'Death to Bloggers' decrees Tehran

One dismal news item noted by the Washington Examiner's

Joel Gehrke  does not bode well for so-called citizen journalists who want to get the truth out:

Iranian courts have sentenced two bloggers to death for "spreading corruption," and government security forces have arrested four other journalists, in the lead-up to the nation's March elections.
"In the past two weeks, security forces have reportedly arrested four journalists," the U.S. State Department said in a statement, "including Shahram Manouchehri, Sahamedin Bourghani, Parastoo Dokouhaki, and Marzieh Rasouli, and Iranian courts confirmed death sentences for bloggers Saeed Malekpour and Vahid Asghari, both of whom were not accorded due process and now face imminent execution on charges of 'spreading corruption.'"
The State Department faulted Iran for trying "to extinguish all forms of free expression and limit its citizens’ access to information in the lead-up to March parliamentary elections."

Fisk on Fisking

Fisking is an internet term for a "point-by-point debunking of lies and/or idiocies", which is not necessarily fun to read. It started when Robert Fisk wrote the following lines about a beating

If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find

Apparently, the reporter was setting himself up for a different kind of bruising. In the blogosphere, Fisk's article was widely mocked for its mawkishness. The Ur-fisking below is blogger Andrew Sullivan's takedown of Robert Fisk's page one account of being attacked by Afghans. Sullivan's fisking was nearly a fisting, some bloggers observed, before promptly imitating the tiresome style. Geekish wingnuts soon became particularly prone to the pastime of fisking, and it's the usual modus operandi of the text-scourers who run the so-called Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).

Here's Sullivan, back in 2001 when he was also penning loveletters to "Rummy", the reprehensible Donald Rumsfeld.

THE PATHOLOGY OF ROBERT FISK: His account of his ordeal at the hands of an Afghan mob – a mob that apparently cried “Infidel!” as they attacked and tried to rob him – is a classic piece of leftist pathology. You have to read it to believe it. Even when people are trying to murder Fisk, he adamantly refuses to see them as morally culpable or even responsible. I’ve heard of self-hatred but this is ridiculous: “They started by shaking hands. We said, 'Salaam aleikum' – peace be upon you – then the first pebbles flew past my face." That sentence alone deserves to go down as one of the defining quotes of the idiotic left. If it weren't so tragic, it would be downright hilarious. Who needs Evelyn Waugh when you have this?

"I WOULD HAVE DONE THE SAME": But wait, there's more. "A small boy tried to grab my bag. Then another. Then someone punched me in the back. Then young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head. I couldn't see for the blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes. And even then, I understood. I couldn't blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.” What does this mean, you might well ask? What it means is that someone – anyone – is either innocent or guilty purely by racial or cultural association. An average Westerner is to be taken as an emblem of an entire culture and treated as such. Any random Westerner will do. Individual notions of responsibility or morality are banished, as one group is labeled blameless and another irredeemably malign. There’s a word for this: it’s racism. And like many other members of the far left, Fisk is himself a proud racist, someone who believes that the color of a person’s skin condemns him automatically and justifies violence against him. So the two extremes touch and are, in fact, interchangeable. Rightist racism springs from the premise that some races are somehow morally superior. Leftist racism springs from the premise that some races are also morally superior. The only difference is the color of skin. Alleged “victimization” sanctifies any evil perpetrated by the oppressed race. Just as the Nazis and Communists claimed self-defense for the mass-murder of their “oppressors,” so some modern leftists claim the absolution of self-defense even for a mob attacking a carful of innocent, harmless journalists. Or a sky-scraper for that matter.

THE VICTIM OF THE WORLD: You know the expression: you wouldn't understand a culture if it actually hit you in the head? Fisk has now officially retired that expression as a metaphor. He goes on: “There were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others…” Notice that phrase – “whose brutality was entirely the product of others.” What can that possibly mean? We’re not talking about extenuating circumstances – things that might help us understand or contextualize the hatred of one people for another. We’re talking about a priori moral absolution. Take this passage: “Goddamit, I said and tried to bang my fist on my side until I realised it was bleeding from a big gash on the wrist – the mark of the tooth I had just knocked out of a man's jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world.” No, Mr. Fisk, that man who attacked you was not truly innocent of any crime. You were. He was not the victim of the world. You were the victim of a thieving, violent mob. For those who believe that the left-wing intelligentsia is capable of critical thought or even a modification of their ideology in the face of evidence, this incident is a wonderful example of why it won’t happen. They won’t recognize reality, or abandon their racism, or moderate their spectacular condescension to the inhabitants of the developing world – even when reality, literally, crushingly, punches them in the face.

When the Feral Beast encountered Robert Fisk this weekend, the topic of fisking was raised. As a reporter whose name has become a verb, what does he feel about fisking nine year on?

"But that only exists on the internet, not in the real world, so it's of no concern," the veteran war reporter mused between sips of his gin and tonic. This Brit still eschews the hate-spewing virtual world. He is a reality maven, and quickly comes across as an erudite trainspotter, planespotter and weaponry gearhead. The Independent's intrepid reporter, who has expanded his beat outward from the Middle East to include Southwest Asia and now India, takes pride in remaining a cyber-Luddite. The sun doesn't seem to set on Fiskworld. His command of dates and details while speaking extemporaneously is most impressive. And he doesn't mince words, self-censor or run with the hack pack. Oddly, his fans have designed a couple of Facebook pages for him anyway.

Helen Thomas' sisters explain

The sisters of the 89-year-old doyenne of the Washington Press corps, Helen Thomas, who retired shortly after a video of her anti-Semitic statements to Rabbi David F Nesenoff went viral online, have defended her. They told blogger Richard Price of Journal-isms that the media got it wrong.

three of them said Thomas was not calling for the destruction of Israel or the return of all Israelis to Europe or the United States, as has been the running narrative, but was expressing her opposition to the disputed Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

"They should stop confiscating the land that belonged to the Palestinians. We feel that there should be a two-state solution in Palestine," said one sister, who did not want to be identified. The sisters, who spoke from the home of one of them in the Detroit area, which houses the nation's largest concentration of Arab Americans, range in age from 87 to 95. Thomas is 89. A brother is 100. The family is Lebanese-American.

"Helen Thomas is for peaceful coexistence in the Palestinian territory," said Barbara Isaac, the youngest sister. "What she does not like is that the Palestinians have been completely devastated and made to live under occupation and all the deleterious effects, and the hazardous effects of that, stripped of their ability to live normal lives.

"Helen has lived with this problem for as long as she's been in Washington," she said. Displaced Palestinians become waiters and cooks there, "and would talk to her, and she's heard nothing but their stories of horror for 60 years," Isaac said, referencing the creation of Israel in 1948. "She's out to dinner and they find her.

"If nobody got angry about injustice, then people just go on suffering, knowing that nobody gives a damn."

As Laura Berman wrote Tuesday in the Detroit News, "When asked about Israel during a White House Jewish heritage celebration on May 27, Thomas told RabbiLive.com: 'Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.'

"As the recording continued, Thomas told the interviewer, Rabbi David F. Nesenoff: 'Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land.'

"Asked where they should go, Thomas answered: 'They should go home' to 'Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else.'

"The fallout was quick."

Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab-American News in Dearborn, Mich., which claims to be "the largest, oldest and most respected Arab American newspaper in the United States," told Journal-isms there was never any doubt about what Thomas meant.

"Helen Thomas hit it right on the nail. They should get the hell out of Palestine," he said. "It's illegal" -- what is taking place, he said, "confiscating land" and "illegal settlements."

"She's talking about the settlements," he said without hesitation, asked to explain Thomas' reference.

"I saw the video six or seven times and I know what she meant."

Siblani ran a column on his website Monday from Katrina vanden Heuvel of the Nation magazine, which he called "the fairest" that he had seen. It was titled, "Isn't There Some Room for Helen Thomas?"

Extra, extra - old media keeps reporter on for 49 consecutive years

Hard-boiled reporters still exist. There's another legendary newspaper hack named Pyle, not Ernie but Richard, who was a mainstay of the Associated Press and is due to retire at age 75 before the ultimate deadline. Half a century of service, minus a year and four days! It's worth reading Dana Kennedy's Q/A with this veteran reporter, over on the blog-heavy Huffington Post. Irascible, gruff newsmen like him are getting scarce. The guy doesn't tweet, apparently

Vicious Snarkfest annoys critic, who tries to profit from the trend. But 'snot so snarky!

"New Yorker critic rails at web malice," tsks the Guardian in London. One doubts that the old school hacks just can't hack it. All this ersatz brouhaha appears to have been concocted mostly to promote Denby's latest slim volume, shown above in all its snot green glory (photographed by cogdogblog, the cur.) Snark's not a mythical critter as in the 'Hunting of the Snark' by Lewis Carroll, but a snide/remark [snark, geddit?] posted in a flame fest of sarcasm. It's what the Guardian might refer to as an irascibly arch comment if it wasn't trying to be bloggy and jiggy widdit. So embarassing all this boomer pandering to the younger, cooler set.

It is the bane of the modern world. It is cheap, nasty and heralds a new cultural dark age. It is "snark".

Or at least it is according to David Denby, a leading critic on the New Yorker magazine, who has sparked a literary debate over snark which pits the printed word against the new world of the internet.

Denby has written a slim polemical book called Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal and It's Ruining Our Conversation, that has created headlines across America. It is a ruthless assault on a tone of writing that combines malice, humour and aggressiveness. While Denby traces the origins of "snark" back to the ancient Greeks, he postulates that it is flowering in the media culture created by the internet. He says that internet message boards, gossip websites such as Gawker and Perez Hilton and the proliferation of millions of blogs have come to dominate modern media with a tone of vicious, unpleasant humour usually delivered in just a paragraph or two. He says that tone has now spread to newspapers and magazines and it is destroying American public life.

Not that Denby himself is shy of using an insult or two. "Indolent parasitism as a work ethos," he says of those who write for Gawker and its ilk. He continues: "The trouble with today's snarky pipsqueaks ... spinning around in the media from moment to moment, is they don't stand for anything or push for anything. They're mere opportunists without dedication and they don't win any victories."

Many commentators and reviewers have welcomed Denby's book as a long overdue corrective. 'God save us from Gawker's world,' opined one review in the Los Angeles Times. But others have seen Denby's outcry as the last gasp of an older media world that is being reshaped by a new generation.

"Some snarkiness is nasty, cynical and damaging. Some is insightful and serves the public good. Young people are right to see that the sometimes personally nasty satire of the Daily Show often offers more insightful political commentary than mainstream newspapers," said Professor TV Reed, a popular culture expert at Washington State University.

Not surprisingly, the reaction among the websites and columnists targeted by Denby has been less than polite. Perhaps it has even been a little ... snarky. Gawker posted a piece on the book under the headline: "Please buy David Denby's book, so he can stop talking."

Go Gogarty. Young Max's blog takes a hike. By popular demand.

Many of the 15 million rather discerning readers of Guardian.online each month are prone to airing their views via the comment page. Whew. There was a collective nose-holding at a faux-amateurish and possibly nepotistic blog written by the spawn of a professional travel writer and PR buff who often files for the esteemed Guardian. The response to the Valentine's Day initial post by this North London wanna-be traveller shocked the editors with its vitriol. And presumably this, more than the prospect of seeing scary India on his own before hitting the beaches of Goa,set Max "kinda shitting himself". Oh dear. Many of the more poisonous barbs were deleted,and his dear Dad weighed in for the family honour, but it's instructive to see the backlash against this privileged young chap.
It's not that bloggers aren't journos. But they are expected to have something worthwhile and preferably original to say. After all, the presigious George Polk prize was just awarded to Josh Marshall, a blogger, for his Talking Points Memo!
Many regulars accused the Guardian of indulging in a thinly-veiled attempt to get more free copy when the editor invited more backpackers to send in their own blogs.
After thousands of comments, Max's blog took a hike. According to the Guardian:

The message was transmitted swiftly, sometimes eloquently, sometimes wittily. His travel diary was extinguished. As an expression of mob will, it was very efficient. But that does not mean it was fair.

The skilled journalist Hilary Macaskill trawled through the comments and assembled some that touched on old media vs new media misperceptions.

Here is a post from 'traveleditor' on the day the blog came out:

Some of you have mentioned that you'd like to be given the chance to
write about your travels. We're always looking for good writers, so
feel free to drop us a line at travel@guardian.co.uk

The next day the final paragraph of his response read:

One thing that came out of yesterday's posts was that you want to
hear a lot more from real people rather than journalists, so I'm
going to be putting up a lot more readers' recommendations and
writing. I hope you like it. I'm sure you'll let me know.

Here are some of the things people said in response to that:

February 15 11:44
Surely the one thing to come out of yesterday's posts is that
'citizen journalism' and 'user-generated content' is generally
bollocks, and people much prefer things done by professionals, rather
than well-connected amateurs?
So the opposite of what you're saying.

February 15 12:28
And no, sod "real people". I want to read people who can write and
have something to say.

February 15 13:16
I'm a little confused by the definition of "real people" as compared
to "journalists". Surely if Max was paid for the piece then surely
that makes him a "journalist" as well, albeit one that is just
starting out on his career.
Indeed, even if Max's piece was bad - which is was - I hope that he
was paid. As a travel writer and editor myself, I know how hard it is
to get a foothold in the "industry" with or without connections, and
to make a living from it. If national newspapers start making use of
"real people's" writing without paying for it, then it will become
even harder for those of us struggling to pay the rent from our
scribblings.
I also think that most of the complaints not so much aimed at Max
himself, but the Guardian's travel editors who chose to commission
such a poorly written piece. It seems to me that with the ever
increasing "blog" nature of the Guardian website as a whole quality
is becoming secondary to quantity. For most of us I think it is fair
to say that we would rather a travel section - indeed the Guardian
website in general - that features fewer articles, well written and
paid for at a fair rate that reflects the talent of the writers and
that has something genuinely interesting to say, as opposed to the
"will this do?" nature of many of the pieces that can be found within
the blog sections.

February 15 12:47
It's just saturating the industry with mediocrity when we should be
encouraging the best.

February 15 12:51
RE: people wanting to read articles by "real people" rather than
journalists.
This comment confused me, on several points.
1) Is Max, then, a "journalist"? He's a "real person" surely (if you
insist on these two categories for people). I think it's pretty clear
wherever Max falls - that is not what people want to read. I
personally am all for reading about the experiences and
recommendations and laughs and disasters and drunken, debauched
adventures of Joe Average (or Joe Trustfund, even) but only on merit.
Only if they can actually write an interesting, informative and
captivating article. I'd sooner read fifty well-written and
appropriate articles by the same journalist than one badly-written,
grossly-inappropriate article by a civilian (arf arf) such as the one
we were gifted with yesterday.
2) That is, of course, unless the logic behind welcoming more 'real
people' pieces is so you can whitewash over this gargantuan fuck up
by publishing yet more articles of this calibre. Quality is relative,
of course. If so, I beseech you once more to stick to journalists who
have credibility and talent. Forget about "keepin' it real" which
seems to be The Guardian's mission statement of late. I think your
readers would be more appreciative of "keepin' it high quality and
insightful".

February 15 13:10
"One thing that came out of yesterday's posts was that you want to
hear a lot more from real people rather than journalists"
No, I want to read more good journalism, not middle class kids on
work experience writing about their holidays,

February 15 13:50
Could the Guardian please pay a little more attention to quality and
a little less to filling up the interweb?

February 15 14:05
Hell no, the last thing we need is more "real" people writing
articles. Reality television has been the worst thing to hit
entertainment since TV was invented. Let's not lead journalism down
the same path.
I want balanced, insightful, fully researched & well written
commentary by experienced, professional journalists. I don't want to
hear opinions from a teenage trustafarian or a middle-aged housewife
from Hull and if I did, there are millions of blogs that I could
trawl for such a waste of bandwidth.

February 15 14:20
On to more serious matters. Look, Mr Grauniad editor. You run a
newspaper. Newspapers should be written by journalists, who are by
the way, "real people."
The difference is that journos' job is to write, and to find
something to write about.
Do you think Shakespeare's plays would have benefited from any Tom,
Dick or Hamlet chipping in from amidst the groundlings with a scene
or two? Would Catch 22 be any better if it was penned by my postie in
his lunch hour?...
Really. What *are* standards coming to? Any pretence that this
"citizen journalism" scam is anything more than attempts to undermine
writers' pay and job security for cost-cutting reasons is DEEPLY
disingenuous.
God save us from newspapers trying to be all things to all people. If
we want to read boring tripe by unexceptional people, we have the
internet now. Not to mention the comments section of the Guardian.

February 15 14:21
Going on funded gap year, getting trashed and having a lot of fun -
Acceptable.
Writing about it online so friends and family can read about it -
Acceptable.
One of the most reputable newspapers of this century posting it on
their website - Completely Unacceptable.

February 15 15:21
The real question is - would the Guardian dare publish this in
newspaper format? It's rhetorical. I don't think the website should
become a resting place for sub-standard writing and writers. Nor do I
think it should serve as a training ground for (as far as I can tell)
fairly talentless writers to hone their "skills".
Not good enough, basically... that applies to both the standard of
journalism (I use the word loosely) and editorial standard.
I suppose I'm in the target age range for this type of article (20).
The logic behind my Guardian readership is that I will be well-
informed, inspired and engaged by what is written. It's precisely why
I advoid weblogs dripping with teenage cliches. I'm very
disappointed, to say the least.

February 15 15:21
"One thing that came out of yesterday's posts was that you want to
hear a lot more from real people rather than journalists, .."
Can you quote please? I don't remember anyone saying that. The
implication here is that Max is a journalist and we would rather hear
from someone who is out-there, living-life. Quite the opposite. We
would rather hear from someone who writes for a living, because there
is a greater chance that it won't damage our eyes just to read it.
Lastly, can I just point out that there is no conspiracy here to
decide to gang up on a random "writer" for no reason. The comments
Max's article (and this one) have received have been posted by
genuinely angry, disgusted readers who didn't expect to be assaulted
by such rubbish on The Guardian's website. You appear to be sitting
in the corner with your fingers in your ears proclaiming that you're
right and we're wrong. Maybe you should consider the possibility that
the massive volume of independent, unconnected, impartial opinions on
this article actually have a point.

February 15 16:05
Dear Andy
Here is a response to your intensely patronising final statement, as
taken from some chap on one of the sure-to-be-many Max-loathing
Facebook groups:
''The response from the travel editor is interesting. Rather than
reflecting on why people found Max's column so horrible, he seems to
think that the criticism is due to people wanting to read stories by
"real people", not "journalists". So, that means he's going to try
and take the paper even further down the road of user-generated
content, citizen journalism, and other utterly fucking meaningless
buzzwords that only serve to produce terrible, terrible journalism.
The exact system that produced Max.''
Read. Take notes. Learn.

February 15 16:43
What a can of worms and poor journalistic judgement this has been.
Having read the original blog and comments my main question is:
Travel editor: Do you think the content of the website should be far
below that of the newspaper?
Surely that can be the only reason you'd let Max's blog slip through
the editorial net.

February 15 18:06
"One thing that came out of yesterday's posts was that you want to
hear a lot more from real people rather than journalists, so I'm
going to be putting up a lot more readers' recommendations and writing."
It seems to me that, if anything, what people have been objecting to
is the arbitrary choice of one "real person" over any of the other
several hundred thousand candidates. Surely the nature of the
complaint makes clear that competent journalists have one great
advantage over "real people", viz, they write reliably interesting
and entertaining copy which will not provoke the derision of the
entire internet community. What this site should be providing is
quality writing, not the gormless witterings of its readers.

February 15 18:08
What's simultaneously so marvellous and so awful about this story is
what a paradigm it is for so much. For how the interweb can explode a
little story so quickly. For how much hatred there towards a
perceived middle class London coterie who run the media. For how un-
selfaware that coterie is about their own status. For how much
funnier cruel stuff is than all that serious nonsense. For how easy
it is to be vitriolic when blogging. And so on and so on....
....
The real issue here, as others have pointed out, is with the travel
eds. I don't think it honestly occurs to you - and when I say 'you',
I mean London based journos on the nationals - just how often, how
incessantly and how forcefully we are fed the stories of the lives of
a small subsection of London society, how we can't open a paper or
magazine without hearing their bleating, self-important voices
complaining about their nannies, discussing whether it's OK to wear a
mini skirt round the Portobello Road if you're over 40, and yes, just
what their kids did on their gap years. It's so dispiriting and
depressing to find that there is LESS of a cross section of a society
represented in the acres of newsprint that there were 30 years ago.
Like university education, the clock is turning back from the brave
years of working class kids taking a step up. Unis are more middle
class than ever and so are newspapers....
....
Sure, it's not his fault he's a painful archetype, but by god,
Guardian, didn't any of you recognise this as an article that was
going to get SLAUGHTERED by us mere provincial mortals? No, you
didn't, because you too, stuffed to the gills with your Marinas and
Cartner-Morleys, you just took it as read that he'd be accepted as
the voice of youth. That's how out of touch you are.
Yes, this whole thing has gone OTT, but don't blame your readership
for biting back for being so consistently and systematically excluded
from your version of who the world consists of - and giving an
article like that space instead. You got found out. Good.

February 15 18:08
This is yet another failure of this type of internet-based newspaper.
It's either got to be ultra high quality, or it's 'let a thousand
flowers bloom'. There's no middle ground. The failure of the latter
approach is there for all to see, and while there are a good few
thousand of us sat here at work passing the time, it's going to leapt
on, hard.

Blogger wins Prestigious reporting prize

Wael Abbas, an Egyptian, is the first blogger ever to win the Knight International Journalism Award. With 30,000 hits a day, Misr Digital is one of those powerful alternative voices that can make a difference, and goads the country's mainstream media and public to follow up.

“It is not the best time for the media and the blogging community,” he said, since the regime is cracking down and trying to tarnish the bloggers' reputations by accusing them of treason and acting on behalf of those outside Egypt.

In February, 22-year-old blogger and student Abdel Karim Nabil Suleiman was sentenced to four years in prison because Egyptian authorities claimed his posts insulted Islam and President Hosni Mubarak.

Egytian blogger behinde bars
However, Abbas said Egypt's bloggers have built up credibility with the public because they have broken stories the mainstream media would not publish, often using video and photographs submitted by the public to back up their reports.

He said Egyptian citizens, often using cell phone cameras and other hand-held devices, tend to give the bloggers their material exclusively since they know it is less likely to be censored.

ICFJ also awarded Burma's May Thingyan Hein with the Knight Award, paying tribute to her perseverance with the country's media censors that led to the dissemination of information on avian flu and HIV/AIDS to the Burmese public.

The Knight Award, given annually, recognizes individuals who have raised media excellence standards in their countries.

Burmese Junta pulls the plug on Cyber-Revolution

Silencing the protestors used to be easy: intimidation was all it took, just a shaking of the iron fist. And if it shields itself from the prying eyes of other countries, a hermit nation like Myanmar can oppress its people with impunity. To counter the biggest Burmese popular uprising in the past 20 years, when monks in blood-red robes took to the streets, the military junta finally got to grips with the 21st century and pulled the plug on the country's two internet servers and all mobile phone networks to silence the festering dissidence. The mobile video phone is the subversive which just may prove mightier than the sword. But, writes Seth Mydans in the IHT, the digital age brought new power to ordinary people:

a guerrilla army of citizen reporters was transmitting videos, photographs and news reports over the Internet even as events were unfolding.
The old technology of guns and clubs had been ensnared by the immediacy of electronic communication in a way the world had never seen.....
They sent SMS text messages and e-mails and posted daily blogs, according to some of the exile groups that received their messages. They posted notices on Facebook, the online social networking Web site. They sent tiny messages on e-cards. They updated the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

They also used Internet versions of "pigeons" - the couriers reporters used in the past to carry out film and news - handing their material to embassies or nongovernmental organizations that had access to satellite connections.

Just as important, these images and reports were broadcast back into Myanmar by foreign radio and television stations, informing and connecting a public that receives only propaganda reports from its government.

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.

Who's on First?

Extra innings were inevitable, perhaps, after a piece about bush league baseball was heavily blogged before it was published in the international print journals that paid for a "non-exclusive" sports story on the fledgling Israel Baseball League. Veteran Israeli journalist, Alan D Abbey, examines the cries of foul on Poynter.org.

Meanwhile, Salon.com was getting plenty of hits with its own Jewish ballplayer feature scripted by Jonah Keri: "With bashin' boychiks knocking the seam off the ball this year, Salon highlights the greatest Hebrew hammers and fireballers to step onto the diamond." The legend Sandy Koufax, pictured above, leads off the roll call of 18 Jewish athletes. The website cautions that

In the name of inclusiveness, we're counting players with one or more Jewish parents (even those not raised Jewish), converts to Judaism, and non-Jews who practiced the Jewish faith.

Bloviators Anonymous? The CIA nods to blogs

That bumbling firm for spooks in Langley, Virginia, now takes bloggers seriously, even if most professional hacks still tend to look askance at aggregators with cyberlinks and ranters with agendas. Check out this and learn how the CIA watches anyone who files as a 'citizen journalist' on a weblog and especially monitors officials who might leak to them. The intelligence agency has updated its regulations and now releases formerly classified information to bloggers under the Freedom of Information Act. (Hat tip to abc's "the blotter".) What's more, an online tool has traced edits on the Wikipedia website to the CIA's office network (and also to the Vatican.) Beware cyber-moles. You can be traced.