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Archive for the 'Journalist Bloggers' Category

Tim Noah, Fire Your Fact Checker

Published by William Beutler on December 15, 2006 in Academic Blogging, Journalist Bloggers, MSM vs. Blogs, Rhetoric and Tom DeLay. 0 Comments

Mickey Kaus has joked that the upshot of blogging is “no deadlines and no editors in exchange for no money and no readers.” I guess that may be more than a joke:

Tim Noah, Dec. 14:

My Slate colleague and fellow Washington Monthly-style neoliberal Mickey Kaus (we also attended the same high school) will likely feel queasy when he discovers that his weblog is included in TomDeLay.com’s “Blog Roll” of linked sites, otherwise all hard-core right. Better shore up that left flank, Mickey!

Mickey Kaus, Dec. 9:

Welcome, Hammer readers!

Not only does Noah not read Kausfiles, but apparently Slate’s copy editors don’t either.

P.S. Blogroll is one word, it isn’t capitalized, and it doesn’t need scare quotes. Let me also direct your attention to:

The blogosphere and its impact on politics/the media/the arts/American life has been discussed to death. There is nothing left to say, particularly within the blogosphere itself. I propose that this topic be banned from all future public discourse.

Translation: I don’t have anything useful to say and I don’t want to bother thinking about it. Kaus may have ghettoized himself at Slate, but Noah is the irrelevant one.

In The Land Of The Blind, The One-Eyed Item Is King

Published by William Beutler on November 28, 2006 in Journalist Bloggers, MSM vs. Blogs and Rhetoric. 9 Comments

Michael Kinsley, former editor of The New Republic, Slate and most recently the Los Angeles Times editorial page, pens a whopper of a blind item in his latest column, for the Washington Post and Slate:

The first person I knew who had a Web site of his own was a fellow Washington journalist. This was when many journalists were still just getting into e-mail, but the URL for this Web site quickly circulated around town and around the world. Why? Well, we were all impressed by the technological savvy. But we were absolutely astounded by the solipsism. What on earth had gotten into Joe (not his real name)? This was a modest, soft-spoken, and self-effacing fellow, yet his Web site portrayed him as an egotistical monster.

The list of possibles is vanishingly small. There’s Kinsley’s fellow former TNR editor Andrew Sullivan… maybe fellow neoliberal contrarian Mickey Kaus, and… there’s Andrew Sullivan. Kinsley offers a few more clues:

Or so it seemed at the time. All of the elements that struck us as obnoxious maybe eight years ago no longer seem that way. In fact, they are now virtually required for any writer’s Web site. The Web address, of course, was his name: JoeJournalist.com. It’s hard to recapture why that even seemed pretentious. But it did. Then there was his deadpan list of books he’d written and awards he’d won. And quotes from other journalists about how wonderful he is. It all seemed totally out of character, and terribly immodest. Poor Joe! Had the World Wide Web driven him crazy?

All right. Is there seriously anyone left who doesn’t think this is Andrew Sullivan?

Update: Mickey Kaus says it’s neither, citing Sullivan as an unlikely to have possessed the virtues Kinsley ascribed to this Washington journalist pre-AndrewSull… er, JoeJournalist.com. Now, I don’t know Sullivan personally, but at least on television — debating on “The Chris Matthews Show” or those old C-SPAN mornings with Brian Lamb and Christopher Hitchens — he is all of those things. Perhaps Kinsley was simply being generous, and besides had a column to write.

Updated again: This blog post is mentioned briefly in the latest episode of Bloggingheads. As the comments here indicate, Kaus strongly implies to Robert Wright that Kinsley’s subject was James Fallows. Meanwhile, Gawker thinks it’s Malcolm Gladwell.

I can’t add much more here. I don’t know the parties involved, and while I don’t think there’s enough content at the early Fallows site to convey anything like solipsism or egomania, I suppose I will defer to Kaus’ certainty.

Into Thin Air?

Published by William Beutler on November 21, 2006 in Blogging Officials, Candidate Bloggers, Daily Kos, Journalist Bloggers, Startups and Website Design. 1 Comment

Air Congress Logo, Danny Glover, Kris Meister

At the risk of turning every other other post at Blog P.I. into an update of what former colleagues are up to, I’ll attempt to turn your attention now to the launch of a new site by Danny Glover (just promoted to editor of Tech Daily, coincidentally) which happens to have been designed by a former colleague from my present job, Kris Meister. They say Washington is a small town, and it’s true, assuming you mean just the NW quadrant.

In any case, the site is called Air Congress, and it’s the logical progression of Danny’s work keeping track of congressional (and other professional) blogs at Beltway Blogroll. He writes in the Air Congress inaugural post:

Much of the content here will come directly from lawmakers themselves — the video clips they post from floor debate, the podcasts they create on various topics and more as today’s high-tech innovations take root in government.

The site also will highlight audio and video content about federal policy from other sources, including the executive branch, trade associations, advocacy groups, government watchdogs, journalists and bloggers. Plus there are plans for original AirCongress content.

The last bit is reassuring, because the biggest risk in Air Congress’ strategy is that the audio-visual content emanating from Capitol Hill is often excruciatingly dull. As someone who subscribes to to every political podcast I can find, from Judd Gregg to Xavier Becerra and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Dave Freudenthal — but rarely listen to any one of them — I think I speak with some authority.

That’s why I figure Air Congress’ best bet for success is not so much in being a collector of legislative podcasts (though if thorougly indexed, that could be useful) but rather in acting as a guide to the best, worst and most noteworthy among them. As Chris Anderson would say, we need a better filter.

To that end, I have a vague sense that such a project would benefit mightily from an open rating and tagging system, elements of which are already in use at YouTube and Daily Kos, respectively. Short of that, only the most dedicated political junkie could pull off such a feat — but then again, there’s every reason to think Danny is just that political junkie.

IPDI/Edelman on Political Blogging (and Wal-Mart)

Published by William Beutler on November 18, 2006 in Blog Consultants, Blogger Panels, Blogs vs. MSM, Journalist Bloggers, Meatspace, Tech Blogosphere and YouTube. 3 Comments

Edelman/IPDI LogosBecause I’m a sucker for nametags and PowerPoint presentations, during lunchtime hours on Wednesday I attended a panel discussion co-sponsored by GWU’s Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet (yes, “Politics Democracy”; no, I’m not sure which word is supposed to modify the other) and PR agency Edelman*. But there was another reason to attend, and Edelman was it — the advertised presence of CEO Richard Edelman, that is.

If you don’t follow business or PR blogs, then you may not be aware of the ethical scrape Edelman recently got its blue chip client, Wal-Mart, into. The friction involved revelations that a few presumably grassroots pro-Wal-Mart blogs were in fact astroturf blogs — one might call them “astroblogs,” if the term “flog” wasn’t already gaining popularity.

To recap, as briefly as possible: In early October, BusinessWeek revealed that a blog called Wal-Marting Across America — featuring a couple driving their RV cross-country, using Wal-Mart parking lots as rest stops — was conceived and launched by Edelman on behalf of Working Families for Wal-Mart. The problem is, none of the parties involved disclosed the arrangement. Once outed, the blog was quickly shuttered.

In short order, B.L. Ochman called on WOMMA to throw Edelman out for having violated a code of ethics Edelman had helped develop, Richard Edelman started doing damage control on the company’s own website, his firm fessed up to two more flogs, and Edelman-employed blogger Steve Rubel drew flak for saying as little as possible about the incident (though he did not work on these Wal-Mart projects). It was quite the swarm.

In the end, WOMMA put Edelman on probation and the company started posting disclosures to their still-extant Wal-Mart blogs. So naturally, if Richard Edelman was going to be taking questions from the audience at a blogger conference, I would have to be there.

However — guess who didn’t show? Richard Edelman. And guess who did show? Activists from Wal-Mart Watch. They stood outside the lobby of the conference room at George Washington University handing out flyers titled “THE WAL-MART BFLOG.”

·      ·      ·

Nevertheless, there was still a panel discussion to be attended. Because the conversation ranged across many topics, allow me to fall back on the ol’ faithful of transition-averse writers — the bullet-point:

IPDI Political Blog Trends Conference Presentation

  • Perhaps the main reason for convening the panel was a new survey by Edelman’s research arm, StrategyOne, titled “Blog Readership in the USA.” Danny Glover has already recapped most of the findings at Technology Daily, so I won’t go into them here. I will point out that whereas the Edelman study focused on all blogs, the panel discussion was titled “Trends in Political Blogging” — which gave the discussion a mild case of multiple-personality disorder during the Q&A period.

  • For example, StrategyOne found that half of all blog readers are in the 18-24 age range, whereas BlogAds and ComScore surveys have shown that readers of political blogs tend to be middle-aged. Panelist Jacki Schechner of CNN offered that at CNN’s recent election night party, their invited bloggers were mostly aged 35-50, and almost none of them were below 30. Because political blogs were what post attendees were interested in, IPDI (note: pronounced “ipdee,” not “I-P-D-I”) director Carol Darr called on BlogAds founder Henry Copeland to generalize about numbers related to the political blogosphere. His estimates: About 100,000 people are blogging daily with an audience of “more than just their friends.” Some 10,000 of them have what could be considered a “commercial audience” — at least 1,000 daily readers (and keep in mind there are only 50,000 brick and mortar journalists in the U.S.). And how many readers of political blogs? Copeland thinks it’s somewhere between 2 and 5 million.
  • RNC eCampaign director Patrick Ruffini, another panelist, praised the netroots’ Use It Or Lose It pre-election campaign, in which liberal bloggers called on safe incumbents with big warchests to donate more to fellow Dems in tight races — or else. Ruffini figures they probably raised as much money then as by collecting the small donations bloggers are best known for. Another good point from Ruffini: When candidates’ positions are fairly similar, such as in a primary campaign, blogs become all the more influential.
  • Edelman Paris representative Guillaume Du Gardier made a great point about podcasting (or netcasting) and video-casting (no one likes “vlogging”) — while often mentioned in the same breath as blogging, they are more top-down, like traditional media. Blogs are a conversation, but podcasts tend to be one-way communications. I would add, this is one reason why YouTube has been so successful — it makes video-blogging almost as interactive as a regular text-based weblog.
  • Schechner said doesn’t consider journalists who blog to be “bloggers” — if your voice is already represented in the media, then you can’t properly be one. I follow that, but it seems incomplete. Not a few bloggers hate the term “blog” and by logical extension, the term “blogger,” too. And it is certainly used as a term of derision, mostly in meatspace rather than cyberspace. Maybe it would be nice to do away with the term, but it’s just not going to happen. Perhaps it would be better to redefine it: Jeff Jarvis likes to say journalism is an act, not a profession — but surely the same must be true of blogging. But if you’re a call center manager whose blog is mentioned in the New York Times, they’re still going to call you a “blogger” on first reference.

IPDI Political Blog Trends Conference Panel

  • Responding to Schechner’s actual point, I would say that a blogging journalist who often links to “true” bloggers should be considered part of the blogosphere. Will Bunch of the Philly Daily News-hosted Attytood is one who does. Chris Cillizza, who writes The Fix for the Washington Post, does not. So you don’t have to be a blogger first to be a part of the blogosphere, while having a blog does not necessarily make you a blogger. This ticket has not been resolved.

  • Bias and balance are an eternal theme of political bloggers right and left, as both believe the mainstream media favors the other side. But this also extends to non-partisan panel discussions, evidenced by a representative from NewAssignment.Net asking if any effort was made to court Democratic representation. (In addition to Ruffini, StrategyOne research director Robert Moran mentioned he had previously worked in GOP politics.) You could tell that Darr didn’t want to say “No.” She said they had sought a range of views, hinted that panelist Bill Allison’s Sunlight Foundation wasn’t exactly a member of the VRWC, and added that Schechner represented “the media.” Pressed about whether IPDI had specifically sought a Democrat for the panel, she conceded the answer was: “No.”
  • The consensus seemed to be that if the Internet had existed in 1976, Ronald Reagan would have defeated Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination. I tend not to ponder such impossible “what ifs,” but that one is interesting to think about.
  • Predictions for 2008? Schechner believes candidates will be better schooled in the ways of the blog. Ruffini wants to see better wireless capability for field organizing — SMS isn’t sophisticated enough. Moran predicted the “ad guys in Old Town” will start getting “jealous” (call me a pedant if you must, but the proper word is “envious”), because blog advisers will start getting the good salaries. Personally, that’s the one I’m counting on.
  • And nobody said a word about the Edelman/Wal-Mart controversy.

*Full disclosure: Edelman is a competitor of my employer. At my last job, I spoke at an event co-sponsored by Edelman. I also know a handful of current and former Edelman employees, whom I count as friends or friendly acquaintances.

Yea, Though I Walk Through The Valleywag of the Shadow of Death…

Published by William Beutler on November 14, 2006 in Blog Fights, Comment Sections, Gawker Media, Instapundit, Journalist Bloggers, Relaunches, Tech Blogosphere, Tough Crowd and Website Design. 2 Comments

Readers of Blog P.I. probably don’t venture very far into the tech blogosphere (a.k.a. the first blogosphere) but one of its higher profile, more controversial sites, is Valleywag. It’s another title owned by Nick Denton’s Gawker Media, where since February of this year, editor Nick Douglas (formerly of publicity stunt-turned-blog Blogebrity) has chronicled the embarrassing hygienic deficiencies of Google’s top brass, suspicious promotional practices of Google’s founders, and… some other stuff about Google, as I recall. But I kid. It’s a fun blog — Wonkette for the IT department. Or, it was until today.

Sometime over the weekend, Denton dismissed Douglas from the site, implemented a new layout, new typesetting, and apparently a new focus (more money, less sex). Here’s what it looked like yesterday:

Old Valleywag Layout

And what it looks like today:

New Valleywag Layout

Moreover, Denton has installed as interim blogger none other than himself. Which could work — he was a tech journalist prior to being an entrepreneur, and was an early, uh, blogebrity himself (if you remember Glenn Reynolds linking favorably to Denton’s hawkish post-9/11 proclamations, pat yourself on the back).

However, here at Blog P.I. we make no bones about getting a kick out of comment sections that turn on the site’s bloggers, and the reaction to Denton’s first post is truly something to behold. Some of the better responses:

Come on. Valleywag can spill the beans on every other “change in employment,” but you try to pass this crap off when Nick Douglas leaves? What gives. You say, “letting him go” which typically means fired. You can do better than that.
Funny, the design was one of the few in the Gawker empire that I liked. Now I’m not sure which of your generic, overlapping sites I’m on. I guess I’ll just have to deal.
How many photoshop filters had to throw up before you got that logo treatment? It may be the single most ugly thing I have ever seen in my life, and I just saw the “Naked Jen” flickr set from Dave Winer.
Oh, and IBM just called from 1955, they want their Courier font back.
The new site design sucks balls. As for Nick leaving, it COULD be a breath of fresh air (I grew tired of reading The Michael Arrington and Jason Calcanis Show), but you’re already on thin ice due to the less than forthcoming nature of the announcement.
well, it was a nice ride. ass design + letting go of your most valuable asset + renewed focus on crap people care even less about = removal from my daily web surfing routine. best of luck to both of you Nicks!
Before Spiers stopped talking to me, she once offered advice about the prospect of working for Denton or Calacanis: (I’m paraphrasing here) “It’s the old lesser of two evils thing, but at least with Jason you’re gonna get someone who is completely honest and won’t stab you in the back.”
I think this post needs more context. Who is this Nick Denton person and why should we care?

And elsewhere, tech bloggers are none too pleased, either. Here’s Zooomr evangelist Thomas Hawk:

Denton refuses to spill the beans. Was Douglas fired? Did he quit? Douglas is a pretty young guy so I doubt the old “he’s taking time off to spend more time with his family,” line works. Denton should know better than to offer us a weak, “Nick Douglas, the kid we plucked from college to launch Valleywag, will be a great journalist. And we will look stupid for letting him go.” … So you are saying he was fired? Or was he not fired? Very, very weak for a gossip blog Denton.

Ethernet inventor Richard Bennett looks at it from a different angle:

It’s probably a step closer to relevance, but still has a long way to go. … The editor was some pimply-faced teenager from Pennsylvania who had no clue about Silicon Valley life (and still doesn’t), the mix of stories is too sophomoric and Google-centric, the comment policy is bizarre, and the design was too hard to read. The new design is even worse, using a faint monospaced font, the comment policy remains the same, Denton is the temporary editor, and the story mix remains to be demonstrated.

And he’s not alone — Matthew Ingram updated a critical post to praise Denton’s later report on mega-sites Fark and Digg ditching John Battelle’s Federated Media for a new ad network run by Maxim (yes, that Maxim). It’s a new direction, for sure. Whereas Gawker, Defamer and Deadspin reign as the definitive gossip sites for NYC media, Hollywood and professional sports respectively, Valleywag wouldn’t be considered a rival to, say, frequent Douglas target Michael Arrington of the hugely popular TechCrunch. It looks like Denton wishes to compete with Arrington, rather than merely antagonize him. And Denton certainly has the connections to make that work. But Douglas’ Valleywag was something different. Denton’s Valleywag, not so much.

Meanwhile, lit fic crit Edward Champion keeps things short and sour:

Nick Douglas has apparently been shitcanned from Valleywag and all I got was this crummy T-shirt (and one of the worst blog designs I think I’ve ever seen).

As I always say about this time: Tough crowd. But that’s the blogosphere for you, and if anyone’s developed an epidermal layer strong enough to withstand this onslaught, it’s Denton. And if there’s anything serious to be said here, it’s that the blogosphere expects accountability and openness from its counterparts in cyberspace as well as its subjects/targets in meatspace. That’s one thing you would think Nick Denton would have figured out by now.

P.S. For what it’s worth (and I realize it may not be much) I was among the first to notice Blogebrity when the site launched as a preview of an alleged blog equivalent of People Magazine speculate about what it was way back when it launched in May 2005. I would also add that I was among the first to report the truth — it was an entrant in the first Contagious Media contest — although I believe I was the only political blogger to pay it any attention at all. History repeats itself.

Update: Via 10 Zen Monkeys, I learn that I didn’t read far down enough to find the actual best comments to Denton’s first post:

JasonCalacanis: Someone tell little Nicky that I have a job for him running NickDenton.net: all Denton all the time. NickDouglas: Jason, calling me “little Nicky” is an AWESOME way to make me consider a professional relationship with you.

If there’s an Adam Sandler joke to be made here, I don’t know what it is.

Second Update: Wisely, Valleywag has dropped the use of Courier in the regular copy.

And again via 10 Zen Monkeys, the truth comes out: Douglas was indeed fired, apparently for trying to lure News Corp. (!) into suing Nick Denton. Can’t say that sounds unreasonable.

But as I added to the comments at the end of the linked post, I recall when Denton launched Defamer in early 2004, Mickey Kaus quipped:

Why not go all the way and call it Defendant!

Can’t say that doesn’t sound like Denton’s ethos caught up with him.

Martin’s First Thesis

Published by William Beutler on November 13, 2006 in Hotline, Journalist Bloggers and MSM vs. Blogs. 0 Comments

Starting today as political reporter for National Review’s The Corner is my erstwhile Hotline colleague and freelancing maniac Jonathan Martin, who got off to a running start this afternoon with a detailed report on the GOP minority leader’s race. If there’s anything wrong with the post, it’s only that it sets a high bar for future reporting:

Political Washington today is focused on three fronts. On one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Topic A remains Iraq, and the forthcoming Baker report and Gates hearings. Up the Hill, members return to the Capitol today for a lame-duck session that will be dominated this week by leadership contests. Everywhere else, the focus is on the above and the fast-developing ‘08 road to the White House news (Vilsack in, Feingold out, McCain putting his first toes in the water). Because I’ve got a weakness for Hill leadership contests, I’ll start there with the House Minority Leader race. First off, all these contests differ from the last one we saw (for Majority Leader in January) in that the candidates aren’t, at least for now, circulating names of supporters. That will probably come as good news to those of you who don’t care to follow the preference of every obscure rank-and-file member, but is sad for those of us who like to keep score at home.

He’s a good writer and great reporter, not to mention a bit of a throwback — he likes to start off his day with an actual broadsheet newspaper. And I hope Jonathan will forgive me for revealing his darkest blogging secret: In spite of his new job, the truth is he was no fan of the blogosphere until the 2005 Virginia governor’s race, when he first discovered that there were some blogs he liked — and quickly realized that blogs were essential for keeping score at home. And now, the conversion is complete.

Hot Or Not: From Beltway Insiders To Blogosphere Outsiders

Published by William Beutler on October 24, 2006 in Blog Consultants, Blogging Officials, Journalist Bloggers, MSM vs. Blogs, Seriously, Startups and Website Design. 11 Comments

HotSoup LogoWhat to make of HotSoup, the non-partisan, non-ideological, mostly non-everything political discussion/debate site just out from Beltway insiders Carter Eskew, Matthew Dowd, Joe Lockhart and Mark McKinnon plus media types Ron Fournier and Allie Savarino (and top-heavy with yet more executive co-founders)? It’s difficult to be polite; I won’t always be.

Toward the end of its debut week, there isn’t much talk at the site. Nor are too many non-”Hardball” news outlets talking about it. Among those who have, appraisals tend toward the grim.

One is GOP Internet strategist Mike Turk, who once worked on a similar project called Grassroots.com. Upon HotSoup’s announcement this summer, Turk warned of the pitfalls at Personal Democracy Forum. But as he wrote this week at his blog, Kung Fu Quip, the problems were bigger than he’d thought:

Perhaps the most vexing thing about the site is the apparent lack of any correlation between the name and the content. Their content is divided into “Issue Loops” but that bears little relationship to Hot Soup. They might as well have called the site Eggplant.com. Honestly, I don’t get it. I have a lot of respect for the people involved in this, but it may be the most poorly conceived idea since Kevin Federline.

Earlier in the week, Paul NcManara of NetworkWorld.com had pled for sanity:

This group cannot be operating under the illusion that all they have to do is provide a platform and the Lincoln-Douglas debates will break out. They must know there’s a good chance that not every Hotsouper will come willing to bridge divides, celebrate differences and gain enlightenment.

Yes, they can be, but to their credit, they seem to: This week Fournier or somebody posted a message in the non-blog front-page meta window, “Hot Corner,” admitting that things need to be retooled:

We knew HOTSOUP.com would go online as a figment of its future potential, and that the finishing touches would come from you. That’s exactly what’s happening …. By scores, we’ve received your comments and criticism through feedback@hotsoup.com. Even better, many of you felt empowered enough to use the site itself to post your critiques in Issue Loops …. This take-matters-in-your-own-hands approach is confirmation of the core value behind HOTSOUP: It’s about you …. That’s why we’re hard at work at this work-in-progress … Among the problems we’ve fixed or are fixing: 1) Speed and performance of video …. 2) Content cutoffs in Loops …. 3) Discussion board display order …. 4) Loops ranking on homepage …. Thank you for your suggestions, and keep them coming. Only you can make the Soup the hottest site around.

It’s since been pulled (in favor of a blithering anecdote about their MSNBC appearance and something about the ONE campaign) — whisked away to who knows where. As I said, it’s not a blog. It’s just a square called “Hot Corner.” Once an announcement is pulled, it disappears into the aether. Please, people. Get a blog.

But there are many more problems than (I think it’s) Fournier addresses. For one, the registration process asks for too much information, and gets unpleasant when you don’t tell it where you live, what’s your job title, how you vote and where your ancestors came from:

HotSoup registration information required

Did I mention the site looks awful? The color scheme is unappetizing, its navigation tools are scattered, no RSS feeds are provided, and they have pictures on the front page where the content should be (c.f. Digg). The actual content (aside from “Hot Corner,” which apparently is not considered as such) is relegated to a narrow column just off-center:

HotSoup Front Page

Check the source code, and you’ll see the site is almost entirely rendered in Flash. Or, turn off your Javascript and watch the site disappear. There’s scarcely an indexable ASCII keyword on the page, so it isn’t likely to rank well in Google searches. This site should be rebuilt from the ground up. Most of the web-oriented co-founders arrive from a social networking site called SisterWoman.com that exhibits none of these amateurish flaws, which makes this venture’s absurd failure to launch all the more perplexing.

One of its selling points appears to be bringing famous-for-DC types to the blogosphere. But The Huffington Post — which was proclaimed to be the failure that HotSoup actually is — already did. (Still, I can’t let it go without noting that Arianna promised Gwyneth Paltrow, yet has so far only delivered Lynne M. Paltrow.)

HotSoup is closer to George Clooney’s “post” at HuffPo than a real meeting of the minds: It’s painfully obvious that most celebrity HotSoupers didn’t sign up themselves, their assistants or HotSoup did. Will we ever see them jump into the fray? How about you, Mary Matalin? Donna Brazile? (Seriously, John Ashcroft?) Hey, maybe even at some point Mark McKinnon and Allie Savarino will weigh in — you know, two founders of the site.

·      ·      ·

For the next part of my act, let’s roll the blooper reel. First, at the top of the main page you can find a link titled “Issue Loops,” and if you click on it even tonight, you will see:

HotSoup, No Issue Loops

Assuming there were threads to be found here, this is what you would want on the front page. This isn’t amateur hour; this is the afternoon before.

And this one is less a blooper, if anything more of a practical joke:

HotSoup marijuana question

The second blooper, now apparently changed but still not actually fixed at the time of this writing, occurs on the celebrity pet issue page for Lance Armstrong, where an unidentified patronizing author/moderator (see “Editor’s Comments” in box at right) demands:

HotSoup, Lance Armstrong

Never mind the fact that here the Beltway insiders are pretending they’re like, the new outsiders, man. Because whether you like it or not, Lance Armstrong has a pitch for his side, which you can pretty much ignore and skip to the very end:

HotSoup, Lance Armstrong's question

Is Lance’s ghostwriter a fan of Joyce? Maybe we’ll find the answer if we just click on the “more…” button…? No:

HotSoup, Lance Armstrong, no files

Okay, now I get it. What big issues aren’t being addressed in current online debate? There are none. This comic software glitch is emblematic of why HotSoup.com is going to fall far short of its lofty goals: Try to be everything to everyone, and you will be nothing to nobody.

Others are already doing what they think they are. If they don’t like the partisan debate sites, there are plenty of online forums already offering whatever kinds of debate you want: Slashdot, Kuro5hin, OffTopic.com, Anandtech, even Something Awful and Genmay. Try the Corvette Forums. You might be surprised.

Though most online forums are not about politics, all the big ones have off-topic sections where debates left, right and beyond are carried on around the clock. HotSoup is going to bring you… prepared text from Lance Armstrong’s agent? The experience of being hounded with insipid questions — “Is the sentence stiff enough? Too stiff?” — by Ron Fournier?

Blooper-wise, best of all is the unenlightening, unlinkable and surely soon-to-disappear V-Factor sidebar:

HotSoup V-Factor

Take it away, Mike Turk:

Something called the V-Factor rates posts on a scale between “never” and “definitely will”, but completely fails to indicate what they will never or always do? What the hell is that?

Update: I had thus far left out any mention of Right Wing News blogger John Hawkins’ involvement w/r/t the Conservative Forum he was asked to oversee — which so far is less popular than the now-defunct Conservative Grapevine message board Hawkins once ran all by himself — but now “Hot Corner” is mentioning it, and well, see for yourself:

…. Today we welcome the many readers of “www.rightwingnews” to the Soup ….

Never mind the fact that Hawkins has been on board since before the launch, so it makes no sense to welcome his readers “today.” Apparently HotSoup editors are not among the readers of Hawkins’ site. Because, depending on your browser, typing in “www.rightwingnews” won’t get you very far.

Update, months later: Things I should have said when the site was still operational:

  1. If it was supposed to actually be “hot soup,” it must have been carrot and pea soup. It never looked appetizing.
  2. Per the image asking what issue “our mainstream media and our leaders” were ignoring, why were the “voices” all people featured in the mainstream media?
  3. One of the key points that I did make was that this thing was bound to fail because it never had any buy-in from the famous-for-DC names attached to it. Carter Eskew and Mark McKinnon might have been interesting discussion leaders, but they never tried.
  4. The apparent teenager asking about legalizing marijuana is actually a married adult, possibly with kids. Months later, I saw him on “The Colbert Report.”
  5. The Corvette Forums have actually been pretty big on Fred Thompson.

I think that was about it.

Hat Tips Are For Losers

Published by William Beutler on October 5, 2006 in Asymmetrical Media, Blogs vs. MSM, Journalist Bloggers, National Politics and Republicans. 5 Comments

Nice reporting there, Radar, though I’m not too clear on why you consider your story an “exclusive”:

Radar Online Covers Mark Foley And Stop Sex Predators

Say, aren’t you suppposed to be out of business?

P.S. Somehow, Passionate America has become “one blogger” in The Oklahoman. This doesn’t bother me quite so much.

The Mariner’s Revenge Post

Published by William Beutler on September 19, 2006 in Blogs vs. MSM, Cable News, Journalist Bloggers and Seriously. 2 Comments

From the “unlinkably elitist” Hotline’s Last Call:

Now that “Talk Like A Pirate Day” is getting cable news coverage, it has officially jumped the plank.

I gave this pseudo-event some space in the Blogometer last year, and today Technorati counts 863 links to the main Talk Like A Pirate page in the last 6 hours alone (note: this factoid will be out of date as soon as this is posted, if not already). So, we can chalk this up as just the latest blogosphere phenomenon to be picked up by the mainstream media. Right?

Actually, chances are this “holiday” would rank somewhere below Festivus without significant pushes by nationally syndicated Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry, first in 2002 and again in 2003.

Popular as Barry is, he’s no match for 150 bloggers an hour (for today, at least). And with as broad a reach as those bloggers have, they’re no match for Barry’s celebrity (that is to say in our media culture, authority). Better, then, to call this an example of the self-reflexive mediasphere, where the amateurs and professionals are simultaneously the source and audience.

So it is fitting that in 2006, Dave Barry is on hiatus from his column, and now himself one of those bloggers celebrating International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

P.S. Arrrrrrrr.

Consolidating Yglesias

Published by William Beutler on September 5, 2006 in Journalist Bloggers and Relaunches. 1 Comment

It’s the end of an era, of sorts, and the beginning of another. Matthew Yglesias, the New York-born, Harvard-educated, District-based, recently-bearded, mid-20s American Prospect contributor and one of the first “famous for DC” bloggers, is removing himself from the three (!) blogs he’s been writing for more than a year now — to write a book and reopen his original site, MatthewYglesias.com. And it’s long overdue.

Yglesias has long been a contributor to his employer’s blog, Tapped, and when Josh Marshall launched his TPM Cafe in early 2005, Yglesias was invited to be the only blogger with his own permanent subdomain. His original site (moved to Typepad) became a repository for discussion about the Washington Wizards, indie rock and his Logan Circle neighborhood.

I was always a bit surprised that Yglesias was willing, let alone able to write for three separate blogs: politics for Tapped, policy for TPM Cafe and whatever he wanted at his personal site. True, he is a full-time writer, he had plenty of co-writers at Tapped, and his Typepad site was published no more often than he chose. Nevertheless, dividing your blogging efforts among multiple sites is a troublesome proposition for several reasons. For one, that’s three times the upkeep to keep up with, not to mention as many as three different content management systems to contend with. While it may bring greater exposure to you, the blogger, it requires too much of your readers. Even if you aren’t spread too thin, they will be. To find your latest insight, they may have to visit three separate sites, and plenty won’t bother. (Myself, I usually settled for the personal site, also being a fan of The Decemberists and Rilo Kiley.)

The disjointed nature of this practice limits the blogger as well: You can’t reference a previous post from another of your sites with too much confidence that a reader will have seen it, so you should probably explain it again, just to be sure, and pedantry is the death of blogging. So is sameness. Most bloggers need a relaunch every year or so to keep things fresh, and Yglesias’ latest transformation will probably serve himself and his readers very well — for another year or so.