Posts by Idiot Savant
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You're right on the button about Chavez. He's not a murdering psychopath (yet), but he's dangerously authoritarian and on a path that undermines rather than strengthens Venezuela's democracy. What he's done for the people of Venezuela has been great (RWDB's MMV), but he should have accepted the constitutional limits rather than seeking to make himself President-for-life.
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Damn, another book to buy. And I already have too many to read...
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Che:
maybe he should swtich them back on with kind of membership/registration proviso.
Blogger doesn't offer that option, and even if it did, I'm not sure that I would want to use it. As I said, I have neither the time nor the inclination to vet every comment, and neither do I want to deal with the inevitable recriminations when someone feels upset about being refused permission to piss all over my doorstep (and given the number of commenter who clearly lack any form of intellectual toilet training, it will happen). While I miss the public input too, at the end of the day, I am simply unwilling to run a sewer.
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The more you get your news from the internet, the more stories you see on the Herald (& Stuff) that are just lifted verbatim from the wires. If NZH was to only use locally generated material, it would be an awfully anorexic publication.
And the more you look at Scoop, the more you realise that many of those stories are barely rewritten prss releases. So why pay for the intermediary?
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That's it. Readers can have a relationship with a blogger that they don't have any more with a masthead.
I like that model.
Now all I have to do is find a way to make money out of it.
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Stephen:
I wonder though whether a co-op, or a lean little owner-operated business (like PA, or TPM) has the same management cost structures as an old-school paper. I don't think they do. A journalist in the "screwed online newspaper" model is screwed because they can't support the admin and management staff and make a decent return on shareholders' funds. Josh Marshall just has to support himself...
Scoop's Alastair Thompson had a lot to say about this - in particular about the cost of highly leverage buyouts and how this dangerously weighs down exsting media institutions. He thought that there was a potential future in community newspapers (print being better than the net for advertising in a tight geographic area), but that big newspapers were going to get seriously squeezed by the advertising crunch, to the extent that they might not survive.
Its also interesting to look at Scoop as a model - its entirely online, yet supports 4 full time and 3 part time staff, as well as dispensing play money to bloggers through its advertising network. Which doesn't sound too bad. OTOH, they're not really a newspaper, more a collection of newsfeeds, and aren't really doing much in the way of investigative reporting (though they do cover Parliament and interview politicians).
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Craig:
I found Judy McGregor particularly bizarre on that score.
So did I. Yes, I know journalists and sources need to get on, but you can't just go around saying things on the record and then deny that you've done it. Key burned her, and tried to use her as a vehicle to lie to the NZ public. I'd have thought that any journalist worth their salt would burn him right back by exposing exactly what had been said.
To be fair, I can get over my knee-jerk hostility to the EPMU and acknowledge there's some interesting and provocative food for thought coming out of the Journalism Matters conference. But the air of navel-gazing self-pity about how the evil bloggers are the barbarians at the gate isn't it.
And to be fair, I think the sensitivity of bloggers isn't that interesting either. Vernon Small said the blogsophere as an institution was biased and unfair and full of wingnuts. And any honest appraisement would say that he is absolutely right. That's not to say there isn't good stuff out there, but Sturgeon's Law applies, as it does to everything. And I cannot blame people who profesionally maintaina solid commitment to quality from being a little uneasy about this.
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There are some unhelpful generalisations there. Blogging isn't "fundamentally contemptuous of journalism" any more than television is fundamentally contemptuous of radio. Some bloggers might operate on a built-in contempt for journalism; the very large majority don't. Blogging might manifest as a critique of journalism, it might be indistinguishable from journalism, or it might regard journalism as irrelevant. It's just a different voice.
To be fair to Mr Warren, he did do some degeneralising at first, and noted that not every blog is about politics ("there are three types of blogs: catblogs, newsblogs, and opinionblogs"). At the same time, he has noted an important feature of political blogging culture, and while its not true of every blogger, its certainly a strong presence which spans left and right (though in different forms).
One of Warren's points (which I left out) was that "most bloggers deny being journalists". Which is true, but it can be for different reasons. Your average foam at the mouth sewerblogger denies being a journalist because they are contemptuous of the "MSM". I deny being a journalist because I don't think I'm good enough (but I aspire to journalism on my better days).
As for strengths of the medium, I was trying to make some similar points to someone from AUT, who is doing a piece about "blgs vs journalists" for their journalism school newspaper. Keith however has said it a lot better than I did in my muddled state.
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We bring it on ourselves, I think. As an industry, we talk ourselves up as bearers of a civic duty, how fantastic the job is, how we'd hate to sell our soul to become a PR hack. It's all true, but damn, it makes for a lousy bargaining position.
That was the sense I got. Like teachers and nurses, journalists think of their profession as "a calling" and see it as serving society. And like teachers and nurses, this belief is ruthlessly exploited. Unlike teachers and nurse, though, they can't just go around their employer and bargain directly with the people with their hands on the purse strings - and neither do they have the level of unionisation necessary for effective collective bargaining.
An interesting idea suggested was that next time the journalists of a major daily went out on strike, they could simply not come back; iven the cost of web publishing, it would be possible to just set up a website and create a serious rival to a former employer overnight (there's a parallel here with the formation of medieval universities, many of which were established when masters and students got into a spat with the local Bishop, moved elsewhere, and took their university with them (a university in that time not being the buildings, but the people)). It's an interesting idea, but I don't think the economics quite work out yet - web advertising revenues are probably too low to fund a serious paper, even a purely virtual one. But that should change (or rather, with the demise of printed classified advertising, it is going to have to change if newspapers are going to survive), which makes it possible.
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At the "JOurnalism matters" summit on Saturday one Sunday paper admitted to being "quite driven" by the concerns Keith talks about; they watch their affiliated website closely during the week, and what gets the page-views plays a big role in story selection. But it seems to be driven more by the strong competition for readership between the major Sunday papers than by a desire to maximise ad revenue.
Can't say who, as the discussion was under Chatham House rules.