Cit Media

This one in the Times of London — “Unique film set ‘wiped out’ in 007 blaze disaster” — transcends idiocy.

Let’s reserve the word “disaster” for the really bad things. No wonder readers often think journalists have no sense of proportion.

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Chicago Lawyer: Law Related Blogging Starting to See a Coming of Age: Berman is among a growing number of law professors, law students, lawyers, and even judges who have gravitated to the world of blogs, the interactive online medium that allows people worldwide to publish their ideas, and others to comment on them — all with an ease and immediacy that many legal professionals have come to embrace.

Every profession — practically every human endeavor — has a collection of blogs about it. The lawyers are making especially good use of the medium, though.

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NY Times: Newspapers to Use Links to Rivals on Web Sites. Newspaper Web sites, which commonly post articles from sister publications, wire services and even blogs, have typically stopped short of providing generous doses of news from competitors. The move made by these papers is not a result of cooperation across the industry as it is a counterattack by publishers against Google and Yahoo, which have stolen readers and advertisers from newspapers in recent years, both with their search engines and their own news aggregation services.

When I started my newspaper blog in 1999, I immediately began pointing to stories in competing newspapers, trade publications and just about any other outside source I could find. Why? Because the readers expected me to tell them where the best stuff was, and if my paper hadn’t done it, that meant pointing elsewhere.

News websites have been notoriously stingy in their crediting of others’ work, for the same reason that they hate to write stories that are catching up with other people’s scoops. It’s a competitive thing.

It’s a stupid thing, though, if the point is serving the readers.

Let’s hope this move catches on in a bigger way.

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That’s what CNet says:

CNN wants some of the clips being uploaded to popular video-sharing sites, such as YouTube, to find their way to the cable news channel.

Of course, the questions include:

• What are the licensing terms?
• Do the citizen journalists get anything but a pat on the back?
• Etc.

Still, this will be an interesting move by CNN, and I’m looking forward to hearing a lot more.

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At the BlogHer conference, Lisa Stone discusses BlogHerAds — billed as “quality advertising for women bloggers” — a new advertising network and service that could be a big deal indeed.

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It’s a gathering in Amsterdam in late September, and I’m among the many speakers. Details here.

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Here’s a page listing on-demand videos from the OhmyNews Forum held earlier this month in Seoul. (I was a speaker.)

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Slate magazine has a nifty feature called “Hot Document,” in which the site posts documents, highlights key portions and then, with mouse-over popups, tells you the significance of the highlighted text. But there seems to be a Firefox bug preventing this from working properly, or a bug in the Slate page coding.

Here’s a partial screen grab from this story, using Safari, showing how the Hot Document site should work:

Now here’s the same page in Firefox:

As you can see, the rollover doesn’t give you the full explainer text in Firefox. (I’ve reduced the size of the screen shots to fit in this page, which is why one has larger text than the other.)

I raise this issue because I think what Slate is doing with this feature is a genuine innovation in online journalism. To see it thwarted by inadequate software code (whoever is responsible) is unfortunate.

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Once again blogs are proving, for a least a few people, to be a great farm system for the journalistic big leagues. As Reuters reports in a story entitled, “Time.com hires former Wonkette blogger,”

Former political blogger Ana Marie Cox, better known as Wonkette, will rejoin the so-called mainstream media as the new Washington editor for Time magazine’s Time.com Web site later this month.

Makes perfect sense to me, and it’s a probably a good move for both sides.

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The New Yorker: Know it All: This is not the first time that encyclopedia-makers have snatched control from an élite, or cast a harsh light on certitude. Jimmy Wales may or may not be the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us tooling down the interstate, with but a squint back at the railroad. We’re on the open road now, without conductors and timetables. We’re free to chart our own course, also free to get gloriously, recklessly lost. Your truth or mine?

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