Monday, December 22, 2003

Bagging the Blog (temporarily) Picking up on the last line of my last post about Howard Kurtz, my own blogging ideas for the near future include an experiment: Taking my media-life and blog-work "offline" as much as possible through the end of the year. For the weblog, this could be just the break I need to back up and add categories to my old entries, making them more useable as "course notes" someday. Outside the computer, I'll be doing pretty much the same thing: shuffling around boxes of books, photos, files and papers, making my life more organized and portable for whatever comes next. To help me stay focused, I'm unplugging the TV tomorrow, my birthday, and will see how long it is before I at least feel the need to pick up a DVD at the library. The computer will stay online for e-mail only. I'll archive listserv messages instead of reading them and following the inevitable Web links. In his book about being over-mediated, The Age of Missing Information, Bill McKibben's solution was to head for the great TV-free outdoors. It's a bit chilly for that right now in Massachusetts. For me, it may be enough "fresh air" to quit surfing, saving and scribbling on Web pages for a week or two. I'm also inspired by a memo I stumbled on in 1985 at Multimate International, the software company where I had worked for a couple of years. I was composing a company history as part of an SEC filing so that the boss could sell out and buy an even bigger yacht to sail around the world. (He landed in Colorado; I wound up writing about yachts. Go figure.) Creating the company narrative was a better job than trying to get reviewers to say nice things about software that was past its prime, despite its $2 million a month in sales. In the history files I hit a memo written by a chief engineer in the program's early days, which sums up my current feelings. It went something like this: In the next release of MultiMate Word Processor we should disable the "Create New Document" function. There are enough documents out there already. If we let our users create more, they will just get into more trouble, which will mean more calls to technical support, etc. Sometimes I think the same announcement should be posted at the entrance to the Web during this day of proliferating interlinked weblogs. Well, my entrance to the Web, anyhow. For now, I'm going to pretend that I have enough documents. 6:27:20 PM     New Blogs on the Block My weblog habits already include an aggregator with 30 addresses in it, but I have to add these two for future reference. John Perry Barlow, who has been writing about freedom of speech online almost since "online" began, has launched a weblog, apparently in conjunction with a previously-existing mailing list of "BarlowFriendz." Among his first blog entries, a letter from a friend in Baghdad, as Barlow says, "writing for her friends, not for editors or advertisers." Howard Kurtz, media critic at the Washington Post, has begun time-stamped weblog entries as an experimental addition to his usual Monday column. "I'll be posting occasional updates as media and political developments warrant, or when I am suitably inspired, or just sitting around with nothing better to do," he says, adding that he reserves the right to bag the idea. 4:36:27 PM     Correcting the First Flight story - a century later Setting the record straight really should be handled more promptly, but the traditional opening in a Virginian-Pilot correction a few days ago was a nice touch: "A story and headline in the Dec. 18, 1903, Virginian-Pilot contained errors."  The original page one story about the Wright brothers stumbled on a few of the traditional journalistic categories of information, including "who" (it's spelled Wilbur, not Wilber; and Orville was the pilot, not Wilbur),  "what" (the plane's dimensions and materials), "where" (the pilot lay on the lower wing), "when" (the Wrights arrived Sept. 26. not Sept. 1) and "how" (there was no propellor providing upward force; the air rushing past the wings does that). There are more mistakes -- many more, down to physical descriptions of the Wrights. I hope the paper keeps this "correction" online forever so that journalism professors can use it as an example of how errors creep into the news now and then. Then did then, and they do now. Another interesting angle for journalism classes (and public relations folks trying to control a story): The Wrights tried to give their hometown newspaper in Ohio an exclusive, but the news was leaked to The Virginian-Pilot, which pieced together the story, embellishing a few details since the brothers weren't giving interviews themselves. The result, as summarized by Cate Kozak of today's Pilot: Suffused with poetic liberties buoyed by a few basic facts, the story was so riddled with errors and embellishments that in a statement to The Associated Press on Jan. 5, the Ohio inventors condemned it as [base "]a fictitious story incorrect in almost every detail.[per thou] In fact, Kozak notes, some of the worst mistakes were in the main headline: [base "]soaring 3 miles[per thou] (really just 120 feet) [base "]over sand hills and waves.[per thou] (Orville stayed above solid ground.) The details may be off, but the story deserved its page one banner. In particular, its lead sentence captures the seventh, and most important, question journalism professors tell their students to ask. Beyond Who, What, When, Where, Why and How, the question that makes a story news is "So what?" The Pilot got it in a nutshell: [base "]The problem of aerial navigation without the use of a balloon has been solved at last.[per thou]  3:23:06 PM

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