American Journalism Review: Blogging on the Hustings. The end of the campaign brought a sense of wistfulness to many Virginia bloggers. Several said they didn’t expect the blogosphere to be quite as open and free the next time around. Candidates, corporations, advocacy groups and paid bloggers – operatives hired by interest groups to blog as […]
Posts under ‘News’
Sanitizing the Past
Two items in current news are raising questions of how to preserve historical truths in a digital age. The Lowell Sun in Massachusetts reports that the staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan “wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of […]
Google's Dual View of World
From Dave Farber’s Interesting People mail list: Here’s what censorship does. Compare Google China: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen Google the rest of the world: http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen
A Publisher's Deceptions, Money Trumping Honor
Timothy Noah (Slate): Did Nan Talese Lie To Oprah? – What did James Frey’s publisher know and when did she know it? Yes, Talese learned about the particular fabrications exposed by The Smoking Gun (there were more than two) “at the same time” that Winfrey did. But Talese had reason to believe Frey hadn’t told […]
Oprah's Wise Reconsideration
NY Times: Oprah Calls Defense of Author ‘a Mistake’. In an extraordinary reversal of her strident and angry defense of the author whose book she catapulted to the top of the best-seller list, Oprah Winfrey said today she believed that the author James Frey “betrayed millions of people” by making up elements of his life […]
Google's Sad Collaboration with Chinese Government
As usual, my new colleague Rebecca MacKinnon serves up the best round-up and commentary on Google’s cave-in to China’s government. Key quote: At the end of the day, this compromise puts Google a little lower on the evil scale than many other internet companies in China. But is this compromise something Google should be proud […]
Iranian Citizen Journalist Heading to Israel
Hoder says he’s “going to Israel as a citizen journalist and a peace activist. A lot of us will be watching what happens next.
Washington Post Fixing Comments, not Killing Them
The Washington Post online executive editor, Jim Brady, just let me know what’s what regarding the comments situation. He says the site wasn’t requiring a valid e-mail address from commenters: because we were working through Movable Type, and we had not synched up our registration system with it. But we are hoping to add comments […]
Skype Claims Five Million Simultaneous Users
This is fairly amazing, when you think about it…
Washington Post Still Not Getting It
UPDATED In her new column, “The Firestorm Over My Column,” the Washington Post’s Ombudsman, Deborah Howell says, “So is it the relative anonymity of the Internet that emboldens e-mailers to conduct a public stoning? Is this the increasing political polarization of our country? I don’t know.” Both are true, but the problem with the Post’s […]