· This seems kind of counterintuitive, given that (A) the traffic stats are still trending upward and (B) the site's disappearance for a few hours is deemed newsworthy enough to warrant a story. (Or two.)

· I'm secretly hoping that if I concentrate all my psychic energy on this, new posts will appear. I don't know that it will actually happen, but I hope that it does. [Ed.--Actually, scratch that. My psychic energy tends to make things turn black, shrivel and die. Maybe I should just stay as far away from it as possible.]

mediabistro.com Hires Elizabeth Spiers As New Editor-In-Chief [mb]
See also: Ones to Watch [WWD]

Hey, it worked!

If you're reading this site, you probably already know that I'm leaving New York magazine in a week to assume the role of editor-in-chief at mediabistro.com. I'm managing a redesign of the homepage, which I anticipate will include the addition of niche-specific blogs, the process of which started with the acquisition of Cable TVNewser and the launch of Galleycat.com.

The design, integration and beta runs for the various blogs will probably occur simultaneously, and I'd like the new bloggers to have a reasonably good understanding of the basics of libel law and fair use. But at the moment, I don't have a quick and efficient way of training them. I'm not even sure that my understanding of either of those issues is really sufficient, given that I had to educate myself with regard to the Gawker and New York blogs. (Nick now has a disclaimer that sort of works around it, but I assume it won't be tested until Gawker gets a serious lawsuit.)

My first impulse was to call the EFF and see if they have a primer for these things--a Marighella's Minimanual of sorts for indie media--and offering to develop something with them if they didn't, but then I realized (after a bit of futile sub-domain Googling) that it would probably be faster and more efficient to just put the question out there and take suggestions from people who know a lot more about this than I do.

If such a thing does not exist, wouldn't it make sense to put together some sort of collaborative blog or wiki that would cover the basics? There are certainly other people besides myself who are hiring bloggers or working with bloggers and have an interest in being able to brief them on these issues. (Nick... Jason... Jeff...)

If there's an easy way to do this and I'm missing it, do let me know. Send me an email (elizabeth AT mediabistro DOT com) or leave a comment.

I understand and share other people's obsession with them, but I can't read any discussion of Presidential poll numbers now without thinking of something James Wolcott wrote in his most recent book and cracking up. From a chapter titled "Punditry for Dummies":

"Every pundit must be as conversant with polls and pollsters as a market analyst is with support levels and significant tops, able to divine the deeper booga-booga of conflicting numbers issuing from Zogby, Gallup, the newspapers, and TV networks. 'Well, as you know, Brit, Zogby polls taken on Friday nights skew Democratic because they're more likely to be home watching Washington Week in Review and counting food stamps.'"

There's a big sign in front of St. Bart's church on 50th and Park Avenue at the moment that reads, "JUDITH MILLER ON FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. THURSDAY, OCT. 21, 7:30 PM." In what is perhaps the creepiest possible extension of Jack Shafer's Judy-Miller-as-martyr metaphor, Miller is now preaching actual sermons on journalistic integrity.

1. Your blog looks different. What did you do to it?

Yes. It now has little blocks of text that appear in reverse chronological order. To be fair, it always had them, but they previously appeared once every two months or so. From now until November 1, they're going to appear a little more frequently because I'll be blogging by necessity at mediabistro until the site relaunch (circa January 31, 2005) and I need some practice. I'm a little rusty. Feedback is appreciated, but keep in mind that "don't quit your day job" is actually a compliment in my case.

2. Didn't you say just two weeks ago that you were kidding about the 100% more blogging?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Consistency, hobgoblin, etc., etc. I also told an editor of mine that I thought media reporting was the most soul-destroying job in journalism. (Then I realized that soul destruction necessitated an actual soul, and that I had nothing to worry about.)

3. If a Zogby poll falls in the forest and no one's around to overanalyze it...

I'd look at the numbers, but I'm too enthralled with Spiderman Reviews Crayons [via D.R.] at the moment. I'm just being reintroduced to the Internet and haven't quite worked my way up to solid foods yet.

Kaus: WaPo on Kerry's cabinet: What, no Steve Rattner?

I think it's the prospect of a 6,000 word Michael Wolff political column in VF that's providing the disincentive.

William Raspberry, in today's WaPo:

The explosion of the Internet leaves us, in effect, with no gatekeeper. Sometimes important information gains currency that way. The problem is that anyone with Web access can run any cockamamie story up the flagpole -- and if enough people salute, prompt the mainstream press to deploy its resources.

I think Raspberry just fundamentally misunderstands the way these things filter up to mainstream media. If "anyone with web access could run any cockamamie story up the flagpole," and expect to see it as a page A1 story, I'd be reading a lot more alien abduction stories in the New York Times. There are gatekeepers: "enough people" (and by that, I assume he means "enough people with the influence to affect the news agendas of major media orgs") are simply not likely to salute to anything that's obviously "bunk." It might happen occasionally, but I don't think there's any evidence that it happens more often when the story leads are picked from the web, or that the risk of it happening outweighs the benefits provided by important stories that have been broken *because* of the web.

I think Raspberry would appreciate web leads a little more if he were a political beat reporter instead of a columnist.

A Web of Bunk[WaPo]

I just got the November/December issue of Foreign Policy (or The Poor Man's Foreign Affairs, as I like to call it) and there are two headlines above the cover story:

"The Tragedy of Colin Powell" by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, and...

"HOW BLOGS ARE CHANGING THE WORLD" by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell (CAPS EMPHASIS my own).

Re: the first -- I used to have a minor obsession with Christopher Hitchens, and to some extent, I still do. But in the couple of years, he's only made sense to me when explaining why he's an atheist. His justifications for the war in Iraq, in particular, have been comically disingenuous. (And yes, it hurts me to say that. Sort of.) In this issue of FP, he attempts a takedown of Colin Powell that really just boils down to the fact that he may have not spent enough time traveling and that his prescriptions for multilateralism were not always successful. If the Hitch managed to knock Powell off his supposed pedestal with that one, I think it's safe to say that Powell landed in a bed of marshmallows.

A sample:

From William Jennings Bryan to Cyrus Vance, history used to suggest a remedy for secretaries of state who became demoralized or disillusioned with the policies pursued by their presidents: resignation. More than just quitting, resignation also at least implies an acceptance of responsibility (as it did, for example, when Lord Carrington resigned as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's foreign secretary over the Falklands imbroglio). But with Powell, one has never been entirely sure whether he considers collective responsibility to be a part of his cabinet rank. Instead, he offers a grudging willingness to stay on, for a little bit at least, in invited--no, make that pressed--to do so. This attitude is normally associated either with insufferable guests, or with people who appear to believe thta they are performing the thankless task of holding up the sky....

Resignation does not always imply an acceptance of responsibility, and in this case, it would be more likely to imply an abdication of responsibility and a refusal to deal with the consequences of one's irresponsibilty. To the extent that Hitchens is right, it can in some cases, be the ultimate form of dissent, but it's a trump card that can only be played once. How often is "I don't like what you're doing, so I'm quitting" more valuable than "I don't like what you're doing, so I'm going to stick around and try to change it"?

Further on:

He may well indeed favor the venerable traditions of negotiation and multilateralism. Yet what reward has this touching faith brought him? The chief evidence against him would be his attempt to prolong the political life of Yasser Arafat, his reluctance to believe that Hussein was incorrigible short of war, his belief in the good faith of the Saudis, nad his willingness, right up until September of 2004, to extend deadlines in Sudan.

So much intellectual dishonesty here, I don't even know where to start (the failures of intellect or the plain dishonesty?) Re: Arafat--oversimplification to the point of distortion, and re: good faith of the Saudis--stand alone distortion without even the courtesy of oversimplification. So I'll just deal with the two most grating charges (to me, at least): (1) that Hussein was incorrigible short of war. If this were a point of fact, John Kerry's support base would be much smaller right now. Most of the conservatives I know aren't fully convinced that Hussein was incorrigible short of war, and the Realists so frequently identified with hawkish administrations (Mearsheimer, Waltz, and if Morganthau weren't dead, I'd wager...) vehemently opposed it, precisely because they thought Hussein was corrigible--or at least, deterrable. That Hitchens treats this as a given is outrageous. (2) extending deadlines in Sudan. I'll give Hitchens that Powell could have done more and sooner, but at least he called it genocide, which is more than could be said of the rest of the administration at the time. If that's the indictment, and it actually sticks, Powell's will be the first of many resignations, and certainly not the most senior.

I could review every paragraph in the article like this, but it all points back to the same fundamental flaw in logic: if Hitchens is going to make the argument that Powell's policy of "quiet diplomacy" is morally flawed on the basis that it's ineffective and/or insufficient, then he has to compare it to the shortcomings of the alternative (loud non-diplomatic actions, I suppose) and acknowledge that the relative distinctions imply an imperative to correct them in order of priority. And if inefficiency and ineffectiveness are the wages of that particular sin, then who's going to hell first? Powell or other members of the administration?

Now, onto the blogging article:

First of all, FP just discovered blogs? "Blogs," writes Drezner/Farrell, "(short for 'weblogs') are periodically updated journals, providing online commentary presented as a set of 'posts,' individual entries of news or commentary, in reverse chronological order." [Ed.--Three issues ago, they explained email as "a message, written traditional letter format, but electronically transmitted via the World Wide Web, an interconnected and decentralized public network." ... Oh, alright. Not really. I made that up.] I cannot imagine that anyone who would ostensibly be reading Foreign Policy would not know what a blog is, given the extensive coverage in all other tangential media of blogs at the Democratic and Republican conventions, presidential candidate blogs, TV anchor blogs, etc. You'd pretty much have to be reading FP and nothing else politically-related to avoid any collision whatsoever with blogs.

But on to rest of the piece:

Compared to other actors in world affairs--governments, international organizations, multinational organizations, multinational corporations, and even non-governmental organizations (NGOs)--blogs do not appear to be very powerful or visible. Even the most popular blog garners only a fraction of the traffic that major media outlets attract.

Not that visible, I'll give them. Not that powerful, I won't. Basing power assessments on size of readership and traffic is like arguing that the President of the United States isn't very powerful because there's only one of him. How many people are reading blogs isn't as important as which people are reading blogs. If the Bush and Kerry campaigns are reading ABC's The Note religiously, Mark Halperin is getting an audience for which high profile interest groups would and have paid millions. There are plenty of well-funded NGOs that are much less capable of affecting foreign policy agendas.

Another observation:

The blogosphere has no central organization, and its participants have little ideological consensus. [Ed.--Is that critical or merely irrelevant?] How then can a collection of decentralized, contrarian, and nonprofit Web sites possibly influence world politics?" [Ed.--This is apparently a big puzzle, yet the question of how decentralized, contrarian and nonprofit NGOs, also known as one of the examples invoked earlier for contrast, can possibly influence world politics is, it seems, self-evident.]

The article is ultimately very "rah-rah-blogging!" on the basis that it allows for the dissimination of niche expertise (i.e.,--UMichigan professor Juan Cole translating Arabic language newspapers) and the bypassing of foreign censorship laws (Bloggers in Iran! Bloggers in China!), but pretty shallow analysis overall-- though I do like the fact that it refers to Jeff Jarvis's Buzzmachine as "the single best source for information on the global expansion of the blogosphere." (Jarvis is the single best source for info on the global expansion of the blogosphere because he has probably engineered most of it himself. A hundred years from now, historians studying the mysterious proliferation of indie web media in the early '00s will be shocked to learn that it was masterminded by a guy in suburban New Jersey.)

And one final note, on FP:

If AIG ever stops advertising, they're going to have to remove the back page entirely, because it has become a fixture and the absence will be noticeable. It'll be like Paper magazine without Chloe Sevigny or the New York Times without the institutional self-loathing.

I'd slam Jack Shafer for knowingly and willingly voting for people he plainly characterizes as numbskulls, but I'm a Kerry supporter, so that would be hypocritical. (John Kerry: the lesser of the two numbskulls.)