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Archive for July, 2004

AJC on political blogs

by henrycopeland
Saturday, July 24th, 2004

In today’s Atlanta Journal Constitution, Marlon Manuel writes a thoughtful and well-reported piece on the shifting border between political blogging and journalism, talking to Wonkette, RealClearPolitics, DailyKos, Politics1.

Manuel gets off a fun line. Responding to my comment that bloggers have an advantage over traditional journalists who can’t relax, curse and be themselves, he retorts: “Well, #@$%, there goes the neighborhood.”

The only problem with the story is that it is password protected.

Beside the setting sun

by henrycopeland
Saturday, July 24th, 2004

Boarding the kids with my parents, we spent three great days this week in Berkeley and San Francisco. Peter and Jess Molnar put us up in their Rozsadomb-like bungalow, keeping us full of red wine and cold chicken. Wednesday, after meeting with an ad agency in the morning, we napped on the lawn in Yerba Buena park and walked around San Francisco all day, stumbling through Chinatown and then 3 miles west on California street. That night we tried to sneak into Chez Panisse without a reservation but settled very happily for some excellent Thai just up the road. Thursday we bought some salami and cheese and had a picnic on the back porch and then drove over to walk through the Muir Woods. The crowds were horrible… until we’d walked half a mile and suddenly had the place to ourselves. Way prettier than pictures. Back for drinks with the Molnar parents and dinner with Arpad and Maya Molnar. Yesterday I evangelized for Blogads at Blogon and we then flew back to Chapel Hill. We’ll be at the beach next week, totally offline.

Blog advertising: New Yorker, WSJ, OJR and CNN

by henrycopeland
Thursday, July 22nd, 2004

Mark Glaser sums up political internet advertising and blog advertising features prominently. He coins the phrase “blogging widow” which my wife will enjoy. And he gets a prime statistic from former Kerry CTO Sanford Dickert: the Kerry campaign made a three-fold return on its online buys.

Have any of your noticed The New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal advertising on blogs? It is flattering to bloggers to have two of America’s premiere publications courting their readers.

(A tangent: I’d love to see these guys use the technique that worked so well for — the latest cover with some headlines. Blog readers are news junkies and the best way to get them excited is to remind them just how cutting edge your product is. And the best way to do that, in the classic advice of writing teachers and editors, is to “don’t tell with adjectives, show with examples.”)

Finally, [url=http://cbs.marketwatch.com/tvradio/default.asp?siteid=mktw&dist=ltvrtab]CBS Marketwatch’s Frank Barnako, an early and astute political blog maven, just mentioned to me that CNN will be pushing viewers to blogs during the convention. Damn, that could be great. Or not? Will blogs live up to the hype? Bloggers excel when they cast their flashlights into murky corners where flood-lights won’t fit — this convention will likely be fairly over-lit and shadowless.

Manchurian blogad

by henrycopeland
Tuesday, July 20th, 2004

Astute blogad observers today will have noticed blogads just about everywhere for Paramount’s Manchurian Candidate movie. Linking to a movie trailer, this is the first major blogad buy by a movie studio. pic

Half convention-going bloggers run blogads…

by henrycopeland
Monday, July 19th, 2004

Comparing this package of convention-going bloggers with the total list, looks like nearly half of the bloggers there will be running blogads.

This is the first fully blogged and televised battle of the uncorporate (but not uncommercial!) media against the corporates. Who will deliver the most scoops of lard or lust or laughs?

BTW, we’ve seen some BIG media companies buying blogads… will tell you more in the next few days.

Blogger are influentials, or not

by henrycopeland
Monday, July 19th, 2004

Chicago Tribune: “Many people don’t take into account how influential bloggers are,” said Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. “Blogs are getting an increasing readership. People who are going to those blogs are real political junkies who can then reach everybody else.”

But Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, sees only bad news in blogging: “bloggers, with few exceptions, don’t add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.”

Funnily enough, Jones doesn’t do any reporting or offer any evidence in his own little bout of “scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.”

Et tu, Mr. Jones?

Old stones in new places

by henrycopeland
Friday, July 16th, 2004

Test for your Magyar expats: where did these statues originally stand?

NYTimes: read convention blogs to find Mencken’s ghost

by henrycopeland
Thursday, July 15th, 2004

A remarkable editorial in today’s New York Times advises readers to log on to blogs to get the scoop on the upcoming Democratic convention. See for yourself. Astonishingly candid. (Via Jeff Jarvis.) Before it disappears into the Times’ archives, I’ll copy a chunk for the scrapbook:

People who think the mushrooming world of wannabe polemicists and their Web logs, or blogs, is merely a high-tech amusement should talk to Senator Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican.

In Web lore, bloggers are credited with relentlessly drilling Senator Lott after he expressed segregation-tinged nostalgia for the Strom Thurmond presidential campaign, a story that the major news media initially missed. Mr. Lott was subsequently forced to quit as majority leader.

Beyond its power as a source of news and commentary, the Internet has proved itself to be the ultimate fund-raising tool. Bloggers can be crass and biased, but politicians no longer scoff at their rich online realm. Hence the red carpet at the conventions ‘ at least for some of them.

The Democrats, needless to say, are already paying for their venturesome invitation. They received applications from 50 bloggers and later announced there was room for only 30. Conspiracy theories are already abounding on the blogs of the disinvited. Such is Web life. We do wonder whether a blogger’s buccaneer self-image will suffer from having to wear a garish credential necklace just to watch conventioneers as they mainly say, “Nice to see you!” to each other. Will bloggers be tamed into centrism? Or, like Mencken, will they gleefully report that the convention’s main speechmakers are “plainly on furlough from some home for extinct volcanoes”? Log on to find out.

Want to advertise on some of the convention blogs? You can advertise for the week on fifteen of the biggest for $1290. Here’s a package for your convenience. (If you know of any convention-going blogads sellers I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll amend.) Update: here’s a completish list of all bloggers at the convention: http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/001461.php

Summer notes

by henrycopeland
Wednesday, July 14th, 2004

Mushroom picking, slicing range balls with son, cooking chicken, selling the jalopy, slicing golf balls with Dad

Blogads press

by henrycopeland
Monday, July 12th, 2004

Nice comprehensive coverage of Blogads last week in the Chicago Tribune and ClickZ.

The Trib’s Maureen Ryan has been watching blogs closely for a while, so it was particulary fun to get her perspective and her then-and-now quotes. Tessa Wigert at ClickZ likes our easy-to-use order form and conducted the most efficient e-mail interview I’ve yet encountered.


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