Blogging & Journalism:

CARR "among the most powerful tools not yet discovered by the Blogosphere", August 26, 2005
Mark Tapscott says a new data analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University which discovered the federal government significantly increased its prosecution of illegal aliens last year shows the value of computer-aided research and reporting skills of the kind that the Media Bloggers Association and the Heritage Foundation are providing to bloggers via a series of CARR Boot Camp training sessions....

We Got The Memo, August 22, 2005
Broadcasting & Cable magazine has a great story about grassroots video journalism and its increasing use by television news operations such as Nashville's WKRN. Nashville blogger Paul Chenoweth is featured extensively in the story, which concludes with a rather ironic quote from a senior news exec at CBS:Even with safeguards in place, news executives worry that questionable content could slip through. "There are a lot of unscrupulous people out there that could be trying to...

Four!, August 19, 2005
Bob Krumm continued to pursue this story and got results, as an error-tainted op-ed has now been completely removed from The Tennessean's website. The paper is to be commended for doing the right thing....

One in Four?, August 15, 2005
Karen Stroup, an adjunct professor at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School, writing in a "Nashville Eye" column in the Friday Tennessean:I was recently astounded to learn that 25% of TennCare enrollees are employed by Wal-Mart. It did not take much research to discover that this is true.Actually, it did not take much research to discover that it is false. Only about seven tenths of one percent of TennCare's 1.4 million enrollees (before the recent cuts)...

2 Live Crew In The News, August 12, 2005
I'm mentioned and briefly quoted in AP reporter Jonathan Katz's story on the plans for a group of bloggers to live-blog Justice Sunday II. The story, "Organizers to sponsor bloggers who attend televised church rally," is online at several Tennessee and Kentucky news sites. Jeff Jarvis and Charmaine Yoest, organizer of the 2 Live Crew, also are quoted. Mine is a one-sentence quote. Katz interviewed me for about 25 minutes. I wish my cell phone...

The Masses' Medium, August 05, 2005
Terry Heaton comments that "Blogs are not mass media." No, they are not. The era of "mass media" is over, or almost over. The era of niche media and grassroots media and personal media has taken root and is now pushing up millions of tender shoots. Few people understand what that means......

"Blogs are people", August 05, 2005
Jeff Jarvis rocks....

documentary:BLOG Clips, August 05, 2005
Two clips from the forthcoming documentary film documentary:BLOG, filmed partially in Nashville at the BlogNashville conference last may, have been posted online here at the film's weblog, www.documentaryblog.com....

A Blog Reader Explains Why She Does It, August 01, 2005
An entrepreneur explains why she takes time each day to read business blogs......

A Nashville Bloggers Survey, July 31, 2005
Terry Heaton has written up his survey of Nashville bloggers about the WKRN/NashvilleIsTalking.com experiment in fusing mainstream media with the blogosphere......

Snaps, July 28, 2005
This is the single most brilliant and on-target commentary about the mainstream media's clueless attempts to co-opt blogging that I have ever read. A grand-slam homerun at the bottom of the ninth, trailing by three, in the seventh game of the world series, with two outs. I wish I'd written it....

FEC Blog Regulation Update, July 12, 2005
Here's an update from the Washington Post on the threat of Federal Election Commission regulation of political blogs. Interesting reading, though it doesn't apply to BillHobbs.com, which is an online magazine of news, politics and commentary - albeit a magazine with a very small staff and a tiny budget....

Chattanooga Paper Explores Blogs, July 06, 2005
The Chattanooga Times Free Press story on blogs ran on Independence Day, which means almost nobody saw it. And because the Times Free Press locks its online content behind a register-and-pay wall, almost nobody online saw the story, either. But the story - by reporters Michael Davis and Herman Wang, is a pretty solid story that deserves to be seen, read, and commented on. I was interviewed by Davis and extensively quoted so I've taken...

Wanted: Oregon Blogger, July 06, 2005
If you're an Oregon blogger with 15,000 page views per month, someone wants to hire you....

The Missing Piece, July 03, 2005
Larry Daughtrey has a good column today on how the Tennessee media is covering the legislature less. Daughtrey: "It just sticks in my competitive craw to see the FBI, not the press, break the biggest Capitol Hill story of the decade." The only media development Daughtrey misses is the growing impact on legislative media coverage of independent "citizen journalists," who publish blogs and online news magazines. This year alone, Tennessee political news blogs and online...

Help Wanted, June 29, 2005
Here's a job ad perfect for a New York City blogger looking a part-time freelance gig. And here's a job ad seeking a blogger to write about IT support issues for small business. Pay is low in both cases....

Thanks to Blogs, Nashvillians Still Have Right to Fight $20 "Wheel Tax" Increase, June 29, 2005
Nashvillians will pay higher property taxes and $20 more per year for their car registrations under a new city budget passed by the city's Metro Council last night. While the newspaper stories don't mention it, the $20 wheel tax increase may not yet be a done deal. Thanks to bloggers, the citizens of Nashville still have the right under state law to force a referendum on that tax increase via a petition drive. Why do...

Co-Opted by the MSM, June 29, 2005
WKRN's Nashville Is Talking blog is having Nashville-area bloggers "guest blog" at the site on weekends, so that the blog can be updated daily even as their paid blogger gets all lazy and slothful and doesn't blog on the weekends. I'll be guest-blogging there on July 9-10. I'll also be taking WKRN's "Video 101 for Bloggers" that Saturday, so part of the time I'll be blogging from inside the belly of the beast....

Playin' Hardball, June 29, 2005
Blake Wylie did a little Hardball blogging last night....

The Stingy List Makes the Wire, June 23, 2005
The Stingy List, blogger Chuck Simmins' list of more than $1 billion in private-sector donations to aid victims of last winter's devastating tsunami gets a big mention in a Reuters story today. Not to brag or anything, but I gave "The Stingy List" its name....

Bubba Blab, June 22, 2005
Michael Silence has a story in today's Knoxville paper regarding the self-outing of the formerly anonymous blogger South Knox Bubba. SKB declined to be interviewed for the story, and is now whining on his blog, http://southknoxbubba.net/skblog, that the story isn't unbalanced in his favor. Whatever. Okay then....

Teaching Bloggers How To Shoot the News, June 20, 2005
WKRN continues to enhance its relationship with the Nashville-area blogosphere. Having hosted Nashville’s first meet-up for bloggers in February, and hired a full-time blogger in May to oversee the new Nashville blogosphere portal NashvilleIsTalking.com, WKRN now is planning a one-day class in early July, "Video 101 for bloggers," taught by the news channel's chief photographer. Class size is limted to 20, and is by invitation only - if you didn't get an evite, don't look...

Legal Tips for Bloggers, June 16, 2005
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a legal guide for blogger-journalists covering such topics as legal liability, defamation law, use of confidential sources, intellectual property law, media access, privacy and more....

Chavez: Blogs "Taking Aim" at "Bredesen's Supposed Fix of TennCare", June 15, 2005
Thanks to Tennessean columnist Tim Chavez for the mention in his column today about the battle over TennCare. Chavez mentions this blog and two others (GeoTennCare and Sharon Cobb) as good sources of info on TennCare and Gov. Phil Bredesen's handling there-of....

Campfield On Radio, June 13, 2005
State Rep. Stacey Campfield, Tennessee's first blogging legislator, will be on the radio now through 9 a.m. central time, on Teddy Bart's Round Table, 1160 AM. You can listen online live here. I've been on that show and it's a lot of fun, or it can be otherwise. I'm listening live for a few minutes and Democratic political consultant Ben Chao just admitted he doesn't read blogs, while Republican political consultant says blogs are important....

CNN Eyes the Blogosphere, June 09, 2005
The Time/Warner Division of Turner Broadcasting - which owns CNN - has a job opening for a "Blog Reporter/Producer" to be based in Washington, DC....

What Blogs Do Journalists Read?, June 09, 2005
Knoxville News Sentinel reporter and blogger Michael Silence did an informal survey of his newsroom colleagues asking them what blogs they read. The results are rather interesting....

Video Blogging, June 08, 2005
Until today, I had never produced a video clip, but today at work we had a groundbreaking for a new residence hall, so it seemed a good time to try. My co-worker shot the video with a cheap Sony digital video cam, and we produced a 2-minute package using Windows Movie Maker, which came pre-loaded on my Dell Inspiron 700m. It isn't Star Wars but it's serviceable. It's on the university's news website, which is...

Live Blogging, June 07, 2005
It's 2:18 p.m. and I'm sitting outside at Bongo Java with a group of Tennessee bloggers along with Lawrence Reed, president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy; Drew Johnson, president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research; and New York Times reporter Jason DeParle. We're discussing issues of open government, public policy, and blogging. There's also a photographer here shooting for the NYT. UPDATE: Blake Wylie was there too, and live-blogged it. Matt White...

Return to BlogNashville, June 07, 2005
I have - finally - gotten around to downloading and editing and posting a selection of photos from the BlogNashville conference. [Hey ... it was only a month ago!]. They're all posted in the extended-entry portion of this post. All images are approximately double in size if if right-clicked for downloading to your PC available, and hi-res versions are available if you need one....

The Bloggy Future of Journalism, June 05, 2005
Here's a help-wanted ad from a newspaper that apparently "gets it" about blogs and the future of web journalism.The successful applicant will be conversant with Web technologies and be interested in exploring how to use visuals to tell stories in different ways. If you're intrigued by using the Web to break news, if you're interested in exploring how the Internet and blogs can help offer readers a wealth of intensely local news, if you know...

Rather Lies Again, June 03, 2005
Dan Rather continues to lie about the forged and fraudulent documents at the heart of the CBS "Memogate" scandal involving the 60 Minutes hit piece involving President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. [In case you didn't get to see Rather on Larry King Live because you are one of the rouighly 280 million or so Americans who don't watch Larry King Live, Ian Schwartz has the...

"A sea change in the way news is disseminated.", June 01, 2005
Today's Nashville City Paper has an editorial noting the role bloggers played in quickly disseminating news of last week's stunning arrests of four members of the Tennessee legislature on federal corruption charges as a result of the two-year FBI undercover probe called "Tennessee Waltz."The revelations of Operation Tennessee Waltz last week came swiftly and stunningly. How they came was via one of the older forms of mass communication and one of the newest. ... one...

Blogging the Blogging Revolution, May 31, 2005
The WSJ has a story today on the growing number of corporations that are hiring bloggers. ITWorld.com, meanwhile, reports that podcasting is emerging as "an ebusiness tool" as "commercial web sites are already using podcasting in dozens of ways, ranging from sponsored podcasts, podcast 'edutainment', corporate communications and as a promotional tool." And E-Commerce News today says, "Blogging has arrived as a force on the Internet, not only for political discourse and personal ramblings but...

Set Up For Failure?, May 31, 2005
The College of Mass Communications at Middle Tennessee State University, which boasts that it is the second largest college of mass comm in the nation, has announced that it has assembled "a board of distinguished television, journalism and music professionals" to serve as a "Board of Visitors" whill will offer their expertise to the college for the next two years. The group includes "such notables as chairman emeritus for the USA Today John Seigenthaler, Hollywood...

How To Blog From Darfur, May 23, 2005
Glenn Reynolds and Bill Quick have been discussing what kinds of mobile equipment an independent online blogging journalist would need to do their job well, with the emphasis on both small and portable and also on inexpensive and yet effective and tough enough to take a beating. Of course, all the cool digital cameras and laptops and digital audio and video recorders in the world won't help a blogging reporter actually publish if they don't...

"It's a Web site.", May 22, 2005
Michael Silence has some thoughts about blogging in a perspective piece in the Sunday Knoxville News Sentinel reflecting on the recent BlogNashville conference.Blog is a contraction for "Web log," an online diary with emphasis on immediacy, commentary and reader interaction. More concise, as Franklin, Tenn., blogger Bill Hobbs (www.billhobbs.com) said at the conference, "It's a Web site." In Tennessee, there are some excellent examples of blogs. In addition to Hobbs, there's South Knox Bubba, www.southknoxbubba.net/skblog/;...

Impact, May 20, 2005
State Rep. Stacey Campfield, Tennessee's first blogging state legislator, notes some specific impact blogs are having on the legislative process in Tennessee. It's all good....

Newsweak Update, May 17, 2005
I've learned from a pretty good source who has a connection inside Newsweek that the magazine, still under fire for publishing reporter Michael Isikoff's unverifiable, unsubstantiated and most likely false report that U.S. troops had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay, is preparing a cover story on the whole mess. More than a dozen people have been killed in riots in Afghanistan sparked by that report. My source tells...

Newsweak, May 16, 2005
Rich Hailey has a must-read post on blogs, journalism and the Newsweek blunder. "Call me crazy," says Hailey, "but last time I checked, there were no deaths directly attributable to a blog post."...

On Blogs and Governing, May 15, 2005
I was interviewed Friday by Christopher Swope, a reporter for Governing magazine, on the growing role of blogs in state legislative matters. Part of our discussion focused on whether blogs are filling a growing gap in statehouse coverage left by newspapers that have reduced their presence and coverage of such things. Yes, I got in a plug for the VolPols project. Swope later emailed me a link to this related article from the July/August 1998...

MilBlogs, May 12, 2005
USA Today has a report on military blogs....

The Scene Does BlogNashville, May 11, 2005
The Nashville Scene's cover story on the BlogNashville conference is now online, and it's a good read. Writer Brittney Gilbert - a freelance writer and blogger who recently was hired by WKRN to run their new blog Nashville Is Talking, skips trying to capture the conference in all its complexity and diversity of content and instead uses the very self-reflxive nature of the conference - bloggers blogging about bloggers and blogging - to explore whether...

Blogging BlogNashville, May 07, 2005
Michael Silence of the Knoxville News Sentinel is blogging from BlogNashville.I attended the session on blogging and journalism with Glenn Reynolds, Bill Hobbs and others. ... What I was most impressed with about the session was the absense of any Old Media versus New Media mentality. Instead, the tone throughout was working together to inform people well and give them more freedom in access to information.That's the way I view blogging and journalism. Radio didn't...

BlogNashville News Coverage, May 07, 2005
The Associated Press has a story on BlogNashville. Check it out here at the Editor & Publisher website or via this Google News search - it has run in print or online at more than 100 newspaper and media outlets including Business Week, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, San Jose Mercury News, Kansas City Star, Orlanda Sentinel, Baltimore Sun, the South Africa's Independent Online, and numerous smaller papers. By the...

BlogNashville, May 05, 2005
BlogNashville is under way with CARR training for a handful of folks ranging from WKRN's new investigative reporter to blogger Blake Wylie to Kevin Barbieux, a/k/a/ The Blogger Formerly Known As The Homeless Guy. The CARR training is taking place at The Freedom Forum, which now and forever has the honor of making a bit of journalism history today by hosting the first-ever CARR training for bloggers....

BlogNashville Scene , May 05, 2005
This week's Nashville Scene had some nice words about BlogNashville....

Pajamas Media, May 05, 2005
The blogosphere is abuzz with talk of Roger L. Simon's new project, called Pajamas Media, which aims to be both an ad-supported blog network and a blog-powered global news service. Here's a story in the New York Sun that's chock-full of interesting details....

Dictator Update: A Political Postmortem, May 04, 2005
Matt White has penned a must-read post-mortem on Tennessee House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh and the political shootout over House Bill 0887. White writes from the perspective of someone who, until very recently, worked in the state legislature and was in a position to observe up close how Naifeh operates.The episode is representative of all that is wrong with House Democratic Leadership in general and Jimmy Naifeh, in particular. They feel like they live under a...

Dictator UPDATE: WSMV's Bias is Showing, May 04, 2005
All of the facts are available to any journalist wanting to report the truth of what happened last week in the Tennessee legislature when House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh broke House rules in order to kill HB 0887, a gun-rights bill he opposes. The video of the April 27 and April 28 sessions are online, as are numerous facts about the case brought out by several enterprising bloggers and other citizens seeking the truth. So, then,...

Sometimes, May 01, 2005
Dana Blankenhorn on the question of whether blogging is journalism:To say that a blog is any one thing is to misunderstand what a blog is. A blog is instant publishing. A blog lets anyone post any type of digital file - text, pictures, sound, video - simply, attractively, without having to know HTML. To say a blog is journalism is like saying web pages are journalism. Journalism can happen on Web pages, and on blogs,...

Star Blogger, April 30, 2005
Blogger Mark Rose reports - with pictures - from The Tennessean's 66th Annual Three-Star Forum Banquet, last night . Each year the paper honors writers of letters to the editor over the past year whose letters it deemed worth of its "Three Star" designation. This year, there were nearly 200 "Three Star" letter-writers. It should come as no surprise that The Tennessean chose many more liberal letters as three-star winners than conservative ones. Rose, who...

Off The Sidelines, April 29, 2005
Sidelines, the student newspaper at Middle Tennessee State University, has an excellent advance story today on the BlogNashville conference. The site requires registration, but it's free. The story mentions that a member of the journalism faculty at MTSU, digital media professor Jennifer Bailey Woodard, is attending the conference and that she hopes to learn more about blogging that would help her incorporate blogs and blogging into the journalism curriculum.Woodard says she hopes to gather information...

Fisking Rupert Murdoch, April 28, 2005
Rocky Mountain News editor and blogger John Temple is fisking Rupert Murdoch....

No Pajamas, April 28, 2005
Linda Seebach of the Rocky Mountain News has an excellent column today on the question of whether bloggers are journalists. Answer: "Sure, when they do journalism." Seebach - who will be a part of a panel discussing blogging and journalism Friday, May 6 - discusses the role of American blogger Ed Morrissey (Captain's Quarters) in breaking a Canadian judicial publication ban on testimony in a political corruption case in Canada, and remarks:We can only hope...

Dictator, April 27, 2005
Tennessee's only blogging legislator, State Rep. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, blows the whistle on House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, who found a way to cheat the legislative system. Blake Wylie also has two must-read posts on Naifeh's shenanigans, here and a follow-up here. What Naifeh did was this: He violated House rules in order to kill popular legislation he personally opposed. Some people think Naifeh is the epitome of corrupt good-ol-boy lobbyist-larded politics. I don't know about...

Hyper-Local Blogging, April 27, 2005
If you live in Middle Tennessee's Maury County you ought to check out MauryNewsNet.com, a new hyperlocal news blog that aims to tell the stories that the local Columbia Daily Herald misses or ignores. It looks promising. Reporters and editors with area news organizations ought to bookmark the site and check back from time to time. My guess is, the site will break some juicy scoops....

Blog Jobs, April 26, 2005
If you're a blogger and you're nuts about biotech and healthcare, and you need a job, click here....

The Future of News, April 26, 2005
What's the future of news? Via a link on Rexblog, I learn that it is "mobile, immediate, visual, interactive, participatory and trusted." In fact, says a new briefing from the Media Center at the American Press Institute, "Make way for a generation of storytellers who totally get it."...

Interactivity Is a Three-Way Street., April 26, 2005
The Poynter Institute's Al Tompkins, in a lecture to a class of college journalism students today, had some good things to say about the future of journalism, though I thought he was quite dismissive of blogs. "Interactivity is absolutely the future of news delivery," he said. He's right about that, but his vision of "interactive" journalism seemed a bit limited. Tompkins is a fine journalist, and his four-year-old column on the Poynter website, Al's Morning...

Pre-K Update: Tennessean Urges Support; Leaves Readers Uninformed, April 26, 2005
Today's Tennessean carries an editorial endorsing the governor's plans for a new taxpayer-funded pre-k progrm, and dismisses critics of that plan in a single, condescending and false statement.The only argument worth debating on establishing a solid pre-kindergarten in Tennessee is how to get the program running and to sustain funding once it is. Only a few detractors argue against pre-K either because they are promoting private programs or they don't want to see the state...

Bloggy Mountain News, April 25, 2005
John Temple, editor of the Rocky Mountain News, has started a blog. Think about that for a second. The editor of the best newspaper in one of America's largest cities - which happens to be the city I'd most love to live in - is blogging. Somebody get him a plane ticket to BlogNashville, quick. Then go and read his rather long post on the exchange between RMN columnist Dave Kopel, and Denver Post Washington...

Memo to the Media: Don't Miss This, April 25, 2005
The upcoming BlogNashville conference May 5-7 will feature a panel discussion on the evening of Friday, May 6, on the role of blogs in journalism, and the relationship between the two, including a Friday night panel discussion, 7-8:30 p.m. in the Massey Performing Arts Center, that is free and open to BlogNashville registrants, the news and public relations media and the general public....

Local TV News Hires Blogger, April 25, 2005
WKRN has hired a blogger to run a new in-house blog. Very cool. Blake Wylie has the details and the relevant commentary. I was a professional journalist for a decade or so before I became a blogger. I would think it is an indicator of the growing impact of blogging on media that we're now seeing a blogger hired by a news organization. In recent weeks, The Tennessean has awakened to the existence of the...

Meet the Press, April 24, 2005
The Tennessean advances a special event this week, a free forum at which public and press can meet to discuss issues of media balance and bias."The News We Need: Finding Balance in an Age of Spin" is Thursday at Fondren Hall in the Scarritt-Bennett Center on 19th Avenue South. Nashville is one of eight cities hosting the forums, which are sponsored by Preview Forum, an initiative funded by the Ford Foundation. "Primarily, the purpose is...

The Future of News, April 23, 2005
Yesterday's must-read article on blogging came from Business Week and focused on blogging's impact on the business world. Today's must-read article on blogging comes from The Economist and it looks at the impact of blogging and other what I call "conversational media" on traditional journalism. It's called "Yesterday's Papers." Here is an excerpt, though you really ought to read the whole thing......

BlogNashville Reaches Knoxville, April 19, 2005
Today's Knoxville News Sentinel has a big advance report on BlogNashville, the big bloggers conference coming to Nashville May 5-7. The story is by Michael Silence, the most blog-savvy newspaper reporter in Tennessee. Silence's online producer is already scheduled to attend BlogNashville, and Silence is making plans to attend as well. As of now, the only Nashville newspaper reporter or editor who has said he plans to attend is the Nashville City Paper's Don Mooradian....

Blogging the Tennessee Legislature's Ethics Debate, April 18, 2005
Today's Tennessean article on legislative ethics reform quotes local blogger Matthew White.Matthew White is a Nashville-based blogger behind www.southendgrounds.com, a political blog with a baseball theme. He's been following the ethics debate at the statehouse like a catcher watches a pop fly. The way he reads the legislation, lawmakers' ethics efforts are more show than substance. "Given the leadership's past, they will run to the water's edge and stop," he said. They will do "just...

NYT Hack Job, April 18, 2005
Bob Cox spots a hack job in the New York Times. Blogs... exposing Big Media's dishonesty one story at a time....

The Marketplace of Ideas, April 13, 2005
I had a good time speaking to the Nashville chapter of the American Marketing Association today at their monthly luncheon. Topic: marketing via blogging. They seemed to enjoy it - and there were lots of good questions afterwards. It was good to see Shaun Carrigan, founder and owner of NetContent, where I used to work. The online content company provides a number of services, including automated monitoring of online news for clients seeking to track...

Blogger Makes Nashville News, April 12, 2005
Blogger Blake Wylie, of NashvilleFiles, gets credit from The Tennessean for leading the charge in opposition to the Nashville police department's plans to install surveillance cameras all over the city. The Tennessean, by the way, appears to be starting to wake up to the blogosphere - although no one from the paper has yet registered to attend BlogNashville - or to cover it - even though it is happening right in the paper's back yard...

A Documentary on the Blogosphere, April 08, 2005
A documentary film crew is coming to the BlogNashville conference, May 5-7 .If you aren't already registered, you should hurry - over half of the 300 available slots are already taken....

MBA Nominated for "Freedom of Expression" Award, April 06, 2005
The new Media Bloggers Association, of which I am a member, has been nominated for a Freedom of Expression award by Reporters Without Borders. MBA founder Robert Cox emails:Some of the work done by the MBA to merit this nomination are known while others are not known except to a few including Julien at RSF who put the MBA in for nomination. Known efforts include the Tsunami Video Hosting Initiative and the Legal Defense Initiative...

The Future of Newspapers Looks Bloggy, April 05, 2005
Terry Heaton has a look at the newspaper of the future. As I said some time ago, in the future newspapers will be blogs, or will be out of business....

Pictures of the Truth, April 02, 2005
8,989 different people saw 1Lt. Lance Frizzell's photos from Iraq that I posted here yesterday. That's 8,989 people who got a little different view of Iraq than that which the mainstream media doles out on a daily basis, thanks to Frizzell, who hails from Rutherford County, Tennessee, and is deployed with the Tennessee National Guard's 278th Armored Cavalry. Think about it - when is the last time you saw pictures of happy Iraqi children in...

How A Blog Swarm Stopped the FEC's Evil Plan, April 01, 2005
Don't miss the National Journal's comprehensive report on how the blogosphere beat back a plan by the Federal Election Commission to muzzle free political speech on blogs in the name of "campaign finance reform." Also, sort of related, I blogged about it last night, but it's already way down the page, so I want to again urge you to read Frank Cagle's column in Knoxville's Metro Pulse predicting blogs are going to play a major...

BlogNashville In The News, April 01, 2005
Nashville City Paper previews the BlogNashville conference, thus becoming the first Nashville newspaper to take notice of a major journalistic conference happening right in their own backyard. One of the scheduled speakers at BlogNashville, LaShawn Barber, who will lead the dicussion of "Faith-Based Blogging," recently appeared on MSNBC's blog-based show Connected: Coast To Coast. You can see the video clip here, courtest of blogger Trey Jackson. Barber is a member of the Media Bloggers Association,...

Legislator Blog Flap Update, March 31, 2005
The Memphis Commercial Appeal opined today about state Rep. Stacey Campfield's blog and the flap it has caused. Good snippet:Campfield's critics say the blog is full of unfair and malicious attacks on Democrats, which violates the decorum required of lawmakers. All of that may be true but there's still a free speech issue involved. Blogs have become a popular forum where ordinary citizens can go onto the Internet and express their views. Campfield didn't waive...

Blogs To Set Pace in '06 Race, March 31, 2005
Frank Cagle believes blogs will set the pace in media coverage of the 2006 Senate race in Tennessee.The growth of weblogs and their growing audience has created a wild card in the arena of ideas, especially political ideas. The gatekeepers are still there, but the back door is open. The Tennessee elections of 2006 will be the first statewide elections in which critical mass has been achieved, so that established blogs, e-mail newsletters and websites...