…if you are the single newspaper in San Francisco or Kansas City or St. Louis, you are just highly constrained about how rigorous you can be in the accuracy of your reporting. Because the whole model is: You are appealing to everybody. Because the whole model is: You are appealing to everybody. … That's why the existence of an independent media sector is so important.
Talking Points Memo is one of the more notable successes in independent journalism and using blogs as a format for journalism. It has broken at least a couple of stories that got picked up by the mainstream press: The
Duke Cunningham bribery scandal, and the
U.S. Attorneys firing scandal. It's grown from being a
one-man shop in 2000 to a staff of ten today.
Josh Marshall talks about how it came to be.
posted by adamrice
on Oct 7, 2008 -
51 comments
My Right Wing Dad is a new-ish and rather informal blog that aims to provide "a chance for folks to examine the unrestrained rhetoric that is quietly passed from in-box to in-box in America," by hosting a collection of the emails that form an often untraceable and unacknowledged part of public discourse in the U.S., especially on the Right. Tagged by category (for example:
God,
college,
flag,
liberal, and
World War II), the amateur archive presents a range of colorful opinion, not all of it strikingly accurate, and some of it offensive. In efforts to understand
liberal and conservative habits of communication, it may be worth considering the role of forwarded email in the electoral process, and the
reasons that the forwarding of email is popular among some people, and whether this behavior tends to correlate with particular political opinions. The emails hosted on MyRightWingDad may in any case be enlightening, unless you're already on the forward list of someone in the know.
posted by washburn
on Aug 15, 2007 -
105 comments
While there have been many posts on Mefi of blogs written by those affected by the Iraq War, I have not seen this one posted. No matter your stance on the war, your opinion of American soldiers, or the amount of other Iraq war blogs you've read, all I ask is that you
at least read these few entries. I've used too many words already, when the journal does more than enough to speak for itself.
A Soldier's Thoughts. (via) [more inside]
posted by wander
on Feb 7, 2007 -
13 comments
Time magazine recently launched a new politics blog,
Swampland. The blog is, to this point, most interesting for its confrontations between the commenters and the bloggers. [m.i.]
posted by ibmcginty
on Jan 26, 2007 -
26 comments
Webcameron. David Cameron, leader of the Conservative party in the UK, reaches out to the Youtube generation.
posted by greycap
on Sep 30, 2006 -
53 comments
Annoyed by the Bill O'Reilly's and Rush Limbaugh's of the world? So is Mike Stark, and he goes out of his way to get on the air on their shows. And then, of course, writes about it in his blog,
Calling All Wingnuts, which includes mp3 clips of his escapades on conservative talk radio airwaves.
posted by Mijo Bijo
on Feb 22, 2006 -
51 comments
Newsfilter: Washington Post columnist/blogger Dan Froomkin writes the "
White House Briefing," an online "daily anthology of works by other journalists and bloggers," which is often critical of the administration. This past Sunday, the new
Post ombudsman wrote that the paper's White House correspondents worried that Froomkin's column creates an appearance of bias at the Post.
Froomkin responsed, and hundreds of commentors offered their support. Then Post national politics editor
John Harris weighed in, to somewhat less acclaim from commentors. Harris expanded on his views in
this interview. The whole affair raises issues about allegations of a
subservient, stenographic press, how the media
deals with charges of liberal bias, the
perceived vindictiveness of the Bush administration, and the relationship between
in-house bloggers and the traditional media.
posted by ibmcginty
on Dec 14, 2005 -
20 comments
Internets: Serious Business! These last few months have seen an increase in the attacks on the participatory culture of the web. The mainstream establishments, both political and corporate, have been looking with a cautious eye towards this new developing place.
So far we've established that
blogs can get you fired,
keep you from getting a job, give
pedophiles a place to ruminate on snatching your children, threaten journalistic integrity *snicker*,
endanger the marketing ,
product planning, and
product life cycles for automobile manufacturers, can
infect your computer with virii, and have
all sorts of negative consequences. The internets (both of them) can cause
your children to be charmed, seduced, and addicted by readily available porn, and can also provide access to extremist radical and fundamentalist groups, prompting
Congress to discuss more restrictive legislation (
NSFW), but only for the porn. It has even been claimed that the web has given
"Al Qaeda wings". P2P is blamed as causing record loses by the music industry, despite their investments in
local station marketing payola. The FEC has held
public hearings attended by both hemispheres of the blogosphere (amazingly in near-agreement)
discussing the regulation of political speech online. The figureheads of
a certain political party fear that their affiliated slice of the blogosphere may be too far-left. Newspapers and TV are leading the charge, with the internet standing in for pharmaceutical scares, yo-yo diets, and missing white women.
The question is, how will the libertarian-minded digerati respond to this very real attack on the essence of web culture?
posted by rzklkng
on Jul 29, 2005 -
34 comments
Black Market Press: Back Again The Popular Tri-State Area Zine Team, Black Market Press is back again, older, wiser, and broadcasting to a much wider readership thanks to the popularity of the Blog. Social and political commentary from the pamphleteering team that brought you
Media Blitz back in 1995. We encourage you to send us links, news, or hate mail.
posted by Mroz
on Apr 18, 2005 -
2 comments
I am Blogger, hear me roar! (3.1mb PDF) - A new study shows that
"Online Political Citizens are not isolated cyber-geeks, as the media has portrayed them. On the contrary, OPCs are nearly seven times more likely than average citizens to serve as opinion leaders among their friends, relatives and colleagues. OPCs are disproportionately “Influentials,” the Americans who “tell their neighbors what to buy, which politicians to support, and where to vacation...” " They are “canaries in the mineshaft for looming political ideas” and tend to be more young, white, single, college educated, and affluent than average.
I just feel so influential. Now where's the friggin paycheck...
posted by troutfishing
on Feb 6, 2004 -
16 comments
Labor Day's forgotten ones. "...there is one class of workers who are largely ignored during Labor Day celebrations, even as our country remains at war on multiple fronts: members of the U.S. armed forces."
posted by skallas
on Sep 7, 2003 -
11 comments
ABC's blog "The Note" suspends operations, citing lack of resources needed for war coverage, the blog's humorous style not being "the right national tonic," and this shocker: "We suspect that the amount of strictly political news — the kind of stuff that is the meat and starch of The Note — is likely to dramatically decrease in the coming days."
GUH? Aren't blogs now more important than ever? Aren't
politics now more important than ever? What message is being sent by the mainstream media here? (Via the indispensable
Lloyd Grove of the Washington Post.)
posted by PrinceValium
on Mar 11, 2003 -
10 comments
