Monday, March 22, 2010

Will Newser End Without Newspapers?


If you can ignore Michael Wolff's distracting, ad hominem attacks against David Carr -- calling him, among other things, "semi-retarded" -- there is a legitimate question buried in yesterday's polemic. Apparently, there's some rivalry between Carr, a media columnist for the Times, and Wolff, the founder of Newser, a content aggregator; Carr thinks Wolff undistinguished, and Wolff calls Carr "really quite a nitwit."
Okay, but what's important is not a pissing match between two middle-aged men, it's the worlds-apart worldviews espoused by these former colleagues about the state of American journalism.
"Let me not put too fine a point on this: newspapers suck," Wolff said in a phone interview this morning -- a somewhat rabid take on a familiar line: that new media is rightfully, and thankfully, supplanting old media.
Carr, by contrast, holds that newspapers have essential -- and perhaps inimitable -- strengths. "Sometimes," Carr writes, "people have to make the calls, hit the streets and walk past the conventional wisdom."
Rather than assess their respective characters (after all, Carr and Wolff have each other for that), let's consider the content of their reporting. I've surveyed the major columns that the two have written on the future of journalism since the New Year -- Carr for the Times, and Wolff for Newser -- and listed their sources (see the appendix below).
Carr has written four columns this year, in which he made 16 citations. Of those, five were personal interviews, 10 were citations from articles or speeches, and just one was a standalone link. He's obtained information from the Chairwoman of the SEC, the founders of Huffington Post, the Editor of the Wall Street Journal, executives of Google and the Associated Press, and authors, writers, analysts and bloggers.
In short, Carr has tried to interview and write about someone who represents almost everyone involved in, or touched by, the future of newspapers. And unlike colleague Richard PĂ©rez-Pe?a, who covers newspapers extensively, Carr is a columnist, and not a beat reporter.
By comparison, Wolff has written 12 articles this year, in which he made 46 citations. Not a single one came from personal reporting.
Of the 46, eight were direct links to The New York Times website, one a direct link to the Los Angeles Times, one to the now-online only Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and another to Editor & Publisher, a journal about newspapers. 22 of Wolff's links point to internal Newser articles, which summarize or paraphrase other publications. Nine come from the Times, and 13 from other content-producing publications. Wolff also cites his own website nine times, and three of the links do not work.
In other words, Wolff depends entirely on working journalists -- and particularly those at the Times -- for evidence, unless he's referencing himself or a blank page.
"At Newser," Wolff writes, "we make the Times shorter. Meaning no disrespect to David Carr, the Newser version of his story is cleaner and quicker than the Times version." But without Carr's actual writing and reporting -- in this case, including quotations from an author, analyst and blogger -- there would be no "Newser version."
And that's the larger point here: in relentlessly attacking the Times in column after column, Wolff implicitly rejects the premise of his own website -- "that the Times...no longer puts out a necessary newspaper" -- by almost exclusively relying on the Graying Lady to make his point. Wolff can't source a blog without the Times, but we're supposed to renounce the paper?
(Wolff, for his part, says it's not a question of sourcing but rather a "question of being about.")
Wolff is convinced that the Times is dispensable, and that citizen journalists can fill the void. Yet do-it-yourself-ism is frowned on in almost every other profession: citizen policemen we call vigilantes; citizen doctors we call quacks; citizen bankers we call Ponzi schemers; and citizen musicians sing karaoke. Perhaps anyone can be a postal worker, and, as Wolff's site does, deliver the envelope -- but who's writing the news inside?
"Let a million flowers bloom, or whatever," Wolff said this morning, and one or many will take the Times' place. But as for just who these change agents are, Wolff admits, "I don't think we know the answer to that."
Wolff holds up Arthur Sulzberger, Bill Keller, and Carr as straw men, as incorrigible tree-killers, doddering fools, flacks and has-beens. What he fails to see, however, is that the newsmen aren't clinging to print for dear love, but for dear life. As Newser ably demonstrates, there's no working alternative yet -- and maybe not ever -- to traditional newsgathering, like that practiced by Carr.
It's hip for bloggers to bite the hand that feeds them, and Wolff's got some oral fixation. It's not good enough for him to kick the Boston Globe or Seattle Post-Intelligencer while they're down; he needs to cite their own articles while he's doing it. We all have a personal stake in The New York Times, but for Wolff it's more than that, it's his bread and butter. Without the news, he's just an -er.

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Sunday, March 21, 2010

Artists create a gory message


Over 45,000 cubic centimetres of blood drawn from red-shirt protesters were used yesterday by artists to paint 70 metres of canvas with expressions of the red shirts' spirit and resolve to oust Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and call on him to dissolve the House."I want everyone to know how people power is important for us," said Akarapol Ngern-Nei, a 15-year-old student from the Victory Monument area of Bangkok, one of the 40 independent painters.Click here to find out more!"Abhisit must return power to the people so they can have something to eat," he added as he painted while trying to avoid the smell of blood.
His pictures showed hundreds of demonstrators surrounding Democracy Monument at Rajdamnoen Road.
Seven blank cloth canvases, each 10 metres long, were laid down on the second floor of Pom Maha Khan near Phan Fa bridge, the main protest site.
Mai-Neung Kor Khuntee, an independent artist who led the group, said all the pictures would be wrapped around Pom Maha Khan as a symbol to tell the world about their political struggle.The artist will also mix some blood with cement to build four city pillars and sculpt an image of Nuamthong Paiwan, a taxi driver who used his own cab to ram a tank in a show of defiance against the military coup in 2006.His statue will be set up in front of Privy Council President Prem Tinsulanonda's Si Sao Tewes residence.
The rest of the blood will be mixed with resin for headbands as souvenirs for protesters.
Akarapol said people had donated their blood as a sacrifice for their beloved country, just like their ancestors had sacrificed their lives to save Thailand from invaders in the past.The young artist said he learned painting at his school in the Min Buri district of Bangkok.
He wanted to show his political inspiration through the pictures of thousands of red-shirt protesters and the Democracy Monument.
He said he would display his artwork to foreign reporters so people around the world could understand the political situation in Thailand.
He has visited and joined the rally at Phan Fa bridge every day since March 12, coming during the day with his friends.He also volunteered for the blood collection campaign last Tuesday and used his blood to splatter Government House and other places.
Next to Akarapol, a 40-year-old Bangkok resident known as Boy had drawn a picture of a gun and two hands fouled with drops of blood.The gun, drawn in blood, means violence and the two hands are those of the government that had hurt people,he said.Vichak Srithai, 49, an independent artist from Ubon Ratchatani, used a cloth canvas to paint a Buddha image with candle wax soaked with blood."When the blood dries, the image of Buddha will be shown," he said.His contemporary artwork signifies the power of drama, which will bring justice to the people, he said.At midday, the red shirts were few as the temperature was rising to 40 degrees Celsius, but in the evening thousands of protesters gathered again at Phan Fa Bridge.

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Lincolnite will not apologize for starting a movement


About two years ago, Lincolnite Rick Brening was talking with a friend about social issues.
"I haphazardly said, ‘We shouldn't have to apologize for what we believe in.'"Out of that observation, a movement was born.Brening, along with Lincoln native Jake Stutzman and Eric Carroll of Lubbock, Texas, co-founded the company I Will Not Apologize.It started as a maker of T-shirts boasting self-affirming statements like "I Will Not Apologize:"For Believing in Absolutes.""For Going Green.""For Being a Nerd."A few months into selling the shirts, Brening said, "We realized that there is a huge community of people that have been lulled to sleep. They've lost their fire. They've lost their desire to speak out."
So I Will Not Apologize began to evolve into something more than just shirts.
"We took it further, this message that it's OK to stand up for what you believe in," Brening said. "Even if it's difficult for others to hear."So began IWillNotApologize.com.
In the past month, the Web site has changed its format. It's not the final version of the site, but it's a good midpoint from what the site started as and what it will become, Brening said.
The latest version looks and feels a lot like Twitter. Upon arriving at the site, you're asked to finish a sentence: "I Will Not Apologize ..."here's no sign-in. It's completely anonymous. And you can be unapologetic for whatever you want.People are not sorry for a lot of things."For procrastinating." "For being weird." "For my muffin top." "For being a grammar snob." "For being a Christian." "For not being a Christian."
The moderators delete hateful entries and profanity, but otherwise, anything goes.
"It's been fun over the course of the last few years to watch it blossom," Brening said. "One of the tenets of the movement is that we don't know where it's going to go. We let the people decide."
The guys decided early on that the site would be driven by the users and not the other way around.
"Now we won't shy away from the fact that we are ourselves proud Americans, proud patriots and, by and large, proud conservatives," Brening said. "But if you're a proud liberal, be a proud liberal."
The point of I Will Not Apologize is not to push an agenda, he said. It's to shake up people with shy and shaky belief systems, people who are afraid to proudly proclaim who they are.
"We want to give people their voices back," Brening said.

Red shirts threaten to 'disarm' soldiers

Weng Tojitrakarn, a red-shirt leader, Monday mobilized 1,000 female soldiers to search military tents around the Phan Fah rally site to check whether the deployed soldiers are carrying weapons.
Weng Tojitrakarn announced on the stage at 9 am that he would send 1,000 red-shirt women to check the military tents.If any military tent refuses the red-shirt female volunteers to go inside and check for weapons, the red-shirt movement would put up a sign saying "this military unit is armed with intention to kill innocent people".Earlier the day, a red-shirt leader announced that the red-shirt people would search the military tents and would disarm the soldiers and turn them over to police.

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Tuesday, March 2, 2010

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