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The U.S. armed forces have joined the Internet’s fast-growing blogosphere. U.S. Central Command is working with more than 250 bloggers "to try to disseminate news about the good work being done by U.S. forces in the global war on terror." (Defense Link News). That effort says CENTCOM--which has its own website for news releases, data and imagery--has reached more than 17 million online readers to date. From his desk at CENTCOM headquarters, Army Reserve Spc. Claude Flowers of the 304th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment from Kent, Wash., fights in the global war on terrorism daily in his own way. It...

The title of this column is one of my favorite lines from William Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury. It is also a precise description of what is wrong with the American press, as two examples from the past week demonstrate. One concerns the blogosphere. The other concerns the nearly universal incompetence of the press in reporting on “the” Danish cartoons that are “causing” the Muslim riots. Faulkner’s character, Quentin Compson, on the day of his suicide at Harvard, reflects on his sister’s long-lost virginity with these words, “which, being believed, was, whether it was or not.” The first...

Every walk of life and field of endeavor generates its own insiders' lingo. Those of us in the MSM — that's the superannuated, archaic mainstream media — have our own jargon, of which the first sentence of an article is the lede, the early edition is the bulldog and the guys working into the wee hours make up the lobster shift. Some of our special vocabulary is being stolen from us by the denizens of the world of Web logs. Above the fold — the top half of a standard-size newspaper page, where the major stories begin — now, in...

This Book Brought to You By For the first time, a major publisher is offering a book online at no cost to readers, supported by advertising. HarperCollins is selling the book, "Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own" by Bruce Judson, through Mr. Judson's site, brucejudson.com. An alert poster at MetaFilter.com noted that the publisher's page for the book did not mention the free version. Despite the cheesy title, Mr. Judson, a fellow at the Yale School of Management, won accolades from Library Journal and others for his book.

Democrats are struggling to reconcile the differences between party leaders in D.C. and independent activists on the Net If I am hearing Simon Rosenberg right (and he is worth listening to), a nasty civil war is brewing within the Democratic Party, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton—the party’s presumptive 2008 nominee—needs to avoid getting caught in the middle of it. “It’s not a fight between liberals and conservatives,” Rosenberg told me the other day. “It’s between our ‘governing class’ here and activists everywhere else.” In other words, it’s the Beltway versus the Blogosphere. What’s interesting is that Rosenberg is himself a...

Web journalism now eligible for Pulitzer Prize Wed, 07 Dec 2005 Internet journalism received a leap in recognition Wednesday as the Pulitzer Prize Board widened its submission guidelines to include online material for all of its journalism categories. "The board believes it has taken a significant step in recognition of the widening role of online journalism at newspapers," prize administrator Sig Gissler said in a statement. Online material will be considered beginning with the 2006 competition (which honours work done in 2005). The eligibility guidelines "will continue to be restricted to newspapers published daily, Sunday or at least once a...

The anticipated transition of the Blogosphere into established and commercially-oriented institutions is beginning to take place. Tomorrow, Open Source Media, a web-site described as seeking to “blend traditional journalism with freeform commentary” will be launched. How long can it be before Microsoft buys Instapundit and Fox Television hires Michelle Malkin?

Sept. 14, 2005 - If I am hearing Simon Rosenberg right (and he is worth listening to), a nasty civil war is brewing within the Democratic Party, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton—the party’s presumptive 2008 nominee—needs to avoid getting caught in the middle of it. “It’s not a fight between liberals and conservatives,” Rosenberg told me the other day. “It’s between our ‘governing class’ here and activists everywhere else.” In other words, it’s the Beltway versus the Blogosphere. What’s interesting is that Rosenberg is himself a Beltway creature, a preternaturally self-assured young insider with a cherubic face and a cold...

Blog readership has risen dramatically this year as the number and reputation of blogs spread, with unique visitors to the top 50 blog-related sites up 31 percent in the first seven months of the year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. By July 2005, blogs boasted 29.3 million unique visitors, amounting to 20 percent of active U.S. Internet users, the survey said Monday. Blog hosting sites, which have spawned millions of blogs, play a key role in the spike in current blog readership. Blog host sites require very little technological knowledge from bloggers and their readers. MSN Spaces, which came out in beta...

Hugh mentions Free Republic like it is a main stream media / news outlet. Cool! ===== The Three C's of Blogging What the blogosphere is doing to help in the aftermath of Katrina. by Hugh Hewitt 09/08/2005 12:00:00 AM IT IS TEMPTING to speculate about how the new Supreme Court will differ from the old (Senator McConnell might want to find another complaint to file against McCain-Feingold), but that debate will rage for months into the future, and the blogosphere has had a very interesting two weeks responding to Katrina and its aftermath. This has been the period when the...

CNN Politics - The Situation Report ...REDDISH TINT TO BLOGOSPHERE: Liberal activist Web loggers have made major advances on the Internet, but they remain far behind their conservative adversaries among the top 250 political blogs, according to a study by a Democratic think tank. Washington Times: Liberals lag conservatives in political blog presence

<p>Be that as it may, in researching the subject, I arrived at a solution to my dilemma; categorize the sites using as a benchmark how far the blog deviates from the real world and descends into conspiratorial fantasy.</p> <p>I discovered that the more forcefully the denizens of these sites bragged about being a member of the “Reality Based Community” the farther they actually were from existing on the same plane of the universe as the rest of us. Some maintain a passing familiarity with reality – as if reality were like walking past a beautiful woman and getting a tantalizing whiff of an exotic perfume. Others have had reality slap them upside the head and still deny the evidence of it with their own eyes and ears.</p>

Earlier this week, Technorati, a Web site that indexes blogs, released its semiannual "State of the Blogosphere" report. It records a steady, and astonishing, growth. Nearly 80,000 new blogs are created every day, and there are some 14.2 million in existence already, 55 percent of which remain active. Some 900,000 new blog postings are added every day - a steady increase marked by extraordinary spikes in new postings after incidents like the London bombing. The blogosphere - that is, the virtual realm of blogdom as a whole - doubles in size every five and a half months. If the blogosphere...

With all the commentary, protests and Monday morning quarter-backing taking place on a daily basis regarding the Iraq war, I was struck by a USA Today report about the Army's re-enlistment rates. It turns out that soldier re-enlistment rates are one-third higher than the Army's target. The report attributes the increased numbers to better monetary bonuses and to "a renewed sense of purpose in fighting terrorism."I'm curious how much air time this particular report will receive in the mainstream media today and this week. "The biggest thing is that soldiers believe in what they are doing," said. Col. Debbra...

A FEW MONTHS AGO, Markos Moulitsas, proprietor and founder of the left-wing blog Daily Kos, penned a brief but extremely insightful posting. Under the heading, "Evidence that we live in a different world," Moulitsas pointed to a recent Time magazine poll that showed 79 percent of the American public had never heard of (or didn't have an opinion of) Ann Coulter. Moulitsas wrote, "I'd venture to say that 100 percent of this site's readers know who Anthrax is." Indeed, there is little doubt that the habitués of the Daily Kos, like their hated cousins who read popular conservative blogs such...

"...Cable goes wall-to-wall, broadcast networks mixed. Some stations still running regular programming. Local news mostly focused on story, but with major local angles that sometimes seem too provincial. Focus on the news that has actually occurred. Let's show we care. Some other stories being covered as well. Actually heard an Aruba update. Let's take a pass on that one for a few days, shall we? ...While the blogosphere jumps right in, talk radio is caught with its pants down. Many regular hosts are away this week and the substitutes in their place range from nightmarish, to completely unairworthy. ...Please leave...

<p>Like a growing number of employees, Peter Whitney decided to launch a blog on the Internet to chronicle his life, his friends and his job at a division of Wells Fargo.</p> <p>Then he began taking jabs at a few people he worked with.</p>

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A BLOG By Michelle Malkin   ·   June 13, 2005 04:01 PM This blog turned one last week! (BTW: Congrats to Karol at Alarming News, which turned the Big 3 today.) First, some blogiversary expressions of gratitude: Special thanks to the following people for their warm welcomes, words of advice/encouragement, and early links during mm.com's incipient days: John, Paul, and Scott at Power Line, John Hawkins at Right Wing News, Frank J. at IMAO, Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom, Bill Ardolino at INDC Journal, Kevin Aylward and the Wizbang crew, Ace of Spades, Spoons, Captain...

There was yet another interminable car chase in the streets of Los Angeles carried on every 24-hour news channel. Excepts of this eight-hour ball of excitement appeared on regular news programs. Everyone who saw none of this, please raise your hands. Hold on, you. Admit it. You did watch. I confess, so did I. This one was a white minivan that wandered over several freeways in downtown L.A. Several times the minivan came to a full stop in heavy traffic, while up to five police vehicles also stopped – 25 feet behind the van. Meanwhile, a police spokesman droned on...

Jeff Quinton catalogs some attempts by media types to start their own blogs. To date, traditional media is far removed from the "common people" and hesitant to dirty their hands with blogging "irresponsibility." Thus, early attempts reveal the latent horror within them as they wade into the blogsphere. Jeff Quinton led me to a sample in Brad Warthen's Blog which he links in his post.Welcome to my Weblog, which begins with a series of disclaimers: First, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m making this up as I go along. I could read other blogs and imitate them, but I...

Alert: Zarqawi died (see update below) The Jordanian thug Fadhel Nazal Al-Khalayla (Zarqawi) 38 years has died. He received treatment from Arab doctors who were not very experts and lacking intensive care equipments which he needed for his puncture in the right lung. His wounds infection gets resistance to the antibiotics. He had what is called septicemia which is according to doctors an infection of the blood resulted from infected wound. Zarqawi's systems started to fail including his kidney and liver. He died and now in the hands of the Keepers of the Hell in its worst level. His family...

Picking apart film releases for political overtones has become an American cottage industry, with media types tripping over their grandmothers, to be first to attack the latest release on cable talk shows. Two more important elements have emerged, however, that overshadow film content analysis: --- How "Star Wars" reveals, in its critical reactions, the new media's pecking order. --- Secondly, the need to look at whether conservatives should really be picking films apart frame-by-frame, looking for bias.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Bloggers - those Internet-based writers without rules - are fighting back against criticism that their work is unreliable, libelous or just poorly done. More than 300 bloggers came to town Friday for a two-day conference that was heavy on teaching techniques used by journalists in what bloggers term "the mainstream media." One class taught students how to access and analyze government statistics. Conference organizer Bill Hobbs called blogging "citizen journalism." "If freedom of the press belongs to those who have the press, then blogging expands ownership of the press," Hobbs said. Right now, more than 8...

Washington, DC, May. 4 (UPI) -- More people are blogging than ever -- particularly young people -- while traditional media grapple with dwindling interest and growing criticism from this tech-savvy share of the public, experts told United Press International. "What blogging has created is a million eyes watching over the shoulders of journalists," Matthew Felling, media director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, told UPI. He cited the recent scourging of CBS Nightly News anchor Dan Rather, after bloggers showed a document Rather used to question President Bush's military service was a forgery.

Captain's Quarters has really stirred up the Canadian blogosphere by carrying details of court testimony on a governmental scandal that is banned from publication in the Great White North. The scandal is about the use of Canadian government money, laundered through a private ad agency, to hire Liberal Party hacks, and is so serious it may catapault the Canadian conservatives into power. This incident marks one more step by the blogosphere into the realm of news generation as opposed to mere commentary. Captain Ed is well aware of this and adds the uncustomary (for a blog) disclaimer: Thanks to a...

Much of the blogosphere is opposed to the recently passed bankruptcy bill. There are way too many to list but Politology, Instapundit and Bizzyblog have some roundups against the bill. Todd Zywicki has some good stuff defending it. Some have said it was “rammed through” by Republicans (even though the only “Nays” were from far left Democrats – with the exception of Lieberman and Feinstein). The main arguments of the opposition portray people who file for bankruptcy protection as innocent victims – of “evil” credit card companies or circumstances beyond their control. There are obviously people who have gone through...

At a recent Harvard conference on bloggers and the media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a response on the "comments" space of her blog from someone concerned that if the voices of bloggers overwhelm those of traditional media, "we will throw out some of the best ... journalism of the 21st century." The comment was from Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The Washington Post Magazine [a sister publication of NEWSWEEK]. "It has taken 'mainstream media' a very long time to get to...

THE FEC VS. BLOGS By Michelle Malkin   ·   March 03, 2005 02:20 PM CNET reporter Declan McCullagh has an important piece warning of the "coming crackdown on blogging." Joshua Claybourn of In the Agora analyzes the campaign finance law absurdities and First Amendment infringements on bloggers here. Winfield Myers is on the same wavelength. He writes: The possibilities that [FEC commissioner Bradley] Smith lays out are chilling and, if enacted, could spell the end of blogging as we know it. Indeed, it could turn much of what is published on the Net into a samizdat-style activity. Sound alarmist? Read on....

The Blogs Must Be Crazy Or maybe the MSM is just suffering from freedom envy. Thursday, February 17, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST "Salivating morons." "Scalp hunters." "Moon howlers." "Trophy hunters." "Sons of Sen. McCarthy." "Rabid." "Blogswarm." "These pseudo-journalist lynch mob people." This is excellent invective. It must come from bloggers. But wait, it was the mainstream media and their maidservants in the elite journalism reviews, and they were talking about bloggers! Those MSMers have gone wild, I tell you! The tendentious language, the low insults. It's the Wild Wild West out there. We may have to consider legislation. When you...

I did not realize I was a “salivating moron” until Steve Lovelady, Managing Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, informed me of that fact. His full quote was even harsher. Regarding the abrupt resignation of Eason Jordan, chief news executive for CNN, Lovelady wrote about us bloggers, “The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail.” I think he meant to write “prevailed.” His statement has become the signature quote in many publications from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal on l’affaire Jordan. However inaccurate, that quote does embody the attitudes of the MSM (“mainstream media”)...

Gaining Competitive Advantage using the Blogosphere The first MSM outlet to devote regular column inches or broadcast minutes to the topics rippling through the blogosphere will be at a significant competitive advantage. Translation: the MSM can stop the ratings and circulation bleeding without wholesale personnel changes and with only minimal investment. Imagine, say, the Old Yorke Times or, heaven forbid, the LA Dog Trainer offering a daily or thrice-a-week recap of the latest buzz on the blogosphere... read rest

NEW YORK To the surprise of no one, the saga of former White House correspondent James D. Guckert, also known as Jeff Gannon, took center stage at a briefing conducted by White House spokesman Scott McClellan today. Gannon/Guckert quit his post at an obscure Web site, Talon News, Tuesday night after bloggers exposed the fact that he had been working under an alias and had possible links to sex-oriented Web sites. Questions have emerged about how and why the White House allowed the reporter to attend briefings and even ask President Bush a very friendly question at his recent press...

Going into the 2004 election cycle, just about everyone said the Internet was going to change politics. But no one was sure how. Now we know....snip ...The Democratic Internet constituency was and is motivated by one thing more than anything else: hatred of George W. Bush. To see that, you only have to take a look at dailykos.com, run by Democratic consultant Markos Moulitsas, which gets 400,000 page views a day -- far more than any other political weblog -- and which received funding from the Dean campaign (which Moulitsas disclosed). It seethes with hatred of Bush, constantly attacks Republicans...

An article by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post on the Eason Jordan resignation quoted Steve Lovelady "of Columbia Journalism Review" as saying of this event, "The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail." This struck me as a grossly unprofessional remark by anyone who claimed to be a journalist. So, I wrote a detailed letter to the Editor of the Review, demanding an apology. Back came a letter this morning from Mr. Lovelady, which makes it clear that neither he nor the Review have a clue about the blogosphere. They do not understand our work, nor do...

The LA Times' review of Hugh Hewitt's new book Blog is enlightening. The Times selected a person named Michael Standaert, with whom I am unfamiliar. I do know this... he has literally set the standard for left-leaning MSM shills to follow. He will be hard to top. I hereby call him out for a brisk fisking...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version February 11, 2005, 12:36 p.m. Eason Jordan vs. the BlogosphereThe heat is on. This week on CNBC’s Kudlow & Cramer I asked three influential U.S. senators about the CNN scandal regarding news executive Eason Jordan. To recap, at last month’s economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jordan publicly accused the U.S. military of deliberately targeting journalists in order to assassinate them. Senators George Allen, Jeffrey Sessions, and Norman Coleman all agreed with columnist Michelle Malkin’s characterization that Jordan and his CNN defenders have “slimed the military.”...

WARNING: The page you have accessed is dependent on JAVASCRIPT which is not supported by your browser. Due to this limitation, you may experience unexpected results within this site. ABC's Inauguration Plans The blogosphere catches Big Media trying to pull another fast one.by Jonathan V. Last 01/20/2005 2:26:00 PM OVER AT POWER LINE, John Hinderaker has found one of the most egregious bits of media bias yet recorded. (Hinderaker found the story at a smaller blog, The San-Antonio Express-News Watch.) It seems that yesterday ABC News posted a call on its website for help from readers: Jan. 19, 2005--For...

Hugh Hewitt announced on his show today that he will be appearing on FoxNews O'Reilly Factor on Friday January 14th at 8pm eastern to discuss his new book 'Blog'. Order and read reviews of his book on Amazon

Many credit the work of the American conservative blogosphere for George W. Bush's victory in the 2004 election. "Blogs for Bush" was an important blogroll that helped spread the conservative message across America. Despite the fact that we have many great conservative bloggers, Canada's blogosphere lacks the depth and organization of our American cousins. "Blogs for the CPC" is an attempt to centralize conservative Canadian blogs into one central list. Unlike the American electoral system, which is predictable in its timing, the Canadian blogosphere has little idea when the next election will be called. Many speculate that the current minority...

Saturday, December 11, 2004 · Last updated 9:34 a.m. PT Man or machine? Rossi-Gregoire recount prompts dispute over accuracy By DAVID AMMONS AP POLITICAL WRITER OLYMPIA, Wash. -- Humans versus machines? No, it's not an old Schwarzenegger sci-fi flick, but a high-stakes dispute in the often strange world of Washington politics. With the governor's race hanging in the balance, an unprecedented third vote count is now underway in the state's 39 counties - by real live human beings this time. The two previous tallies, both by machine, showed underdog Republican Dino Rossi to be the winner by the tiniest margin...

Wither The Mainstream Media? By William Bennett In many ways—especially from the views of Blackrock, 30 Rock, and Times Square —President George W. Bush should not have been re-elected: the economy was in less than stellar shape; images of terrorism and death from Iraq flooded the news coverage; civilians were being kidnapped and beheaded; President Bush did not acquit himself well in the presidential debates; and Osama bin Laden gave us a long-awaited (and, in some cases, long-unexpected) proof-of-life days before the election. And, yet, instead of George W. Bush packing up his office this December and January, Dan Rather...

THE BLOGOSPHERE GIVES THANKS By Michelle Malkin   ·   November 25, 2004 09:45 AM Thanksgiving blogservations...Robert Spencer of JihadWatch gives thanks that no major terrorist attack has occurred in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001.BlackFive is thankful for American GIs; so is Marvin Olasky. Jen Martinez is thankful for our Special Forces.Scrappleface reports that Maryland has renamed Thanksgiving "Lucky Thursday:" Faced with the constitutional prohibition against teaching about the Christian origins of Thanksgiving in public schools, the Maryland State Department of Education has rewritten its curriculum, and renamed the holiday 'Lucky Thursday'. The American Thinker reprints George Washington's 1789 Thanksgiving...

The blogosphere, an ad hoc network of news commentary web journals created by pajama-clad scribes who write so well they don't need editors, claimed another triumph this week, forcing the retirement of Dan Rather, a 73-year-old news anchor whose show ranked a distant third in a field of three. "We have put the MSM [main stream media] on notice," wrote one unnamed blogger. "If we can do this to a septuagenarian at the sunset of his career, who can withstand our withering firepower?" The official unnamed spokesman for the blogosphere said the next target for "Operation Early Retirement" is 86-year-old...

Richard Morin took the time over the weekend to address the 'exit polling' controversy, but also found plenty of time left over to take a shot at bloggers.It's also time to make our peace with those self-important bloggers who took it upon themselves to release the first rounds of leaked exit poll results. Those numbers showed Democrat John F. Kerry with a narrow lead, which ignited premature celebrations in one camp and needless commiseration in the other -- until the actual votes showed President Bush had won. (snip) But rather than flog the bloggers for rushing to publish the raw...

Richard Morin took the time over the weekend to address the 'exit polling' controversy, but also found plenty of time left over to take a shot at bloggers.It's also time to make our peace with those self-important bloggers who took it upon themselves to release the first rounds of leaked exit poll results. Those numbers showed Democrat John F. Kerry with a narrow lead, which ignited premature celebrations in one camp and needless commiseration in the other -- until the actual votes showed President Bush had won. (snip) But rather than flog the bloggers for rushing to publish the raw...

Internet revolution is forcing transparency Mark Tapscott November 15, 2004 Debates about “red states” and “blue states” aside, the 2004 presidential campaign made one thing clear: The Internet is rapidly establishing real-time transparency in government and the media as the sine qua non of American public policy. That’s good news for the American voter, because for the most part government and the major media remain for now much as they have been for the past half-century -- too remote, restrictive and elitist. Revolutions aren’t won in a day and sometimes progress is slow, so friends of openness in government can...

Here is the video clip of Rather's infamous comment to Ed Bradley about the White House having used the blogosphere with great success during the campaign and speculating that it would now unleash this same sinister force to pressure Kerry to concede even though the network had not yet called Ohio.

Caught this interesting post on a British Blog {start of post snipped} Welcome to the new media world, Polly*. Up until now, an information elite has been able to misrepresent and manufacture fact with virtual impunity - sometimes accidentally, sometimes as a deliberate means of pushing a chosen agenda. For example, if a newspaper polemicist wanted to contend that "Scandinavian countries are best of all" at overcoming obesity, it was unlikely that many would notice and connect the fact that: "Norway has the highest percentage of overweight men in Europe, according to a new report by the World Health Organization...

Here's a thought: A blogger might be the first to announce the winner of Tuesday's election.Pure speculation on my part, of course, but is it so crazy a guess? News organizations now abide by an agreement not to project a winner until after the polls close on the West Coast. The folks who conduct exit polling usually have a pretty good idea which candidate is going to come out on top.That information is closely held. Four years ago, blogging had yet to burst upon the mainstream. Even if an insider wanted to spill the goods, the blogosphere did not figure...

From Getting Borked to Getting Blogged By Joshua Livestro In October 1987, after Robert Bork's candidacy for the Supreme Court was rejected by the Democratic majority in the Senate, a new political turn of phrase entered the dictionary: "getting borked." It referred to the venomous politically motivated attacks on Bork's record that left his candidacy in ruins. As the recent borking of the Italian candidate for the European Commission, Rocco Buttiglione showed, a candidate about to be borked can forget about getting a fair hearing. The past few months have seen the birth of another new political expression: "getting blogged."...