Has blogging become sooooo 2004? Some days I wonder. There were a lot of stories around this time last year about a surprising drop in blog traffic, considering how the 2008 election was at hand, and the authors threw out a lot of theories -- but they all missed what I thought the obvious answer was: People were spending too much time with their friends on Facebook to check out blogs as much. The number of Internet diversions keeps increasing, but last time I checked the number of hours in the day stayed fixed at 24.
And this was before Twitter -- now Facebook can seem soooo 2007 at times. I had my doubts about Twitter -- a network where you exchange pithy observations with friends and other followers, and by pithy I mean they can't be more than 140 characters. So today on an Eagles Sunday I'm reading lots of "tweets" (I know, I know, but that's what they call them) along the lines of "Westbook, yes!"
Insightful? I had my huge doubts about the Twitter phenominon and resisted joining, but now that I finally did a month ago I am learning its usefulness as well: A passenger in the Denver plane crash was twittering even before he fled the burning plane, I read about an environmental disaster in Tennessee on Twitter before reading it in the mainstream media, and I've been introduced to the writing of a student journalist named Suzanne Yada who should be offered a job upon graduation somewhere withi Philadelphia Media Holdings -- if only we did that sort of thing (i.e., hire people) anymore.
So now I am a tiny cog in the Twitter revolution (although only when I'm on the big clunky PC, since the next email or even text message that I send from a cell phone will be my first). Any remaining Attytood fans :-) can follow me on Twitter by going here.
The funny thing is that when it came to promoting my upcoming book on Ronald Reagan -- "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future" -- I would have guessed not long ago that having a blog would be a valuable tool for getting the word out. I still think that's true, but I'm already seeing evidence that social networking, via Facebook especially, may be a more valuable tool for spreading the word -- virally, starting with my online friends (and I'm always looking for more of these) and then with their friends. On New Year's Day, while Penn State was getting routed, I launched a Facebook group for Tear Down This Myth, which now already has more than 400 members (!) and continues to grow. If you're interested in news about the book (i.e., in-person or media appearances, or where to, ahem, buy it) I hope that you'll join as well.
The rise of social media is an exciting thing -- if you haven't tried it, it's a great way to reconnect with old friends from high school, college, etc., while possibly making some new ones, but I think this development is also one more clue that points to why newspapers and other local news organizations are in trouble. I've come to see over the last couple of years that most people are the most obsessed with news from two areas. One is what I would call "media world" -- TV. movies, music, pro and big-college sports, and politics as practiced on a national level over shoutfests and yukfests from Rush Limbaugh to Keith Olbermann to "The Daily Show." The second wave is what I would call "friend world." Just a couple of years ago, the idea of marketing "news" about your circle of friends and family would have seemed patently absurd but now, thanks to Facebook, Twitter and the like, it is this type of "news" that many people seek out first.
Newspapers fall into a dangerously grey area here. While we overlap, obviously, with "media world," (and almost not at all with "friend world"), the real goal of most local media is to peddle news of "your hometown world" -- a world that especially on the metro-area scale is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the TV/computer age (with one huge exception, hometown pro sports teams, which have literally kept us in business). Some have suggested newspapers move more into social media and to some degree they have (you can follow Philly.com on Twiiter here, for example), but a newspaper isn't going to invent Facebook or Twitter.
Because else somebody already did.
Posted by Will Bunch @ 9:37 PM
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52 comments
Will, the suicide hotline is open 7 days a week 24 hrs a day.
Yes, Facebook and Twitter have already been invented, and the news model that relies on them swallowed up.
But you can't assume Facebook and Twitter will have anything to do with the news models that will be more relevant 2, 5, 10 years down the road? Why couldn't a news organization be the one to invent them? To me it's all about community-building and crowdsourcing, two areas in which a big news organization has a built-in advantage. It's there for the taking if there are enough forward-thinking journalists focused on that task.
I think Daniel Victor has a good point BUT Facebook appears to me to be community-building and I believe that blogs with responsible commenters are crowd-sourcing, so the invention of the future is still in the future.
Daniel, I agree and if you read some of my earlier posts about media reform (which kind of peaked last year...long story) you'd know that I'm a huge booster of both of these. And I do think you will see much more successful crowdsourcing in the coming months, if only because newspapers are starting to learn they won't be able to afford the old model of investigative reporting. As for community-building, news orgs desperately need people working on this but that would mean new hires or redeploying people from the tried and true (cops, courts, etc.), which is why I suspect start-ups will eventually beat out existing news orgs here. Sigh.
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"But every night all the men would come around/And lay their money down" -- Cher.
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I'm trying to figure out how someone gets "mid-life crisis" from that, but then it's hard to get inside the bizarro world of someone whose entire existence is based upon trash-talking Philly.com blogs and articles. I guess you would call that "get-a-life" crisis.
baaaaa...I hate Reagan...baaaaa....Reagan bad....baaaa......liberals good....baaaaa....sign me up.....baaaa
Will, you forgot, obsessively trash-talking Philly.com is definitely batboy's entire existence. He also takes time on multiple occasions every day to think up and post his homoerotic fantasies.
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Cher lyrics? Will, word of advice. Quoting Cher won't impress anyone on the Pulizer committee. Now the Sloth on the other hand, that just sealed the deal. His obsession with you is now irreversible. Good luck with that.
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(1) Will quotes Cher lyrics. (2) Republican Attytood toadies line up to respond in anger one after the next. Hmmmm. I guess they consider Cher lyrics to be the domain of "conservatives." Not surprising, really, since they Attytood Republican toadies also post homoerotic fantasies daily.
Twitter and facebook are not 'news'. But they are a good place for erstwhile journalists to peddle their wares.
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My post was factually true, batboy. Yours was yet another in your long line of obsessive homoerotic fantasies about me.
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Sounds like Will The Shill Bunch is having a relapse of his teenage case of RDS (Reagan Derangement Syndrome). I know the type. I have some friends who are postal workers who still think Reagan is going to come back from the dead and privatize the post office. I guess Will The Shill thinks a second Jimmy Carter term or a Walter Mondale presidency would have really boosted the country...
The funniest part of your posting, batboy, is how you consistently protest that you're not angry. Thread after thread you spew hatred and anger. And now it turns out, not only at Attytood. Lol!
WIKI: "In October, 2008 a draft US Army intelligence report identified the popular micro-blogging service as a potential terrorist tool. The report said, "Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives."." Gee, why am I not surprised that Bunch would be promoting a terrorist-friendly networking service? Cue a post any day day now when it is soon to be revealed by one of our patriotic news organizations that the CIA might perhaps be monitoring the communications of AQ cells.
---}}} Cue a post any day day now when it is soon to be revealed by one of our patriotic news organizations that the CIA might perhaps be monitoring the communications of AQ cells. {{{--- Wow. the CIA might be monitoring AQ cell-phone calls? I'm sure that AQ could never figure that out if it weren't reported by some news organization. I mean, the fact that they changed their cell-phone usage way before the NYT article was published is pure coincidence, and of course, is unrealted to the fact BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS publicly boasted that AQs phones were being monitored - before the article was published. Sloboat, a question for you. Is their no issue that is too important for you to hold hostage to your fraudulent Republican toadyism?
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Keep spinning, batboy. Keep spinning. As usual, we get the "Angry? I'm not fricken angry, you Kos-Kook moron." The we get the "Angry, I'm not angry, you Kos-Kook moron. You're the one who's angry, not me." Next we'll get: "Angry, I'm not angry, you Kos-Kook moron. You're the one who's angry, not me. That's why I post daily, in multiple posts, about how you 'exploit' Guatamalans, and "wear fuchsia leotards. And it's also why I visit each Philly.com blog, daily, to whine incessantly about the bloggers."
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I'm angry.
January 5, 2009: Bunch declares something called "Twitter" the future of journalism. My friends, when you have a so-called newspaper reporter pin his hopes for the future of journalism on such, you can rest assure the word "dead" in the phrase "dead tree media" will take on a whole new & all too real meaning.
No, the Sloth has absolutely no anger issues what-so-ever. That's why he will do the utmost to convince himself and Will that everyone else is angry with his next 41 posts here today. Hey Table Pounding Sociopath, can you try and make a new year's resolution to quell your disgusting obesession of using the following words for 2009: Toady, lackey, scatalogical, homoerotic, namaste and yoga. Also, could you please stop screaming "I love Willy Bunches" from the spans of the Ben Franklin? Thanks. Ladies and Gentlmen, Table Pounding Sociopath, president and charter member of Yoga Failures International. BTW: R.French was looking for you...and he doesn't look happy.
Lol! Now we hear from bp on the subject. Yet another Attytood Republican toady who reads each an every one of my posts in detail, commits them to memory, insults me constantly, and then weighs to illogically explain how the time of the day he posts proves that he's not obsessed with me and proves he's not a loser. I guess when you calculate on an "atomic scale," that all makes sense.
Talking point sleuth: Do you really believe that when someone says "the CIA might perhaps be monitoring the communications of AQ cells", that they are referencing cell phone usage? You do know that "AQ cells" does not mean "AQ cell phones", don't you? Seriously?
Due tell, chief - just how do those AQ cells communicate? By smoke signal?
Umm, no. I simply just pointed out that you are the lone leotard-wearing, yoga-bending poster at 11pm on some random Thursday night, still spewing your hatred for anything not liberal, LONG after everyone else has left the office and continued living their lives. But yeah, you're right. Talking to yourself and responding 3 or 4 times to a 9 hour old post that everyone but you has forgotten doesn't make you dimented, or crazy, or unstable, or creepy, or friendless, or flat out utterly pathetic, or...well, you get the point. And, ladies and gents, please do not be misled. Toilet Paper Slimer has confused his kinky contortionist game he plays with his boytoy as yoga. I'm sure he's sorry for the confusion he has caused.
How about hand-written letters, yoga-fail? Or maybe even nefarious means such as coded bills of lading sent to shell companies? But I guess you're right with your assumption that somehow AQ and muslims are too dumb to use anything but cell phones in order to communicate. And stop trying to sound so sophisticated, you make 2 year olds sound more intelligent...it would be "Do tell..."
And while you're at it, chief, maybe you could explain what articles were referenced by the sloboat's comment about "patriotic news organizations that the CIA might perhaps be monitoring the communications of AQ cells" Were the, perchance, articles that discussed warrantless surveillance of phone communications?
You didn't answer my question....that is very telling. Sure, they can use cell-phones among the many and varied ways of communicating. What is obvious to all is that the writer was not limiting his remark to cell phones, but rather was saying that the CIA could be monitoring the gamut of communications methods that AQ cells would possibly use. It is also plain that your understanding of his post was that he meant strictly cell phones.
You don't comprehend what you read very well, do you sleuth? The comment about patriotic news organizations were referencing possible FUTURE articles about any type of AQ communications which will be written by patriotic news organizations. Not past articles, not strictly cell phone communication.....wow!
Neither is correct, chief. My assumption is that sloboat was referencing the NYT article that exposed the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance. I could be incorrect in that assumption, but you certainly have given no proof of such. Nice try, though.
It is my assumption that the term "patriotic news organizations" was a sarcastic reference. The sarcasm was based in sloboat's constant refrain that the NYT article on the Bush admin's warrantless surveillance was "traitorous," and gave away valuable information that could have put Americans in danger. This, despite the fact that no one has ever made a legit argument how the NYT article might really have changes the logistics of how terrorists function. Again, I might have interpreted sloboat's comment wrong - but that was my interpretation, and I stand by it as being the most likely.
Even if you were correct in that assumption, you would be incorrect that the warrantless surveillance controversy was exclusive to cell phone usage. Also at issue were landlines, text messaging, e-mail, web based communication, etc. You seem to be the type of individual who has a problem saying, "oops, my mistake". You'd rather make a fool of yourself twisting in the wind trying to make an obvious oversight into something entirely different.
The answer to your question is simple. Do I realize, and did I realize that the term "AQ cells" is not limited to AQ's usage of cell phone? Yes. I am, and was, aware of what a terrorist cell is. So there was no such confusion behind my earlier comment. As to the subject of the warrantless surviellance, you are right and I was wrong, it was not limited to cell phone usage. However, one of the bogus claims made to support the accusation that the NYT article was "traitorous" was that AQ chenged their phone usage methodologies after the publication of the article. In point of fact, that isn't true - they changed their methods well before the article was published - and the NYT article was published after high-ranking Bush admin officials already made public comments about surviellance of AQ communications. Again, "the writer" made a comment sarcastic comment - which I intepreted to be referencing the NYT article - and so my comment was on point. I may have been wrong about that assumption also, but I doubt it.
BTW, chief, you have provided no evidence of this claim ---}}} The comment about patriotic news organizations were referencing possible FUTURE articles about any type of AQ communications which will be written by patriotic news organizations. Not past articles, not strictly cell phone communication..... ---{{{ And, you were flat out wrong about this one ---}}} It is also plain that your understanding of his post was that he meant strictly cell phones. ---{{{ Now, you wouldn't be one of those people who has a problem saying "oops, my mistake," would you?
Actually what is clear is that you assumed that "sloboat" was making a sarcastic comment about left wing media bias. You wrote a reflexive reply trying to putdown this poster. In your haste, having read "AQ cells", you inadvertantly assumed that he was discussing CIA surveillance of cell phones (even though you knew better...you knew what terrorist cells were...but it just didn't dawn on you in your eagerness and you made a mistake that anyone could've made.) Since that point, you have been trying to put a positive spin on your error, because you seem to be unable to admit a mistake.
In the first instance he was referencing possible future articles through allusion to the past one. I was not wrong. And I don't need to provide proof that he was referencing future articles; just look at the sentence structure and verb tense. In the second instance, I was definitely wrong in my wording. It wasn't that your understanding of the post was that he meant cell phones...it was just that you were going to take a shot at that poster.
---))) In your haste, having read "AQ cells", you inadvertantly assumed that he was discussing CIA surveillance of cell phones ---{{{ And that would be wrong, chief. I made no such assumption. It is your assumption that I did, and you are wrong. I assumed that sloboat was referring to the NYT article, and responded accordingly. I didn't interpret his use of "cells" one way or the other. In fact, I didn't even notice his use of the term, but "in my haste" focused on his whining about the vast left-wing media bias. He has a long history of doing such. So, once again, chief, you were wrong, and continue to repeat your mistake even though I've informed you that you were wrong, and continue to base even other wrongful assumptions on an incorrect premise.
---}}} because you seem to be unable to admit a mistake. ---{{{ Lol! You're reading my posts very, very carefully - to the point of telling me what I was assuming in my comments, yet you missed where, in this thread, I admitted to making a mistake. Seems that you're more interested in showing me up than in actually determining what is and isn't factual, eh? You were wrong on the point you raised initially, and keep piling wrong assumption on your incorrect premise, even after I explained that you were wrong.
Ah well, stick to your guns if you must. It is clear to all what happened when you saw "CIA monitoring...AQ cells" and proceeded to write "the CIA might be monitoring AQ cell phone calls". Nah my mistake, it wasn't what it appeared to be AT ALL. Nope not at all. (pssst....wanna buy a bridge in Alaska?)
Chief...I'll save you some time and aggravation. TPS is a total fraud as evidenced by your sequence as well as many others. His dispicable arrogance does not allow him to admit he is wrong or accept his defeat. He would argue that the sky is fuscia (coincidentally the color of his contortionist leotard) and spin his way through the argument. His only weapon is the circular argument which spins and spins away, out of control and somehow no matter the debate he is ALWAYS right and the adversary leaves labeled a racist, lackey, toady or whatever other lame insult he'll throw. He is truly a coward and a dope. But then attacks me, b.atk, SBVFT, genius and a host of others calling us obsessed, angry, etc for doing essentially the exact same thing he is now doing to you. Table Pounding Sociopath looks at you as an easy target because you're not on here all hours of every day like he is. But unfortunately for the Yoga Sloth, you have now joined the ranks of the countless posters who have completely exposed him for the low-life fraud that he is. And now I'll cue Yoga-Fail to spit out some lame insult about the "atomic scale" or some other irrelavant rant. But the truth is, the Slimer has the most disturbing obsession with Will Bunch and defending his blog, while labeling everyone else angry, obsessed and racist.
Thanks bpphilly. I didn't know about all of the history with this guy, but it was quickly apparent to me that he is a spin doctor extraordinaire. No sane person would accept his "explanations", but it seems to make him feel better to spin away. Doesn't he ever engage in honest discussion/debate?
No prob...just like Manny, this is the Sloth being the Sloth...propogating his opinions as fact.
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LOL b.atk....what the h*ll does BWAAAAACK even mean??? What an obsessive, pyschopath the Yoga-Fail-Sloth is. Spewing his out of control hatred like Michael Richards at a low rent comedy club. Truly a disgraceful human being.
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About Will Bunch
Will's book: Learn about it here and purchase it here.
Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
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