AJC on political blogs

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.

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Beside the setting sun

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.

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Blog advertising: New Yorker, WSJ, OJR and CNN

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 TNR -- 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, 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.

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Manchurian blogad

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.

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Half convention-going bloggers run blogads...

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.

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Blogger are influentials, or not

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?

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Old stones in new places

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

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NYTimes: read convention blogs to find Mencken's ghost

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

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Summer notes

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

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Blogads press

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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Hot books

Back from a week in Greenville NC. Hot and sunny 12X7.

When not listening to music or tossing a baseball, I was reading. John Le Carre's Absolute Friends, Robert Harris' Pompeii and Greg Bear's Eon.

I enjoyed all. The first two are recent, the latter written in 1985, with the USSR a belligerent player. Each deals with failing empires, although I didn't pick them for this theme; in fact Eon was basically random, the only tolerable book I could find at the Greenville Target, when I ran out of books midweek. Any tips on summer novels to read?

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Henry offline

We'll be on vacation in Greenville, NC this week. Miklos will be covering my e-mail and phone.

Enjoy your July 4th! And treasure your good luck being American.

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Outsourcing to India

Read the article in this week's New Yorker (flags on the cover) about outsourcing Wall Street jobs to India. Astonishing, tectonic stuff portrayed up close and personal. Shame it is not online.

"Almost tweny percent of the jobs on Wall STreet have disappeared in the last three years. Office Tiger [the firm profiled] recently doubled its staff, to sixteen hundred and fifty workers, and will nearly double in size again by year's end, on the strength of 'judgement-dependent services': equity analysts, legal research, and acccounting jobs that pay an annual salary of up to a hundred thousands dollars in the US and between ten and twenty percent of that in Chennai."

"Salomon Brother in its heyday received five hundred job applications a month. Offic Tiger sometimes receives fifteen hundred applicants a dady, many of them accompanied by parents who pray as their sons and daughters take one test after another..."

The region's "per capita incomes equates to thirty-six U.S. dollars a month."

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Blogads with bite

People ask: what's an effective blogad look like? It's hard to say. Kinda like asking, "what's an effective pickup line?" It depends (folks say) on the situation, depends on the audience, depends on the product on sale, and often depends on luck.

Having said that, a sense of humor and a geniune sense of the blog audience makes a big difference. My bet is that this ad, which adopts a meme that ran on Atrios a couple of months back, is doing well:



As Glenn Reynolds told Farhad Manjoo in Salon a couple of weeks ago: "Now, anyone can be Jesse Helms. In the old days, you could take somebody like Jesse Helms or maybe Ted Kennedy and you could demonize them in order to raise money. With the Internet, you can hit any candidate and raise money by turning him into Jesse Helms for a small demographic." Yep, that is one strategy.

Although I talked at length with Farhad, there was no mention of Blogads.com in Salon's article, which dealt exclusively with ads bought through the site. I wonder.

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Future office

This coffee and free wireless stuff is going to migrate upward, dragged by entrepreneurs, and take out corporate offices. Come back in ten years and confirm my prescience in the comments, please.

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Internet fund raising

Candidate Kerry raised $3 million online Wednesday. Hey, this innernut thing is getting serious, innit?

Offline and on, "almost 350 people have now raised at least $50,000 each for the campaign; almost half have raised $100,000 or more." Note that Atrios ($250,000) and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga are part of that elite $100,000+ crowd.

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Political hot-wire

Taegan Goddard has recruited an young Yalie reporter to help run the highly regarded Political Wire. Taegan very kindly gives Blogads some of the credit for helping him expand.

It used to be news when bloggers got hired by traditional publishers. Watch bloggers build their own teams. Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall and now Taegan Goddard have deputies. Three is a trend.

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Moon shining

Bloggers Ron Gunzberger and John Gorenfeld seem to be getting under the skin of Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

Check out the press release attacking them, and you'll find some backhanded praise for Ron and John's reporting.

(Hey, wait a minute, I thought the first amendment said only corporations could do journalism?)

Click here to run an ad on their blogs if you'd like to win some smart new customers and/or support their journalism.

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