Two articles on Sunday New York Times

New York TImes has two articles on Sunday that explore the problem of blogs as new media. on Week in Review section, Adam Cohen discussed the ethics policies that should be imposed on political blogs in 'The Latest Rumbling in the Blogosphere: Questions About Ethics'. Cohen notes that bloggers will be hold accountable someday for what they publish on line. While bloggers often criticize MSM for violating journalistic ethics, they seldom apply the same rule to themselves:

"The thing about influence is that, as bloggers well know, it is only a matter of time before people start trying to hold you accountable. Bloggers are so used to thinking of themselves as outsiders, and watchdogs of the LSM (that's Lame Stream Media), that many have given little thought to what ethical rules should apply in their online world. Some insist that they do not need journalistic ethics because they are not journalists, but rather activists, or humorists, or something else entirely. But more bloggers, and blog readers, are starting to ask whether at least the most prominent blogs with the highest traffic shouldn't hold themselves to the same high standards to which they hold other media.
Every mainstream news organization has its own sets of ethics rules, but all of them agree broadly on what constitutes ethical journalism. Information should be verified before it is printed, and people who are involved in a story should be given a chance to air their viewpoints, especially if they are under attack. Reporters should avoid conflicts of interest, even significant appearances of conflicts, and disclose any significant ones. Often, a conflict means being disqualified to cover a story or a subject. When errors are discovered or pointed out by internal or external sources, they must be corrected. And there should be a clear wall between editorial content and advertising.
Bloggers often invoke these journalistic standards in criticizing the MSM, and insist on harsh punishment when they are violated. The blogs that demanded Dan Rather's ouster accused him of old-school offenses: not sufficiently checking the facts about President Bush's National Guard service, refusing to admit and correct errors, and having undisclosed political views that shaded the journalism. Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive, resigned this year after a blogmob attacked him for a reported statement at the World Economic Forum at Davos that the military had aimed at journalists in Iraq and killed 12 of them. Their complaint was even more basic than in Mr. Rather's case: they were upset that Mr. Jordan said something they believed to be untrue."

Cohen notes that reformers should 'held themselves to higher standards thatn the institutions they attacked':

"Many bloggers who criticize the MSM's ethics, however, are in the anomalous position of holding themselves to lower standards, or no standards at all. That may well change. Ana Marie Cox, who edits Wonkette, notes that blogs are still "a very young medium," and that "things have yet to be worked out." Before long, leading blogs could have ethics guidelines and prominently posted corrections policies."

Some blogs have begun the self-regulation; an example is http://cyberjournalist.net/

The second article is 'A blog revolution? Get a grip' (May 8, 2005, BU1) on Business section. Discussing the business model of Gawker Media, a network of teens of blog, including gawker, fleshbot and Wonkette, Zeller, the author implies that blogging is just adopting the traditional media model and publishing on line. With the strategy of grouping of blogs, like what Gawkers do, Advertisers are treating them more seriouly.

" "There are too many people looking at blogs as being some magic bullet for every company's marketing problem, and they're not," he (Denton, Founder of Gawker) added. "It's Internet media. It's just the latest iteration of Internet media." "

'Tags' Ease Sifting of Digital Data

New York Times
May 2, 2005, Technology

This is mainly about 'Tagging' tech, starting with digital photos, but it's been picked up by blogs for a while:

"Organizers of a blogging conference in Paris last week encouraged participants to tag their entries ''lesblogs.'' Italian blogger Luca Lizzeri did just that and got hundreds of additional visitors.
Sites like Technorati not only let you search its own indexes, but also pull items from other sites. So a search for ''tsunami'' brings together Flickr photos and del.icio.us links besides blog entries -- creating a mini-magazine of sorts on the fly.
Unlike hierarchical classification systems, taggers create categories spontaneously. There are no rules to craft on what categories to include and what falls under each.
Hierarchies ''are more accurate, but they move less quickly,'' said David Galbraith, founder of a tag-based wish list called Wists. ''It takes a long time for people to sit down and agree on them.''
Matthew Haughey, founder of the community blog MetaFilter, considered a taxonomy to organize archival posts but ''it's hard to make perfect categories and sub-subcategories.'' If you wanted to paint a fence, should you look under ''home and garden'' or ''household''?
So he went for tagging.
The blogging site LiveJournal plans to introduce tags in the next few months as an alternative to categories, and Rojo Networks Inc. launched a service last month for tagging news stories, so no longer are you limited to sorting items by publisher.
Of course, tagging has its drawbacks, and some Webophiles aren't quite convinced it will evolve into the Next Big Thing.
Consider classifications for a common pet.
''If one group decides we're going to call them `canine,' another `dog,' another `puppies,' ... when someone goes to search for what they call the dog, they are not going to pick up everybody's tagged instances,'' said Geneva Henry, executive director of the Digital Library Initiative at Rice University.
Engineers recognize the shortcomings and are working on better tools.
Search for ''automobiles'' of Flickr, and you're given ''cars,'' ''car'' and ''porsche'' as related options. Enough people tag photos both ''automobiles'' and ''cars'' that clustering software can tell they are related.
Another drawback lacks an easy solution, though. Once tagging takes off, marketers are bound to add irrelevant tags to hijack you to the latest Viagra ad.
Warns Danny Sullivan, editor of the online newsletter Search Engine Watch: ''The noise and deliberate manipulation will probably just bring the system into a crashing halt.'' "

Traditional media eagerly eying blogs to boost revenues, profile

from AFP via Yahoo! news

The booming of blogs seems a threat to the existence of tradional media:

"Media mogul Rupert Murdoch even warned the American Society of Newspaper Editors last month that the owners of traditional media cannot afford to be complacent.
Young people "want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle," Murdoch said.
"Where four out of every five Americans in 1964 read a paper every day, today, only half do. Among just younger readers, the numbers are even worse.
"So unless we awaken to these changes, and adapt quickly, we will as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans, or worse, many of us will disappear altogether."

Some stats from Perseus:
"According to the US web consultants Perseus, blogs are increasing at an incredible rate. In 1999, just 23 blogs were thought to exist.
Now there are more than 31 million, and the figure is set to reach 53 million by the end of the year."

What do MSM do to incorporate bloggosphere to the press:
"The Guardian newspaper in Britain turned a young Iraqi into an overnight success when it picked up his blog filed during the height of the 2003 war in Iraq.
Salam Pax's vision of the horrors of daily life was soon scoring 20,000 hits a day, and The Guardian eventually recruited him as a journalist.
As well as recruiting would-be reporters, media outlets are also giving free rein to their journalists to launch their own blogs.
"While some journalists have set up their own blog, others are publishing whole online magazines," said Six Apart, which organised a meeting of 300 bloggers from 22 countries in Paris last week. "

Whats' the benifits of including blogs to MSM:
"For deputy editor-in-chief, Benoit de Sagazan, their blogs had a double advantage. "They allowed up-to-the-minute reports, and also allowed the correspondents to tell lots of intimate details which would have been impossible to publish on paper due to the lack of space.
"The blog allows a more direct and spontaneous tone."

At Los Alamos, Blogging Their Discontent

New York Times
April 30, 2005

This is unusual. Los Alamos lab, the governmenet lab used to be classified for top secrecy, attracted public attention recently because of a scandal exposed on a group blog. The blog, contributed by a unknown number of anonymous Los Alamos employees, centers on the rumor of the labs' director's possible resignation due to his management flaws.

"Furious debate centers on Dr. Nanos, a retired vice admiral of the Navy who holds a doctorate in physics from Princeton and became the laboratory's director two years ago. Many bloggers criticize his decision to shut down most of the laboratory in July, when he cited "egregious" safety and security violations after two computer disks with secret information were reported missing and an intern working with a laser suffered an eye injury. The security alarm turned out to be a clerical error - the disks, in fact, never existed. Still, Dr. Nanos kept many laboratory areas closed for nearly seven months, until late January. In that time, laboratory personnel worked on improving safety and security."

"Since most messages are anonymous, there is no way to know how many laboratory employees contribute to the blog. Even so, from the sheer volume, detail and differing styles of the messages, the number is clearly many more than a handful. The language, often studded with obscure acronyms, suggests that the authors have a deep knowledge of the laboratory's exotic culture."

"Several outside experts said that the director's quick departure was inevitable and that the blog's attacks were playing a significant role."

"Nanos is leaving," said Greg Mello, the director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a private organization in Albuquerque that monitors weapons laboratories. "The blog changed the climate, giving people an outlet they didn't have before."


"Jeff Jarvis, who publishes BuzzMachine, a blog that focuses on media issues, said the Los Alamos site showed "a new ethic of transparency" that has come with the explosion of electronic self-publishing. "It's not just the power of the blog," Mr. Jarvis said, "it's the power of the citizen." "