Cody Brown's Blog

Adapt the Blog vs. Print debate into a song?

Yesterday I stumbled into a blog post about NYU Local. ‘Avallonne,’ the blogger, said very nice things about the site he/she said it makes ‘wonderful social commentary,’ digs the tone, but stopped and hesitated to ‘call the NYU Local bloggers journalists in the traditional sense.’ Avallonne said that NYU Local mostly just aggregates news from various sources and WSN does the long term lifting.

I’ve heard this point before. Usually from WSN staffers who are going from a stage of holier than thou denial to a kind of quasi acceptance.It is, of course, not true and I posted the following comment.

Interesting write up but this ‘not journalists’ meme is a complete misnomer. It’s inverted, the biggest stories of last semester - Abu Dhabi Developments, Megan Cruz CAS Controversy, and of course, the TBNYU! student protests were all broken on NYU Local and spurred detailed analysis on the site and in the comment section.

http://nyulocal.com/tag/wtf-is-happening-with-nyuad/ http://nyulocal.com/on-campus/2009/04/06/cas-student-council-votes-to-block-nearly-all-of-cas-from-running-for-office/ http://nyulocal.com/tag/tbnyu-kimmel-takeover/

That administrative decision you mention that NYU Local ‘barley mentioned’ was covered in detail on NYU Local before WSN published an article: http://nyulocal.com/on-campus/2009/05/06/sexton-budget-email-some-good-news-for-students/

NYU Local reporter, Charlie Eisenhood, was recently recognized by UWire as one of the top journalists in the country. Despite this being a story for NYU, this was not mentioned at all by WSN. http://www.uwire.com/content/UWIRE100/charlieeisenhood.html

WSN spent most of last semester writing neutral sounding summaries of NYU Local posts and comment sections. In some cases they would learn about a story on NYU Local, assign their staff to do analogous reporting, then publish the results days (or, weeks) later without any reference to NYU Local.

http://www.nyunews.com/news/university/council-changes-await-cas-vote-in-late-april-1.1647307

When I asked WSN’s editor-in-chief about this, she had no issue with failing to cite analogous reporting. This is, of course, disingenuous to the research conducted for an article.

I see the distinction between long and short term views of NYU but I’m not seeing any evidence to suggest that NYU Local is short or bound by its medium (bloging) to be short.

There are a lot of things NYU Local needs to expand on but there is a reason the site received 1.7 million hits last semester.

Henry Jenkins is a G.

I checked back the next day, my comment was not there. Instead the following was posted and attributed to CB, my initials.

If news is anything,
news was then
and this is now,
so hit the road, Jack.
Don’t cha come back.
Stop! in the name of ads,
before you break my bank.

All the world really needs,
all the world ever needed was
blogging twitter bugs on
the interspace webface browser,
all the world will need;
please, won’t you demon-
strate the demon’s straight,
won’t you please demon-
strate the demon’s strait,
won’t you just demon-
strate the demon’s strate:

One of these things is not
like the other;
One of these things is
black and broke and read not ever.

We are the Otherland,
the fate, the destiny,
the foxhole, the black hole,
the hyperbole, the paradigm,
the be-all, end-all, a crystal chime.
The time has come, the Walrus said,
to talk of many things. Dead
is that sweet thing we once called
the Tree when we were too young to know sin.

Can someone please perform this and post it on youtube?

Also, Avallonne, if you comment on this post, I will adapt your words and add another verse.

May 21

“

No one should take this development lightly. As Walter Lippmann wrote about the shortcomings of the press in its coverage of the First World War, a crisis of journalism is a crisis of democracy. No one should assume that the institutions committed to a professional culture of journalism or scholarship can be replaced by thousands of individual, citizen-journalists, just as you cannot replace our great universities with multiple individual websites each offering specialized knowledge in an atomized way. Sometimes you need big, strong news organizations to challenge the vast powers of government, corporations and other large institutions.

Next week under that dome behind me we will give a Pulitzer Prize for a deeply researched newspaper report on how the Pentagon successfully pitched its Iraq spin to many of the former generals who often appear as military experts in the news. It is unlikely that a lone blogger would have had the wherewithal to get and publish that story for a national audience.

It is also a fact that we can no longer expect the free market to produce institutions that actually play a quasi-public role, as universities do or the press does as our “Fourth Branch” of government. Eventually, there will have to be new sources of funding for the press, other than through the private market. For now, oddly, a significant part of our world news comes through the BBC, and therefore courtesy of British citizens. (Meanwhile, other government-supported broadcasters, from China’s CCTV to Al Jazeera English, are developing their own global presence.) We have yet to realize that we will need to compete for our ideas in the global marketplace of ideas.

Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University

April 23

“ Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse… Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living. Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

March 4

My character development exercise for Color Sync

January 23

The Most Apt Expression of What Will Really Happen if the NYT Dies

The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives. It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind. And it will seriously damage the press’s ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy.

From Michael Hirschorn in the most recent Atlantic

January 12

What if the The Grey Lady Actually Gets It?

Spot-the-fuck-on:

“Yet there is something exhilarating about watching web innovation finally explode at the Times, with its KICK ME sign and burden of authority. Elements like the Word Train appear at first glance quite un-Timesian, but at second, they provide a philosophical jolt—what is the Word Train, after all, but a variation on the classic “streeter,” that roundup of quotes from twenty voters, this time done with many anonymous thousands? Despite the effectiveness of blogs, the majority still mainly provide links and commentary. The Times Online suggests what might happen when technology fuels in-depth reportage—and more radically, when readers are encouraged to invest their own analytical skills in the site’s raw resources, when some kid in Kansas finds fresh patterns in an open electoral database, then posts on his blog with a link back to the Times, enabling an expansive, self-correcting interpretative voice.”

January 9

Mayakovsky

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

- Frank O’Hara

+

Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

- Philip Larkin

December 31

Time to Test

December 29

David Carr Reviews Murdoch's Bio

I’m halfway through an advance copy. It’s often absurd and hard to take seriously when Wolff ends a great deal of his sentences with ellipses…