Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

BW has a great wrap-up of the best of the web, including one of my faves, Digg.com. And another, Basecamp.

It’s bothered me for ages that media keep reporting that Google and Yahoo are media companies. Afterall, Yahoo is a slef declared lifestyle engine. The reason is bugs me is that determining a company is a media company on the basis that they make revenue from advertising seems pretty narrow. What about content creation? Reporting? All that other good stuff. Aren’t they merely content repackagers with little IP in content creation?

Anyway, enough of the rant… Seems Yahoo is about to head – albeit in a very small way – down the road to being a media company. The NYT reports that they are appointing a Journo to start covering, of all things wars:

The Web site, called "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" will focus entirely on Mr. Sites’s travels as a war correspondent and will use nearly every kind of format the Internet allows. His reports will begin Sept. 26.

Mr. Sites, who is 42, has long been comfortable using new technology and the Internet as part of his reporting, from shooting his own video to writing blogs from places like Kosovo and Afghanistan. The use of technology, he said, allows him "to report in ways that haven’t been done routinely in the network news business."

They point out that this isn’t a Blog, V/Blog or any such thing. No, no, no…

Mr. Sites said he hoped that Yahoo users understood that what he was doing was different from the mass of opinion blogs and other Web sites.

"We are a journalistic entity," he said, "trying to do things in a responsible way you don’t always see on the Internet.

So there you go. The Internet company doesn’t want to be like Web 2.0. It wants to be like, well, The New York Times…

Steve Gillmore says:

What’s new is the insistent voice of the blogosphere beginning to dominate the conversation between vendors and customers. It’s more of a zero sum game than many are willing to accept. Analysts are consolidating (read: contracting) and tech news has been commoditized to something approaching loss leader. Folks like Stephen Shankland and Ephraim Schwartz are increasingly providing analysis in their beat areas, and of course the Redmonk boys are open-sourcing their methodology if not their recommendations.

Yes!

Newsweek reported false, unsubstantiated rumors as fact. They falsely reported that U.S. interragators in Guantanamo Bay desecrated the Koran by flushing it down the toilet, sparking riots across the globe. They took their time in correcting this massive error and buried it when it was time to face the rioters. This pretty much says it all…

Newsweek may have admitted Sunday that its sloppy reporting, about how a U.S. soldier at Guantanamo Bay flushed a Koran down a toilet, led to riots in Afghanistan which killed at least 15 people, but they hardly made their concession prominent in the May 23 edition of the magazine, especially online where, on the magazine’s home page, you’d have to guess that this headline, "The Islamic World: How a Fire Broke Out," had something to do with a retraction. And to read Editor Mark Whitaker’s message, you’d have to know to click on "Letters and Live Talk" in a left side column, then, under "More," choose "The Editors’ Desk." And even then, whether online or in the hard copy, Whitaker didn’t approach an apology until the last sentence of his last paragraph: "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst."

Here’s the story on "How A Fire Broke Out". And here’s Newsweek’s somewhat pathetic response. Shame on you!