Take That, Mr. Newsman!
Answering Back To the News Media, Using the Internet
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
2 January 2006
The New York Times

"Subjects of newspaper articles and news broadcasts now fight back with the same methods reporters use to generate articles and broadcasts -- taping interviews, gathering e-mail exchanges, taking notes on phone conversations -- and publish them on their own Web sites.
This new weapon in the media wars is shifting the center of gravity in the way that news is gathered and presented, and it carries implications for the future of journalism".

example:

''Nightline'' broadcast a segment in August about intelligent design that the Discovery Institute, a conservative clearinghouse for proponents of intelligent design, did not like very much. The next day, the institute published on its Web site the entire transcript of the nearly hourlong interview that ''Nightline'' had conducted a few days earlier with one of the institute's leaders. It urged readers to examine the unedited interview because, it said, the transcript would reveal ''the predictable tone of some of the questions'' by the staff of ''Nightline.''

"All these developments have forced journalists to respond in a variety of ways, including becoming more open about their methods and techniques and perhaps more conscious of how they filter information. "

Posting primary source material is becoming part of public relations strategies for interest groups, businesses and government. The Pentagon and State Department now post transcripts of interviews with top officials on their Web sites or they e-mail them to reporters, as does Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

While the publication of raw material is often aimed at putting the journalist in a bad light, it can sometimes boomerang on the source. The Pentagon got into a dispute with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post in 2004 over quotations in his book ''Plan of Attack'' that were attributed to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld about the invasion of Iraq. The quotations had not appeared in the Pentagon's official transcript of Mr. Woodward's interview with Mr. Rumsfeld. But they appeared in full in Mr. Woodward's transcript, and the Pentagon had to admit that it had deleted those portions from its transcript.

Sometimes the subjects of news articles even post such material on the Web in advance of an article or broadcast, scooping the reporter and getting their version out first. Earlier this year, Edward Nawotka, a book critic based in Austin, Tex., described in The Texas Observer an interview he had conducted via e-mail with Ann Coulter, the conservative writer, a couple of years ago. She sent him a 2,000-word response by e-mail, which he then asked her to trim so he could include it in a daily e-mail newsletter -- only to discover that she had already posted her entire response on her Web site.

In 2001 David D. Kirkpatrick, who then covered the publishing industry for The New York Times, wrote an article about Dave Eggers, author of ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.'' Mr. Eggers posted a 10,000-word response on his Web site complaining about the tone of the piece, and included their e-mail exchanges, which Mr. Kirkpatrick had asked be kept private.

In another case involving The Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin, a business reporter, interviewed Mark Cuban, the technology billionaire, via e-mail last summer for a column about Mr. Cuban's investment in an Internet company. Mr. Cuban was unhappy with the column and posted their e-mail exchanges, touching off an extensive discussion on the Internet about, among other things, the value of seeing a reporter's raw material.

Blogs make the subjects of the news easiely to publish their sides of story:

Blog posts can be linked and replicated instantly across the Web, creating a snowball effect that often breaks through to the mainstream media. Moreover, blogs have a longer shelf life than most traditional news media articles. A newspaper reporter's original article is likely to disappear from the free Web site after a few days and become inaccessible unless purchased from the newspaper's archives, while the blogger's version of events remains available forever.

In corporate world:

Posting of original material may be somewhat less common in the corporate world than among individuals representing themselves. Steven Rubenstein, president of Rubenstein Communications, the New York public relations firm, said that posting raw material was ''another tool in the tool chest'' and that if a corporate client had been damaged, ''you'll certainly want to get something out that's Google-able.''
But, he said, a corporation must also consider whether publishing such material would alienate an influential beat reporter as well as an entire news outlet and possibly reporters for other outlets. ''You have to balance the incident over the long-term relationship,'' he said. ''But you can get your side out in a benign way. It doesn't have to be antagonistic.''

Impact on Journalism:

Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, said reporting on reporters had created a kind of ''Wild West atmosphere'' in cyberspace.
With reporters conducting interviews more frequently by e-mail, he said, ''You have to start thinking a couple of moves ahead because you're leaving a paper trail. And the truth squad mentality of some bloggers means you are apt to have your own questions thrown back at you.''

Some news outlets are posting transcripts of their interviews with newsmakers, and some reporters are posting their own material. Stephen Baker, a senior writer at BusinessWeek, has posted not only transcripts from his interviews but also his own notes on his Web site, saying he likes to involve his readers in the journalistic process.

While some say they are learning to accept the new interactivity, they also worry that the view of many bloggers -- that reporters should post their raw material because they are filtering it through their own biases -- ignores the value of traditional journalistic functions, like casting a wide net for information, coaxing it out of reluctant sources, condensing it and presenting it in an orderly way.

Jamie McIntyre, CNN's senior correspondent at the Pentagon, said the traditional skills of sifting through information and presenting it in context were especially vital now because there were so many other sources of information.

''With the Internet, with blogs, with text messages, with soldiers writing their own accounts from the front lines, so many people are trying to shape things into their own reality,'' he said. ''I don't worry so much anymore about finding out every little detail five minutes before someone else. It's more important that we take that information and tell you what it means.''

Rebecca MacKinnon (a former CNN correspondent who is now a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where she studies the effect of blogging on journalism. ) predicted that traditional journalism and the art of distilling information would not vanish. ''Most people don't have hours and hours every day to read the Web, and they want someone who can quickly and succinctly tell you what you need to know,'' she said. ''But it's great the raw materials can be made available to those who have the time.''

myspace fights back

My thought is Murdoch has learn a thing or two from China where he's engaged and invested for more than 20 years.


Lesson for Murdoch: Keep the Bloggers Happy The New York Times
Business/Financial Desk; SECTC
By JULIE BOSMAN
2 January 2006
When Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought MySpace, the social-networking Web site, in July, some of its users gloomily predicted that the site would be altered to suit the company's corporate interests.
Proof for many of those people came earlier this month, when MySpace users began to notice that any references to YouTube, a video-sharing site and a competitor, were erased or blocked from appearing on My-Space. Some MySpace users also reported that when they tried to download videos from YouTube, a patch of white space appeared instead.
Ever-sensitive to corporate meddling, many MySpace users got angry. ''My friends and I are trying to make the blogging community aware of a stealth censorship campaign that is being conducted by MySpace,'' one MySpace user, Ellis Yu, wrote to the Blog Herald, a Web site about blogs. ''They are not admitting to it, and are trying to do this in secret.''
Matthew McCullough, a blogger from Montclair, N.J., wrote in a Dec. 22 blog post that ''if you even mention the word YouTube on your MySpace profile, it will be literally ripped out and only an empty white space will remain.''
The official blog maintained by YouTube offered another explanation the next day, saying the issue was ''a simple misunderstanding, and MySpace has re-enabled all YouTube embeds.'' A spokesman for the News Corporation did not return phone calls on Friday.
The incident underlines the peril corporations face as they buy blogs and networking sites like MySpace, which depend on the good will of their users. Mr. Murdoch paid $580 million for MySpace, a significant investment for a two-year-old Web site primarily populated by fickle teenagers and users in their 20's. Like other members of free community Web sites, MySpace users often react with indignation if they believe their content has been tampered with.
And they can always decide to leave for other networking sites. As one irate user put it in a message to MySpace members, ''visit Friendster and Hi5 if you're interested in social networking sites that don't censor content and allow your YouTube video embeds.''

pew research-gender difference in Internet usage

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/171/report_display.asp

You Wanna Take This Online?

You Wanna Take This Online?

Jeff Chu. Time. New York: Aug 8, 2005.Vol.166, Iss. 6; pg. 52,

"zsazWHAT DOES 13-YEAR-old Taylor Hern [hearts]? Lots of things: the actor Ewan McGregor, the color pink, the band My Chemical Romance, her boyfriend Alex. You would know all that if you visited her Xanga, a blog-home-page hybrid that is the modern teen's public and interactive equivalent of a diary. You could even leave a comment on her Xanga or send her an "eProp" if, say, you [hearts] Ewan McGregor too.
On April 18, Taylor, who is about to enter eighth grade at Lost Mountain Middle School in Kennesaw, Ga., got an instant message (IM) from her friend Sydney Meyer that said, "OMG [Oh, my God] OMG OMG go to your xanga." Someone using the screen name lmmsgirlsgot2hell had left Taylor a comment that read, "Go to my Xanga, bitch." Taylor did-and found a List of Hos. Her name was on it. The list was hurtful, but Taylor says she wasn't as bothered as other girls. "A bunch of the cheerleading chicks spazzed," she says. "Me and all my friends thought it was stupid. Who would actually make time in their schedule to do something like that?"
Turns out, many of her peers would. Technology has transformed the lives of teens, including the ways they pick on one another. If parents and teachers think it's hard to control mean girls and bullying boys in school, they haven't reckoned with cyberspace. Cyberbullying can mean anything from posting pejorative items like the List of Hos to spreading rumors by e-mail to harassing by instant message. It was experienced in the preceding two months by 18% of 3,700 middle schoolers surveyed by researchers at Clemson University. Their study is scheduled to be presented at this month's American Psychological Association meeting. The phenomenon peaks at about age 13; 21% of eighth-graders surveyed reported being cyberbullied recently. And incidents of online bullying are like roaches: for every one that's reported, many more go unrecorded. "Our statistics are conservative," says Clemson psychologist Robin Kowalski. "Part of the problem is kids not recognizing that what's happening is a form of bullying."
Online bullying follows a gender pattern that's the opposite of what happens off-line, the Clemson study found. On playgrounds and in school hallways, boys are the primary perpetrators and victims; online, girls rule. Nearly a third of the eighth-grade girls surveyed reported being bullied online in the previous two months, compared with 10% of boys; 17% of the girls said they had bullied online, but only 10% of the boys said they had. Such stats get an eye roll from teens. "Girls make up stuff and sooooooo much drama," Taylor said (by IM, of course). "Drama queens."
On the Internet, you can wear any mask you like-and that can be harrowing for the victim of a cyberbully. A few weeks after the List of Hos was posted, Taylor's classmate Courtney Katasak got an IM from someone using the screen name ToastIsYummy. Courtney thought it might be a friend with a new screen name, so she asked, WHO IS THIS? ToastIsYummy responded with teasing lines and a link to a porn site. "Then they kept sending me these inappropriate messages," she says. "I blocked the screen name so they couldn't talk to me, but I didn't know who this person was or what they were trying to do. It freaked me out."
"Anonymity emboldens the person doing it-and it increases the fear factor for the victim," says Kowalski. Parry Aftab, founder of an online nonprofit called WiredSafety.org, says teens "are exploring who they are-and they role-play by being mean, horrible and hateful in ways they would never be offline." Aftab recalls meeting a New Jersey 13-year-old with a preppie-perfect appearance-khakis, button-down shirt, penny loafers complete with pennies-and a creepy hobby of making online death threats against strangers. He would gather information from chat rooms or people's websites, then threaten them as if he knew them. Says Aftab: "He said to me, 'I would never do anything in real life. I'm a good kid. But I can do it online because it doesn't matter.'"
Actually, it does. When a cyberbully lashes out, it can be a sign of emotional or psychological problems. And cyberbullying is viral. The Clemson study found that kids who are victimized "seem to be heavily involved in bullying others," says psychologist Sue Limber. In the real world, physical intimidation may keep those who are bullied from retaliating, but that's not a problem online. "Cyberbullying can also lead to other forms of victimization," Limber says. If someone insults a classmate on a Xanga, the effects could include ostracization at school. "Passing notes or writing on lockers was nothing," says Limber. "This takes public to a whole other level."
It can be especially embarrassing since cyberbullying often has sexual overtones. "It's raging hormones, and 13 is the heart of it," says Aftab. "We tell adults they can't operate heavy machinery under the influence. These kids are under the influence of hormones 24/7".
A parent's instinctive response may be to apply an electronic tourniquet, cutting off a teen's access. But experts agree that severing online links is not the solution. "The Internet is no longer just an advantage. A child is at a disadvantage not having it," says Brittany Bacon, an FBI-trained WiredSafety.org volunteer. She says teens need to learn boundaries and manners in cyberspace just as they must in other venues of society.
It's also the parents' responsibility to be aware of a child's life online. "Kids know so much about the computer that some parents just throw up their hands," says Patti Agatston, a counselor with Cobb County Schools' prevention-intervention program in Georgia. "Don't do that," she says. Instead, parents should keep their eyes open. "Parents are totally clueless that some of this even exists," Aftab says.
Taylor Hern's mother Caryn counts herself in that number. "I am absolutely an idiot when it comes to that kind of stuff," she says. But Taylor's cyberbullying experience convinced Hern that she had to get Netsavvy. She has signed up for lessons from an expert: her son David, who is 19. "You read about what kids do to other kids, but you don't think it's going to happen to yours," she says. "Who knows what happens online after I go to bed at 10? I need to find out."
[Sidebar]
What Parents Can Do About Cyberbullying
1. LEARN Be sure you know how to use the Internet before you let your children go online.
2. BE AWARE What do your children do online? Do they have a Xanga, visit chat rooms or use instant messaging?
3. TALK A good ongoing dialogue with your children will help them feel comfortable telling you if something bad happens online.
4. TEACH Instruct your children in good netiquette. What they wouldn't do off-line shouldn't be done online either.
5. TRUST Snooping and secretly reading their e-mail are obstacles to openness. A balance of safety and trust allows teens the Net's benefits while protecting them from most of its dangers.
[Sidebar]"

Attack of the Blogs; They destroy brands and wreck lives. Is there any way to fight back?
Daniel Lyons
Forbes 14 November 2005

"logs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It's not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can't even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM's Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims--even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat."

Survey: One in Five Teens Have Own Blogs

Survey: One in Five Teens Have Own Blogs
NYT. November 2, 2005

"CHICAGO (AP) -- Nearly three in five school-age teens with Internet access have created online content, including Web pages with artwork, photos and stories -- and about a fifth have their own blogs, which also allow friends and other readers to create feedback postings.
Those are some of the findings from a survey of 12- to 17-year-olds conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
The survey also found that older school-age girls with online access were most likely to keep a blog. About a quarter of girls, ages 15 to 17, did so, compared with 15 percent of boys in that age group.
Among adults, Pew says about 7 percent of Internet users have created their own blogs, or online diaries. And while 26 percent of adults say they read blogs, 38 percent of young people with online access said they do so.
Researchers note that the main reason teens are drawn to blogs is a wish to keep in touch with one another.
''Blogging for teens is about staying tuned into their friendship networks, not about politics or people getting in trouble at school, which are two of the main narratives that journalists have covered in recent months,'' says Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher at Pew who helped compile the report.
The findings, which have a margin of error of 3 percentage points, are based on a random telephone survey of about 1,100 young people and their parents, conducted Oct. 16 to Nov. 28, 2004."

MySpace Keeps Getting Bigger

Business Week
NOVEMBER 7, 2005

"MySpace Keeps Getting BiggerAny 16-year-old can tell you that logging on to MySpace.com is as vital to teen culture as showing your face at the right party. Now, with 34 million users, the social networking site is becoming a can't-miss for advertisers as well. During September, 1 out of 10 ads viewed on the Internet was seen on MySpace, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Only Yahoo! (YHOO ) and MSN (MSFT ) boast higher ad views. That reflects MySpace's rising visibility: Users have nearly quadrupled since January. Advertisers also are intrigued by the relatively low cost of a campaign -- $80,000 to $300,000 for four to six weeks -- to reach the fickle teen audience. Procter & Gamble (PG ), for instance, recently sponsored profiles for Hilary Duff and other pop stars. "It's an experiment for us," says a spokesperson for P&G's Secret Sparkle Body Spray.With backing from new owner News Corp., (NWS ) MySpace co-founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe are experimenting, too. They plan to launch a MySpace record label, film production company, and satellite-radio station. They are even considering a mobile service to go up against teen-targeted cell-phone plans from Sprint Nextel's (S ) Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile. "

Brand Blogs Capture the Attention of Some Companies

Brand Blogs Capture the Attention of Some Companies
NYT October 24, 2005

Faithful consumers have dedicated their blogs to their favorate brands:

thebarqsman.com - news about Barq's
hackingnetflix.com - about Netflix
firstinthirst.typepad.com -about sports drink Gatorade
starbucksgossip.typepad.com - about Starbucks


Blog can be part of important 'word of mouth', like the customer reviews on Amazon.com, which help customer make decisions about what to buy.

"And according to a survey released this spring by Yankelovich, a marketing firm based in Chapel Hill, N.C., a third of all consumers would prefer to receive product information from friends and specialists rather than from advertising."

"It's a 24/7 focus group that's transparent and out in the open," Said Steve Rubel"the opportunity here is for companies to find their brand ambassadors."

The New Crystal Ball: It's the Internet

The New Crystal Ball: It's the Internet
Aug 8, 2005.Vol.146, Iss. 6; pg. 14

"IF YOU WERE SELLING A product to Generation Ythe age group between 10 and 27, which has yet to come up with a melodious monikerwho would be your ideal spokesperson? At one point in marketing history, answering that question would have been a pricey process involving phone surveys, focus groups and hanging around schoolyards and student unions. Today there's a perfect shortcut: the Internet. Specifically, blogs and chat rooms, where the opinions, whims and heartthrobs of today's youth are freely aired. "We have the ability to listen to unsolicited opinions and comments," says Howard Kaushansky, CEO of Umbria Communications. "Listening to the stream of consciousness, we get an unbiased view of what people think." As a result, Umbria's team of Web surfers and analysts didn't have to make any phone calls or interrupt a single soccer game to come up with the guy you want selling your product to young males: Kobe Bryant.
That's only one of a million juicy fruits that are now hanging lower, courtesy of the Web. The instant availability of even the most intimate consumer preferences and turnoffs has initiated a new boom in market research, which can be done more cheaply and accurately than ever before.
Some of these pears and plums are so low-hanging that anyone with a laptop can pluck them. The giants of Internet commerce all offer, right on the surface, gobs of up-to-thesecond market information. Amazon.com gives sales ratings of even the most obscure products; eBay determines the market value of Picasso prints and baseball cards; Google search results tell you the Web popularity of anything. You can also do quick probes of the blogosphere with services like Technorati or Daypop. Sometimes the results aren't terribly surprising. For instance, a few weeks ago Shopping.com's Consumer Demand Index informed us of great interest in the new "Harry Potter" book. Really!
To make full use of the bounty of information, there are highly sophisticated services with sophisticated digital divining rods. Umbria, for instance, claims to have developed algorithms that can detect the age and gender of bloggers and chatters by analyzing speech patterns and subject matter. And IBM's WebFountain, a product of its West Coast research arm, does text analysis on billions of documents, from blogs to trade journals. "If you know where to look, it's easy to find things," says IBM's Dan Gruhl. "But we can look everywhere."
Drinking from its data fountain, IBM can anticipate the popularity of rock stars and monitor the way people are reacting to prescription drugs. Recently, the Web Fountain crew has been tracking blogs to predict which books would hit the online best-seller lists (it correctly predicted the U.S. success of the selfhelp book "What Not to Wear").
Will these techniques lead to better products, better customer service and fewer marketing faux pas? That's not so certain. One potential mistake might lie in assuming that blog popularity translates directly to sales. Umbria's research for Burger King unearthed plenty of self-appointed food critics who made vicious fun of Burger King's new product, the obesity-courting Angus. But despite a flurry of disparaging blog posts that spelled the name without a "g," the product was a success. While well-calibrated data mining will certainly tell you what people think about a given product, and even what they say they want to buy in the future, it still takes instinct, vision and the courage to ignore conventional wisdom to produce the category-busting innovations that become breakout products-and the obsessive subject of millions of blog items and chat comments that have yet to be written."

Blogging becomes a corporate job; Digital 'Handshake'

Wall street Journal
Sarah Needleman
Aug. 7 2005, B1

Businesses are hiring people to write blogs, people who 'can write in a conversational style about timely topics that would appeal to customers, clients and potential recruits' . Stonyfield Farm Inc. Recruited a freelance writer to four blogs including a blog about healthy foods in schools. The job entails researching, linking to new and providing personal insight. Microsoft has the staffing programs manager to write about recruiting, write about what it is like to work at the company and hiring trends. Dale & Thomas Popcorn, a gourmet popcorn company is seeking an online-marketing coordinator to create and maintain a company blog on the love of popcorn, as well as boost the company websites search-engine rankings. The position offers a salary between $40,000 to $55,000, and has received about 100 applications.

"Blogging as a job has emerged as companies of all stripes increasingly see the web as an important communications venue. Blogs allow firms to assume a natural tone rather than the public-relations speak typical of some static web pages, and readers are often invited to post comments. ... Currently only 4% of major U.S. corporations have blogs available to the public, according to a recent survey by eMarketer, a New York research company."

Ads for blogging jobs are popping up on online job boards in recent months.

Looking for a blog in a haystack

BusinessWeek
July 25, p.38

Time is rife for blog search engine. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN may soon plunge into blog search. A protype Yahoo blog search page was briefly spotted before the company pulled it back.

Most of blog search engines today are slow. Bloggers, who count on Technorati, Feedster and Blogdigger to track down who's writing about them and their blogs, are pressing for faster search. Blending blog into web is challenging since it requires adding time into traditional search, which is based on page ranking.

'The challenge is to marry this orderly web with the blogosphere's never-ending flood of perishable posts. Searching the blogs for key words shouldn't be so hard. The challenge, though, is figuring out which posts should rank atop the results. Should it simply be the most recent? Or from a popular blogger? Or perhaps a blogger already bookmarked by the user, or even by those on the user's buddy list?"

"Search engines may initially wall off blogs from the rest of the web. But the more ambitious goal is to provide readers- and advisers-with just the right blend. This work will push the search wizards to spin their most dazzling algorithms yet. But those who pull it off stand to become powerhouses in the blog world, dispenser of everyday's buzz"

Let them Eat cake-and blog about it

France's passion for web logs is beginning to alter the political and business climate
BusinessWeek, July 11, 2005, P. 48

4.9% of French population have their own blogs, the highest in Europe.

"France has a long tradition of public protest, from the 1789 revolution to the carricades of 1968 to the frequent strikes that snarl public services:'French people love to tell everyone exactly what's on their minds'"

Ublog.com, a french blog host was aquired by Six Apart. THe biggest promoter of French blogging is Skyrock, a radio station that launched a free blog-hosting service since 2002.

"...blogging clearly played a role in France's May 29 vote against the European Constitution. An anti-constitution site run by Marseille schoolteacher Etienne Chouard drew 700,000-plus hits. "During this campaign there was a loss of credibility in the traditional media, and more and more people turned toward alternative sources," says Nicolas Vanbremeersch, who runs a blog featuring commentary on both sides of the issue.Corporate France is also giving blogging a whirl. "

"One of the country's best-known blogs is that of Michel-Edouard Leclerc, the head of E. Leclerc, a leading French retailer. Recent postings range from a lampoon of the government's anti-inflation policies to an emotional response to the release of a French journalist from captivity in Iraq. Leclerc, who started the blog early this year as an extension of a personal diary he has kept for 30 years, has this advice for other CEOs: "Don't be afraid of it. It's a way to concentrate your thoughts, test your ideas, accept criticism."