-
Website
http://www.mathewingram.com/work -
Original page
http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/03/27/russell-smith-web-bashing-101/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
All Comments
To what end? What consultant got paid millions of dollars telling them to do this? I'd like to know.
to link to it, since it's one of the things that got me thinking about
a response to Russell's piece.
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 11:04 PM, Disqus
I'm a content-whore myself, and when I was doing traffic strategy for a community newspaper not so long ago I tried to get everything I could online as spider-food. But one also has to service one's readership. Not sure how anyone's served by clogging up Google with 100s of variations on the same theme.
More importantly, I think, is that for that extra smidgen of traffic, they're risking their credibility - which is a lot like virginity, if you know what I mean. Once it's gone...
You do several rhetorical fallacies, which I see over and over in blog-boosting posts.
Claim: Writer points out news coverage is not getting better
Fallacy: Say MSM is not great.
Of course, the writer didn't say that. The blog-evagenlist just finds it a good strawman to knock down.
Then there's the two-step, "blog" means "journalism", except when it doesn't.
Oh, why bother, I've been around this too many times :-(
shouldn't point out the mote in someone else's eye if there's a 2 by 4
in your own, I think someone said. It's a simple matter of balance.
And the word "journalism" is a lot broader than you imply -- oh, why
bother, I've been around this too many times :-)
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 12:52 AM, Disqus
you're giving me Rhetoric 101. I know that if we were on the debating
club in high school, I would get a negative mark because of my logical
fallacy. My response? Whatever.
My point is that in terms of balance and fairness, and all that is
good and right and true in our society -- perhaps even our universe --
it would have been nice if Russell had admitted that the same failings
he is criticizing were invented by mainstream media. That is all.
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 9:21 AM, Disqus
"This snake-oil doesn't work. In fact, it makes you sicker than conventional treatment".
"Hey! In fairness you must point out mainstream medicine doesn't always work either. Side-effects were invented by mainstream medicine!"
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 12:56 PM, Disqus
"You shouldn't use snake-oil because it has side effects."
"Hey! That's not a good reason to abstain from snake-oil, because mainstream medicine has side-effects, and nobody thinks that's bad. What's the real argument against snake-oil?"
Now to bring it back around:
Smith: blogs are bad because it leads to a million sources reporting the same thing.
Ingram: Wait, MSMs do that too. that's not a good argument against blogs.
See, Seth? Mathew was doing the logical fallacy thing before you got here.
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 4:27 PM, Disqus
Perhaps the most depressing of them is the fact that despite the massive proliferation of news-headline websites and "citizen" news sites (that is to say, blogs), there is no more actual news being found and reported.
In brief: The evidence shows snake-oil (blogs) doesn't help.
Blog-evangelists cannot deal with this as a fact. They have to launch into attacks on the writer, distractions, fallacies, etc, because THEY NEED TO GET ATTENTION. And the way to get attention, is by playing to the crowd. Which is sort of Smith's point.
[Pre-emptive: "The MSM plays to the crowd too!" . Sometimes. The problem is blogs have much less else.]
isn't true. "There is no more actual news being found and reported"
is just an out-and-out lie -- or at least, not supported by the facts.
For one thing, the Pew report focused mainly on cable TV, not online
-- and even it noted that there was more coverage, it was just
coverage of the same stories (which, as I pointed out, were pretty
important). And don't even get me started on what the phrase "actual
news" means.
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 7:32 PM, Disqus
There is extremely little of it, and the web-hype was that all the "citizen-journalists" would be generating a huge amount of such news.
Really, one of the most frustrating things I find in these discussions is the necessity of repeating, over and over, the elementary points at issue.
As Scott Karp repeatedly points out, blog software is simply a content management system. The content is as useful or relevant as the author is capable or informed.
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 7:59 PM, Disqus