Journalism & Media:

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......

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 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......

Monkey Media, July 29, 2005
I meant to get to this last week, but simply forgot. Last Thursday was the 80th anniversary of the famed "Scopes Monkey Trial," in Dayton, Tenn., immortalized in the film Inherit the Wind. Except, the movie got the history entirely wrong - and that's a problem as today's journalists view the debate over evolution theory, intelligent design theory and public education through the lens of that film, says Jonathan Witt, PhD., senior fellow at the...

Wired War, July 29, 2005
The August issue of Wired has an excellent story by John Hockenberry on military bloggers. Mudville Gazette, Thunder 6 and other great mil-blogs are mentioned and profiled. It isn't online yet, but will be on August 4, according to the website. You don't have to wait for the digital version of course, as Wired is also distributed on thin slabs of dead trees....

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....

No Reasonable Offer Refused, July 24, 2005
Last week, media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. agreed to buy Intermix Media, owner of the popular community website Myspace.com, for $580 million. MySpace had had 17.7 million visitors in June. Based on those metrics, BillHobbs.com, with 30,000 unique visitors per month, is worth just under $1 million. Offers welcomed......

London Bombings a New Kind of News Story , July 08, 2005
Today's Washington Post looks at how cellphone digital cameras added immediacy and personal viewpoint to the news coverage of yesterday's terrorist bombings in London. ... Also, Tim Porter had a very good look at the irrelvance of newspapers on such a day as yesterday....

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...

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...

Ch' Ch' Ch' Changes..., June 22, 2005
Terry Heaton's essay on TV news in the high-tech postmodern era, Chaos at the Door, is a must-read, even if you aren't in that business, because it is about so much more than teevee.The paradox of power is that discontent increases with opportunities for acting on it. The more the bottom is given the tools to make and distribute their own media, the greater their power; the greater their power, the greater their discontent and,...

Media Lynching, June 16, 2005
Mark Rose reminds us that it was Democrats who blocked a proposed federal anti-lynching law back in the 1960s, though the media today declines to say so. Might I add that Blake Wylie is right about the real purpose of the recent Senate resolution apologizing for something it didn't do half a century ago. And, might I add, lynching was already illegal back in the 1960s, under the anti-murder laws on the books in every...

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....

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....

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...

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/;...

Newsweek Has Blood On Its Hands, May 16, 2005
Austin Bay has a superb post on Newsweek's false story that sparked anti-American riots in Afghanistan. People died because Newsweek lied. I stopped reading Newsweek years ago, when its anti-conservative, anti-Christian and anti-American slant became simply too much to stomach. Now, it's sloppy and false "reporting" has lead to 15 deaths and greatly undermined America's national security. More here, with many, many links. If you subscribe to Newsweek, please cancel your subscription. UPDATE: Powerline: Newsweek...

The Myth of Media Monoplization, May 14, 2005
Via the excellent Technology Liberation Front blog, I came across Benjamin Compaine's fascinating report on The Media Monopoly Myth. Subtitled, "How new competition is expanding our sources of information and entertaiment," the report looks primarily at media consolidation in the broadcast industry and concludes that "the empirical reality does not support any notion that in the United States, in 2004, consumers of content via the media have fewer choices of sources or fewer choices in...

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....

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...

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...

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....

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...

Pulitizer for a Ghoul?, April 09, 2005
Thunder 6 reflects on a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph from Iraq.In my humble opinion the unnamed photographer who took the snapshot isn’t an keen eyed photojournalist. He isn’t a Pulitzer Prize winner. He isn’t a AP stringer. He isn’t even a man. He’s a ghoul. A wretched fool who makes his money chronicling the misery his insurgent contacts inflict on their countrymen. I wonder what the going price on a soul is these days? Maybe I...

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...

Influence, April 06, 2005
Terry Heaton has a fascinating essay on the nature of influence in the hyperlinked world. Media companies would be well advised to follow the advice implied....

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....

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...

Legislator Blog Flap Postscript, March 30, 2005
I would be remiss if I didn't mention how WKRN handled the story of the Tennessee legislator whose blog has riled the leadership of the state legislature. WKRN is more blog-savvy than the other teevee news operations, and it shows. Not only did the station run the AP story on its website, it ran a sidebar with links to blogosphere reaction to the story, including to my post from this morning. Click the thumbnail to...

Something For You, March 30, 2005
Already, as of Wednesday night, 115 people have registered for the big HUGE BlogNashville conference May 5-7 . All events on Thursday, May 5, and most on Friday, May 6, are for a limited number of members of the Media Bloggers Association, but the events on Friday night and Saturday, May 7, are geared toward larger crowds. Registration is capped at 300 for the Saturday sessions. The Friday night panel discussion about journalism and blogging,...

Buggy Whips, March 29, 2005
Newspapers are dying. Oddly, the rising profitability of the newspaper industry is an indicator of their coming death. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen explains in a must-read article if you work in the newspaper business. To see the future of the news industy, come to BlogNashville, May 5-7 ....

The Future of TV News, March 28, 2005
Jeff Jarvis explains the ease of video-blogging, and why it matters to teevee news outlets, in a 3-minute "vlog" I found via Terry Heaton's blog. Check it out here. I want this....

The First Five Freedoms, March 28, 2005
Today I attended a talk by John Seigenthaler, former longtime editor of Nashville's The Tennessean newspapaper and founder of the First Amendment Center , in which he noted that surveys done by the Center find that only about 1 in 100 Americans can name all five freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment. Can you name them? Try - and then click "read more" for the answers, and for the rest of this blog post. (Please...

BlogNashville Registration Opens, March 28, 2005
The Media Bloggers Association today opens registration for BlogNashville, a three-day blogging conference scheduled for May 5-7, 2005 . BlogNashville will bring together leading bloggers from around the world including Glenn Reynolds, Robin Burk, Brendan Greeley, Rebecca MacKinnon, Hossein Derakhshan, LaShawn Barber, Ed Cone, Henry Copeland, Dan Gillmor, Jay Dedman, Mark Tapscott, J.D. Lasica, and two journalists who actively cover the blogging space, Mark Glaser of Online Journalism Review and Staci Kramer of PaidContent.org. As...

Bloggers Play Role in Tennessee Legislative Ethics Push, March 25, 2005
Today's Tennessean reports that the public is pushing the Tennessee legislature to adopt tougher ethics rules for legislators - and says bloggers are playing a role, too.Republicans and Democrats in the state Capitol appear to have started a race to see who can pass new, thorough ethics rules to better police lawmakers. The House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation yesterday that makes it a crime for members of the General Assembly to receive consulting fees,...

Conyers Gets It Right, March 24, 2005
I rarely agree with U.S. Rep. John Conyers, but the Michigan Democrat has put his name on a very good op-ed about whether bloggers ought to be granted the same First Amendment-related legal protections as journalists. Conyers:Bloggers should be classified as journalists and given First Amendment protections based on the function they perform, not the form of their transmissions. Properly understood, the First Amendment applies to all those who report with journalistic integrity - offline...

Blogging@Wharton, March 23, 2005
Knowledge@Wharton from the business school at the University of Pennsylvania has just published a story looking at blogs, asking "Blogs are here to stay. Where are they headed?" Here's an excerpt:Recently, blogs have been credited with everything from CBS News anchorman Dan Rather's departure, to unauthorized previews of the latest Apple Computer products, to new transparency in presidential campaigns. The big question is whether blogs, short for weblogs, have the staying power to become more...

Weather Blogging, March 23, 2005
Nashville's WKRN-TV Channel 2 has started a weather blog. I wish I'd photographed the big pile of hail that appeared to have erupted from the ground at my house this morning. Seems it all came down the rain gutters and flowed through the underground pipe that carries rain from the gutters underground below the mulched landscaping and deposits it on the lawn via a ground-level pop-up valve. So much pea-sized hail came down the pipe...

Bloggers: Journalistic Dadaists?, March 22, 2005
Are bloggers the Dadaists of journalism? University of Texas journalism sophomore Clint Rainey thinks so.Just like a bicycle wheel atop a white stool in any museum, everyone's talking about it. Robust debate on the future of journalism, now an everyday event in elite media circles, is bringing us to face a professional crossroads: From where did this stool come, and should it stay?Rainey doesn't like blogs, claiming that what they "offer increasingly is an irresponsible,...

Bloggers to Get Journalism Training , March 21, 2005
Here's a major announcement regarding the May 5-7 BlogNashville conference....

"This is Journalism.", March 21, 2005
Patrick Beeson, a graduate student of journalism at the University of Alabama, has an excellent article on the relationship between blogging and journalism, on the website of Quill, the magazine for members of the Society of Professional Journalists. Best quote in the piece:"This is journalism. Raw, unedited, but still journalism," said Jonathan Dube, MSNBC.com managing producer and publisher of Cyberjournalist.net.The question "Is blogging journalism?" is actually a very stupid question. Some is, some isn't. At...

Inside The Walls, March 17, 2005
NashvillePost.com, a subscription-only business news website, has taken notice of the launch of a new blog by a member of the Tennessee legislature.In his first post on March 9 2005 Campfield wrote "my goal with this blog is to share with you some of the experiences and things that happen in the legislature that you may not hear about, what really happens behind the scenes." His first post, and only one so far, drew several...

I Got My MBA, March 15, 2005
I am now a member of the Media Bloggers Association, as of today. The MBA is a sponsor of the BlogNashville conference May 5-7 ....

Birds of a Feather, March 14, 2005
Liberal bloggers are "reaching out" to the mainstream media, via a conference call, reports the New York Times.Mr. Fertik maintains that the blurring of boundaries has benefited left-wing bloggers less than their adversaries on the right, saying that reports posted on conservative blogs more easily make the jump to the main news media. "The way we perceive it," he said, "is that right-wing bloggers are able to invent stories, get them out on Drudge, get...

Offline Bloggers Face FEC Regulation, March 14, 2005
Reuters:Internet bloggers should enjoy traditional press freedoms and not face regulation as political groups, lawmakers and online journalists say.Non-Internet bloggers, on the other hand will have their First Amendment rights abridged just as if they were political groups......

BlogShine Sunday, March 13, 2005
Today is BlogShine Sunday, a focus on freedom of information and open government. You can learn more here, and here. It's a companion project to the MSM's focus on the same issue today, as the MSM suspends its attacks on the blogosphere in order to focus on what really matters: the truth and openness that are vital for a healthy democracy. It was my intent to write something fairly long, incisive and eloquent today about...

Whom Does the First Amendment Serve?, March 11, 2005
Donald Sensing weighs in on whether bloggers are entitled to the same First Amendment-related legal protections as journalists....

Is the First Amendment Only for Journalists?, March 10, 2005
JournalismJobs.com, a resource for job-hunting journalists that also from time to time lists good opportunities for freelancers, is currently running a web poll asking "Should bloggers have the same legal rights as journalists?" I just grabbed a screen shot of the results, and they rather disheartening for this journalist-turned blogger: More than half of the respondents, who would mostly be mainstream journalists, think bloggers should not have the same legal rights as journalism. Click image...

Rather Uncool, March 10, 2005
The Tennessean laments how Dan Rather was treated as he was leaving the CBS anchor job he held for 24 years....

Great Scott! Dan Rather Retires..., March 09, 2005
In one of those weird coincidences of timing, less than 12 hours after Dan Rather retires tonight on the 24th anniversary of becoming the CBS Evening News anchor, long-time NBC weatherman Willard Scott celebrates the 25th anniversary of his affiliation with the Today Show. Rather exits the CBS Evening News anchor desk after tonight's broadcast, on the 24th anniversary of his taking over that slot from Walter Conkrite. Rather long coveted Cronkite's informal title -...

Buzz, March 08, 2005
If you work in the news media and you aren't a regular reader of Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine, well... you should be....

No Substitute For Journalism?, March 08, 2005
Here's yet another attack on blogging by mainstream journalism, this time by University of Maryland journalism professor Christopher Hanson, published in the March 7 Baltimore Sun....

A Collection of Voices, March 07, 2005
Michael Silence says:The blogosphere is not an institution or entity. It is simply a collection of voices, by one estimate more than 8 million of them. ... A collection of voices does not need regulating.Exactly....

Why Do We Need Blogs?, March 07, 2005
Washington Square News, a student newspaper at New York University, notes that when the MSM writes about blogs, they neither ask nor answer a very key question about blogs: Why do we need them?...What do we need blogs for in the first place? The answer lies in a mainstream media plagued by superficiality, over-polarization of important issues, restrictive selectivity of story coverage and consolidation of outlets. It is notable that in their coverage of blogs,...

Open Up!, March 01, 2005
The recent battle waged by The Tennessean and - incredibly - a state legislator seeking to force TennCare, Tennessee's Medicaid-plus program, to open its records is only the highest-profile such battle taking place across Tennessee. Ben Cunningham of Tennessee Tax Revolt emails that more citizens and newspapers in Tennessee are being forced to sue for access to records which ought to be public but are being withheld due to "