Category: Business

— Ken and Matt are secretly plotting with Dick Riordan to create a real newspaper for LA (| KEN . LAYNE . DOT . CON |)

It’s all true. Matt and I finished the Secret Documents for Riordan early Friday morning, and we’ll be meeting this week so the former mayor can tell us how dumb we are.

See Rick Orlov for details. This is a great development.

— Check out the The Warblogging Book. This picks up on a suggestion of Matt Welch’s for publishing a book of essays reacting to 9/11 like Tristin Laughter’s.

— The pseudonymous author of Warblogger Watch criticizes:

The patronizing and racist Asparagirl (don’t you know that hiding behind a psudonym [sic] is like a terrorist hiding behind a ski mask, babe?)

while pretending to be “Eric A. Blair” (George Orwell’s real name). The poor thing’s quite insane.

— Do you believe the government was behind 9/11? Rebecca Blood does: “Were the clues found by law enforcement officers planted to mislead the search for the perpetrators of 9.11? I’ve been wondering, and so does Stratfor.” Check it out.

— Doubting Thomas has declared himself president of the Omphalos Fan Club:

General Richard “Beef-n-Curry” Bennett
Not only did GEN Bennett win an amazing 10 Congressional Medals of Honor as an infantry officer in Vietnam, he also invented the light bulb, pocket pizza, space travel, the video game TRON, and the French language. As you recall, GEN Bennett was the young Captain in the Battle of Dak To who ordered a napalm strike on the infamous VC-run “Number Ten” Noodle Shop, which subsequently saved 5,000 people from getting a stomach ache and the shits. He also participated in Operation Buddy Hackett, which was a CIA campaign to root out irony in the Mekong Delta in 1969.

It’s very fine piece of work, and we should all encourage Tommy to take all his meds everyday.

— I heard Wm. McGowan on the radio today, pitching his book Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism. He discussed the made-up anti-Arab backlash that was supposed to have swept the nation in the wake of Sept. 11, a fine example of the liberal media suffusing their reporting with wish-fulfillment. Here’s a description of the book from his web site:

McGowan subjects the journalism of the New York Times, the Washington Post and other prestigious news organizations to careful analysis in showing how the quest for “diversity” has influenced not only editorial policy but news gathering itself. The diversity that has seized hold of the nation’s newsrooms does not value true diversity of opinion, he maintains, but instead promotes one-sided reporting-by-the-numbers.

The message seems to be similar to that of Bernard Goldberg’s Bias, and I hope it’s better-supported. There’s nothing worse than a weak argument for the correct point of view.

— InstaPundit put some e-mail on his site that he got from “hot-shot blogger Rebecca Blood,” author of a forthcoming book on weblogs. Here’s the part that proves she’s an idiot wannabe:

I’m interested in how many readers I have. cookies would be the most accurate way oftracking that, but without using cookies the standard measure that most closely correlates to that metric is unique IPs …even considering the inaccuracies involved (as noted by scalzi), I feel this is the most reliable measure available (at least comparable to the circulation figures used by print publications).

Neither Blood nor the source she cites – some idiot named Scalzi – understand the relationship between IP addresses and people on the web. IP addresses are not only assigned dynamically most of the time (Blood and Scalzi sound like they heard about that), but they’re hidden from the net, or aggregated, behind NAT boxes and firewalls. Every time somebody where I work visits a web site outside the company Intranet, they use the same IP address, because we have a firewall. All big companies have firewalls and NAT boxes, and most schools an universties. These people are lame beyond measure, and they’re writing books about the frickin’ web? Jesus H. Christ – it’s probably all about Goth grrrls and raving. Gag me with a spoon.

— In yet another article on blogging, Brendan Nyhan reports that a WaPo reporter is trying to get her critics fired:

But after suffering through increasingly harsh criticism of her coverage of Clinton, Schmidt apparently snapped after receiving the emails, as MWO first reported (the story was then picked up by Jason Cherkis in the Washington City Paper).
According to both Rentschler and the associate, she researched the domain names the emails were sent from and forwarded their emails to their employers.

You know you’re getting to them when they resort to this kind of behavior, which can be very effective with some employers.

— If you agree that Emmanuelle Richard has the Froggiest Blog, you should go to .:: BLOGGUEUR ::. Qui aura le meilleur blog? Vous?, click on [VOTER] in the first category (Meilleur Blog,) and then select “Naughty Bytes“. Voting is a sacred duty, and she’s Matt Welch’s old lady and the world’s most famous Emmanuelle.

— Fairly honest assessment of journalistic fear and loathing:

Borg Journalism – We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated:
Weblogs scoop you at every turn, breaking “your” stories before you have a chance to rush your article to press. And even if you do manage to break a story, weblogs take it over, dissecting every point you made and pushing your logic to every inevitable conclusion. Forget that follow-up you had planned – ‘blogs have already anticipated and published every point you might have made.
Welcome to the world of Borg Journalism. Resistance is futile: journalism is being assimilated.

At least this journalist knows what he’s talking about.