News-Record.com

If I comment, does that make me a crank?

I mused over that one myself, Jeffrey.

It's a transparently nice trick of the pen to quote someone else (someone who's "in") about "cranks" (people who are/feel "out" . . . also known as "trolls" and "whack-jobs"), and then "put it aside" so you don't have to claim it as your own. The slam is still out there and you're clean.

The biggest impact that blogging has had on me in terms of "community impact" is to discover that in today's journalism it's not about the story (its truth, its merits, its relevance, or its potential impact) at all.

It's about being "in" or "out". The trick is to package the journalism so that ordinary citizens think that what they think really matters . . . when it doesn't.

When they realize it doesn't, a "crank" is born.

I respectfully request that this not be a discussion about who's a crank and who's not and whether I'm causing the cranks.

I'm interested in discussion about the core question of community impact, and I thank you, Dr. J., for addressing that.

I respectfully request that you consider how your words (or the words you quote) might provoke when you draft your posts in the future.

The question you posed could have been asked without "cranks" being mentioned at all.

You make your living by writing, John. And, unlike most of the rest of us who blog, you are part of the MSM, and in a position of local influence and power. How you write . . . and what you write about (or don't) . . . impacts the community.

One of my biggest disappointments in blogging (in Greensboro, anyway) is how little actual good, worthwhile discussion is going on as compared to how many time someone blogs something and then five or six different people yell at each other about things that aren't really terribly related to the issue at hand.

On this blog, which I agree is generally more interesting without the comments, it's usually JR posting something and then getting slammed for covering or not covering some other story, being questioned about his political affiliation or his family's business dealings, etc.

Much the same thing happens over at Ed Cone's place - but a lot of the posts are actually political, so partisan bickering makes a degree of sense (though it's taken to extremes).

I agree that (with a few exceptions) very little "good, actual worthwhile" discussion is taking place.

Joe, you speak of JR and Ed getting "slammed" on their blogs by other bloggers complaining about this or that. But more often than not, it is because what they post provokes the response (as first Jeffrey, then I pointed out here).

If you don't want "the cranks" coming out, don't crank them up.

JR and Ed are also high-profile, "powerful" local bloggers . . . by virtue of their job (JR) . . . or their longevity (Ed) . . . the "King" and "Blogfather" (or "High Priest") of the GSO blogosphere respectively.

I took a long break from this blog because I did not believe the hype anymore - after answering JR's general invitation to tell my story - and investing so much of my heart and soul into telling it - only to be totally crushed. In my retreat, my own blog was born . . . but it is a damned shame it was born of anger and frustration - rather than a sense of this "community" everybody keeps talking about. I've only ventured outside of my own blog again because I am so disgusted by much of what I am reading. But I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

The threads getting the most hits on Ed's blog this week are the Foley mess (around 300 comments and counting) and abortion (the irony there is that almost all of the commentary is from men). Both subjects are NOT "local" and are divisive by their very nature. I also note that the same (few) people are commenting.

If I'm reading the blogging bibles correctly, that sort of thing panders to the "extreme" and is solely about Google hits and traffic. It does not build "community".

Neither does ignoring what people (who care enough to respond) are telling you . . . and what is going on right under your nose.

And that's essentially the same thing as killing the comments.

I'll proudly be called a crank if it means I don't rubber stamp every musing on these blogs...

That aside, I'd take issue with the "community" aspect of the Greensboro paper's web project in the mid to late 90s.

To say that the Depot (or whatever it was called) was putting groups online is a bit of a stretch. For the longest time it was just a list of links of community groups -- I guess that is what is meant by "putting them under an umbrella)".

Later -- in 1999, I think -- it started offering community publishing tools. But, even then, it wasn't exactly a big, good-doer that created websites wholesale for dozens or hundreds of "community" groups.

I also have no idea what Beau is talking about when he says that there were essentially blogs back then being done by the paper's website or The Depot..

Not to rain on anyone's parade any further, I'd also say that the N&R isn't doing everything "right" now -- and still doesn't "get it"

Breaking news? That's critical and I see very, very, very little of it here. Good video or audio? Not seeing it. Really. There are flashes of video, but the projects being done are so NPR-ish it's like listening to paint dry (actually a narration of paint drying).

Yes, the blogs are generally good. JR's is appreciated.. but, there's so much missing.. (For example, your online weather offering is so sparse as to be laughable -- but you have 20 blogs.. uh, OK)

This harkening back to how great a link list was in 1996 is really just too much...

A few things -

first, hot damn, Beau's got a very good observation. Nice to have someone who steps back and can put the present into perspective.

And time to acknowledge that Chewie had a point in this space(?) a year or two back with the harping on need for greater civility; she was the canary. Fortunately not belly-up, but also not here - flown the coop to her own blog.

(do blogs emulate a snowballing "bowling alone" effect? when the commons become too obnoxious, there's now the option of pulling back to your own property, where you get to set the rules and decide who can come in; thus further impoverishing the common areas, plus if you're not careful you'll find yourself hosting a pack of boors in your own living room.)

And the more people who've retreated to their own spaces, even if they reach out via trackbacks, the more disjointed and fragmented the constructive online conversation becomes.

How much could better tools help, that would emulate or serve as well as the filtering that "groups as units" does, to select for participation by people who 'play well with others'?
[and what does it mean, that i get too cranky and impatient in any group that'll have me as a member 8-( ]

I'd like to see more experimentation with tools - e.g. what would the PressThink comments section be like, if it had threading and above/below-the-fold distinctions and killfiles?

(actually, the P.T. comments space tells an interesting story - once Jay's topics moved from hijackable press-covering-politics analysis to constructive "here's what I want to build" posts, the trolls pretty much melted.)
(unfortunately so did most everyone else)

re Beau's
> "what's the impact in the community itself?"

(I'll ignore the direct question, quoting Santayana: "All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.")

To take a knee-jerk business-school tangent - what positive impacts in the community could you _envision_ occurring, how could you measure them, and what actions could you take that would act to improve that metric?

How much impact in the community? How many hits do you get a day? Whatever the quality or lack thereof on the blogs, my sense is that not that many people log on, and that--to repeat a point I made a week or so ago--there's a fairly narrow demographic group involved.

I've known probably six LTE writers in the past year, and I always post a hostile response to their letters just out of principle. But when I check to see if they've read it, almost invariably they've been unaware that the forum exists. That's unfortunate, because I put in a lot of effort trying to think up clever, nasty things to say about what they've written.

So how many hits?

Broadly, though, the positive impact is (on whatever scale) that the paper is not issued ex cathedra from some unimaginable site of enunciation, but that it lives in the same town as I do, that it talks back--the anthromorphizing thing you mentioned the other day, basically.

I've always believed the blogs here were frequented by a couple dozen regular commentors. That's a statistically insignificant group out of a county population of over 300,000 souls.
It's a small space where people who like to argue gather to hash over the topic du juor.
I'll admit to being one of them. :)

JR's post morphed one I have been working on for days . . . but could not pull together . . . until reading more of the comments here.

On Being Cranky And Waiting For Bledsoe

Now that I've "cranked" that out, I am leaving this "community" for the weekend to immerse myself in a real one.

Jim -- I'll clarify a few things, then explain why I like your post.

We did a bit more than a list of links in 1996. As a Depot staffer at the time, I spent a considerable amount of time on the phone with people who were trying to publish their sites through Notepad (or whatever primitive WYSIWYG editor they had) and FTP. We didn't have the tools to do otherwise at the time.

The idea as I understood it -- and you can judge how well it worked better than I could -- was that news and information could bubble up from the groups. The Depot would be more than the N&R. (Someone please correct me if my memory is hazy.)

As for blogs in that era -- they weren't blogs in the sense that this one is. They were what we might call "live-blogging" today. They would look especially primitive today, but they were ahead of their time.

Now in terms of "getting it" and doing it "right" -- in context, I meant that's the perception of the N&R among the Jay Rosens and Jeff Jarvises of the world. I'm not sure how well this is known within Greensboro, but the N&R has attained a hipster appeal beyond the Triad, one rarely conferred among newspapers. The conventional wisdom among Web elites is that newspapers don't know what they're doing. Thanks to the blogs, the Town Square efforts and so forth, the N&R is now considered one of the rare exceptions. Why else would a New York professor bother to visit Greensboro? You and I know it's a nice place to be, but New Yorkers wouldn't consider it a top tourist destination.

And so we come to my question: What's the effect in the community?

And you've answered it. You'd rather see the site post more breaking news and do a better job covering the weather.

In academic/Web-hipster terms, you prefer Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Good to hear from you. A lot of the academics and Web hipsters want to deny that people like you exist. Jay Rosen probably "gets" that people like you are still around and have valid opinions of what you want from a Web site, but he's the exception among that crowd. A lot of folks think Web 2.0 should be done at the expense of such mundane things as the weather, high school football scores, etc. If that happens, newspapers will lose readers like you. And they can't afford that.

> "the positive impact is ...that the paper is not issued ex cathedra...but that it lives in the same town as I do, that it talks back--the anthromorphizing thing you mentioned the other day, basically."

Yup.
(not a greensboro resident, but that's how I view it)

> "The idea as I understood it -- and you can judge how well it worked better than I could -- was that news and information could bubble up from the groups."

One thing I've thought should be done - esp. since the tools are so much better now, so once it's set up, the process could be pretty much automated - is to get local groups set up so they're publishing their newsletters on blogs, then aggregate the info from them onto the paper's website. There's a lot of material in local newsletters that's well written and ought to get wider exposure, and as long as they're dispersed, the exposure doesn't happen, practically speaking.

and this would avoid "why should I write something for your paper for free" syndrome, since there'll be a benefit (greater publicity) accruing to the organizations whose newsletter items are featured, and for whose benefit the person wrote the article in the first place.

(which Web rev number would this fall under?)

> "I'm not sure how well this is known within Greensboro, but the N&R has attained a hipster appeal...is now considered one of the rare exceptions"

um, yes.

> One thing I've thought should be done - esp. since the tools are so much better now, so once it's set up, the process could be pretty much automated - is to get local groups set up so they're publishing their newsletters on blogs, then aggregate the info from them onto the paper's website. There's a lot of material in local newsletters that's well written and ought to get wider exposure, and as long as they're dispersed, the exposure doesn't happen, practically speaking.

Exactly -- regardless of whether we did it well at The Depot 10 years ago, I'm wondering if the best avenue to open up the paper beyond the newsroom is to do it at the group level, where much of the interaction the newspaper hopes to start is already taking place.

I agree with your other point that these blogs at the very least put a human face -- a local face -- on the paper.

> "esp. since the tools are so much better now"

Related (though not as much as you'd think from title) - Conover's it's the tools (with a big honkin' smart thoughtful "yes-but" comment from Dewey)

Beau: I don't know where you are going with this academic/Web-hipster thing. I truly don't. Who wants to be an academic-slash-Web hipster? I don't. It's a trivializing term.

You haven't written about what I actually think, or examined what I actually said, but just peddled a stereotype you favor--"the perception of the N&R among the Jay Rosens and Jeff Jarvises of the world"--and that you say is out there.

What I have written about the N & R, most of which dates from 2004 and 2005, concerned the part I was qualified to comment on-- their pressthink. Meaning: the ideas they had about what needed to be done, the directions they wanted to go in, and the reasoning they developed as they thought about what to do. "This is promising, this is smart, this is different, this bears watching." That is what I said.

How well it's worked in the community since then is not something I feel qualified to observe upon sitting up here in Greenwich Village. I refer you to my interview with Slashdot where I said something similar:

The goal was a virtuous circle. "Community conversation feeds professional journalism. Journalism feeds conversation. And around, and around." I think there is something to that idea. How well it works is for people in Bluffton to address.

As for your remarks to another poster, "a lot of the academics and Web hipsters want to deny that people like you exist," I don't know what you're talking about, or where you are going with that, either. You seem to have some kind of resentment you either want to express for yourself or mobilize in others. Maybe you should come right out with it.

"A lot of folks think Web 2.0 should be done at the expense of such mundane things as the weather, high school football scores, etc." Got any quotes?

As for why I would come to a place like Greensboro, you wouldn't ask that if you knew more about my career. I've visited more than 50 newsrooms around the US and the vast majority of them were places "like" Greensboro-- typical stops for me would be Norfolk, Spokane, Wichita, Portland, St. Paul, Madison, Raleigh (I was there the day after I spoke to the N & R) and Columbia, SC. Hipsterish joints?

I've never spoken to the staff at a newspaper in New York City--Times, Daily News, Post, Newsday--because I have never been asked to. Never spoken at the Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, or Chicago Tribune, either.

I invited myself to Greensboro because I know there are people there who are interested in the same things I am.

oops.
It seems that even when mirroring Jay Rosen (or Beau Dure), our mirror neurons are not Jay Rosen (or Beau Dure).
("These neurons may be important for understanding the actions of other people... Some researchers also speculate that mirror systems may simulate observed actions, and thus contribute to our theory of mind skills...")

(aka "projection" but without the judgmental overtones)