I have to admit that I was surprised when I watched CNN's annual special about the decision-making behind Time's Person of the Year. Every since 9/11 and beginning with the 2001 decision, I have found the program to be riveting and a great behind the scenes look at how the decision was made.

This year was not something I expected: ME, the person of the year? It took my reading the argument inside the recent issue to truly understand--- and then I got it. Little people like you and me have helped shape the way the news is distributed as well as what is seen as newsworthy.

We have only to look at the way Howard Dean's rise to popularity and his demise was aided by bloggers and those who used their online presence to let their voices be heard.

I was watching Fox News Watch today (another one of my must-watch programs) and saw how they disected Time's decision... and their were some good points made there as well.

Look at the "big news" stories of the past few weeks: Mountain climbers in one state hypnotized a nation. One family caught in frigid temperature and how the lose of one made him a hero. O'bama visits New Hamshire and he's seen as a political rockstar. Beauty pageant winners go wild, and we can't talk about them enough... and the list goes on. Even the JFP has done its part to shape the way news is reported.

So my question is this: what do you all believe it takes to make a story A STORY? Why do some stories get no attention while others are talked about for weeks to come?

Just curious as to what you think.

Another thing here: did anyone disagree with Time's choice for Person of the Year and if so, did you think it was a safe way to skate around choosing a "bad guy" for the cover?

I think it was a way of skating around choosing the YouTube millionaires for the cover; they realized they'd picked an awful lot of business people over the past ten years and didn't want to seem like a megacorporate magazine. Which they are (heck, they're one third of the "AOL Time Warner" name), albeit a really good one.

In the old days (and in the Jackson/MS mainstream media), editorial types would simply pick which stories get coverage based on what they think fits their editorial goals, sells copy, and sells ads. Now the general public can actually compel most mainstream media to cover something by giving it coverage in alternative media--be it alternative edited news (a la AAN weeklies, as we've seen with the JFP breaking stories that are later "broken" by mainstream media sources), or citizen journalism/blogging/viral video (a la the Tabatabainejad tasering, which would not have otherwise received much mainstream coverage).


Cheers,

TH

I think the Time piece is gratuitous corporate crap, if I may add my two cents. If you go to their Web site and look at the person of the year feature, you'll see a shifting array of smiling, expensively dressed yuppies. It reminds me ever so much of the schlocky advertising we saw so much of at the end of the '90s. <i>You're not only a busy professional, you're also a rockstar, a revolutionary, and just maybe the best hope for human salvation our planet's ever seen.<i> Cut to image of smiling African villager holding up cell phone.

It's press day, so I can't rant for very long, but I really think this sort of "journalism" would have been laughed off the page even 25 years ago. That's no bash on blogging, which really has changed journalism for the better. But it's certainly a bash on Time.

I understand myself being the person of the year, but I don't know why they had to throw all of you in with me.

Actually, if they were honest about the news coverage, the person of the year should have been something like "Brangelina Tomkat Hilton-Simpson-Spears"

In terms of National media stories, we get what we ask for. They wouldn't air it if it wasn't getting ratings.

So, when we get several hour-long features on why Brittney Spears can't seem to afford underwear, instead of, oh, say, even a little coverage of massacres in Darfur, we have only ourselves to blame.

In this regard, Fox News is the worst. I don't generally bash them, because I think they do some good work that is useful, and they have some very good people ( I think John Scott is the best interviewer in the national television media). But, with respect to dwelling on these juvenile sex-obsessed type of stories, they are the absolute cellar-dwellers.

In terms of National media stories, we get what we ask for. They wouldn't air it if it wasn't getting ratings.

That's actually a classic excuse that the media corporations make—and it's faulty. People do respond to good media—the companies don't want to spend the resources on it, though (or piss off too many other corporations and powerful people), so they resort to crap for easy ratings, even as they lose viewership and readers because they're just putting crap out there. (See: Clarion-Ledger/Gannett). They're going for the easy money, in other words, and it doesn't pay off in the long run. And blaming the consumers for that is irresponsible and letting the media execs off the hook way too easily.

Agreed on Fox being cellar-dwellers. They are a big part of the reason the others have followed them down the toilet. It's short-sighted, though.

I'll defer to your knowledge about that, Ladd. And I really hope you are right. I'd like to see more intelligent and in-depth reporting on the air. The only thing I like about the way the news is done now is that it gives me plenty of material to mock while I'm watching t.v. with my friends.

I do think we have to shoulder some of the blame though. There is so much money to be made on gossip and cheap juveline sexuality in this country, someone must be buying all of it. And that can't help but influence what they want to consume as news.

Oh, I agree. It's up to the consumers to demand better media—and not just to blindly follow the herd. It's just not good enough for the media conglomerates to *blame* the consumers. In other words, make smart decisions about how you spend your time and money with media, just as many of us are doing with retail (by just-saying-no to Y'all-Mart, for instance).

I understand myself being the person of the year, but I don't know why they had to throw all of you in with me. GLB

Funny, when I looked at it on the shelf at the store all I saw was ME! Not you, Me! But, I didn't want to pay $3.99 to glorify myself and bought an Enquirer instead! ;-)

It is hard to take stock in a media source like Time when they do things so they become the news.

Sure once in a while a reporter or magazine uncovers something outstanding or salacious enough to garner some media coverage for their accomplishments and reporting. But, Time is constantly trying to make headlines with their "covers" instead of just reporting on the (mostly) useless stuff they report each week.

I find it amazing that Time and many other cookie cutter magazines still have such a large readership - outside of grocery store lines and doctors offices. Glad to know the new media is making them aware of their own mortality.

I find that amazing myself, Pike, and I wonder whether Time will go the way of Life. And that was a spot-on analysis regarding Time's covers. There really isn't much in Time most weeks but rehashes of news somebody else has already covered better. It's practically Reader's Digest.

No time to read all these comments, OR the Time pieces, yet, but I will offer this: One thing that is intriguing to me about this choice is that the Internet, blogging, etc., are definitely removing the "gatekeeper" ability from corporate media. That means that more can get through -- some of that's crap (but so is the corporate drivel). It is a sea change to take the reins of information away from corporate media outlets. And a necessary one, considering how they've abused the privilege. In that sense, I find the "you" rather apropros, regardless of Time's presentation of it. What's most funny to me is to watch corporate media now scramble to try to emulate citizen journalism while keeping their gatekeeper functions in place.

News to corporate: It. won't. work.

I mean, just look at the pitiful "information center" that The Clarion-Ledger is offering up as the next step after they abandon the daily newspaper concept (or leave it to old folks).

George Will's column yesterday was priceless: Just another old, increasingly irrelevant white guy whining about something he doesn't understand.

Ya'll-Mart... that makes me laugh. I don't really have a dog in the Wal-Mart hunt, but on a personal level I just really, really, really, don't like it. The only times I go there are when I am accompanying someone else as they do their shopping.

I agree that the congolmerates can't just blame the customers and say "well, we give them what they want". Journalism is a profession, and like all other profesions it has a duty to self-regulate its own standards and practices. So journalists should seek to report on newsworthy events, regardless of whether they are in demand or not.

I understand that they have to make money, but the standards should not be violated.

And I think they are being violated, when the conglomerates allow demand to dictate content, and thereby absolve themselves of any respobsibility.

With regards to Time MAKING news -- it is a bit depressing how many news magazines do stories that are essentially just descriptions of trends in American culture. Somehow, there is something very disturbingly narcissistic about that.

Everybody has a dog in the Y'all-Mart hunt. Don't kid yourself.

Journalism is a profession, and like all other profesions it has a duty to self-regulate its own standards and practices. So journalists should seek to report on newsworthy events, regardless of whether they are in demand or not.

And I think they are being violated, when the conglomerates allow demand to dictate content, and thereby absolve themselves of any respobsibility.

Right on, GLB.

As for your last point, the media hype junk (like reality stars) into trends, and then report on them. They then blame the consumers for wanting to consume crap. They need to self-regulate themselves into offering better choices, but is there is anything corporate media are good at, it's abdicating Fourth Estate responsibility in favor of higher profit margins.

Shmucks.

I call it LCD entertainment (Least common denominator)

Right, that's the corporate modus operandi. It's also the biggest problem with The Clarion-Ledger. Their owners clearly think Mississippians are stupid, and they hire and send in people who think they have to pander to statewide stupidity. It's such a corporate slap in the face of the people of Mississippi.

Journalism is a profession, and like all other profesions it has a duty to self-regulate its own standards and practices. So journalists should seek to report on newsworthy events, regardless of whether they are in demand or not. GLB

Cool GLB! Now I think I'll *bump* my new thread under the media forum about David Hampton's editorial this past Sunday.

I really didn't want to *bump* it being deadline day and all. ;-)

I thought the whole thing was very cool. For example, take the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting, held in June or so. You don't hear the whole story looking at the SBC's website or following their news. You find a blogger or two that are actually at the meetings: then you follow their blogs.

Certainly, Lady, a huge benefit to blogging (or bypassing the media gatekeeper) is that bloggers don't have a devotion to fake objectivity. A huge problem with the way corporate news is reported today is that they do backflips to "balance" the news in stories that aren't split halfway down the middle. That is, they leave out vital and interesting details about one "side" (and guess who is choosing the "sides") because they don't have as much about the other. You can quickly see how that can benefit the "side" that chooses to not give up enough information!

Personally, I love watching the corporate "information centers" squirm. The chickens are comin' home to roost for those guys.

I have a little contest I started this year, with my friends and family; It's called the "Nail in the Coffin" contest. It is basically the one cultural "event" (such as a song, story, catchphrase, ect) that most pointedly demonstrates the decline and fall of western civilization. My only rules are that it has to have happened this year, and it has to make me laugh.

I exercise sole dictatorial judgement of the winner of this contest.

One example fo what kind of thing might win would have been the song "Lick my Neck". It wasn't released this year, so it can't go in this year's contest. But that one sure was a doozie.

Anyway, I have to do the judging very soon ( entries have been coming in all year, but now I have to pick a winner).

I'll let you guys know what wins.

Interesting critique of blogs.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009409

I think a lot of what he said is true. However, blogs are essentailly in their infancy. Hopefully, over time, there will be a self-winowing process with blogs, and a format will develop that will result in a better quality of journalism.

Sort a natural selection process.

The end result will be a product of the selective pressures. So the question is, what will those be? If they are things like entertainment, or dogma-validation, or quality of opponent excoriation, or something like that, then blogs will continue to suffer.

But if the selective pressures are the quality of communication, quality of fact-finding, rigor, good sourcing, ect, then the blogs will improve.

I guess we'll see.

True, GLB. The danger is that corporate media will figure out how to regain control, and return us to their watered-down form of fake objectivity that tells, maybe, half the story if we're lucky. That's what they want, of course—control. We can't let them have it back.

Be the media, folks. That's a phrase Todd has used for years, and the iTodd has vision (and it has little to do with information centers and memory holes). ;-)

With due respect, I don't care what a Wall Street Journal thinks of anything. They have a massive self-interest in gatekeeping. If you can't control the media, you can't profit off it as much—or, in their case, manipulate on behalf of the markets in the way they've done for so long.

All these old farts complaining about the "quality" of blogs tickle the heck out of me.

Like I said about ol' George Will: They. don't. get. it.

Of course, there's crap in blogs; there's crap in dailies, on editorial pages and on the Sunday morning airwaves, too. They're just not in control of the crap anymore. And that stings like a sassy little bee, eh?

I think you will find they have been pretty critical of the quality of reporting as conducted by most of the media. Many of your critical comments of the media I have read in similar thoughts in the WSJ.

His main points were not to slam blogs, just to take them for what they were. He stated that in general, they don't replace serious, quality reporting and that too often in the internet age, we only go to news and blogs that tell us what we want to hear.

I don't see where you would disagree with that at all. I think what you would think (and I'm not assuming) is that there is less and less serious quality reporting and that the blogs to some degree are picking up the slack a little. I think there is less and less reporting. One thing I do like about your columns on this site is in your columns, you tend to report some news or facts, something alot of op ed writers don't do. They just spew their opinion for a few paragraphs instead of reporting some news and offering their own opinion. That is probably why Novak is one of my favorites as he makes a point to actually report something in his opinion columns (yeah I know, here comes the old white guy comment but there is a reason both Dems and Repubs talk to him).


I disagree with over half the stuff on this site but I probably enjoy reading it more than I do others that are more in line with what I think.

Novak?!? Chortle. Do you understand the lengths he has gone to hurt his own credibility of late?

Frankly, I didn't read that WSJ whine to the end. His arrogance was too much a turn-off, starting here:

"Written by fools to be read by imbeciles."

and then:

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

Right there, I decided he's a self-important goober and stopped reading. It's not as if his newspaper did real reporting to help stop that Iraq debacle and expose the lies of the Bush administration in time to keep more of our soldiers alive. Thus, the idea that a WSJ editor is going to tell me something about the need for real reporting is laughable. And I sure don't have to read through that kind of language (and all those "there ares" and "there ises") to get there.

Again, it's an old fart (or someone who sounds a lot like one) whining about the inflated self-importance of blogs, when the real issue is that the MSM is being forced to give up its stranglehold on the flow of information. Funny thing is that most good bloggers are too busy blogging to talk so much about self-importance. Again, this is the MSM unearthing a "trend" so they can kvetch about it.

Delish, I must say.

I understand what you are saying about Novak. However, I am referring to his long career as a columnist. There used to be more columns like his. Safire. Vic Reisel (remember LABOR columnists?). Jack Anderson.

Honestly, how many columnists do you read where you actually learn something besides their opinion on a topic?

However, if you had read through that link, you would've seen the points he made that I related to you.

By the way, the editorial page has been critical of the Bush admin's conduct of the war. It has not called for a pullout but it has been very critical of how Bush has conducted it since Iraq fell. It criticized the appointment of Bremer and said the Iraqi needed to be brought on board immediately instead of appointing a proconsul. It has repeatedly criticized the admin's tactics and policies. It did support a going into Iraq but it listed sound reasons for doing so and also went off of the idea that there were WMD's, which most if not all intel services thought as well. I would not call it dishonest reporting when its own sources were probably telling them that there were WMD's. They have done real reporting on Iraq and I've posted some of those stories in your forums.

Your last couple of sentences agree with what their Deputy Editor wrote. You referred to good bloggers. He said there were good bloggers, just they were heavily outnumbered by the bad ones is all.

Yeah, I see your point. But Novak sold out. Badly.

Molly Ivins is one of the more educational columnists today—precisely because of her journalism work in Texas. As a result, she knows more about Bush (and the Delay Republican Corruption machine) than about anyone else working. Unfortunately, not enough people paid attention to her warnings all those years. But she was right on about every Bush point, if not every one.

The WSJ was too little, too late on Iraq just like other MSM lapdog media. They have decent reporters, but their editorial page has long been sold out.

Your last couple of sentences agree with what their Deputy Editor wrote. You referred to good bloggers. He said there were good bloggers, just they were heavily outnumbered by the bad ones is all.

Well, he picked an interesting path to get there. What a goober.

Ms Ladd: I think you will find this amusing. It is some letters to the editor from the WSJ Friday over the column I posted above. Enjoy.

Print This: Your Blast Into the Blogosphere Insults Your Readers
December 29, 2006; Page A9
Uh oh. Now you've done it. In one fell swoop Joseph Rago has managed to insult a large swath of your readership for whom the Journal was the one remaining mainstream media (MSM) product it still consumed ("The Blog Mob," editorial page, Dec. 20). Blogs are "Written by fools to be read by imbeciles"? What a lovely thing to say to your own readers.

Thank God we have Mr. Rago to lead us to the "truth." No longer will I have to wade through blogs and make decisions for myself regarding the value of what I am reading. Finally, I am free to cancel my Internet service and put my civic education back in the hands of the experts where it belongs. And for my part, I will come clean and admit to having missed Katie, Barbara, Dan, Anderson, Maureen and all the other "journalists" who work so tirelessly for me. Does al Jazeera have a print version? It would be so much fun to curl up with it on a Sunday morning and catch up. Thank God the experts are back.

I'll miss James Taranto and the other misguided bloggers at OpinionJournal.com. They were fun, and cheeky, but clearly so misguided. I hope you are generous in your severance package -- remember, it is the holiday season. Or perhaps, now that your print edition subscriber base will undoubtedly explode, you can find a place for them on the loading dock. It's hard work, but honest, and will keep them, and us, out of trouble.

Steven Gruber
Syosset, N.Y.

Blogs in their best form serve as a complement to a diverse source of information, offering a range of raw opinions spanning the gamut; the reader is left to form an opinion in the middle. Blogs are like one's colleagues -- some are truthful and some embellish, but, please, give me the option to decide.

Daniel S. Cohen
Boston

Does Mr. Rago suppose that the public is not sophisticated enough to separate the wheat from the chaff in the blogosphere? Has he ever read the Powerline blog, or Captain Ed's blog, or Little Green Footballs? Yes, there are low-quality blogs out there. Even the high-quality blogs occasionally get things wrong. But so does The Wall Street Journal. Please give the readers of the blogosphere some credit for critical thinking.

Marilyn A. Turnbow
Lubbock, Texas

continued.


It appears that Mr. Rago's commentary refers to political bloggers; but he lumps all blogs into one huge pool. Based on the blog search engine Technorati, there are more than 55 million blogs. In that large school of fish you will find many that are worthless. However, if only 1% are of any value, then that means there are more than 550,000 interesting and informative opinions.

Of course, none of us could ever consume all that information. So, people who are in the blogosphere, through various means, identify the blogs that are significant to them. And for those who have not dipped their toe into the blog water, the world of blogs addresses every interest.

Ken Leebow
www.Leebow.com
Marietta, Ga.

(Mr. Leebow is author of the "300 Incredible Things to Do on the Internet" book series.)

Blogs represent the spectrum of ideas, while the MSM do not. If Republicans were to limit their reading to The Wall Street Journal, for example, one might conclude "open borders" is the preferred immigration policy of conservatives everywhere. Scan a few blogs, however, and get a reality check.

Joseph Rago misses the point of the blog "revolution." It is precisely because blogging has minimal barriers to entry that makes blogs as powerful and useful as they in fact are, providing an immediate check on MSM prevarications. The Dan Rather forged memo fiasco would not have been covered by the MSM but for the blogs. Nor the Reuters and AP photo scandals from the Middle East.

MSM editorial priests choose what stories to report or ignore. Blogs tend to reveal the manipulations of the man behind the MSM curtain.

Technology is no substitute for thought, and the advent of the blog ought to be no threat to an intelligent, market-responsive MSM. That blogs are so popular has just as much to with the failure of MSM to compete in the marketplace of ideas as with the success of the Internet.

Roger Snowden
Omaha, Neb.

Mr. Rago derides the "careless informality" of blogs. However, the critical reader can follow hyperlinks, pore through primary sources and judge for himself the blogger's talent in eliciting facts from data. That same critical reader would throw up his hands at Mr. Rago's essay, whose florid prose leaves no room for footnotes, quotations or a single shred of evidence. Thus, his essay ironically illustrates the forces driving hardened skeptics in the information age to view the world through the blogosphere.

Andrew Gradman
Beverly Hills, Calif.

uh oh.

The Empire Strikes Back.

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/01/political_blogg.html

King: Already there...

It's scary that it's the democrats moving to stifle free speech this fast.

Irong, it was Vitter that sponsored this although he is backtracking now.