UNITY 2004: Gaming the News

Engaging Audiences with New Forms of Interactive and Participatory Journalism Sponsored by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation

Thursday, August 5, 2004
Washington Convention Center
Washington, D.C.

Blogs as Interactions
Presenter: Sreenath Sreenivasan, Associate Professor
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

SREE SREENIVASAN: Well, folks, I’m going to talk a little bit about blogging. There are several experts on this and interactive and participatory journalism here, and I just wanted to point them out. Andrew Li who teaches in Hong Kong but was my partner in crime at Columbia University for many years, Andrew, just raise your hand there, and Paul Nemia, who teaches at Emerson is also another web genius and you should connect with them, if you can, as well. I’m sure there are other people who I know from your name and from your work, but I don’t recognize you from here.

I just wanted to show you a few blogs and talk a little bit about how blogging is affecting so much of life now in the media. Once they were like a flavor of the month, but the months have been adding up and so let’s see how far it goes. Just to help me understand, how many people here have their own blogs? At the back, that’s very interesting. Is anyone blogging at this moment? Sort of. How many of you who are blogging are connected to mainstream news organizations? Several of you. Okay, interesting. And anyone running their own personal blog? All right, so you do both?

I also wanted to show you a web site that is sort of a blog, but more importantly this is a site run by a gentleman named John Dube and he runs cyberjournalist.net in conjunction with the American Press Institute. He’s actually a former student of both Andrew and I, and he’s a producer at MSNBC. He’s an example of how, if you have a niche interest, even if you work for a big corporation, they let him do this on the side and now this has become one of the best places on the web to learn about what’s going on in cyber journalism. So, even if you’re not a cyber journalist yourself, I think you’ll find this a very useful web site. He’s got great work and examples there all the time and, of course, he’s linked right to the Batten Awards, so Jan will be happy as well.

I’m going to show you a range of things. How many people read usaviation.com every day? Nobody?

This posting-- as you can see it’s a two-line posting -- was posted by Spiderman, himself, Peter Parker. And it says here, John Kerry’s 757 in Hangar 4, picked tonight John Edwards. VP decals being put on engine and upper fuselage.

You know what that means? This was the guy who broke the story about John Kerry picking John Edwards and he beat the mainstream press by about 10 hours. He posted it at 9:44 p.m. the night before. If you remember, the first people to publish this didn’t do it ‘til 6:30, 7:00 a.m. and it was someone who read this web site.

So, it’s an example of how a niche, small publication can be a great source of story ideas. This gentleman, he’s not really Spiderman, he was a mechanic who was in the right place and saw the plane and he’s now been interviewed in every major publication and on CNN.

Another example, you might remember this story about the war dead photos? I recommend to everyone a web site called thememoryhole.org, which works to save information that’s being removed by the government, by corporations, by news organizations. What he did was, it was just one man, a guy named Russ Kick, he filed a FOIA request for those funeral photographs, those coffin photographs, and he got hundreds of photographs of soldiers’ remains. It’s a terrific site and you will get lots of story ideas from it.

Over here is the New York Times, a big publication that has two blogs that a lot of journalists and the readers are following closely. One is Dan Okrent’s web site, this is the public editor of the New York Times. And Nicholas Kristoff, here on the right you see a picture of him. He’s a foreign affairs and other topics columnist and he has a column called Kristoff Responds, a blog where he responds to readers.

And this is what’s so interesting about the web. There was a timewhen we were interested in keeping people away and didn’t have time to answer all the phone calls. And now, not only are they allowing people to post their responses to a New York Times story, someone is then responding to those responses and the whole thing is called Kristoff Responds and you can find it very easily in the Time

So, I thought we’d do a tour here of some of the blogs and this is just a small portion, obviously, of the millions that are there. I wanted to focus on some of the big political ones given the season.
How many people here read Drudge? I read it several times a day. You might have known today about an Albany mosque that got raided and they uncovered a big missile plot -- a fake plot to kill the Pakistani ambassador, it’s all very exciting. And I remember this morning saying to somebody that John Kerry got a standing ovation here. Do you remember that some of you stood? And right on Drudge there was the headline: Three out of four minority journalists give standing ovation to Kerry.

I said to somebody, the right-wing bloggers are going to go after this as proof that that the journalists are biased towards Kerry and, sure enough, that’s the second item over here.

So, I read Drudge every day. He gets a lot of bad press, but I think he does a good job of giving you access to what issues are the big picture stories and most of the time he doesn’t link to his own work and that’s why it’s worth reading. And it’s, of course, at DrudgeReport.com. If you don’t like Drudge and you want a more left-wing thing you can go to Drudge Retort, which is just at drudge.com. So, there’s a drudgereport.com and Drudge retort.

Now, this guy is sort of the George Washington of bloggers. How many people read InstaPundit.com? Several of you here know him. There’s a guy named Glenn Reynolds, he’s a law professor and is really the most important of the,big bloggers and he’s a very conservative blogger. And, interestingly, one of the big daily papers called him a liberal blogger even though it’s like calling Matt Drudge liberal or something. But he found it amusing so he now calls himself the liberal, liberal blogger.

And andrewsullivan.com. Some of you know about Andrew Sullivan. He’s a guy who has a lot of columns in big publications -- Sunday Times, Time Magazine, The Advocate, New Republican. This guy does a lot of writing, but he also blogs on his web site at andrewsullivan.com and, has managed to get a lot of funds for his site from
people who read it.

So, you see, support this blog or the tip jar, as they call it, and he makes this thing called Keep the Site Alive, sort of begging for money. But he’s done well with it.

By the way, just so you know, Matt Drudge had about eight and a half million visitors to his site yesterday while USA Today’s circulation is about 2.1 million. I’m showing you the conservative sites first and then I’ll show you some others to balance it out. Oxblog.com. I somehow find when I disagree a lot with blogs, they’re more engaging and so I read a lot of these. Oxblog is three Oxford University students who are all Americans who are blogging all the time and do a good job of covering stuff and you get ideas. That’s, again, why you need to be reading these just to get an idea of what’s going on, to get story ideas and then you have a chance to beat out some of your competition. And here is www.kausfiles.com. You might know about Micky Kaus, who used to be a Democrat or is still sort of Democratic, just doesn’t like Kerry and now he doesn’t like Teresa, so he’s going
after them.

Now, let’s get you some liberal blogs. Anyone know Daily Kos, www.dailykos.com? He used to be a soldier in the Army and now has a blog. He has hundreds of people responding and reading his stuff. Here’s talkingpointsmemo.com. By the way, I will have on my web site all of these links.

Here’s a funny example. There’s a very liberal blog named www.calpundit.com, a guy named Kevin Drum used to write it, and he shut it down and is now blogging at the Washington Monthly. The irony of Washington Monthly, is that it’s now almost an hourly publication because Kevin Drum is blogging there. Go to washingtonmonthly.com and you can read him and he defends Kerry.

Now, for more public sites. Anyone hear of this site, wonkette.com? Jan and I were talking about this --the problem with most blogs is men write them. And so, here Ann Marie Cox trafficking on the fact that she is not a man, very clearly.

Campaign Desk is a site done out of Columbia Journalism Review. This is a really good site to get an idea of mistakes that journalists are making in covering the campaign.

They also talk about the echo chamber. That’s the other problem with most of these blogs, if you make a mistake or you say one thing it just gets repeated again and again all over the web. And so, campaigndesk.org is a site I would recommend for you to see.

Here is another site that tries to play it straight, spinsanity.com. One of the things I find real irritating about the media is everything’s either liberal or conservative. Well, here’s a site that goes after both sides with equal venom and they do a good job. Spinsanity.org.

Now, if you’re curious about blogs and want to know which are the big ones, there’s a site called Technorati.com. Let’s just look at the top 100 just to give you an idea of what kind of blogs are out there. The number one site, for the moment, Slashdot.com, which is a very technical web site, a bunch of techy folks mostly speaking at each other.

Down further at number five you see instapundit, you see Andrew Sullivan, Daily Kos.
My theory is that the conservatives are doing better.

Smokinggun.com is a good blog. They’ve gotten a lot of publicity. And there is Dan Gillmor at number 40, who has had a lot of attention paid to him today. Another site I’d recommend is Arts and Letters Daily, which was an independent blog but got bought by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Those of you who are interested in arts criticism and, and arts, it’s at aldaily.com. And John Kerry is showing up here at number 50, which is interesting though I don’t know how much of the blogging he does himself.

So, Technorati will give you an idea of what the top web sites are.

Let’s talk a little about the problems with blogs and then I’d like to take your questions and maybe get some of the folks in the audience who have done a lot of this to participate, as well. If you look at most blogs, you don’t know what is the most important thing. So, if you’re looking at a blog and the White House has been blown up, but that happened at 9:00 a.m. and it’s now 3:00 p.m., it’s not there as a top item anymore because it’s all in reverse chronological order.

So, unless it’s something that has a continuous thread you won’t see it again. And that’s a problem I have with blogs. Many of us don’t have time to sit around and look at all these blogs. And that’s where having a site that puts things in context so you can see what’s important is useful and that’s where something like Drudge works.

On the other hand, some people want the latest stuff first and that’s why the blog format has been so successful. I’ve been talking about building a site that goes after Romenesko’s blog. You know about Jim Romenesko, right? Everybody reads that. I read it eight, ten times a day, but I find that unless you read it regularly you miss what the context is.

So, I want to have a Romenesko blog off of Romenesko, where all you do is take the most important stuff that he has. I got the idea first if anybody copies it here. It’s a tribute to Jim, of course, but that’s just an idea I have.

The other problem is, of course, keeping up with all of this and I just wanted to touch upon very quickly the concept of RSS. Does everyone know what that is? You will see on many sites the word RSS.

It is a way for you to have the blog postings pushed to you so that you don’t have to go out and try and find them. Earlier Jan referred to columns on Poynter. It’s much easier if it comes to you than you going out and trying to seek it.

And so, I got a call from the White House a few months ago from a journalist there, asking if I could help make the case for having an RSS feed on whitehouse.gov. And the reasons I gave
to the person were what I’m saying here now. As soon as your site is updated everybody who really cares about what you say, all of that is in their in-box, so-to-speak, instantly. And that’s so helpful if you’re trying to build a participatory interactive experience for your members or for your audience.

One of the things that happens to me with Jim Romenesko -- on Friday afternoons I would keep refreshing the page, hoping for more gossip and he wouldn’t really tell you that he’s gone home for the day. So, now he puts a back on Monday button and then I know I can relax that I’m not missing any gossip on his site. But that’s an example if you have RSS on your site. If you go to Reuters you’ll see the entire site is available on RSS so that you can keep up with what’s happening.

Let’s take some comments and some questions. Yes, sir?

SPEAKER: I read about 6 to 8 blogs a day and here we are in the amphitheater of the news service and, yet, here are all these people doing the same thing. What would be your response to people who are generating their opinions in this manner?

MR. SREENIVASAN: What do you use these blogs for, just to get ideas or...

SPEAKER: I read them because as a liberal I find the media to be lacking. It’s so much to the center that it seems misrepresentative, and I get more informed by reading blogs than any national publication.

MR. SREENIVASAN: That’s a big statement there but I’m glad that you are at least trying to get different points of view. So, you’ll probably be getting things that you want to hear. That’s the other problem with blogs – they become like an amen corner, especially with the conservative blogs, I find they don’t, try to reach out and cross the line and hear other points of view.

MR. SREENIVASAN: I don’t know how far this will go because it’s really hard to sort of break through the crowded field. But there are now these small of blogs that are getting some attention. Wonkette is part of it.

Media Bistro is starting a chain of blogs and TVnewser.com -- some of you know about this. There’s a guy who did nothing but watch cable news and he had a blog called cablenewser.com and network executives were reading his blog. It turned out he was an 18-year-old kid in college and he was outed in the New York Times. He’s been so successful that now Media Bistro is paying him money to blog at its web site and it’s called tvnewser.com and it’s a great site for keeping up with the television news business.

So, sometimes it’s possible to break through, but you have to have good content. And we have seen examples of small sites, one-man operations, one-woman operations that are breaking through.

Just a point here, being at Unity. One of the problems I have with the web is in these more general topics you don’t see much diversity, right? You see Daily Kos is run a gentleman who is Hispanic, but otherwise in those top 100 blogs it will be very hard for you to find a woman, to find a black person, Asian, Hispanic. It would be very, very difficult. And that tells you something about the importance of more of us trying this out. Otherwise it’s going to be a replication or even worse than the mainstream media. Yes?

SPEAKER: Just to that point. First of all, Joshus Micah Marshall is an interesting case. He’s a journalist, writes for the Washington Monthly, he’s written for the New Yorker and others. In October he posted a message to his readers asking would anyone be interested in seeing him cover the election primaries? If you’re interested, send along a couple of bucks and I’ll try to fund it. Overnight he got $5,000 that someone else had sent.What do you think about journalists having their own blogs and what are the issues that they have to deal with?

MR. SREENIVASAN: Well, I think there are a lot of issues that they have to fight over. Right now we’re seeing that some people have been told not to blog any more on their site. Even if they’re writing something that has nothing to do with their work, because companies are scared and don’t know how to handle this. At the same time, there are other very progressive companies that are asking their journalists to blog.

And it’s going to be interesting, this kind of tension, as more people want to blog, but I, I really can’t tell you where that’ll go. We had a student named Chris Albritton who wanted to go back to Iraq and -- getbacktoiraq.com, -- and he raised money to go back to Iraq to cover it as a blogger. You’ll also see the whole interest in blogging the DNC Convention and how people are trying to do it.

I think blogs allow companies and media outlets to build that network with their readers and viewers the way that Northwest Voice is doing. I think nj.com has these great blogs about things in New Jersey, including a Sopranos blog that I read during very closely during Soprano season. It’s written by everyday people who are just crazy about The Sopranos. There are three or four blogs, one is ba-da-bing blog, of course.

MS. SCHAFFER: You know, I had great antipathy towards blogs. I really thought they were narcissistic, inefficient and yet you can’t ignore where these sites are breaking news again and again and as a journalist you’ve got to stand up and pay attention.

MR. SREENIVASAN: Right. I find a lot of journalists are very cynical about this and anything new or anything that adds to their work. I mean, I’m not going to get paid extra to write that blog; it’s going to be a problem. And then some people just don’t want to be edited. There’s an example of a blog at the Sacramento Bee where reporter Dan Weintraub was blogging on his own and now there’s somebody who back edits and checks.

SPEAKER: I’m fascinated by new media and coming from a history-filled background, at my newspaper as well as other papers, we have workshops where we talk about how can we get people to buy the newspaper and pick up the paper and pay 50 cents, 35 cents to get the newspaper and think of innovative ways to keep the dinosaur going and then we always talk about why is it that people don’t buy newspapers. We don’t see the reason, we look to the TV and then the Internet when it’s our fault that my colleague says that the particular way in which we go forth does not have an effect.

MR. SREENIVASAN: Oh, I think it has some effect, but, Mary Lou, I’d actually like to get your opinion on this since you, you deal with this on a daily basis.

MS. FULTON: My opinion is that the, the whole mass market is fragmented. So, that includes mass market. Generally those publications are losing market share everywhere whether that’s in print or broadcast or online. When you see the specialties here in blogs, right? The niches, and that’s really what draws attention of consumers. And so you know, it’s not about the medium, it’s about the content.

SPEAKER: You know, increasingly I think with the market fragmenting we’re having to think of niche products. We are not a mass market medium anymore and blogs can be just a supplemental product of ours, that can reach particular interests.

Lawrence.com in Lawrence, Kansas, is a site that exists that is not overtly connected with the
Lawrence Journal World, and it’s filled with blogs. Some of them actually are pretty out there. They talk about music and reviews and civic life and the city scene and young people and it’s an incredibly highly read site, and revenue-wise it’s making money for the news organization. But it’s a niche product. They don’t want it to be overtly branded by the news organization. And so, seems to me like we’ve got to be thinking about new tricks to pull out of our bags.

MS. SCHAFFER: You folks have stayed overtime. Thank you very much, you’ve been a wonderful audience. Thank you.

MR. SREENIVASAN: Thank you. I’ll be happy to stick around if you have any questions.