Tuesday, June 21, 2005

...a couple of times since 2000

A brief sentence in an op-ed by Douglas Turner in the Buffalo News titled "Clinton's distrust of media runs deep" reveals another disparity in the media, though I don't think the author realized anyone would use this piece to make this point:
Clinton has met with the New York press corps only a couple of times since 2000. By contrast with the Moynihan regimen, where the reporters had a share in the agenda, Clinton totally controls it.

One technique is the "conference call" open to Washington reporters, and radio and television stations across the state. They are very brief, focused on an issue of her choosing. Sometimes she declines to take questions on any other topic, or closes off the session with a cheerful, "Gotta go."
Wait a second. Where have I heard this before about Hillary avoiding direct confrontation with the media? Oh yeah, never! That template has already been applied to Bush (the idiot)! But Hillary is the smartest woman in America -- what's her excuse?

Nothing bad happened until /. happened...

This is a followup to mypost from a week ago about the LATimes setting up "wikitorials" in which anyone could participate in the creation of an editorial. Now the NYTimes has a story that covers the demise of the wikitorial:
A Los Angeles Times experiment in opinion journalism lasted just two days before the paper was forced to shut it down Sunday morning after some readers repeatedly posted obscene photos. [more...]
The LATimes simply has this notice in place of the wikitorial:
Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material.

Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit.
The NYTimes story quotes an LATimes editor who says that "Nothing bad happened really until after midnight on Saturday," which was shortly after a Slashdot story highlighted the wikitorial. The LATimes editor calls the /. crowd "malicious" and pretty much blames them for forcing the LATimes to remove the feature.

A /. story today covers the sordid disaster -- /. user RayDude commented "It would have happened sooner or later, they should thank us for finding the bugs right away." (His post was quickly modded "Funny.")

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine picked up on the spin that the rest of the old media will now use:
"The New York Times and other media outlets have covered the collapse of its wikitorial project and I've heard more than one old-media person say, well, I see LA tried wikis and it's dangerous.

But no. This is like hearing Kathie Lee Gifford try to rap and then, upon hearing the results, declaring hip hop dead."
The concept of the wiki is sound -- Wikipedia is a great resource that opened up not only its editing functions to ordinary users, but also the moderating functions. To quote Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice: "Once again: the CONCEPT was sound; the execution needs some mechanism to weed out the dorks." That's the secret: if you let the mob in to write content, you've also got to unlease an army of moderators, and the tiny staff that the LATimes devoted to this was nowhere near large enough to handle the task of watching over their experiment. Where do you get that army? The answer is the same: open-source it.