February 24, 2003
Balanced Subjective Journalism
Don Park on Balanced Subjective Journalism and his proposal to jump-start the dying SF Examiner with peer-to-peer journalism.
Thanks to Dave for the pointer.
Calling all warbloggers
Ryan Pitts, an online producer for spokesmanreview.com in Spokane, Wash., is putting together a page on online war coverage. Admirably, he wants to include weblogs in the conversation. Writes Ryan:
I naturally want to include a well-rounded blogroll, spanning the left, the right and everything in between. I consume plenty of blogs, so I'm pretty comfortable compiling this list. However, I'd *also* like to include headline feeds from five or so of these warbloggers. ... Do you have any ideas on who I might choose in order to provide a decent cross-section of ideology?
I've never been a part of the "warblogger" community, though I've read about them on OJR and elsewhere. Anyone out there visit a warblog on a regular basis? If so, send me a note, or post your comment below, and I'll pass it along to Ryan.
RI nightclub fire blog
Sheila informs that Projo.com's Rhode Island nightclub fire blog is now outside the company's registration requirements and out on the open Web here. The blog includes a list of victims, coverage of the national news media's reporting on the tragedy, the status of Ty Longley, rhythm guitarist of Great White, who's still listed as "missing," and much more.
rusty said:
This fire has led to a good example of what K5 is good at, journalism-wise. A former soundman at a Boston club found the contract rider on The Smoking Gun and wrote why he thinks, based on his experience in a similar job, that it's implausible that the soundman at the R.I. club didn't know the band was using pyro. His story is here, and the comments are also full of interesting analysis from others who had small-club jobs and have been in that kind of situation.
JD Lasica said:
Rusty's comments are dead on. Check out the thread at Kuro5hin: You've got a house soundman offering first-person analysis of what goes on at these clubs, and he's joined -- with some agreeing, others disagreeing, but all chiming in with something worth -- by band members, lighting technicians, clubgoers and others. A mix of fact, insight, conjecture and bullshit, but all of it riveting.
Who's fleecing whom?
The usually reliable Declan McCullagh had an incredibly wrong-headed new column up today at News.com: Get ready to be fleeced.
I admire Declan for not following the herd and staking out independent positions (and his political slant is popular with the anti-government libertarian crowd). But even if Congress follows his advice and repeals the most egregious parts of the DMCA and other federal copyright laws -- which it won't -- that still leaves private industry free to bamboozle and hoodwink millions of unsuspecting customers with crappy products, laden with DRM, that won't play on their computers, on their portable music devices, or in other ways. The great Invisible Hand of the Marketplace won't solve that. Information will. If there's no market incentive for the record lables to mark their DRM CDs as defective -- and there isn't -- why would they?
"Get ready to be fleeced"? How? By providing customers with the information they need to make informed decisions?
Studios, firms in piracy talks
LA Times: "Trying to plug another potential hole in the anti-piracy dike, Hollywood studios have started a new round of private meetings with high-tech companies and consumer-electronics manufacturers to explore ways to stop unauthorized recordings. This time, the issue is how to preserve anti-copying signals on a digital television show, online video or DVD when converted from digital to analog."
The Microsoft-Apple tango
Glenn F. has a new column up in the Seattle Times that looks at the uneasy dance between Microsoft and Apple. Nice job.
Salon death watch
The LA Times has the latest on the Salon death watch.
Meantime, just got an emailing from Salon editor David Talbot, who's trolling for more subscriptions, but this can't be good news. Writes David:
"If every one of our 53,000 subscribers brings in just ONE additional subscription, Salon will finally break even this year."
Grammys: The Norah Express
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I discovered her last summer and immediately fell in love with her incredible, silky-voiced stylings. Thought she only appealed to the over-30 set, though, so I was surprised to see the Norah Jones tsumani sweep through this evening's Grammys. (Though, by the look of the crowd, was there anybody there under 30?) Now, if they'd only cut out the flabby, just-lying-there 90-minute mid-section, they might have had a decent show. But it was worth staying up to see Bruce, Elvis, Little Stevie and Dave Grohl let it rip on the Clash's London Calling. Damn, that was something. As was the Simon-Garfunkel reunion. Maybe I'll post the segments online some day, cease-and-desist letters notwithstanding.
As for Eminem, I still don't get it.
