished my Journalism double-major.

And you know, I bet we can fit this into a hastily-assembled anti-triumphalist SAT problem like the ones above:

Note: As I promised above, a bit more about the Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellowship Program. They are presently seeking applicants for 2008. If you’re inclined toward constitutional democracy and classically liberal economics, and have less than ten years of journalism experience, then you (yes, you!) could land $50,000 to $75,000 to write on a topic of your choosing. Details here. Tell ‘em Blog P.I. sent you.

*I was also the only panelist with a client of current interest, so it made for a few interesting moments as the subject was indeed taken in almost any direction. Hats off to the Standard’s Michael Goldfarb for trying to get me to make news.