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Showing posts from October, 2006

I Was Never Here ...

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About 10 years ago it was considered heresy at Reuters to propose building a web site with real-time news and rich multimedia content. So the North American Editor secretly conspired to build one even though he had been specifically told to do no such thing. Of course, our prescient leader knew a thing or two about the company and guessed -- correctly, as it turned out -- that it was just a matter of time before his superiors told him that what they had meant was build a web site with real-time news and rich multimedia content . So it is with some amusement that I read this week -- 155 years later in Internet time -- that Reuters has "opened" a news bureau in the virtual world, Second Life . Reuters is getting scads of press attention -- all positive, for a pleasant change -- and the company seems to have made genuine inroads at establishing the street cred which had not so much eluded it as they seemed to intentionally evade. Now, with all the positive reinforcement, c

Ask Osama

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"What I say to the American people when I am out there is, all you got to do is listen to what Osama bin Laden says." -- President Bush , 10/11/06 Taking his acclaimed truth-telling to the next level, Osama is now here to help you understand life, love and relationships. Letters of no more than 250 words are welcomed – no calls please! Due to the heavy volume of material received, personal replies are not possible. Dear Osama, I'm a little reluctant to use email again, but my sponsor says getting used to doing the little everyday things again is a big part of the rehabilitation process – so (deep breath) here goes! I recently decided to quit my job and left Washington on the same day after someone special – someone to whom I thought I was special -- "humiliated" me in public. I feel very "betrayed" but mostly I am "hurt" because "we" meant more to "me" than to "this person." I guess I was "mature one" i

Don't Ask, Don't Tell?

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Joe Maguire, an editor at Reuters, has lost his job. That fact may be the only one not in dispute; while neither Reuters nor Maguire say he was dismissed, the proximate cause was the imminent publication of his book, Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter . Reuters has an iron-clad editorial policy requiring freedom from bias but it does allow its employees write books. As the New York Times reports , Maguire got "conditional approval" for his and it quotes him as saying: "I thought I had met the conditions, and proceeded accordingly. As a result, I no longer work there.” Freedom from bias in one's reporting is not a debatable point at Reuters, and it shouldn't be anywhere journalism is done. Still, some critics of MSM see it everywhere and some of those do so, I believe, to justify taking sides in their own "reporting." When I was a reporter at Reuters neutrality was just one of those things that permeated the air. Tiny transgressions of the &q

Mark Cuban, ONA Conference Keynote

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Headline: YouTube is toast (when copyright holders decide to enforce their rights) Subhead: Google would be crazy to buy YouTube (or moronic , as Cuban subsquently blogs) Best line of questioning: Does it pass the smell test to: do private research into a tradeable company, take a position in that company based on your private research that will likely result in a gain if the facts were disclosed, disclose the information and simultaneously, disclose that you have taken a position for the purpose of making a gain, thus creating, end to end, the conditions to benefit financially from the research you commissioned? Best question after the event: "Wasn't that a keynote Cuban was supposed to deliver?"

A "4" on the Foley Scale

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photo by jsmjr Former U.S Rep. Mark Foley has now hit for the cycle: I'm am alcoholic I'm gay I was abused as a teen, By a clergyman None of these are excuses, of course, his lawyer says , for his client's having made a number of provocative overtures in emails and instant messages to a number of teen pages. Whatever. What needs to happen is this: Nobody turns this into a gay-related scandal. This is sexual abuse of the most garden variety type: a man in a position of power trying to seduce subordinates. Nobody proposes legislation to restrict email or instant messaging. Nobody says "molested over the Internet" anymore. Democratic Rep. Patty Wetterling has already done so in an election ad .

Free Speech is Good, Right?

No, that is not me making a comment about Brian Rohrbough's comments. That is what the embedded YouTube player does all by itself. Isn't it ironic ... T he new CBS Evening News feature Free Speech can I suppose be seen as an honest attempt to bring an aspect of community to what is an ivory tower enterprise -- nobody is calling it guest video blogging yet. I am not going to hold my breath -- but I think it is one of those things that will be difficult to declare a success, and there are two reasons they probably shouldn't even try. One is the admittedly losing argument that network TV news programs have precious little time anyway and anything not devoted to news is wrong. It may be wrong but there is nothing wrong with success, per se, and the new CBS Evening News is successful, with an audience that the networks aspire to have , even though its total numbers have declined since Katie Couric took over. If, to continue to be a viable delivery mechanism that draws a