website statistics

Archive for the 'MSM vs. Blogs' Category

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.

Great Minds Think Alike

Published by William Beutler on October 21, 2006 in Asymmetrical Media, Elections, George Allen, Lamont v. Lieberman, Language, MSM vs. Blogs, Seriously and YouTube. 2 Comments

Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece “Arcadia” reminds us that the important discoveries and great achievements of human history are not uniquely occurring circumstances. If lost, they are never misplaced for long:

THOMASINA: [T]he enemy … burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! — can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschlylus, Sophocles, Euripides — thousands of poems — Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by the noodle’s [Cleopatra's] ancestors! How can we sleep for grief? SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

In the meantime, we have ample evidence that mere cliché will be repeated often and unembarrassedly as long as it remains useful. Illustrations below the fold:

Continue reading ‘Great Minds Think Alike’

Does That Make Him Crazy? Possibly…

Published by William Beutler on October 17, 2006 in Asymmetrical Media, Earned Media and MSM vs. Blogs. 1 Comment

In the latest issue of New York, ex-Spy Kurt Andersen considers the Duke lacrosse rape case and the New York Times’ peculiar reticence to say what almost every close observer (including “60 Minutes” as of this weekend) already has — that the indictments against the three team members are wholly without merit.

Rather, Andersen writes, the Times’ 5,600 word definitive take* “attributes all criticism of the prosecution to defense lawyers, Duke alumni, and obsessive bloggers.” As a counterweight to the Times’ arguably negligent aloofness, Andersen devotes the last third of his piece to one of those bloggers, and it’s worth quoting at length:

In the movie, Tom Hanks would play K. C. Johnson. He’s the most impressive of the “bloggers who have closely followed the case,” in the Times’ tacitly pejorative construction. But Johnson is the Platonic ideal of the species—passionate but committed to rigor and facts and fairness, a tenured professor of U.S. history (at Brooklyn College), a 38-year-old vegetarian who lives alone in a one-bedroom Bay Ridge apartment and does pretty much nothing but study, teach, run, and write. Johnson has no connection to Duke. (His B.A. and Ph.D. are from the Harvard of the Northeast.) His attention was grabbed in April by the “deeply disturbing” public comments of Duke faculty that righteously indulged in invidious stereotypes and assumed the lacrosse players’ guilt. “One area that the academy, especially since McCarthyism, is supposed to stand up is cases where due process is denied,” he says. He usually posts at least once a day—not standard autoblog rim shots, but carefully argued, deeply researched essays running 1,000 words or more. “I need to ensure that it meets what I consider to be an acceptable level of academic quality.” He has traveled to Durham several times. When he wanted to find out if Nifong’s unfair photo lineups were standard provincial practice—they’re not—he spent days talking to fifteen North Carolina police departments and prosecutors. People assume he’s a right-winger. “I’m a registered Democrat who has never voted for a Republican in my life.” Not that he doesn’t wildly speculate—he is a blogger. I wondered why, after Nifong won his primary, the D.A. didn’t start tacking away from the case, setting himself up to drop the charges. Because, Johnson argues, if it doesn’t go forward, he would be vulnerable to civil suits from the indicted players, and disbarment. “This is someone whose career is on the line. He has no choice.” The Times has not addressed any of this. For the past few years, I’ve tended to roll my eyes when people default to rants about the blindered oafishness or various biases of “the mainstream media” in general and the Times in particular. At the same time, I’ve nodded when people gush about the blogosphere as a valuable check on and supplement to the MSM—but I’ve never entirely bought it. Having waded deep into this Duke mess the last weeks, baffled by the Times’ pose of objectivity and indispensably guided by Johnson’s blog, I’m becoming a believer.

I’ve recently mused on the (not entirely unwarranted) tendency of the established media to treat bloggers as if they were crazy. I’d be the last person to claim blogging is always beneficial — after a year writing The Blogometer for The Hotline, I was distinctly less pro-blogger than I was at the beginning. Then again, I probably went in basing my opinion on only the blogs I liked to read. But if you read blogs already, it’s a worthwhile exercise to seek out blogs you wouldn’t normally.

That seems to be what Andersen has done, and needless to say, his piece is a welcome antidote, explaining to readers in detail just how blogging can have a salutory effect on news reporting. And to Johnson’s credit, he may not be a political conservative, but he has written at least one column about the case for National Review Online.

For whatever reason, unfortunately, New York’s online edition doesn’t link to Johnson’s page, Durham-in-Wonderland. I’ve only had a brief chance to peruse the site — and not being an avid follower of the case, it’s unlikely I’ll spend much more time there — but it does seem to be exactly what Andersen says it is: cogent, methodical and rigorous. And even if New York won’t link to it, it seems to be doing better than just fine.

P.S. For more reaction to Andersen’s piece, see Matthew Hoy and S.T. Karnick, plus North Carolinians Betsy Newmark, Brendan Nyhan and Ruth Sheehan of the News & Observer.

  • FYI, minus the dateline it’s actually just 10 words shy of being 5,700 words. To be fair, Andersen is a satirist by trade, and not a business reporter.

You So Crazy

Published by William Beutler on September 21, 2006 in Lamont v. Lieberman, MSM vs. Blogs, Netroots and Washington Post. 3 Comments

At the risk of giving over this week’s blogging entirely to surveying opinions about bloggers by writers for the Washington Post Co., two more caught my attention today. First there’s David Broder in this morning’s Post (though of course available at Post.com last night), lamenting the polarization of politics in Washington and touting apparent countervailing forces:

Now … you can see the independence party forming — on both sides of the aisle. They are mobilizing to resist not only Bush but also the extremist elements in American society — the vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left and the doctrinaire religious extremists on the right who would convert their faith into a whipping post for their opponents.

And in a dispatch filed late this afternoon, Slate’s John Dickerson described Hugo Chávez’s United Nations speech thusly:

“It smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of,” he said, as he stood at the U.N. lecturn where Bush spoke the day before. It was hard to tell which was stranger, that the United Nations had let a blogger take control of the podium, or that the delegates who are famously comatose and unresponsive during General Assembly speeches stirred themselves to applaud the diatribe.

Broder is referring specifically to the Lamontsters, while Dickerson didn’t bother to make any ideological distinctions. What’s to be gleaned from this? Not much, really. It shouldn’t be news to anyone that bloggers are viewed skeptically by the mainstream reporters they so frequently criticize. Nor should conservative bloggers be surprised they’re easily lumped in with their more widely-covered counterparts. I do find these references somewhat annoying, but the stereotypes didn’t come out of thin air. And will the bloggers-are-crazy meme ever go away? I certainly have my doubts.

As for WaPoCo’s third major property, Newsweek, there’s nothing especially notable from them blog-wise today — although I am at least a little disappointed to see they appear to have discontinued their blog roundup.