Interesting Richard Bennett Post on the Next Generation of Blogdom: Bennett, Jeff Jarvis, Nick Denton and Henry Copeland (among others) seem to be circling around some Big New Idea, though the technology of it is beyond my grasp. Eric Olsen has a good round-up of it all.

05/11/2002 02:18 PM  | 

‘Liberal-Progressive’ Blogger of the Day: It’s George Kelly, from Oakland! He writes entertainingly on politics, music, race and whatever-the-hell, with a mind far more open than what you’ll see at most Berkeley rallies. He’s been out there for years, and does not shy away from a good fight.

05/11/2002 01:39 PM  | 

[You] Make a Poor Man Drunk: That’s a line from my favorite Stones song, and it describes what happened to me today. Last night, I must have rattled the tin cup a twee bit louder than usual, because just over 24 hours later (and after links from the generous Glenn Reynolds and mysterious a. beam), an incredible 61 of you nice people reached into your virtual wallets and sent me money. Sixty-one! I’ve written many a column or article that were lucky to be read by 61 people, let alone by people who paid close attention, sent me educational e-mail, and had the reflex to lift a guy’s spirits on a lean day. I’m stunned, a little embarrassed, and very happy. Thank you.

05/10/2002 10:14 PM  |  Comment (5)

Do You Visit Log Cabin Chronicles Enough? I’m guessing you might not. John Mahoney’s been putting it out there for seven years, long before there was a word “blog.” Check him out. Also, for those alert fact-checkers out there, John Cole is the proprietor of the recommended Balloon Juice. And me? My brain is a pile of mush ... even though I'm the luckiest guy alive.

05/10/2002 12:07 PM  |  Comment (1)

Alterman’s Latest: Since I’m apparently now a one-man Alterman watchdog (honestly, kids, I don’t pay attention to him that much), people are mailing in critiques of his new column. I now hand the blog over to Comedy Central writer Jason Ross:

Here's the lede to Alerman's latest MSNBC thing...

It is a clichéd if cynical notion that the only purpose of television programming is to keep your posterior on the couch long enough to sell you commercials.

Note to Alerman: "Cliched if cynical" means fuck-all. And, no, TV shows aren't there to "sell you commercials." They're there to sell you soap, charcoal, tampons, beer, etc.

Here's a line from the fourth graf:

And nobody embodies that tautological truth than network executives.

To quote Oliver Twist: Can I have some "more"?

05/10/2002 11:19 AM  |  Comment (11)

839 Unanswered E-mails: That’s how many I’ve got in the in-box right now. It’s a rather startling number, almost beautiful in some abstract way…. Apologies to each and every one of you. I’m swamped.

05/10/2002 12:52 AM  |  Comment (3)

Another Volokh Precedent? Eugene pre-empts his upcoming Opinion Journal column on the Second Amendment by posting 17 footnotes, complete with links. What should we call this interesting new behavior? Pre-footnoting? Or perhaps, deferring to Australian Naming Rules, “pre-footy”?

05/09/2002 08:23 PM  | 

Ain’t Too Proud, etc.: Just because I’m a “web-renowned” would-be newspaper co-founder, described by some as one of the “best liberal bloggers,” by others as one of “the blogosphere’s great college dropouts,” (thanks Glenn & Virginia!), well, none of that means I’m not broke. This media scheming is fun and all, but so far it’s been all talk, no top-hats. As a result, I’m broker than a three-dollar bill. Shoot, I’m broker than the L.A. Unified School District! I’m more broke than my own shower head, or Andrew Sullivan's plumbing. … Sorry. Anyways, this is my pathetic monthly reminder that just over to your left you’ll find a PayPal button and an Amazon tip-jar. Further below, you’ll see links to some book & CD titles I highly recommend, and if you click & buy, I get a cut (even if you click on the Amazon button and buy a Gnome Chomsky book, I get a small cut of that). With any luck (and a lot of hard work), this will be the last time I embarrass myself like this. Thanks, pals!

05/09/2002 04:52 PM  |  Comment (4)

Ex-L.A. Times Editor: People Resent the Good Writing: Was just flipping some TV channels around, and caught this micro-nugget from former Times city editor Bill Boyarsky, on some media-ethics roundtable broadcast by the local public television station:

One of the reasons why people get angry at the L.A. Times is that the reporters are very good writers … who can tell compelling stories.

05/08/2002 07:58 PM  |  Comment (23)

My Favorite New Phrase: From Eugene Volokh, who you should read twice a day:

Note, though, that this is one of the many subjects on which I'm rationally ignorant, so far all I know this article might be total bunk; one never knows with these sorts of controversies unless one has invested much more effort than I'm planning to ….

05/08/2002 06:10 PM  |  Comment (1)

Two Bemused Takes on Journalism & the Short-Lived Jenin Massacre: By the Weekly Standard’s Richard Starr, and the always-hilarious Mark Steyn.

05/08/2002 01:36 PM  |  Comment (4)

Two Great Olsens for the Price of One! Eric busts out with Part Four of the New Media in the Old series, and crazy Dawn interviews Tony Pierce.

05/08/2002 12:38 PM  |  Comment (2)

Classless Alterman’s Clumsy Lies: The back story: In March, “media critic” Eric Alterman of the Nation and MSNBC published a creepy list of prominent U.S. “columnists and commentators who can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification." Included on that insulting ledger, erroneously, was Cathy Young, who writes for the Boston Globe and Reason. Young responded to the error writing a column that, for once, focused on a Mideast conflict she normally ignores. Alterman responded on Jim Romenesko’s letters page by admitting, barely, that he

[M]ay have been mistaken at the time. I do make mistakes. But based on my reading of her response to her inclusion, I'm not sure this is one of them. […]. Either I was correct about Young in the first place or I've turned out to be prophetic. Either way, I'm not feeling too terrible about it.

The fact that I turned out to be correct about Cathy Young's views on the Middle East was lucky, but it did not justify my mistaken inclusion of her on the list in the first place. I cannot now reproduce the reasons that inspired me to do it, and so I will simply apologize. (Ironically, however, because of the column, she now stays on the list.)

For the record, I responded to Cathy Young in a letter to the Boston Globe last month, apologizing, pointing out where she was right and where I think she was making false accusations against me. After repeated interventions by the ombudsman, the letters editor asked me to send the letter a third time, leading me to wonder if the section on their website that asks for letters is not just a hoax, designed to give people the illusion of access. In any case, this same letters editor who emailed me asking for the letter after being contacted by the ombudsman, refused to publish my response and did not bother to let me or the ombudsman know. I did not learn of this until I finally reached her on the phone. I write not to rehash the entire matter, only to point out how easy it is for a great newspaper to abuse the power it enjoys in refusing to allow the people it attacks the right of response.

A few days ago, Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation, published an article on MSNBC.com decrying what he regards as the unthinkingly pro-Israeli bent of much of the American punditocracy.

To my shock, I found that his list of “commentators who can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification” has my name on it - which is rather baffling, since I have never written about the Mideast. (My e-mail to Alterman was unanswered.) Ironically, the main reason I haven't touched this issue is that my sentiments about it are too ambivalent.

05/08/2002 01:17 AM  |  Comment (22)

Two Useless TV Anecdotes: Last night, ESPN’s 10 p.m. Sportscenter telecast ended with a baseball-triva reference to 19th-century pitcher Mickey Welch (no relation). The co-host then made a joke to transition into the 11 p.m. broadcast, something about how “we won’t Welch on our duty to bring you another Sportscenter” or thereabouts. As a namesake, I can only approve of this creative widening of the humorous verb “to Welsh.” And as a descendant of Welsh immigrants, I am engaged in an ongoing battle with my cousins to keep this colorful little phrase alive in the language, as opposed to yapping at every politician who lets it slip, or successfully pressuring the style-guide editors of monopolist daily newspapers to ban the word. That’s right, “Welsh” is a slur-non-grata in the Los Angeles Times. Believe it or not, I was accosted with some seriously angry letters back in Budapest when I used “Welshes” in a banner headline to describe the government going back on one promise or another. These people are everywhere!

Anecdote two: This morning, an MSNBC anchor was interviewing some former U.S. ambassador to some Middle East country about whatever new temporary micro-agreement has been tentatively hashed out between Israelis and Palestinians. To put the guy on the spot about what a truly minor breakthrough this was, the anchor pulled up a mocking quote from … Jon Stewart. Treacher and Layne are right.

05/07/2002 01:04 PM  |  Comment (4)

Eric Neel Talks to Walt Frazier About ‘Linking and Thinking’: I’m serious. The world is getting weirder by the minute. Frazier, for you non-NBA fans, was a wonderful guard for the New York Knicks back in the ‘70s who went by the name of “Clyde,” and wore cool suits while kicking the crap out of everybody. These days, he’s a radio announcer. Eric Neel is a columnist for ESPN.com, and is one of the most interesting sportswriters out there. An excerpt from the terrific interview:

What do you do to build your vocabulary?

Frazier: I used to get the Sunday New York Times, the Arts and Leisure section, and I used to love the words when they critique plays, or whatever: "riveting," "mesmerizing," "provocative," "profound." And I used to write them down, in notebooks and note how they were utilized in a sentence. And then I just studied them. People think I'm a voracious reader, but the only thing I read are my words and phrases.

Do you keep a list next to you when you call a game?

Frazier: I used to have a list, but whenever I go on the road now, I just grab two or three of my books and review. The secret is review. Review, and linking. I call it linking and thinking.

Do you still play ball at all?

Frazier: Why, are you challenging me? (laughs)

Oh no. No, sir, though if that's an invitation, I'm on a plane right now.

05/06/2002 09:54 PM  | 

Student Web Journalist Exposes Decadent School Board Waste! My favorite story from last year was a bit about this remarkable 16-year-old muckraker in Hillside, New Jersey named Sergio Bichao. Was checking out his site today, and found a lead story with the headline: “‘LIMOUSINE LIARS’ WINE ‘N’ DINE ON HILLSIDE’S MONEY.” Here’s how the article starts:

As the Hillside school district faces a budget crisis, the Hillside Board of Education's junket to New Orleans ran up a ten thousand dollar tab, this report can now reveal.

According to invoices obtained by this report Friday afternoon, board members Helen Schierer-Dino, Elbert Smith, Dennis Kobitz, Nagy Sileem, former board member Cynthia Wilson, business administrator Christopher Tarantino, and Superintendent Raymond Bandlow wined and dined at fancy cafes and bars in the French Quarter and rode to the airport in a limousine.

All of the participants in the trip - with the exception of Nathalie Yafet and Dr. Bandlow - ate a brunch at BRENNAN’S restaurant, leaving taxpayers to foot a bill totaling $432.74.

FODOR’S Guide to New Orleans places BRENNAN's in the highest priced category.

Amusingly, a prominent journalism person last year reacted to my profile with disappointment that journalism kids nowadays were choosing to emulate Matt Drudge….

05/06/2002 03:59 PM  |  Comment (1)

Gatekeeper Arrogance, Personified: Over at LAX, I just put up a post about a damning Jewish Journal column slamming the L.A. Times. You do not have to believe that the Times has an anti-Israel bias to be horrified by the responses from the paper’s “readers representative” and outgoing foreign editor. Go there to read their quotes; basically, they boil down to: “How are we supposed to cover huge rallies in our city, when we’ve got all these other counties to worry about?” And, “I’ve heard your complaint so often, it doesn’t have any effect on me, nyeah nyeah nyeah.” Amazing.

05/06/2002 02:51 PM  | 

Nice Article About Weblogs: By Jadine Ying, who demonstrates nicely the forgotten value of interviewing several sources for a story.

05/06/2002 11:11 AM  | 

From Eric Neel’s Most Recent Sports Column:

2. Any and all references, invocations, snippets, clips and glimpses of Bootsy Collins are a good thing -- on television, in your mind, in your soul, wherever.

05/06/2002 12:10 AM  | 

What Happens When Common Pirates Are Allowed in Hollywood:

05/05/2002 11:48 PM  | 

The Lure and Challenge of a Crazy City: Former L.A. resident Benjamin Kepple writes a mini-essay too good to excerpt, about his memories of living in this confounding city, and how the local media outlets couldn’t ever come close to explaining the town he was experiencing. The post ends with a very generous plug for our new paper.

There have been many such plugs this past week, and I intended to list & thank them all today … but other duties called. Here’s an especially edifying post, by Martin Devon, about a John Balzar column, and what it says about a company that employs 1,100 journalists but can’t cover a city. Read it.

05/05/2002 11:36 PM  | 

Entrepreneurs, Blogs, Americans, Frogs: Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post today called “Blog Biz” (perma-links aren’t working), in which he posits that “Bloggers are also entrepreneurs.” Got me thinking about various unrelated things.

When I went to Europe, in 1990, at the age of 21, I did not, to say the least, consider myself an entrepreneur. Hippie? Yes. Decent basketball player? Uh-huh. Narcissist/guitar player? Sure. Sunburnt Californian? You betcha. College dropout with no discernible future? Check. Guy who had written hundreds of articles, a daily mini-humor column, ran a production department, operated a unisetter & half-tone camera, and trained new recruits for a good daily university newspaper? Also. But, to quote one of my favorite Layne columns, my “business experience was generally limited to collecting beer money at parties.”

When I got to Prague, maybe 90% of the economy was still state-owned, and much stuff didn’t work. Worse (for me, that is), I had no idea what was going on. Talking to other English-speaking weirdos, I noticed they shared my frustration. When a bunch of my friends showed up, unexpectedly, they said the same thing. So it seemed altogether natural to start an English-language newspaper -- there wasn’t one, and we wanted to read one, so we made one.

Within a year or two, there were very many variations on this story. Transplanted Californians with zero previous entrepreneurial aspirations became sick with withdrawal from Mexican food, so they started Mexican restaurants from scratch. Or coffee shops that served refills of the americky stuff. Or a handful of interesting literary magazines. Or a terrific bookstore/coffeehouse. Or dive bars that became angry Nick Cave songs (not to mention disturbing self-portraits [third one down] with weird connect-the-dots implications). You never saw such a bunch of slackers so damned busy with payroll issues, even while the newsweeklies back home whined about the mopey work ethic of Generation X. And it was almost always Americans starting these things, rarely Brits or Germans. I came to realize -- Americans, undeniably, have an entrepreneurial gene, even when they don’t realize it. All it takes is to be confronted with something infuriating that doesn’t work … hey, I can do better than that!

And now, for a contrast. My wife, the lovely futurist Emmanuelle Richard, is a crackerjack French journalist, who contributes regularly to the hip French daily Liberation (kind of like the Guardian UK), the enormously popular weekly Telerama (the New Yorker meets TV Guide … really!), and the various radio networks that comprise the French version of the BBC. What’s more, all her bosses think she’s fab, and marvel at her energy & enthusiasm. She is four years younger than I, speaks several more languages, and writes well in English. On paper and off, her career stomps mine like a sad bug. Yet every time she even hints about moving back home, her colleagues and superiors just roll their eyes and shrug. “You know how bad it is here,” they’ll say. France does not create media jobs, does not allow tenured media professionals to be fired, and treats new media companies like little satan-dogs that need to be kicked into the river. Meanwhile, that 35-hour work-week you may have heard about has meant that journalists have simply received an extra three weeks of vacation -- 11 weeks, instead of the paltry eight from before (it was assumed that measuring a reporter’s hours was a bit silly).

This has resulted in two things: an increased gap between full-time French journalists and hard-working free-lance dynamists like my wife, and an increase in the number of French journalists visiting us here in L.A. during their endless vacations. (I’ll leave the logistical nightmares of working for editors who are always on vacation for another time.) Many of these journalists are colleagues from Liberation, who are genetically inclined to bitch about the inefficient and politically Byzantine habits of the ‘68er editors there (who deserve their fair share of criticism, believe me). For years now, I have made a point of asking each one of these nice young people the same single question:

So, why don’t you start your own publication?

Tonight, after Le Pen got thumped, many of the new frog-loggers jumped up and down, and proclaimed “We won!” My wife, in an anguished and uncharacteristically long post, asked (in French) “What did we win?” She’s right. The French are far too willing to proclaim victory when a few hundred thousand march in the street, and end up getting what they want. The crime problem in the most crime-ridden areas of that country is directly reminiscent of the kind of fatalistic-yet-P.C. crap crippling U.S. cities in the late ‘80s. Unemployment (especially among the young) is outrageously high, and has been for most or all of Emmanuelle’s life. Far too often, geopolitical rhetoric is delivered in the immature screech of those grown accustomed to being safely removed from real power. Until 95% of French truly believe that the burning of synagogues in Marseilles is a crime problem, not a direct consequence of U.S. foreign policy, will I be ready to proclaim “We won!”

I say this as someone who is beyond weary reading the gleeful exhortations of warbloggers to “go beat up a Frenchman” or whatever (which spoiled, for me, this otherwise terrific Cinco de Mayo post by Monsieur Domenech). Yeah, my skin’s a bit thin on this issue ... though the SNL skit made me snicker.

What I meant to emphasize here was that the elusive blogger gene is not that far removed from the elusive entrepreneurial gene, and that they are both in ample supply here, short supply there. The blogging phenomenon, pre-9/11 and post-9/11, supplements an already rich explosion in online media since 1994 or so, and the fallout will probably surprise. As one who was bitten early by the publication-starting spider, I have hopefully been able to empathize with the various dot-com pioneers as they fitted and started. At the same time, I have a fever in my blood that now prevents me from doing things like enjoying a simple vacation in Europe without devising an entire series of interactive travel-guide “context” books, or compiling “The Top 50 Small Towns in France,” or fantasizing about that beach bar/pension/bookstore in Croatia. The mere act of creating a public entity, however accidental, re-wires your brain, and makes previously impossible fantasies seem like amusing challenges. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next.

05/05/2002 11:25 PM  |  Comment (5)

NY Times on the Blogs: I had a feeling it was shaping up to be a Warblogger Triumphalism day. … Anyways, Judith Shulevitz introduces Grey-Lady readers to the “Blogosphere” (without mentioning poor William Quick!), and the result is pretty interesting. I liked this paragraph:

No matter what a blog may actually say, its more visceral effect is to prove, again and again, the irreducible individuality of the blogger. Blogs provide a counterweight to the increasing unreality of mass journalistic culture -- its quality of having been processed beyond the realm of the recognizable, its frequent tone of unearned authority. They're the antidote to the blow-dried anchor, the unsigned editorial, the pronunciamento of the token credentialed expert.

Bloggers like to disagree, but they are unanimous about blogging's advantages over traditional journalism.

a compulsive honesty that has bloggers linking to articles in which they found their ideas.

My only other quibble is her Beam-like insistence that Andrew Sullivan is guilty of obsessing about “his plumbing problems.” I read the guy most every day, and I just don’t remember that … speaking of which, if any of my L.A. neighbors out there are handy with fixing pressure-less shower heads, I’d appreciate a little advice.

05/05/2002 03:00 PM  |  Comment (4)

Words to Live by, From Rick Fox: There’s a great quote from the most quotable Laker in today’s L.A. Times, describing that peculiar moment in the Portland series when Dale Davis kicked him twice in the head, yet he just smiled:

People talk about playing us physical. They play physical and hope we respond negatively. I got kicked in the head. Part of me wanted to jump up and go at Dale. The other part of me started laughing. I said to myself, 'This is the point where I lose my head or I laugh and recognize the part of the game where I go beyond them.'

05/05/2002 02:10 PM  | 

Fine Pro-Blogging Column in U.S. News & World Report: John Leo writes a very nice column about the post-9/11 newsblogging phenomenon. He makes a good point about how “the fairness of the blogworld is impressive,” gives a solid “nobody knows for sure” about the alleged conservo-liberatarian tilt of the warbloggers, and admits to scrapping several columns on topics he’s seen dissected online before he could finish. He also has a nice word to say about our LA Examiner:

In two cases, bloggers have prepared the way for new newspapers in major cities. Smartertimes.com, a running account of the sins and omissions of the New York Times, led to the founding of the New York Sun, New York City's new conservative daily paper. A similar path is being followed in Los Angeles, where LAExaminer.com regularly snipes at the Los Angeles Times to prepare the way for a new anti-Times daily paper. […]

The blog was started as a stop-off for L.A. media links but quickly became a collection of news briefs and media criticism.

05/05/2002 01:04 PM  | 

Winnie the Pooh’s New Blog: Concocted, apparently, by none other than the confounding A. Beam. Still need proof that the funnyman ain’t me, Jarvis? Ask yourself if I have that kind of free time for such laugh-out-loud cleverness.

05/05/2002 12:12 AM  |  Comment (1)

Hi! What are you doing down here?