The Young Curmudgeon

BREAKING: OSM to be PJM Again (UPDATED)

Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson have relented and given the name back to Christopher Lydon. Their note about it makes them sound unserious and like they don't know what they're doing. It also contradicts all of their previous notes on the subject (all of the stuff about how Lydon "relinquished" the name or "graciously agreed" to give it to them). In addition going back to the Pajams Media name now contradicts all the rhetoric about how Pajamas Media was an unserious name and how moving away from it was a recognition of growing up and that the blogosphere needs to learn to build things instead of just criticizing (hence the move from a Rathergate reference). It still makes the company look like it's run by amateurs, but at least they've given the name back to its rightful owners. In a way they should be grateful that the name problem has been forcibly solved for them. Now they just need to solve the problem of figuring out what they are and finding interesting content for their website.

UPDATE: Utterly essential (and hilarious) Dennis the Peasant reaction is up.

UPDATE: And Althouse. I agree with commenter Benjamin at Jeff Jarvis's that the marketing people were right and Pajamas Media is a bad name. (My problem with it being that it relates to an extremely inside baseball joke that can only be appreciated by blog geeks). The problem wasn't changing the name, but changing it to Open Source Media, which goes too far in the other direction, sounding too dull and corporate. And it was already in use to begin with. I'm not saying I can come up with a better name. Names are hard. Even if I could think of one I wouldn't post it for fear of somebody using it.

Further Roundup of OSM stuff

The Name Controversy

A complete explanation of this, from the person whose blog and radio show they tried to steal the name from, can be found here. Brendan also responds nicely to the bizarrely disingenuous "About Our Name" section of the OSM website, which has been changed multiple times, usually without acknowledgment. (Hmmm, multiple unacknowledged and disingenuously worded corrections which themselves contain inaccuracies. OSM is starting to remind me of some other "SM". Can't quite put my finger on it, hmmm . . .). He responds to the first stealth edit here and to the next one here. Now the note stands with a correction (really a correction of a correction of a correction or something by this point I think) that seems to finally jibe with Brendan Greeley at the real Open Source Media's version of events, but doesn't deal with the central question at all, that is the brand confusion issue, nicely explained by Jeff Jarvis here. Jeff also does a good job picking apart the ridiculously pompous and self-important tone of the disingenuous "About our Name" post:

The goal of our enterprise is to bring gravitas and legitimacy to the blogosphere

Oh, gag me with a mitre.

I don’t think that blogs need to have legitimacy laid upon them … and who died and made you the legitimizer?

And gravitas? Good God, big, old media has an oversupply of that. That’s what got them in such trouble. And that’s what we’re running away from.

Previously, I was merely amused and confused by whatever-we-should-call whatever-it-is. Now I’m cringing as I await the sound of trains crashing.

The latest wrinkle in the story is that Roger and Brendan are going to talk sometime this week. Do you think Roger'll turn on the charm like he did with Ann Althouse? (see bottom of that particular post). That certainly worked out well! Seriously what's disturbing about this name thing is that it means that at a minimum they've never heard of Open Source Media, a fairly well-known weblog and radio show. Unforgivable for someone trying to do what they're trying to do. On top of that, it means that they didn't do a basic search to see if anyone in the same field had the same name, a basic first step when starting up any new business which even I knew about as little as I know about business. And that's from interpreting the facts in the best possible light. More sinisterly, maybe they knew full well that the name was already being used and they thought that they could somehow use the power of the conservative blogosphere to bully their way into stealing it. I'd believe anything after what we've seen these last few days.

In a hilarious bit of high-concept punditry blogger Don Surber has renamed his blog Open Source Media.

The Luke Ford Controversy

Not enough has been said about this part of the story. Matt Welch summarizes the episode concisely. Luke Ford, exasperating as he can be, is an American original and a good writer who would have definitely helped the site greatly. Casting him aside at the last minute, however, was not unforgivable in and of itself, just unprofessional and rude. What's more troubling is thinking of what must have lead to the decision to do so. As Welch writes "I just hope that Pajamas acted as it did because it somehow didn't realize that Luke was still writing about porn, which if true would just mean that they were remiss in not conducting basic due diligence, and that they have a prudish take on what is acceptable. Any other explanation I can think of (and I'll post 'em as I get 'em) suggests something considerably worse."

Some good speculation on the "considerably worse" can be found here. Cathy Seipp admits in this National Review Online column that Ford was dropped "at the insistence of the porn-hating main Pajamas investor." So, this all begs the question who is this double super-secret main investor who seems to really call the shots?

The Best Account Yet of the Party and of the Launch Generally

I've been meaning to link to this. It's simply one of the best pieces of writing I've seen on the internet in months and one of the best blog posts I've ever seen. It's really a read-the-whole-thing situation with this, but I can't resist excerpting a large portion of it here and, forgive me, bolding the parts I most agree with. I've never seen anyone so deftly puncture the pomposity of blogs, bloggers, and of OSM. It's from Jim Lowne, a photojournalist and writer and friend of Tim Blair:

Apart from Blair and the ever-lovely Cathy Seipp, I didn’t know a face in the room. But people seemed friendly and introduced themselves as they tried to get closer and speak with Blair, or better yet, have a picture taken with him.

“Are you a blogger?” I was asked repeatedly.

“Well, I have a blog…” I would answer.

At about this point, Blair would jump in and introduce me as photographer and tell highly exaggerated stories about me shooting wars and covering September 11th. It was here that I started to get a different read on some of the people gathered in the function room. The internet is this incredible thing that allows access to an amazing flow of information from all over the planet. But a blog is really about everyone’s own little world. And some of these folks truly lived in their own little worlds.

Blair was making up stories about me in Bosnia and then said something about covering 9-11.

“So, you went right from the war in Bosnia to 9-11?” asked one woman. The woman next to her also eagerly awaited my answer.

I just looked at them and said not exactly. There was a six year gap between events. In all fairness, why should they know or care about the Balkan wars from 10 years ago? I was there, so it is matters to me, but I can’t fault anyone for a lack of knowledge about it.

The women, both 40ish and well-dressed, seemed nice and reasonably intelligent but disturbingly disconnected from the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. It was as if they had mentioned a class in college they once took and had some authority on the subject. I mean, did anyone actually “go to 9-11”?

The September 11 attacks quickly became the meat of the conversation. But these nice folks didn’t mention the horror or death or the survivors or the wounding of a city or brave firefighters or fatherless children. They didn’t even offer a personal tale of the day. There were no “I remember exactly what I was doing when I heard” stories.

The talk went straight to the media coverage. One woman made comments about how the flow of information about it all slowed dramatically in the weeks shortly after the attacks. Why did “they” stop showing certain pictures from that day, another asked. A mainstream media conspiracy was afoot, it seemed to them. It was clear to me that none of them have ever worked in the news business.

I believe many of these people have come up with the information equivalent of the biggest mistake in dirty politics. As we know in politics, it’s not the alleged crime but the cover-up that takes you down. To some of these bloggers, it is not the story that matters but the coverage. And they want to use the coverage to take down whatever news outlet doesn’t fit in their world.

Not long into the 9-11 conversation, Blair mercifully suggested we retreat to the overpriced bar in the hotel lobby so I could finally get a drink and a fresh conversation. He went up to the bar to refill his wine glass and took my martini order while I waited in a little drinking area. There I met two gentlemen who were still buzzing on the possibilities of Open Source Media, and some wine I would guess, too.

One gent was a tall, quiet Dutchman who flew down for the OSM launch from his home in Vancouver. The other guy said he was a professor at a university in Boston. Since I knew absolutely nothing about OSM or any of these people, I decided to do something a decent reporter would do; if I opened my mouth it was only to sip my drink or to ask a question.

I asked the Boston guy if he was a blogger. It seems like the right question with this crowd.

“I’m thinking about it,” he said.

“What would you blog about if you had a blog,” I then asked.

“It's clear in my mind but I can’t put it into words,” he said after an incredibly long pause.

Thankfully, he was wise enough to put off his blog launch until he figured out the words part. But he had no shortage of words verbally. Boston guy praised former New York Times reporter Judith Miller who spoke at an OSM event earlier in the afternoon. He said he could understand her hesitation to start a career in blogging after leaving the Times. I asked him what the risk was for her.

“She wouldn’t have the protection, the layers, the editors to shield her from criticism,” he said. “It would be just her putting her words out there for everyone to pounce on.”

“She could turn off the comments section on her blog,” I offered.

“She would really be making herself vulnerable.”

“Well, most reporters have thick skins to begin with,” I said

“Yes, there is a think skin, but this would put her reputation at stake,” Boston guy said.

“Didn’t she do that when she fucked up?” I asked

The whole Miller thing went flat, so I asked him about what Open Source Media was going to do or be.

“It is going to take on the mainstream media.”

“Like a wire service?” I asked.

“No, not exactly.”

“How exactly will it work?”

He really didn’t have an answer. Actually, the few people I spoke with didn’t seem to have any clear or detailed answers of what exactly OSM was going to be or do. But Boston guy sure did know it was going to be bad for the mainstream media, especially the New York Times.

“There was no mainstream media coverage of the French Intifada for the first five days.”

The what? At first I thought he had a speech problem or too much wine but then realized he meant the rioting in France. I hadn’t caught that term. Clever, I thought. And Boston guy was clearly proud about being clever enough to use a clever term.

“You mean to tell me that there wasn’t a wire service there at the start?”

“Well, the New York Times didn’t report about it for the first five days.”

This could have been true. I didn’t know since I hadn’t been following the story that closely. It sounded like classic rioting with all the classic reasons for rioting. It was horrible but wasn’t directly affecting my life, as I was working very hard to get a guy elected governor of New Jersey. People riot for a reason, things burn and then change comes for better or worse. The long-term effects and the French government’s plan and policies are the interesting stories down the road.

In any event, I tried to explain to Boston guy why it wasn’t exactly a massive international story the first night of rioting. A local story at best, perhaps a national story in France. The story only got legs as it dragged out night after night.

“Bloggers were all over it the first night,” he said.

“That’s great,” I said and meant it. “I am sure they had some great first person accounts to share.”

“No, they reported it the first night!”

“Um, how?”

“They were all over the French Intifada.”

“Sorry, I didn’t see any of that,” I apologized.

“It took the New York Times five days.”

Nothing I could say would change Boston guy’s mind that there was some media conspiracy being led by the New York Times. Even worse, Blair still hadn’t delivered my martini.

The conversation went around in circles with me asking about how OSM could do it better and what exactly was wrong with the Times. Finally my drink arrived but any enjoyment was short lived.

“You are of the second millennium,” Boston guy spat at me, in French no less.

“Excuse me, but you don’t know anything about me.”

“I can tell by your reactions.”

“You are presumptuous and insulting,” I replied.   

He didn’t care. I did not get it or agree with his gospel, as far as he was concerned, so I was ignorant. The New York Times and the mainstream media are both evil. That was it. That was all that mattered to him. And when he gets his blog that’s what he will write about, everyone who disagrees be damned.

Before harsher words or fists flew, I downed the martini and grabbed Blair for a smoke outside.

Fuming, I bitched to Blair about the self-important clown while pulling on a Marlboro. Blair told me to forget about it. The guy probably had too much wine. Whatever, he wasn’t worth the energy. Besides the beautiful Filipino woman who asked for a light was far more worthy of attention.

Blair and I talked much nonsense with the beauty as we smoked. He said we were in business together.

“What kind of business?” she asked.

“Big business,” he lied.

“Oh, I like big,” she smiled.

I don’t think Blair caught that and I let it pass but I was a little concerned when he invited the beauty to join us for a drink. One Gray Goose Sea Breeze with a splash of orange for her, and I moved to scotch.

“So, would you like to come back to my hotel?” she quietly asked me as we stood in a group of bloggers.

I was trying to think of a polite way to say I don’t have that kind of money. So, I smiled at her dumbly instead and sipped my drink.

In this new group of people around us at the bar was a blogger woman who lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and her investment banker husband. She said she likes to blog about art and literature, things that move her, some things that don’t. She was very sweet and excited about meeting all these other bloggers.

I asked her husband about blogging and he hadn’t a clue but was happy his wife was so thrilled with it. Since he was an investment banker, I asked what he thought of OSM as a business. He said he wasn’t hopeful, and it reminded him of the internet bubble. It was hard to disagree.

Soon Blair and I were chatting with the beauty again.

“So what do you do?” he asked her.

“Anything,” she smiled

“No, I mean how do your earn money?”

“I believe she already answered that question,” I piped in.

She just smiled, still looking for a ride back to her hotel, and for the first time ever I saw Tim Blair speechless.

Once he was able to talk again, Blair and I went outside once more for a smoke. The bloggers faded away from the bar and the beauty thanked us for the drink and said good night. I watched her walk away up Lexington alone and realized she was the only person I had meet at the Open Source Media after-party who was truly open and who had a solid business plan.

(Emphasis Mine.) And I think that's all that really needs to be said.

 

Big Roundup Post on OSM/Open Source Media/Open Sores Media/Pajamas Media/Name to be Announced Media Problems and Controversies

Woooh doggies! So that whole have-a-splashy-launch-to-create-good-buzz-early thing didn't go too well, huh? Unless you've been living under a rock, or getting your news entirely from Roger L. Simon, Charles Johnson, and Jeff Goldstein, (which is to say again, unless you've been living under a rock . . .) you know that what Jeff Jarvis aptly calls the "trainwreck known variously as Pajamas Media, Open Source Media, OSM, and Open Sores Media," has come under a lot of fire since the moment of its birth and even before. And it's not just that the recently launched web thingy (criticism one, what the hell is it?) with the constantly changing name (probably changing for the third time soon) is being criticized by its natural enemies on the left (which it is and with some cogency), it's also being criticized by right-of-center law professors, political conservatives who have been screwed over by Roger L. Simon, and even members of its own "editorial board." At this point, the only people defending the project outright are bloggers who have signed up for it who must be worried about their ad revenues. The haziness of the business plan (if there can really be said to be one), the lack of interesting content on the website itself, and even the business ethics of the CEO himself have all been questioned, and seemingly all with good reason.

Since I happen to have been at the launch I thought I would write a post partially from the perspective of seeing if any of these fears were allayed by actually being there. Let me say a couple of things as caveats. First of all, unlike a lot of the people who are talking about this, this is only the second ever launch of a product, service, publication, website or anything I've ever been to. The first one was the party Nick Denton threw when he was launching the weblogs Screenhead, Lifehacker, Kotaku, and Jalopnik. Let's start there though. The difference between the two affairs seems instructive. At Denton's event there was no full day of panels and blah blah, no Rainbow Room, why, there wasn't even a "keynote address" by a disgraced former New York Times staffer. Imagine that! (I think Jayson Blair had a previous engagement snorting coke in the bathroom of Siberia or something). The entire event consisted of an open bar and hors d'ouevres over a couple of hours inside an Audi showroom. An Audi showroom you say? Yes, you see, they probably got the space for free because Audi was there big advertiser. Cutting costs and having big name advertisers set up as you launch as oppposed to just talking about how you'll have them in the future!? Madness, I know.

My second caveat is that, unlike a lot of these cogent critics, I know nothing about business, on-line or off, and have made a pathetically small amount of money in my life. Why, my trying to opine about OSM's viability as a business model would make about as much sense as a fiction writer with no business experience wanting to be CEO of a multi-million dollar company. That said, the criticism coming from people who do know about business and have made money in their life, especially Jeff Jarvis and Kenton E. Kelly aka Dennis the Peasant is much more convincing to the business layperson than the defenses (such as they are) coming from the OSM crowd, characterized as they are by whiny poses of martyrdom and facile, defamatory charges of stalking. What are you doing here Roger? Channeling Paul Krugman when he accused Donald Luskin of stalking him? It's called criticism. I went into the OSM launch event neither a believer nor a non-believer as to whether it would make money, and have only caught up on the discussions of that question after the launch, now I'm a definite non-believer and the conversion process was a lot of fun. And I owe it all to Dennis the Peasant. Really, if you're interested in this stuff and you haven't done so yet, you need to read the whole saga of his posts on why OSM/Pajamas/whatever was a doomed venture from the start. Just started around here and keep going forward. Of course, he's insanely bitter and has his own agenda, which he's completely up front about, but he also makes a lot of specific points about how the whole thing won't work that I've yet to see refuted.

My other caveat turns out not really to be caveat, my very small relationship to the project and to the people involved, one I share in common with virtually every blogger who gets more than ten hits a day. (A lot of these stories of initial discussions with Pajamas Media which lead nowhere can be found in the survey responses and comments to this James Joyner post.) On March 22, 2005 Roger L. Simon sent me an e-mail inviting me to "join a company in formation called Pajamas Media aimed at making substantially more money for bloggers and also increasing their importance." Since I'm all for increasing my money and importance I signed an NDA and I think two other agreements without much hesitation.  I certainly didn't have the hesitation that a lot of the bloggers who were early critics did, that Pajamas Media wouldn't give them the flexibility or the money that BlogAds already did, because I didn't have any ads. I've never had any illusions that blogging should make a lot of money. Recently, Typepad has instituted a service where you get ads from something called kanoodle and this now pays for my Typepad "pro" level subscription. This still seems like a great coup to me. My hobby now pays for itself. In fact, I was the ideal candidate for a Pajamas Media blogger as it was being explained at the time, a 150 visitor a day type of guy (at the time) who would just love to be aggregated with other low-but-not-non-existent-traffic blogs to buy ads, who wasn't on blog ads, and who didn't expect much. Anyway, some months went by and I heard nothing back from them. My thought was that this was either because a) My political leanings were drifting farther and farther from those of the other Pajamistas, or b) I was blogging less and less frequently. I wrote Roger an e-mail in late September asking what was going on. He said I was still welcomed to come on board, and put me in touch with Nina Yablok, an attorney who is also conservative blogger Ed Driscoll's wife. I went back and forth with her a couple of times but nothing came of it. So this was the state of play as I went to the launch event: I thought I still had a chance to be part of the venture and I wanted to be. So, in fact my bias was pro-OSM.

So, was OSM's business model explained and were the critiques answered if you attended the launch? That would have to be a resounding "no". First of all, there were the embarrassing technical glitches, the disastrous panels, the fact that Judith Miller was the keynote speaker. These could all be seen as sideshows though, if they presented and explained their product in a way that made it appealing and understandable. But, I've noticed something troubling (for the company) when I look over my multiple earlier posts on the launch: I actually forgot to mention the moment when Charles Johnson, put the site on the screen. You know, the actual launch part of the launch. That's because it was that forgettable and lasted about 10 seconds. The site moved painfully slowly and Johnson didn't go on to explain any special features of the site or anything (if they exist). What appeared, what still appears is nothing new, or particularly interesting: clunkily written news stories "compiled by OSM staff", links to wire service stories (as many have pointed out, most of which ironically come from the Chinese Communist government's Xinhua news service). This is all fine and well, but I fail to see how it will be a new "hybrid of journalism and blogging" or how it will revolutionize either, but the breathless tone of all of their announcements etc. have said that it is and it will. They've been so self-important and pretentious about everything they've made themselves easy targets. Like a lot of other people who were actually there, I have no better understanding now of exactly what OSM means to be and that has to be a bad sign.

Anyway, if you haven't read it yet read Dennis the Peasant's/Kenton E. Kelly's detailed account of getting screwed over by Roger L. Simon. Contrast that with Roger's only defense thus far, which is essentially that verbal agreements are meaningless to him. See which one you think is more compelling. You may not need good ethics or manners to succeed in business, but I can't imagine that this much taint attached to the CEO of a brand new company is a good thing.

The Party

Now we're finally onto the party, the final installment of this epic four-part saga. First of all, everyone should read Karol's account of the party. She does the best write-ups of parties, really capturing the feeling of being there. And Karol is damn right about the quality of the open bar booze. That was one area at least in which OSM was on point. But, what's this about there being something wrong with drinking Merlot. I mean, yes, yes I know a nice Pinot Noir of Shiraz would be preferable but at least it's red wine.

I myself chose to have a few glasses of the Merlot as well as a couple Martinis, upon hearing this Ace of Spades said "That's good. They say you should mix." Well met sir. For some reason I don't dig his over-the-top online persona but the couple of times I've met him in person I've found him funny. And it was nice to see his commitment to his various ventures. He was immediately on the "get" for the radio show when he saw Cliff May in the room.

I talked to Cathy Seipp. (It turns out her last name rhymes with pipe not seep or tape, all three of which I had thought were equally likely). We talked about David Ehrenstein, this crazy lefty commenter at her site, (who is also a published author apparently). She said he was a really nice guy in person, always wears a nice blazer etc., just gets crazy on-line. Also, he lives in LA without a car so he spends a lot of time stuck in his house. That explains it.

I talked to these two friends of the charming Englishman in New York. They were photographers. One had some sort of UK accent I couldn't place and the other some sort of continental European accent I couldn't place. I thought they were the most hilarious people there, but maybe because they caught me when I was at the perfect point on the graph of drunkenness.

I talked to this Jewish guy named Ben about the great Gene Wilder/Harrison Ford film The Frisco Kid. He said that in the late 70s when it came out he took his family to see it and the older generation all assumed it was anti-Semitic. The kids explained to them that it wasn't, that it was quite the opposite. Now it's a beloved favorite of his whole family. He said that the very fact that he's alive at all is a miracle. I felt like crying, but in a good way.

I didn't really approach any of the gazillion huge name bloggers there. I guess I didn't want to appear sycophantic or something. I spent most of my time during the party proper with Judith, Mary, or Karol. When the party was over many of us repaired to one of the downstairs bars. I talked for a long time with Clive Davis, not the music guy, the real Clive Davis. It was a great conversation and we see eye to eye on a lot of stuff. He agrees that it's ridiculous how people slagged Andrew Sullivan off for his pledge drives and vacations. We talked about how surprising Blair's reaction to 9/11 was and how there was no one else in English politics to carry Blair's foreign policy forward.

All the while Glenn Reynolds was in deep, deep conversation with Pamela of Atlus Shrugs.

I also briefly met the legitimately funny (not just by blog standards) Tim Blair. He's a really, nice friendly unassuming great laid back guy, just like everybody says.

Judith Miller/Senator John Cornyn at OSM Launch

And now we move on to the most star-studded part of the day. Lisa Ramaci, Judith and I were all seated one table away from the table of "luminaries" which included John Podhoretz, David Corn, Roger L. Simon, Charles Johnson, Kate Lee - superstar literary agent to all the bloggers including Glenn Reynolds - and eventually Judith Miller. Now far be it from me to criticize the choice of Judith Miller as keynote speaker, because that of course would make me an enemy of free speech, so I'll just do some straight reporting of what she had to say.

Ostensibly she was there to talk about a federal shield law for journalists and whether it would apply to some or to any bloggers. She spent about five minutes on that topic. The rest of the time, for the millionth time, she went over the details of her story, which everyone who wanted to know and doesn't live on Mars should know by heart by now. What her tale of woe and self-martyrdom had to do with Open Source Media no one knew.

Let me interject here that Judith Miller is one hot middle-aged woman. She is petite and has a very sexy voice and an appealing, quasi-flirtatious manner. I can easily see why she's so good at getting information and access. I don't mean that in any snide way, nor do I remotely mean to suggest that she's had an "improper relationship" with anyone, I just mean I think she probably uses feminine wiles of the more subtle sort to get powerful men to open up to her. Now only if she would vet what they were saying to her more instead of just transcribing it and putting it in the paper.

After regaling us with the passion of Saint Judy she finally got around to talking about the shield law, the only thing she said which remotely had anything to do with blogging or new media in any way. She said that the federal shield law which she's advocating for would cover all journalists and some bloggers. She was very clear about this point. She thinks that there is some kind of bright line that can be drawn between God-fearing, respectable blogs which would get the shield protection, and blogs that deal in (her words) "humor" and "vitriol" which wouldn't. I think this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

The floor was open to questions then which meant that it was time for the big shots to talk. A bunch of them had shown up just for the Judith Miller portion of the day. The first question was John Podhoretz. The next was Bill McGowan. The third was Jay Rosen.

Rosen's question was the most penetrating. He said that he was watching MacNeil/Lehrer over the summer and Bill Keller had said that despite the fact that he supported a federal shield law for journalists he admitted that the Judith Miller case would not have fallen under it and should have been a case of her going to jail in an act of civil disobedience, just as it was without the law. Given that, she goes all around the country and talks about her case when she's advocating for the shield law. Shouldn't she make it clear that her boss says that her case wouldn't be covered?  Miller responded that her lawyers tell her she would have been covered and one of the authors of the legislation told her he would have been covered, so it's a gray area.

There was a question I was burning to ask but didn't because if the intimidating crowd, one related to Rosen's question. I wanted to ask this: The idea of having a shield law for journalists is premised on protecting whistleblowers. At least, that's the only conceivable justification I can think of for it. However, in this case we're not talking about a whistleblower. If you buy into the premise that leaking Valerie Plame's name and the fact that she worked for the CIA was this horrible crime possibly endangering national security, which I don't at all but that was more or less the premise of the investigation and it was the position that the New York Times itself staked out over the course of multiple editorials, then we're looking at a situation in which the very act of speaking to the reporter was a crime. Ergo, by not giving up her notes or testifying you, Judith Miller, (again, if you buy into the premise that Valerie Plame was actually an undercover agent covered by the relevant statute) were covering up a crime. We're pretty far removed from the whistleblower scenario here aren't we? So, anyway, are you saying that journalists and certain (non humorous, non-vitriolic) bloggers should have a special law passed for them which allows them to cover up crimes with impunity? That can't be what you're saying is it?

I know, silly question.

Next was Senator John Cornyn, who was beamed in to appear on a screen in the front of the room. Though, like most politicians, he was very boring to listen to, he was also pro-blog and had the right ideas about not having blogs become regulated political speech.

The left-wing journalist Russ Baker was deeply disturbed at the Senator's egalitarianism. He asked a question which made what I find to be the most tiresome of old media's anti-blog arguments, but journalists have all this training and knowledge and special expertise so how can you compare them to just some guy with a computer and yadda yadda yadda. The Senator had a good reaction, he pointed to Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair and all the other debacles and how they seem to all come from people who've had all the special training so how can you posit a bright line distinction between journalist and joe schmoe?

The Political Panel

The political panel included John Podhoretz, Richard Fernandez of the blog "The Belmont Club", David Corn, Claudia Rosett, and Larry Kudlow as the moderator.

For most of the panel Fernandez closed his eyes and tilted his head back as if her were deep, deep in thought. On the few occasions in which he did speak he started using terminology from I'm not sure what discipline - software? engineering? - I'm not sure what, but I certainly didn't understand what he was trying to say. He doesn't know how to do panels.

David Corn makes a good point out the outset which is that blogs are mostly dependent upon the MSM to gather facts. I think OSM is supposed to get blogs more in the business of gathering facts themselves somehow, but nothing I saw yesterday indicated how that would happen. Corn's point doesn't really go far enough though. Blogs are actually dependent upon the MSM for the vast majority of their content period, as that content is mostly reaction to and criticism of the MSM. I even wonder if most of the bloggers in the room would actually like to see improvements by the MSM. What would there be left to talk about. Of course you could always talk about someone not reporting things your way and how that means they're "biased".

Fernandez manages to say one comprehensible thing here which is worth responding to. He says "blogging is the revenge of the guy with the day job." This is true if your day job is law professor, or software developer or think thank fellow or if you're some kind of consultant who works from home or something like that. Try blogging when you have a regular day job where you have to go to a cubicle and your boss is constantly hovering over you and internet is probably filtered or you're not allowed to use it at all.

J-Pod says that he has special qualifications and there's really no reason anyone should listen to him, but he's an MSM opinion leader and "there's a mystique to being an MSM opinion leader that isn't earned," whereas "in blogs the authority comes from the work.

Kudlow winds up for a long time into a question. He says he's reading the new Doris Kearns Goodwin Lincoln book (J-Pod asks "Who wrote it?") and in the book there's a lot of stuff about the various political races Lincoln was in in the 1850's and of course 1860 and how back then there were innumerable different explicitly partisan papers who would all report the exact same debates etc. with completely different storylines. The point obviously is that we now have the same kind of situation with blogs and everything's just hunky-dory and no one should strive to mute their bias at all. The exact question he asks David Corn is whether this sort of Lincoln-era situation is okay and everyone should just let-'er-rip or if individual sites should strive to be "balanced". (Paraphrasing except for last word obvs.)

Corn makes an interesting comment, which is that the internet in general has put opinion journalism on the same footing as traditional "objective" news, since you can so easily click from the New York Times coverage of an event to that of The Nation or National Review depending on your persuasion. He also makes what I think to be the second most important point made during the panel, (He also made the first most important later.) which is that with blogs and internet opinion journalism "everyone has self-ghettoized". This is true and is one of the most disturbing features of this new media age we live in. Initially, it started with the MSM, which as Podhoretz correctly said later "thought they weren't a niche when they were.", but now a conservative counter-niche has been created through talk radio, cable TV, blogs etc. in which the inhabitants also don't think they're a niche. OSM/Pajamas Media has made various noises about trying to do something about rectifying this problem, but I fail to see how bringing together over 70 bloggers who all are (to varying degrees albeit) pro-Bush, pro-war etc. does this. Not that there's anything wrong with putting together a partisan site in the same way that the Huffington Post did, but I just don't see where all the talk of intending to "foster dialogue" etc. comes from.

I'll just move on to Corn's best point, which he phrased in the form of a question, something along the lines of: Isn't there value at least to the aspiration to be objective, accurate, to get things right? No one really touched with a ten-foot pole, I think because the question points to a huge problem with the way the endlessly lionized bloggers there view blogging. There's this idea that you can be as intellectually lazy, as resistant to dissonant data as you want, and as long as your explicit in your bias, as long as your bias is blatant not latent, that this is okay. While it's correct to point out the MSM's frequent failures to live up to their professed objectivity, I agree with Corn that the ideal, the aspiration to be not objective maybe but how about intellectually honest, to not be totally blinded by your  biases should not be forgotten. It's a pity that so many bloggers have forgotten this ideal, using the excuse of "Hey at least I'm up front about my bias."

The panel closed with Kudlow asking Rosett if we will all end up working for the UN? She said that we should all take to our blogs to stop that from happening. She said the midnight ride of Paul Revere was a good reference point.

At that it was time to file out for the traditional rubber chicken (I actually didn't think it was that bad) and Judith Miller and the afternoon speakers. This was actually the most exciting part of the day for me, because it was when I got to experience what sincerely was one of the greatest honors of my life, meeting and hanging out with Lisa Ramaci, widow of murdered journalist Steven Vincent. Unlike someone who merely types and cuts and pastes links into browser windows all day Steven Vincent was a true hero, someone who put himself in harm's way and eventually lost his life trying to observe first-hand the liberation he advocated for.

Lisa Ramaci is an incredible person, warm, open, unassuming and intellectual, a medieval history expert. She spoke of trips with her husband to Viet Nam before relations were normalized and even to Iran, where it turned out everyone was pro-American. She talked about her husband's memorial service, with representatives from the fetish scene, the downtown arts scene, conservative politics etc. and is going to send me a DVD of it to watch. Like Steven Vincent, she's a true American original and an utterly amazing person. Meeting her and actually getting to talk to her at length made my day and meant a hell of a lot more than meeting some blogger or journalist.

Impressions From the Open Source Media Launch Event

Yesterday was an amazing day and it was a great privilege to be a part of it. I don't mean that it was a historic day in the development of media or anything like that. I still, like Jeff Jarvis, don't really understand what this venture is all about, and this is after having attended the launch. I also think that, despite the fact of its train-wreck-like quality, Dennis the Peasant's relentless, vitriolic critique of Pajamas/Open Source Media does raise some good points. (Also see Ann Althouse here and here questioning why bloggers who are already getting a good income from blogads would want to sign up with OSM in the first place.)

No, it was an amazing day just in the fact that it got a group of smart, absurdly varied bloggers and journalists and other strange personages together at the same few events, which made for a lot of fun and some real moments of intellectual/cultural frisson. Also, the party had an open bar.

It was an amazing day for me personally just in that I got to meet so many people, some of them people I admired greatly or read already or whatever, and I also got to re-connect with so many people I hadn't seen in awhile and connect better with people I only sort of knew.

What follows will be an exhaustive account of my impressions:

I started the day talking to Boi from Troy. I asked him what his brief stint editing Wonkette was like. He talked about how hard it was dealing with all of the e-mail from Wonkette's rabid lefty audience wanting him to pursue dubious anti-Bush conspiracy theories and rumors.

Next I hung out a bit with blogging wunderkind Steven I. Weiss, of Canonist, CampusJ and countless other blogs and other outlets before that. I talked to him about my interest in learning more about Jewish thought (no secret to anyone who really knows me) and he hipped me to some authors whose names I've forgotten now.

Then it was time for the morning panels and launch. The table I was at included a diverse group of people. There was Weiss, a student from the New School Media Studies program, a Japanese reporter from Nikkei (which I guess is a news service as well as the stock exchange) and Stephen Green, aka Vodka Pundit. I didn't talk to him, but what I noticed about him that day was his clothes. For the day time portion of the proceedings he was wearing a salt and pepper blazer and some sort of gray slacks with an ordinary white shirt blue tie combo. But, for the cocktail hour he was in a very slick dark suit with a burgundy pocket square (though it was double-breasted and I don't know how I feel about that). Multiple costume changes like he's hosting the Oscars or something! Wow! (Actually a lot of people put on fancier clothes for the evening, something I couldn't do because I live in the suburbs.).

The first speaker was Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge's right-hand man, the guy somehow involved in founding the Huffington Post, the guy behind the new breitbart.com newswire etc. etc. He's a charming, laid-back guy and I wish he'd done more stuff over the course of the day. I saw him at the party that night and he was hilarious (or maybe I was just drunk).

He said that this was the first launch he'd ever been to at which Parliament-Funkadelic wasn't playing and maybe that was a good thing. He said he'd been on-line for 10 years, literally. He noted that being involved with Huffington Post he was in competition with OSM, but here he was introducing them, because "in the blogosphere we're all friends". (Ahhhhhh) He went on to introduce Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson and say that they were both heroes. Over-the-top encomiums and reckless throwing around of the h-word quickly became the order of the day.

Roger L. Simon was the next speaker. First he tried to explain the name change. He said that Pajamas Media was conceived in ironic recognition of a moment in media history. (The whole Jon Klein, president of CNN calling bloggers just some guys in their pajamas thing.) He then went on to recount the Rathergate thing as an illustration of the power of blogging. But the purpose of this venture is not merely to criticize but to create. Or "Times have changed but with changing times comes responsibility." (Hence the new name.)

He said the Open Source Media was to be "a hybrid of journalism and blogging."  He said it will have "elaborate fact-checking protocols" and "a firm firewall between news and opinion," and that it will "publicize errors on the front page."

He then went on to say that OSM will be "citizen journalism, not created by elites, top-down" but will instead be "grassroots" etc. etc.

Roger then turned it over to José Guardia, the "Western European Editor" of OSM, leading to one of many technical hiccups that would take place over the course of the day. Guardia appeared in the form of a really crappy looking Windows Media file of some kind, with bad resolution, lots of audio hiss and pop, and constant freeze-framing. It was literally painful to look at. I still don't really understand who the audience of this day-long event was meant to be but if it was to include media or potential investors and not just people who were already cheerleaders then I can't imagine this looked good to them.

Roger took over again. He said that the goal was "not to overthrow the MSM but to enhance it." He also said that OSM intended to "foster dialogue", meaning dialogue between those of different political persuasions. To this end OSM has commissioned studies by Princeton. He quoted one study which supposedly shows that 43% of Americans are uncomfortable being called "conservative", "liberal", or even "moderate". Interesting if true obviously. Roger's conclusion: "Hybrids aren't just for cars."

Roger then went into the usual spiel that anyone launching a new venture involving blogging does: Blog readers are affluent, early adopters, opinion leaders etc. Which in short means that they're members of the elite, which probably means that bloggers are members of the elite. So tell me again how blogging empowers the common man Professor Reynolds?

Finally, Roger informed everyone that OSM would also have "lifestyle blogs", meaning blogs on sports, fashion, pop culture etc. This signaled a major problem with OSM's approach, one which would become more apparent during the disastrous, cringeworthy "fashion panel". What seems to have happened is that as an afterthought they thought they should somehow bring on board some "fun" (i.e. non-political) blogs, but since no one involved with OSM ever reads non-political blogs (seemingly) or seemingly knows anything about pop culture, they made a couple of mistakes in how they did this. One: the very idea of cordoning off a part of the site and putting a big sign up saying "fun" or "lifestyle" is a bad one. This is not how the human mind works. You don't all of a sudden say "Okay, brain I want you now to focus exclusively on silly, fun thoughts about America's Next Top Model" and then "Okay, now it's time for serious political thoughts and nothing else," particularly in the internet age, in which at the click of a mouse you can go from a deconstruction of Plamegate to a deconstruction of a Lost episode to a deconstruction of a bad celebrity outfit. The best blogs shift gears all the time, whether it's Andrew Sullivan talking about Madonna in the midst of inveighing against the Bush administration's torture policies or Karol alternating between hip-hop and conservative politics or Ken alternating between conservative politics and relationship stuff. A sense of fun and awareness of pop culture should be infused throughout all the writing on the site, in the manner of the great New York Observer or even the way Gawker mixes in serious topics, albeit approached obliquely. If you ghettoize the fun to a fun zone labeled "fun zone" you risk killing the, um, fun. Second, they didn't get very good fun bloggers, which became apparent during the panel.

This panel was one of the most bizarre spectacles I've ever witnessed and would justify an epic-length post in and of itself. First of all, there was a high-concept conceit to the panel which went amazingly badly due to technical issues. The panel was supposed to be moderated by The Manolo who's one of those bloggers with an annoying on-line persona shtick. Because he's anonymous his moderating was to be piped in over the speakers from somewhere else. The trouble was he was on an enormous delay. Judith says 10 seconds here. To me it felt more like about 5 minutes.

Tom Julian, this corporate coolhunter guy, was also trying to moderate on-site.  Beyond the technical glitch, he was clueless as a moderator. The discussion was directionless and awkward. The only thing memorable about it was that Elizabeth Hayt, an NYT fashion journalist, bravely showed up. And I say bravely pointedly, to contrast her dignified bearing with the hooting and hollering that occurred both in the room and on-line for her daring to depart from the blog triumphalist mood of the day.

She stated at the outset that when she was booked she told the guy on the phone that she doesn't blog, she hates blogs, and thinks blogs are absurd so she didn't know why they were booking her. He said "That's why we want you." She was brought in as a sacrificial lamb, an example of evil MSM thinking for the assembled blog horde to devour with their teeth. She gave her quick critique of blogs, half of which I agreed with: the endless self-refrentiality, the bad writing etc. She also said that they were "for rich people with too much time on their hands who feel disenfranchised." Since most big bloggers are rich law professors or software developers or something like that who felt disenfranchised by the mainstream media's coverage of things it's hard to argue, especially when you're trumpeting how upscale your demographics are simultaneously.

The crowd was having none of it. By the third comment here someone's talking about bitch-slapping her. Nice. Ed Driscoll admits to hooting at her remarks here, which means that he openly admits to doing so to a guest who was invited by a company he works for specifically to share her views. Classy.

Thankfully, this torture eventually ended and it was time for the political panel.