Dakota to the Daily News

Dakota Smith, the editor at Curbed LA, has taken a job as general assignment reporter at the Los Angeles Daily News. Here's the announcement (via LA Observed).

Blogs about newspaper companies

Nieman Journalism Lab lauds Jim Hopkins at Gannett Blog for keeping a watchful eye on what is the largest newspaper chain in the United States and for offering other Gannett observers a virtual water cooler to gather 'round.

From the write-up (which notes he took a sanity break for several months last year):

And so, on Dec. 9, Hopkins resumed publication. Mindful of his yearning for a return to traditional journalism, this time he stuck to straight news, without the contentious tone of its earlier period. By setting a different tone on the news side, he felt that he could “dial down the volume of the anger” in the comments, and he has largely succeeded in this goal.

He has more actively monitored the comments, entering the threads himself to keep it focused, correct misinformation and prevent flame wars. “When people try to pick a fight, I don’t engage them. it’s tempting sometimes, but I think once, twice, and three times.” His personal life stays out of the blog these days. (You can find him on Facebook for that angle.)

-snip-

An innovation on Gannett Blog, inspired by the fact that comments were getting more pageviews than anything else on the blog, is the open-ended “realtime comments” post that’s always at the top of the page. It simply says, “Can’t find the right spot for your comment? Post it here, in this open forum.” Hopkins refreshes that post once a week; it often garners more than 100 comments — far more than his typical posts do.

 The report has links to other blog watchdogs, including Lee Watch, the anti-McClatchy McClatchy Watch and guild-run MediaNews Monitor. Don't forget LA Observed, which isn't a watchdog blog per se, but keeps a watchful eye on the Los Angeles Times and its parent, Tribune Co.

Credit when credit is due

Kevin Roderick at LA Observed complains that his old employer, the Los Angeles Times, has repeatedly failed to credit him for stories and tips taken from his blog.

FiveThirtyEight hearts the NYT

Nate Silver's successful and indispensable FiveThirtyEight blog has bred with the New York Times. Their offspring is here.

Going rogue at the LA Times

Alex Pareene at Salon is the latest to criticize the Los Angeles Times for not labeling its "Top of the Ticket" blog, written by Andrew Malcolm and Jimmy Orr, as reliably conservative, and he ripped the paper for failing to identify Orr as a former flack for President George W. Bush. (Malcolm, as both Pareene and the Times notes, once served as First Lady Laura Bush's press secretary.)

Here's Pareene:

So. A former professional Republican flack is writing for the L.A. Times newsblog without the paper identifying him as such. Or even just saying it's a "conservative blog." ... In fact, nearly everything Malcolm and Orr write is critical of the Obama administration, disdainful of Democrats, and supportive of Republicans. ...

If the Times wants a conservative blog, they can go ahead and launch a conservative blog. The point is to actually identify it as such. Right now the Times seems to be catering their online product specifically for Drudge and the right-wing blogosphere while pretending it's still objective in the traditional old newspaper sense of the word.

I can only assume Pareene, whose story is dated June 28, searched the Times site for relevant information about Orr and came up empty. As of today, the paper does include a bio for Orr that says he was "a spokesman for President George W. Bush and directed the e-communications strategy as the White House Internet Director." The bio is dated June 22, 2010, which is six days before Pareene's story ran - although Orr has written for the blog since at least April.

Prior to Orr, TOTT contributors included Johanna Neuman and Don Frederick, neither of whom were shills for conservative talking points.

A few weeks ago, Eric Boehlert at Media Matters took a stab or two at the blog and Malcolm's "sneering" political wit (here's Patterico hating on Boehlert, if you crave some balance), and LA Observed blogger Kevin Roderick, a former Timesman, had a few words to say about the blog becoming a Republican mouthpiece:

Malcolm has developed a whole second life as a conservative media pundit off his anti-Obama platform at the L.A. Times. It's easy to see what Malcolm gets out of it — he used to be pretty anonymous even within the paper — and the paper's website gets some national Republican eyeballs it wouldn't otherwise. But if you're the Times suits, why not double your pleasure with smart voices whose loyalty is to Times readers over ideological water carrying? If you're gonna go down the cheap hits route with shtick that wouldn't make the LAT's Op-Ed page, at least play the rest of the spectrum. The LAT may soon have to compete at home with the Wall Street Journal and New York Times — and they want to make a stand by boasting they're only interested in engaging the reddest of Republicans?

Malcolm, in a recent interview with his own paper, explains the recipe of his success:

I discovered the freshness of almost live exchanges with the readers. Using in-jokes. Code words for regulars. Past references to favorite phrases. Throwing in little comments. We turned the old-fashioned, robotic inverted pyramid newspaper writing into more of a conversation with friends at a sidewalk cafe. And readers responded by 100s of thousands. So just like back in sixth grade Show & Tell, when the class laughed, I did more of it. Did I mention, I have never had more fun?

Silver and Gray

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog became essential reading during the 2008 presidential campaign and won him a couple snazzy book contracts. Now, the New York Times has decided to host the blog on its site and make Silver a regular contributor at the Sunday magazine. NYT

Capitol Weekly, LA Times team up

Sacramento political coverage is increasingly dependent on blogs to push stories, everything from the Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert to Rough & Tumble. With that in mind, the Los Angeles Times has joined forces with the Sacramento-based Capitol Weekly to produce a blog about California politics in the run-up to the November elections.

The blog is called, coincidentally enough, "California Politics," and the contents can be found here or here. The primary writer for the blog is Capitol Weekly editor Anthony York, but other reporters are contributing, including Shane Goldmacher, who was a driving force behind the success of the Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert before he got hired away by the Times.

E&P lives in exile

Former reporters and editors of the shuttered Editor & Publisher have taken up residence at the E&P In Exile blog, which launched on New Year's Eve.

A world wide web of opportunities

Here's a pitch I got (and ignored), offering me a little revenue stream for my blog:

Hello,

I'm Joy from SeoBlogReviews.com.

I would like to know if by any chance you would be interested in getting paid to publish reviews of products and websites on your blog http://reporter-g.blogspot.com/.

If you are interested please let us know the amount of money you want in order to publish a review by clicking the following link:

http://blog.seoblogreviews.com/default/index/4d5674896a98a4ecb08603034256ee04

As soon as you do that we'll start sending you paid review proposals from our customers.

Thanks,

The SeoBlogReviews.com Team

The Interntubes are fragile

According to a Facebook executive, a fierce denial-of-service attack aimed at a single Georgian blogger yesterday was what brought down Twitter and disrupted service on Facebook, LiveJournal, Blogger and YouTube.

CNET News has the story:

The blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News. ...

Political conflicts between Russia and its former republic spilled online last year with DoS attacks and Web site defacements going in both directions.

Are these sites really this vulnerable? Do the Russians (clearly implicated here) have that much technical kung fu? Or is there more to the story than an attack on a Georgian blogger?

*Also, one year ago today Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, marking the start of a 5-day war.

Feds want to look under journalism's hood

The new chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Jon Leibowitz, hinted to The Wrap that he might favor easing anti-trust laws for big media companies, but not until he takes a detailed look at all that ails the traditional news industry.

From the Wrap:

“We are strong believers in the antitrust laws and in opposing exemptions from the antitrust laws,” Leibowitz told TheWrap, “but when you think about other values, and you think about the First Amendment, this might be one of those rare industries where you must think about ways to ensure the vibrancy of news.” ...

He said, however, that the FTC examination will be “much, much broader” than simply whether an antitrust exemption is needed. The agency will look into other reasons for the current problems.

“We are going to have economists and journalists and bloggers and people from different parts of the news media, and we are going to think through [what is occurring] and what the future will look like and whether that future -- which might be a handful of newspapers and [TV] networks that don’t have nearly as much reach as they once did and 5 million bloggers -- is a good thing for American democracy,” he said.

I'm sure they'll get to the bottom of it.

(via Romenesko)

Is San Diego California's online news incubator?

The Los Angeles area is peppered with individual and group blogs, but San Diego seems to have an edge in start-up online publications. PaidContent reports that the online news site San Diego News Network is making fine progress in its fund-raising efforts, having raised $707,000 toward its $2 million goal. The company has 16 full-time staff, 23 freelancers and 12 bloggers. In addition to the the downsized San Diego Union-Tribune, SDNN will compete with one of the best-known startups, Voice of San Diego.

Klein gets post at Post

Irvine native, UCLA grad and "liberal darling" Ezra Klein is moving his blog from American Prospect, where's he's listed as associate editor, to the Washington Post.

Reporting on blogs' reporting

Just how much of the content on the top blog sites constitutes original reporting? Not much at all, according to a spot survey done by Simon Owens at Bloggasm.

TechCrunch tops the list at 37 percent; a few of the blogs, including Daily Kos, tie for bottom with zero percent. Huffington Post checks in at 18 percent.

Of course, no one said blogs need to provide original reporting, but the survey should give pause to those who think Huffington Post and the like will pick up where shuttered and shrunken newspapers leave off.

Also, some might dispute Owens' definition of original reporting, but it would have to be stretched pretty far to improve the numbers much.

Other Tribune Co.-related blogs

In case you wondered what unhappy workers at the Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel had to say about the latest cutbacks:

tribunetwostep.blogspot.com

newsofthesun.blogspot.com

amazingshrinkingsentinel.blogspot.com

tribuneemployeetalk.blogspot.com

To blog, or not to blog...

Simon Owens at Bloggasm surveyed newspapers across the country on whether their reporters should be allowed to blog on their personal time:

Of the 250 surveyed, 39 responded. Twenty-two — 56% — said they wouldn’t mind if writers blogged on non-beat issues without obtaining permission. The remaining 17 — 44% — either required disclosure of the blog, issued caveats over what subjects couldn’t be covered, or had outright bans on having personal blogs at all.

Surprisingly, most of the papers that responded to the survey had no written policy on blogs, Owens notes.

One of the more thoughtful survey responses came from Bill Doak, editor of the East Hartford Gazette:

“Blogs are really a Pandora’s Box for reporters,” he wrote. “On the one hand you have a reporter who, like anyone else, wants to be free to run home and say whatever he or she wants to say to friends, family, other reporters or on a blog. But the reporter risks his or her credibility and objectivity in so doing. Of course there is a place at every newspaper for those with opinions. But a reporter also squanders their objectivity by blogging, and that blog might also jeopardize the objectivity of the newspaper. So, to a degree the blogging reporter risks much more than he or she gains, not the least of which includes employment.”

I'd add that these same risks apply to blogs published by newspapers. Clearly this is a time for experimentation and, like it or not, blogs are becoming a common feature in many newsrooms. But most papers aren't large enough to hire a separate Web staff, so questions of whether reporters should share their opinions, write commentary, or divulge personal matters are landing right on the city desk.

Slow blogging in LANG-land (updated below)*

Having posted about the server troubles plaguing Singleton's SoCal newspaper blogs, I quickly clicked on a link for the Daily News' Inside the Dodgers blog promising an "Update on why you can't comment," only to be told by the Internets that the server could not be found.

I went to the paper's general blog page and got a little more info from a teaser for the post: It has now been almost two weeks since I was warned in advance about this possible glitch, and I apologize profusely to all of you. I'm still being told this is allegedly going to be fixed in the very near future, so I appreciate your continued patience, but I also understand that patience isn't infinite. This is a great blog ...

But what comes next?

Before I sound the alarm of paranoia, the other blogs at the DN seem to be working fine, and Frank Girardot, who mans the Crime Scene blog at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, tells me the molasses-slow process of posting to the Web has recently sped up.

The glitches are due to a stalled changeover in Web hosts. Apparently the move didn't happen as quickly as planned and so the blogs were left on the servers of Indigio, the company that was being abandoned. I'm told the company wasn't thrilled with the arrangement.

*Looks like the link to Inside the Dodgers got fixed. Click here.

Cutting words to create consumers

Lee Siegel laments the rise of anonymous thugs and the sharp sword of gossip on the Internet in a new book.

He also has something to say about the Internet and civic empowerment: You have a situation now where the audience is so exalted and catered to that at the end of a Broadway play you will have the actors applauding for the audience, and the audience will take a bow. That's the power of the Internet, where consumers are seen to have such powers that they must be heeded. What this masks is a crude commercial pitch. Getting people to participate is just a way of getting people to consume.

Silver-colored jumpsuits, jet packs and ubiquitous blogs

I get that the Internet has wrought, and will continue to wrought, changes in our lives that are substantial and meaningful. This includes the lives of journalists.

But I'm tired of writers who characterize the habits of anyone who doesn't want to embrace the latest pop trend as old fashioned or tired.

Funnily enough, most of the people I see saying this are usually graying men (Jeff Jarvis, Steve Outing) who seem to feel they only have a short time left to embrace the future.

So little time, in fact, that they can't waste it understanding history.

For some reason, it makes me wish Philip K. Dick were still alive and writing.