Controversy opens Harvard blog meet

CBS Marketwatch ^ | 01/21/05 | Frank barnalo

[bubman]

By Frank Barnako, MarketWatch Last Update: 11:58 AM ET Jan 21, 2005 WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) - An invited group of bloggers and journalists began a two-day conference Friday morning at Harvard University amid cold weather (3 degrees) and controversy.

Alex Jones, head of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, acknowledged "contentious" comments have been made about the event's guest list of about 50 people.

Among the critics was a conservative blogger who said the meeting "is a hopelessly biased group of center-left academics/journalists who are once again getting overwhelmed by the marketplace." That statement was made to Ed Cone, one of the conference's participants.

Cone's response was, "I see it as a chance for a handful of bloggers who get journalism and journos who get blogging to explain this real slow to the journos who don't get it yet."

In his opening remarks this morning, Shorenstein's Jones said that "one (unfortunate) lesson that mainstream journalism can teach blogging is that credibility is fragile and mainstream journalism has lost too much of it in recent years," according to Jeff Jarvis of Advance.net. He is attending the conference and writing about it on his Weblog, Buzzmachine.com.

The Friday and Saturday sessions are being Webcast here. Weblog comments about the conference itself can be read here.

PubSub Concepts, a company which filters and monitors Weblog content for news feeds, reported this morning it is now tracking 8.1 million Weblogs, half of which it says are active. That's 20 percent more Weblogs now than PubSub tracked two months ago.

[Paleo Conservative]

"I see it as a chance for a handful of bloggers who get journalism and journos who get blogging to explain this real slow to the journos who don't get it yet."

[cloud8]

Too bad CBS Market Watch didn't identify the "conservative blogger who said the meeting 'is a hopelessly biased group of center-left academics/journalists who are once again getting overwhelmed by the marketplace.'"

[Bigh4u2]

Actually, They did!

"That statement was made to Ed Cone, one of the conference's participants."

[Buckhead]

Hugh Hewitt complains today that Ed Cone published comments Hewitt made about the make up of the conference in private e-mails between them. Ergo, it is reasonable to conclude that the comments were made by Hewitt.

[Bigh4u2]

Sorry! My mistake.

I could have sworn it said 'by' instead of 'to'.

Old age I guess!

LOL!

[cloud8]

Thanks. Harvard, full of surprises lately, considers a conservative blogger worthy of invitation, but Market Watch, Old Journalism, doesn't attach much importance to it.