Category: Media

is the subject of this entry at Libertarian Samizdata

From this little article lifted in its entireity from today’s JPMorgan Chase Tech Industry Daily, it would appear that the corporate world is starting to take notice.

Will bloggers compete with journalists?

I certainly hope so. The trouble with public education, in a nutshell, is that it’s practiced by education majors, not the brightest lights on the tree. Similarly, the trouble with journalism is that it’s practiced by people scarcely a notch up from education majors, who don’t really understand most of what they write about. You clearly get better quality analysis from people like Andrew Hofer, Megan McArdle, and VodkaPundit on business and economics than you find in the papers, which is why their blogs are so hot.
Continue reading “Bloggers and Journalists”

— Fox News’ celebrity blogger Will Vehrs has discovered one of my favorite columnists:

I think Kathleen Parker is one of the best columnists out there who isn’t syndicated to the WP or NYT. She’s got a nice web site and answered a long-ago email I sent her quickly and very graciously.

You can also read her on Jewish World Review. Parker is one of the sensible voices in the divorce wars, where her experience as a girl raised by her father guides in in the right direction. I first learned about her when she sent me an e-mail about a piece I’d forwarded to some e-mail lists about a study in England showing the women most successful in politics and business had strong relationships with their fathers. Highly recommended.

Speaking of Fox News, they feature Los Angeleno Ken Layne today, doing Dave Barry impressions. Check it out.

— Will Vehrs says Fox News is gonna put a new blog on their site every day of the week, with his coming back next Saturday as a regular feature. The editor’s note makes sense now. It’s good to see blogs making more penetration into the mainstream media. The first one to emerge was Jack Kavanaugh’s Rough & Tumble, the Daily Driveby on California politics, featured on CBS’ 60 Minutes a couple of years ago. Kavanaugh’s content is so rich that his site is self-supporting now. He also gets calls from Washington if the content isn’t updated by 7AM Pacific Time, so there’s a downside to every upside.

that Fox News has picked up Pundit Watch for their website, even if they don’t know what they’re buying. They say:

Editor’s Note: Beginning this week, Fox News brings some of the web’s newest voices under its wing with the addition of the Fox Weblog. With it, we hope to bring the farflung corners of the Internet to your desktop, with a little commentary on the side. For those who don’t know, a weblog is a tour of the ‘net guided by a pilot you will come to know over time. We hope you enjoy the tour.

Fox only carries the Television Pundits part of Punditwatch, not the “far-flung corners of the Internet” part, so you wonder what they’re smoking (besides CNN).

Oh well, at least Punditwatch isn’t totally dependent on Blogspot any more.

Blogger newbie Andy Dodge complains that fellow newbie Glenn Reynolds ripped him off: Dodgeblog

Ok, now I am bloody pissed off with Glenn at Instapundit. What the hell is his damn problem with giving people credit for sending him links to stuff? I live in London, got The Spectator as soon as it came out and sent him info on it. Did I get any credit, NO! Glenn thinks he is god to bloggers and doesn’t have to give the rest of credit for giving him heads-up on stuff. I am not the first to complain about this.

I don’t have any insight into this particular problem, but I suspect it’s hard to maintain a 30-a-day posting regime and still observe all the proper social forms; it’s also unlikely that Reynolds gets all those links by acting badly. Whether Reynolds is stingy with his credits or not, Andy’s problem is easily solved from his end.

It probably won’t be long ’till some other enterprising newbie publishes a summary of the 4 or 5 Reynolds entries um, most worth reading in a given day; maybe Andy himself can take that on. (source: Ben Kepple.)

Update: the boys have now officially kissed and made up. Feel the love.

who’ve linked the navel of the Blogosphere recently:

More Than Zero
Kolkata Libertarian
On the Third Hand
Libertarian Samizdata
Random Jottings
Vodka Pundit
Daily Pundit
Protein Wisdom
Rantburg
Sgt. Stryker
Balloon Juice
Blogs of War
Ben Domenech

Update: more recent links:

Dropscan
Little Green Footballs
The Edge of England’s Sword
Insolvent Republic of Blogistan
Benjamin Kepple’s Daily Rant
Ye Olde Blogge

You’re a pretty excellent cross-section of the high-quality end of the Blogosphere, and I appreciate the attention.

“Al Qaeda is … planning new attacks on the US…. Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups … have silently declared war on the US; in turn, we must fight them as we would in a war.” — Steve Emerson, May 31, 2001…

NPR blacklisted Emerson in 1998, bowing to a pressure campaign by Muslim extremists who falsely libeled him as an anti-Muslim bigot. It was an outrageous charge: He always stresses that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding. Nevertheless, NPR officials – including its national news editor – explicitly vowed to keep Emerson off the air. ”You have my promise he won’t be used again,” producer Ellen Silva wrote to Ali Abunimah of the American Arab Action Network. ”It is NPR policy.”

I had a similar experience with the PBS News Hour show – they interviewed me on-camera for a story on child support reform in California, a process that I was intimately involved in. I explained that the structural reorganization contemplated by the legislature was unlikely to produce results, since the basic problem was that the State of California demanded unrealistically large percentages of income from child support obligors, mainly fathers. I ended up in the cutting-room floor, and they went to Washington for a second opinion agreeing with the other side. Our tax dollars support this sort of spinning, of course. (Jacoby story linked by InstaPundit.)

This is a lovely article, posted on Slashdot:

You can smell the aroma of panic wafting from the federal courtroom in Los Angeles where some major TV producers filed suit against SonicblueInc. The California company makes Replay TV, a digital video recorder with features that may delight consumers but terrify broadcasters. For instance, the latest version of Replay TV can let the viewer skip over TV commercials without a glance. Moreover, the device allows users to send copies of favorite shows over the Internet.

There’s already a site in Taiwan where you can download any movie you want, practically, for a dollar Movie88.com. But free is better.

Q&A Flashback with David Murray on National Review Online

Kathryn Jean Lopez: No child has ever been harmed by strangers contaminating candy on Halloween? Even if no kid ever got hurt, does it hurt to have the warnings, and to have hospitals voluntarily checking candy every Oct. 31?

David Murray: A study of national criminal data back to 1958 found only 76 reports of any kind of tampering, almost all of which were fraudulent or mistaken. There have been three reported cases of children dying from tainted candy. The first case involved parents trying to cover up after their child ate the father’s stash of heroin. The second case involved a father intentionally poisoning his son then blaming it on tainted candy. The third case involved a child who suffered a fatal seizure while trick-or-treating. She suffered from a congenital heart condition and no evidence of tampering was ever found. Although her parents immediately notified the authorities about their daughter’s heart condition, the media ran shocking news reports of yet another incident of poisoned Halloween candy.

In praise of A &amp L Daily, this (by way of Charles Murtaugh):

On one level, Arts & Letters Daily operates simply as a Web site providing links to other Web sites, a system that’s also used for spreading information about everything from movies to hotel accommodations. But that’s only the format. The content makes Arts & Letters Daily unique in cultural history. It’s an engrossing magazine that only the Web could have spawned — cheap, fast, smart and full of surprises.

It’s a unique site, and worth a daily read.