I never fail to be amused by the insane notion that the press was out to get Bill Clinton during his presidency. In fact, they struggled mightily to avoid reporting on his and Hillary’s more egregious activities, and when forced to, usually helped the first couple by eagerly putting the best positive spin on them. As evidence of the former, Thomas Lipscomb asks why, with all of the reporting on private dick (multiple meanings to that word in this case) to the stars Anthony Pellicano, no one seems interested in mentioning the most interesting connection:

Numerous unbiased accounts of the Clintons have repeatedly stressed the importance of Hillary

In the previous post in which I introduced (some of) my readership to the new space blog over at Florida Today, I mentioned the kerfuffle going on between Todd Halvorson and NASA Watch, but it occurs to me that this is a good example of the difference between conventional journalism and blogging. Keith has a valid point when he writes:

Gee Todd, let’s read my post a little more carefully, OK? And wouldn’t it be useful for your readers to have a link to the actual post you are referring to – and not have them rely only on what you want them to think I wrote?

When I scroll down all of the blog posts at The Flame Trench, I see not a single link, to anything. It is all conventional “reporting” where the reporter has learned something, via whatever methods he or she has, and then broadcasts it to The Rest Of Us. The only difference is that the stories are shorter, and not put up on any kind of schedule. This is not blogging–it’s journalism in a different format.

There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but it’s considered de rigeur in the blogosphere, when commenting on someone else’s post, to provide a link to it, so that the readers can, as Keith says, go look and judge for themselves if it’s being properly characterized. And over the years, I’ve noticed that mainstream journalists are very bad at this, because they tend to have a reluctance to reveal “source material”–a habit that carries over in many cases to their blogging, when they decide to try their hand at it. Of course, in some cases, it’s because the journalist is being duplicitous, and doesn’t want people to be able to easily discern that (though I’m sure that wasn’t the intent here). In this case, of course, it’s ridiculous, because the source material is on the web, and anyone with a little effort can go see for themselves anyway, because Todd does say that it’s at NASA Watch.

Just consider this friendly advice to people who, while they may be justifiably successful journalists, are apparently still novices when it comes to blogging.

[Update on Friday morning]

Now that’s a blog post. And I can see the links just fine.

24/7. Really.

For a book I’m working on. Does anyone out there have any stories of “progressive” indoctrination as part of required courses (or just in general) in journalism schools? Email me (address at top left) if you don’t want to post publicly. The question is prompted by this post about the phenomenon in schools of education.

La Seipp, on Nikki Finke:

How hath the crazy fallen, I thought when I noticed L.A. Weekly columnist/pretend lawyer Nikki Finke now has a blog, because of course Nikki has long been dismissive of the blogosphere. She also, at least until fairly recently, has been ignorant of basic blogospheric knowledge that the IP addresses of commenters are easily checked. So for instance if you post once here under the name Nikki Finke, and then again pretending to be a lawyer threatening me with libel for insulting Nikki Finke, it might be better to post that second comment from someone else’s computer. I guess that’s inconvenient, though, if you rarely leave the house. I haven’t seen Nikki in years, probably because these days she looks like Jabba the Hut, if you can imagine Jabba after he’s said to hell with the diets already.

Simon Mansfield reports that his publication SpaceWar.com, one of his SpaceDaily family of web sites is no longer having its pages served by Google. Strangely, if you search for “Space War” you find lots of sites linking to http://www.spacewar.com, but if you search for sites linking to www.spacewar.com, the search comes up empty. To enforce Google’s “Don’t be evil” policy, I don’t think Google’s robots are smart enough to parse the following:

<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”war, death, destruction, ruin, hate, bad bad bad”>

which have been in the keywords section for years. (Load this page and view source to see it last year.)

Space.TV corp, SpaceWar.com’s parent isn’t taking this lying down. “We consider the ban a violation of the recently enacted US-Australia Free Trade Agreement.” We wish them a fruitful trade war.

—

2006-02-25 09:55 Update: It’s back up and running. See Simon’s comment.

Hey, I’m as big a critic of the MSM as anyone, but this strikes me as a little underhanded:

…regarding the Gillette Fusion, some men clearly will like it and others won

And they don’t represent me. I didn’t know that David Gregory was my proxy (or even that he fantasized that he was), but if so, I revoke it too.

In fact, let’s start a Google campaign. David Gregory, I revoke my proxy.

“Man Shot By Cheney Leaving Hospital”

Guess he was just finishing the job.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jane Bernstein points out that they’ve already fixed it.

But this time, I kept a screenshot of the original (though it lost a little quality in the conversion to jpeg to put on my server–I still have the full bitmap).

Glenn asks if blogging is going to lose its freshness as more (though still not many) bloggers start to make a living at it. He’s not worried, though:

…why are so many people doing it? Because it’s fun! And fun is good.

That’s a good reason to do all sorts of things. Press accounts tend to focus on making money (perhaps because many journalists dream of walking away from their day jobs, and editors?) but money is only one reason we do things, and usually not the most important. As people get richer, and technology gets more capable, I think we’ll see a lot more people doing for fun things that previously were done only for money. And I think that’s a good thing.

Speaking of journalists, it’s easy to see why they’re both fascinated by, and frightened of blogs and bloggers. I suspect that it’s because journalism is something that doesn’t seem to take much skill to do well (at least as well as its largely done), or if it is, most journalists don’t seem to be up to the job. It’s kind of like Hollywood (or has been, up to now)–it’s not so much what you know, or how much talent you have, but who you know, and how lucky you are. But the days in which a clueless journalism major could (by whatever means) get a job in the industry, and not have to worry about competition are coming, or have come, to an end.

The problem is that journalists, as a class, are rarely experts in any particular field. We always used to say in the tech proposal business that it was easier to take an engineer and teach her to write, than to take an English major and teach him engineering (there are exceptions, of course, particularly when the English major took some science classes on the side). Same applies to journalism, and any sort of expertise. The best journalists, particularly those who specialize in certain areas, such as science, or finance, are generally people who came from those fields to journalism, as opposed to being journalism majors.

It’s been noted that the blogosphere is chock full of people who know things (not to mention lawyers and law professors who know how to make logical arguments, against which many journalists are utterly helpless, at least to go by the Cory Peins, not to mention Mary Mapes of the world), and this was dramatically demonstrated to journalism’s detriment in the Ra^thergate affair. And now that bloggers have pulled the curtain from the journalism wizard, many journalists’ dreams (to whatever degree they exist) of “walking away” and just making money blogging will probably go unfulfilled, because it’s not at all clear what they will bring to the table.

For these reasons, if there is a flow of talent between blogging and professional journalism, I expect it to be largely in one direction–from the former to the latter–because that’s the direction that the osmotic pressure of the talent and knowledge will dictate.