Political Blog News: March 7, 2006

by David Perlmutter Comment Closed
Items of interest this week: Blogged Out of a Job; Few Firms Have Rules but Posters Be Warned, Amy Joyce, The Washington Post, February 19, 2006. A reporter in Dover, Del., was fired earlier this month for offensive postings on his personal blog. The number of bloggers continues to grow, but the number of workplace policies explaining the company's rules on blogging remains anemic. And that can cause a lot of workplace angst for both management and workers. Activists turn to blogs for war news, Leigh Shelton, The Daily Reveille (LSU), February 14, 2006. Recent Internet research shows blog readership jumped 58 percent in 2004, and blog readers find personal publishers, or "bloggers," to be much more credible than traditional journalists. The Iraq war debate between anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan and U.S. Marine Lt. Col. David Couvillon that occurred in Baton Rouge, La., drew, among others, a small group of war-supporting mothers and anti-war organizers with seemingly nothing in common except that they said...
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Interview with Suzanne Stefanac (Dispatches from Blogistan), Part 1.

by David Perlmutter Comment Closed
Interview with Suzanne Stefanac (Dispatches from Blogistan: a Travel Guide for the Modern Blogger) Perlmutter: Tell me how you came to write a book on blogs? Stefanac: My trajectory here mirrors a lot of what went on in the computer industry. Once the Web started to take hold, its tentacles went very deep here. I had been writing for computer magazine for years, and so when the Web first started up, and Macworld? offered me the head of MacWorld online, the magazine didn’t know what to do with it, I think. Nobody knew what to do with any of it yet. I had great hopes for it. It was 1994 and there really weren't good database and search tools for the Web yet and I thought search was so important.… I felt like there were two great advances in civilization: plumbing and search algorithms. (more…)...
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Are Blogs the New Iowa? (Redux…)

by David Perlmutter Comment Closed
I have speculated here before on the new dimensions of political blogging. Most recent is a longer essay just published by the Chronicle of Higher Education. It is behind a paywall, so I reprint it here (with a few editorial revisions!): And thanks to "doorguy" at Daily Kos for the publicity. Political Blogs: the New Iowa? (Chronicle of Higher Education, May 26, p. B6) Like many political junkies, I get my news and opinion fixes from newspapers, television, and specialty newsletters. But I also rely increasingly on blogs, the Web pages that contain both interactive, hyperlinked reportage and commentary. Such information sources are no longer curiosities. For example, Daily Kos (http://www.dailykos.com) — started by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who served in the U.S. Army before going to college and law school — includes contributions from a giant group of leftist, liberal, and Democratic bloggers. The Nielsen//NetRatings service reported that in the single month of July 2005, Kos attracted 4.8 million separate visitors. The Kos...
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Interview with William Beutler (BLOGOMETER, BLOGPI)

by David Perlmutter Comment Closed
Early this summer Shearon Roberts, one of my Masters Students, working for the Wall Street Journal conducted a series of interviews with interesting and innovative political bloggers. Among her first talks was with William Beutler, then a Senior Writer with the blogometer column in The Hotline (of the National Journal). He now (August 2006) produces BlogPI as a blog analyst for New Media Strategies, a PR firm based in Alexandria, Virginia. Beutler: At The Hotline, I write...the blogometer. That section of the main publication is also published on the Web right after The Hotline...as a Web column basically. And that Web column, the blogometer, I spend 6 hours a day reading probably 150 blogs. And I screen them trying to find the interesting conversations and the things people are saying that are affecting politics and things that are affecting bills that are on the hill. It’s a powerful tool. If you could read 100 blogs a day and you’re interested in politics...
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PHOTOJOURNALISM IN CRISIS? (The Bloggers Strike!)

by David Perlmutter Comment Closed
In my book (BLOGWARS, forthcoming, OXFORD, 2007) I try to make the point that it is time to move on from the confrontational blogger-vs-MSM bipolarity of the earlier days of blogging. The so-callled MSM needs bloggers and is, in fact, "blogging up." Bloggers are becoming a normal part of the spectrum of media. But we still have brushfire battles, and perhaps they are the "birth pains" of a new media alignment. I wrote the article below for E&P--predictably I got some hate mail from journalists saying I was too pro-blogger, and from some bloggers saying I was a lackey of the MSM...or Hezbollah! Oh, well, if you support a marketplace of ideas you should not expect it to be tidy and nice. That said, as links below show, most bloggers who cited the piece understood I was trying to be fair to all parties... PHOTOJOURNALISM IN CRISIS By David D. Perlmutter, Editorandpublisher.com, August 17, 2006 (August 17, 2006) -- The Israeli-Hezbollah war has...
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Interview with Ken Spain [Deputy Chief of Staff, U.S. Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas)]

by David Perlmutter Comment Closed
Shearon Roberts, an LSU Masters Student, working for the Wall Street Journal conducted a series of interviews with interesting and innovative political bloggers. In November 2005 she talked to Ken Spain [Deputy Chief of Staff, U.S. Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas)] How involved is Mr. Conaway in operating the blog, http://www.conawayblog.com/,making posts and reading comments? We assign a staffer to maintain the blog on a daily basis, the Congressman is very active in his posts, however, all the posts do not come from the Congressman, some come from staffers. The Congressman usually blogs once or twice a week usually on an issue that is important to him, an issue that the staff may point out that has a relevance for that day or time, we would usually try and get the Congressman to blog on that issue…if he does not point out what he would like to blog about. He will sign off at the bottom of his blog entry as Mike. The other...
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THE GREAT BLOG & FAUXTOGRAPHY DEBATE CONTINUES

by David Perlmutter Comment Closed
Before I started working on a book on blogs (BLOGWARS) almost all my research was on photojournalism and its famous icons and mediated imagery of other kinds. Obviously it is of great interest to me that blogging has driven the great controversy over visual coverage of the Israeli-Hezbollah war. That prompted me to write my "Photojournalism in Crisis" essay for Editor&Publisher which I posted on here at PBB and was picked up my many blogs. Some updates... E&P EDITOR DEFENDS WAR PHOTOGRAPHY Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor&Publisher has published a major “DEFENSE OF WAR PHOTOGRAPHERS” against attacks by bloggers. (See Part I and Part II). Very much worth reading in counterpoint to my original E&P piece as well. BLOGS AND THE MYSTERIOUS AMBULANCE INCIDENT “Zombie” of zombietime.com has published “THE RED CROSS AMBULANCE INCIDENT: HOW THE MEDIA LEGITIMIZED AN ANTI-ISRAEL HOAX AND CHANGED THE COURSE OF A WAR.” This is an important post—perhaps when a future history of blogs is written “The Red Cross Ambulance Incident” will...
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Interview with Polblogger Aaron Pena (D-Texas)

by David Perlmutter Comment Closed
Shearon Roberts, an LSU Masters Student working for the Wall Street Journal conducted a series of interviews with interesting and innovative political bloggers as a project for a class I taught. In January of 2005 she talked to State Representative Aaron Pena, (D-Texas) of District 40 in South Texas. He blogs at http://acapitolblog.blogspot.com/ How involved are you in operating the blog, making posts and reading comments? 100% of it is my personal involvement. I started doing this in I think January of 2005. It’s become not only a way for me to communicate with constituents but a hobby. I’ve come to enjoy the banter between myself and other bloggers not only in Texas but from around the globe. How frequently is the blog updated? Three or four times a day. How is the blog designed, is it a true blog--a strict daily diary for the politician, or a mix of website features and posts? What is the writing style or tone of the blog? It’s personal, it’s conversational. Well...
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ConfederateYankee Get’s an “A+” For Investigative Journalism

by David Perlmutter Comment Closed
I first talked about the blogger-driven battles over the Israel-Hezbullah war imagery in an essay for Editor & Publisher and then here and here in PolicyByBlog. And the controversy continues--with a constructive object lesson for us all. I don’t think blogs will replace big media, but the small blogger can, with moxie and smarts, shame the big boys and girls by doing the job that we trained the professionals to do in journalism school. Every good J-School teacher I know instructs her/his students to think, question and dig. Don’t just accept the press release about, easy answer for, herd response to or the face value of an event or issue. Scratch your head and ask: “Where can I go besides the usual sources to get the information that will better reveal the truth?” Sometimes the answer is simple, and you think “Wow, why did nobody else think of that?” The answer is sadly that industrial journalism breeds laziness and routine. There are many hard working journalists out...
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