I ended up moving more quickly than I had intended. But as of today, this is the new permanent home of Media Nation. After four years on Blogger.com, I decided I wanted a better-looking blog with the greater functionality offered by WordPress. Over time, I plan to consolidate my various other Web presences here.
Thank you to everyone for your comments and advice on the new look and feel. I agree with those who say the photo — taken in the booth at WBZ-TV (Channel 4) while political analyst Jon Keller was interviewing U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch — is distracting. No offense to Keller and Lynch; the fault is entirely the photographer’s. At some point I will come up with a better image.
Please adjust your bookmarks and your RSS subscriptions.
Many thanks to my former student John Guilfoil, the founder and editor of Blast Magazine, who helped me with the set-up process and is now assisting with tweaks to the design.
Tweaking away: What I know about CSS would not fill a tiny thimble. But I’ve managed to boost the body-type size by 5 percent and improve the contrast a bit.
I’m writing this from the newsroom of “Beat the Press,” and will be running around for the rest of the day. Tomorrow I leave for a five-day backpacking trip. So don’t look for any new posts until late next week.
I’ve turned on comment moderation, but I won’t be here to moderate. In other words, you won’t be able to post a new comment until I get back. So get outside, folks.
In my commentary for the Guardian, I take on the latest bad idea to come out of the Cleveland Plain Dealer — reader representative Ted Diadiun’s widely mocked claim that bloggers are “pipsqueaks” who steal content.
WBZ-TV (Channel 4) political analyst Jon Keller will be interviewing Doug Bailey and me about Bailey’s column in today’s Boston Globe, in which he argues that newspaper comments are worthless. (They are if you’re going to do them the way the Globe and the Boston Herald do them. But we’ll talk.)
The segment should pop up on the 11 p.m. news.
And by the way, has anyone yet figured out the identity of the anonymous blogger whom Bailey attacked?
Doug Bailey want you to know there’s a local blog out there that’s not as reliable as maybe it should be. (Imagine that.) But he doesn’t want you to know what the blog is. Bailey, a former Boston Globe staffer-turned-media consultant, writes on the Globe’s op-ed page:
I recently contacted a blog that has apparently gained a reputation as an “authoritative source” on local news to point out an outrageously inaccurate — and easily verifiable — item posted on the site, attributed to one of its many “insiders.” The editor of the site conceded to me his “inside” information had actually come from an anonymous posting he saw on a newspaper website. If this wasn’t outrageous enough, this site has developed a following among traditional media reporters who apparently believe this blogger is wired and who regularly republish his missives unaware that his “exclusive” sources come from anonymous comments on their own websites. The identities of the “insiders” are unknown even to the original blogger.
Without the name of the blog and its author, and a chance for him to respond, the value of Bailey’s anecdote is approximately zero. Let’s have it, Doug. And let’s see the Globe give his target an opportunity to defend himself.
My online-journalism video tour continues with Solana Larsen, managing editor of Global Voices Online, a project that tracks bloggers around the world. I interviewed Larsen on June 9 at her Brooklyn apartment.
On April 23 I interviewed Global Voices’ Central Asia editor, Adil Nurmakov, while I was attending the Eurasian Media Forum in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
If you haven’t seen this yet, stop what you’re doing and watch. It’s 15 minutes long, but it’s well worth your time.
Ted Diadiun, the reader representative — i.e., the ombudsman — for the Cleveland Plain Dealer has some things to say about bloggers, and he’s not a damn bit happy about what’s going on in them there tubes. The video has become an instant classic — the talk of Twitter and of posts like this one, by Salon’s King Kaufman.
I’ve e-mailed Diadiun some questions that I hope he’ll respond to, either in his column, on another webcast or to Media Nation. I’ll keep you posted.
I want to call your attention this morning to a terrific new local blog. Campaign Outsider is written by John Carroll, formerly a fellow panelist on “Beat the Press” on WGBH-TV (Channel 2) and now senior media analyst on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM).
John and I worked on the set-up outside Northeastern’s Au Bon Pain a couple of weeks ago. He’s off to a strong start, weighing in today with a tough piece on the Washington Post’s pay-for-play scandal.
Currently a mass-communications professor at Boston University, Carroll has a long and distinguished career in print, radio and television. I’ve already plugged Campaign Outsider into Google Reader, and suggest you do the same.
The sound was not great, so I missed a lot. VisiCalc founder Dan Bricklin, credited with the invention of the spreadsheet, finally became frustrated enough that he got out of his seat and ran around with a little handheld microphone. But I did get a chance to score a signed (by Searls) copy of “Cluetrain,” which has been reissued on the occasion of its 10th anniversary.
I read “Cluetrain” online a couple of years ago as research for this. I anticipate getting a lot more out of it this time around, now that I have a print edition. A computer screen is still no way to read a book.
From time to time I’ve considered instituting a real-names policy for Media Nation commenters. Take a look at this exchange and you’ll see why.
I know I would end up with many fewer commenters than I have now. Some folks who use regular pseudonyms add value, and I know there’s a good chance I would lose them.
But, too often, Media Nation — like most other Internet forums — has become a place where people come to say things behind a mask of anonymity that they would never say if they had to attach their names.
"Dan Kennedy ... exercises the blogger's imperative to bloviate beyond his expertise." — Boston Globe, 11/30/08
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Technology | Dan Kennedy | 
August 22, 2009 9:29 am | 
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