Category Archives: community

New York Times: Joe Weisenthal vs. the 24-Hour News Cycle

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Profile of Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider: "During the course of an average 16-hour day, Weisenthal writes 15 posts, ranging from charts with a few lines of explanatory text to several hundred words of closely reasoned analysis. He manages nearly a dozen reporters, demanding and redirecting story ideas. He fiddles incessantly with the look and contents of the site. And all the while he holds a running conversation with the roughly 19,000 people who follow his Twitter alter ego, the Stalwart. ... He is like the host of a daylong radio show, except no one speaks out loud. He rarely makes phone calls. His phone almost never rings."

NYTimes.com: Romenesko Taken to Woodshed for, um, Not Much. And Then Resigns.

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David Carr: "Out in the civilian world, [Romenesko's] departure is, um, less than seismic. But to those of us who read and followed him, it seemed like an ill-advised way to end a run that was remarkable in all aspects: He was a proto-blogger, helping to define the form; an arbiter and observer of the great unwinding of journalism; and an eerily fair aggregator of other people’s work."

Felix: Here’s why I’m so angry at Julie Moos’s unjustifiable attack on Jim Romenesko

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Felix Salmon: "Jim Romenesko is a KING of the blogosphere. He’s the kind of person you should be looking to as an exemplar of best practices in the blogosphere. If your guidelines go against what Jim is doing, then there might well be something wrong with your guidelines. You do not throw him under the bus like this just to get out in front of a CJR piece. For shame."

The Awl: The Intolerable Evolution of Poynter’s "Romenesko+"

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Choire Sicha: "Romenesko's entire practice was about giving credit, in ways that virtually no other blog has been, a position that "Romenesko+" does not embrace as strongly. Poynter has worked systematically to erode a fairly noble, not particularly money-making thing as it works to boost "engagement" and whatever other (highly transitional!) web "best practices" are being touted at the heinous "online journalism" conferences that regularly go on. Charitable with links and naming bylines, and producing even more links when grubby reporters would come emailing with "but I posted that memo just now tooooo!", the intention underlying Romenesko's work has always been directing readers to reported material."

New York Times: Small-Town Gossip Moves to the Web, Anonymous and Vicious

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"Topix, a site lightly trafficked in cities, enjoys a dedicated and growing following across the Ozarks, Appalachia and much of the rural South, establishing an unexpected niche in communities of a few hundred or few thousand people — particularly in what Chris Tolles, Topix’s chief executive, calls “the feud states.” One of the most heavily trafficked forums, he noted, is Pikeville, Ky., once the staging ground for the Hatfield and McCoy rivalry. “We’re running the Gawker for every little town in America,” Mr. Tolles said."

My heart’s in Accra » Understanding #amina

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Ethan Zuckerman: "As I observed in analyzing media coverage of the 2009 Iran green movement protests, when countries close themselves to international media, there’s a tendency to report stories relying heavily on social media. Syria was the right place for a hoax in no small part because journalists were hungry for any information coming out, particularly information that could help readers and viewers connect to the story. ... "

The Electronic Intifada: New evidence about Amina, the "Gay Girl in Damascus" hoax

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"In a comment on that post, Paula Brooks, executive editor of LGR, gave two IP addresses which she said had been used by Amina to access LGR’s servers. The whois records for these IP addreses both have descriptions that indicate they are allocated to UoE or The University of Edinburgh. One of these IP addresses was the source of a number of edits to various articles on Wikipedia. These edits from 188.74.110.134 begin in October 2010. The edited pages all involve Middle East, Arab, Islamic and historical topics."

The Washington Post: ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ comes clean

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"The Post on Thursday contacted Scott Palter, a board game creator from Minnesota who corresponded regularly with Amina on a Yahoo message group called “The Crescentland.’’ In a telephone interview, Palter said that he asked her several years ago for a mailing address to send her Christmas cards and that she gave him an address in Stone Mountain, Ga. Local real estate records show that MacMaster has owned the house since 2000 and that he and his wife lived there until they left for Scotland in September 2010. ... Other links between Amina and MacMaster quickly surfaced."