Feral Beast: Buzz-builders leak news content to bloggers

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Buzz-builders leak news content to bloggers

Are you being served? Are you being used?
The Economist is courting blogs to drive up online viewing statistics. The journalism.co.uk site discloses how blogs and aggregation sites now are the main source for links to newspaper sites.

"What we've found to be very successful for getting views is to actually engage with bloggers," said Mike Seery.

"In the US we identified the 100 most important political bloggers and we effectively give them content before it's published in print, so that it builds a buzz around the thing before it's there.

"It takes work and it's not the exclusives you might get in a national daily here [in the UK], but it's the sort of thing that create a big buzz and brings lots of traffic the next day," he added.

Brave new world.

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Feral Beast? Try Lemming

If the press were an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I’ve got my answer. A legion of lemmings, furry and well-intentioned, but ultimately condemned by their nature to follow each other mindlessly off a tall cliff, over the Paris Hilton peak or into the Invade Iraq crevasse. The words “feral beast” certainly wouldn’t come to mind. It’s not particularly accurate or particularly evocative. But that is how the departing British prime minister, Tony Blair, sees journalists: as malicious tormentors who have tried to tear him limb from limb.

--Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review

“Journalism is a form of cartography,” write Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach of Pew. “It creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map.”

"Journalism is good at solving small problems or taking small bites of a big problem. It’s not good at solving big problems." Adapted from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

Retrospective : five decades of journalism as reported by CJR

Fake AP Stylebook reminds us: Unless you're doing a story on the Muppets, you are not a gonzo journalist.

"The once idealized information superhighway has become a parking lot of error, misinformation, rumor and junk." Poynter Institute, advocating a broader definition of who is a journalist.