Reading both Andrew’s comments on the Atlantic’s site re-design and Ta-Nehisi Coates, I am reminded again of the importance of creating something personal with new media, that blogging is not journalism exactly, and that bloggers themselves are more rightly the “brand” in question than the publications they write for (though, in all honesty, there is and should be a mix – Coates and the Atlantic are in some sense a dual-brand, neither one the same without the other.  Same goes for all the Atlantic bloggers.)  As Andrew notes,

[A] blog is inherently a live process and conversation and anyone who actually understands blogging’s intimate relationship to its readership – and the critical importance of conversation to the endeavor – would never have dreamed of turning it into a series of headlines. That’s what worries me deeply. Not the inevitable transitional glitches but the philosophy behind it.

I think this cuts to the heart of the matter, and cuts directly to why so many people – myself included – really dislike the re-design at the Atlantic.  It’s not the aesthetic that I find so bothersome – and indeed, I don’t notice much of a change at all at Andrew’s digs – but the transformation of the other blogs into essentially archives, subsumed into the larger “channels” and thus stripped, to some degree, of their personalities.  Since the draw of these ‘voices’ has always been one of the Atlantic online’s strongest features, I find this disappointing to say the least – but like Andrew notes, it is the philosophy behind it that is most troubling.  This passage from Coates is worth reading also:

For my part, you have to understand that, to a large extent, whatever beautiful things have happened here, over the past two years, were, essentially, a fortunate mistake. What you’ve gotten is me hopping online and rather carelessly deciding to be myself, to talk to you, as much as possible, in the same way I talk to the people I know. And then basically curating the comments, banning people, deleting, and coaxing until there was a comments section that I, personally, loved reading.

It wasn’t market-tested. When I first got here, we didn’t even really have a web editor, and none of us expected this to grow into what became. We didn’t discuss whether it would be a good idea to have a post about Barry Sanders, next to a post about the Real Housewives of Atlanta, next to a series about the Civil War. We didn’t discuss commenting policy. We just kinda liked each other (me and my editors here) and decided to try something.

In short, none of this was intentional. It was all intuitive. And it’s fucked up, but it’s only as I’m writing this that I’m actually getting that that really is the point, and a big part of the draw. I kind of knew that, but it’s only in the absence of a coherent thing that I’m really seeing that.

This unintentional process is important.  There is something spontaneous and personal about blogging that is a serious if intangible change from traditional journalism. It is also, I think, the most important thing about a successful blogger – this ability for readers to connect and empathize with them. Similarly the community created around a blogger or a project is vitally important.  Jaybird has likened our own humble digs to a bar where we can all sit around and talk politics and culture and whatever over beers.  I have adopted this analogy in how I think about The League.  Indeed, I have come to think of The League as more than just a site, more than just a cadre of writers, but as a community unto itself, with all our commenters as part of the larger project.  The place would not be the same without the many commenters who liven up the threads – from Jaybird to Bob Cheeks to Michael Drew to North to greginak and so on and so forth – the list is too long to name you all. 

One of my great struggles writing elsewhere has been the lack of this relationship.  (New technical limitations have limited my own ability to respond to comments here in a timely fashion, but I do read each and every one.)  Indeed, though I am paid to write at True/Slant, I find myself devoting more time and energy to my writing here – and not just because it is a project that I helped start and continue to help shape, but because of this ongoing conversation we have gotten ourselves into – I can only frequent so many bars, I suppose, and this is my bar of choice.  (I know there is some crossover between commenters here and at True/Slant, but to be honest the comment system there is somewhat inhospitable.  And I dislike, perhaps, being just one of several hundred writers, whereas here I feel like I am part of a team, or at least a band of misfits…)  There is something organic about it that I enjoy.  I can anticipate who will be sitting where and drinking what, and who will storm out angry and who will chuckle at the antics and so forth.   And part of this is the site design, how we have worked to make the comments an integral part of this site, how we have kept the site fairly clean and ad-free, and so forth.  Perhaps it is also human nature to seek out communities (and bars) which we feel comfortable in. 

However, one of our original intentions with this site was to create a place where sustained, internal dialogue between writers, commenters, and guest-writers could be nurtured and grow into something rather unlike anything else on the interwebs.  I think, to some degree, in our push to increase traffic, to link to (and be linked by in return) Really Important Bloggers, we have let that part of our mission fall to the wayside.  I know others here have expressed a similar sense that this is the case.  Whether this has been an inevitable side-effect to creating a successful site, or to simply running out of things to talk to each other about is hard to say.  For my own part, I know that I focused a great deal on increasing traffic, on making the site as good as possible – and I admit to feeling a bit of a rush when I’d pick up a link from the Dish or get a good response from Larison or other bloggers who I had read and admired.

Either way, I wonder how the readers and commenters feel about this (not that the two groups, I hope, are mutually exclusive).  After just over a year, it’s incredible to see how far this blog has come.  We have gained and lost bloggers.  We are still (I hope, and believe) producing good, interesting, and relatively unique content.  We are still ad-free and entirely self-funded or funded by the generosity of the best damn commenters on the internet.  But have we lost some of that original vision?  Some of that original intent?  I would be interested to hear from both writers here and commenters on how, if at all, we could right the ship, reorient to bring back some of the conversational aspects of the original mission.  Make the site even better and more lasting.  We ditched the “series” function, but perhaps went too far in ditching the concept of series altogether.

In other words, this is a space to talk about blogging, this blog in particular, how it is doing things right and how it is doing things wrong, and so forth.  Thanks.

I wish I was as sanguine about the future of authoritarianism as Anne Applebaum, who breezily predicts that repressive regimes not named the People’s Republic of China will have a rough go of it in the coming decades. China, of course, is a pretty glaring exception, and I think Applebaum’s prognosis misses an important aspect of the relationship between authoritarianism in China and the vitality of other authoritarian regimes.

A smart person (whose identity, despite repeated Google searches, remains shrouded in mystery) once observed that China’s efforts to stay ahead of the new media curve are easily exportable to other, less technically adept authoritarian states, who can then free-ride off Chinese “innovation” to keep dissidents in line. Zimbabwe, Iran or Turkmenistan may not have the capacity to keep up with the social media revolution, but China certainly does, and I doubt the PRC will have any qualms about selectively sharing the architecture of repression.

It’s also worth noting that China has a pretty big incentive to disseminate the latest in repressive technology to like-minded despots. Foreign revolutions often inspire dissidents closer to home, and exporting the tools of authoritarianism to friendly regimes sounds eerily similar to China’s current relationship with client states across sub-Saharan Africa. Applebaum’s optimism notwithstanding, I think authoritarianism is here to stay, and not just in mainland China.

This should be cool.  I like Carlson.  I think he’s a pretty smart guy, one of the more honest voices on the right.  We’ll see what it’s like when it goes live… [Read more →]

The Federal Trade Commission has recently announced its new Guidelines Governing Endorsements and Testimonials and perhaps unexpectedly there’s reason for bloggers to take note (emphasis mine),

Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect. In contrast to the 1980 version of the Guides – which allowed advertisers to describe unusual results in a testimonial as long as they included a disclaimer such as “results not typical” – the revised Guides no longer contain this safe harbor.

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

The news has been met with mixed reviews from various blogging corners, but I think Jack Shafer over at Slate is about pitch perfect in his response,

Allowing these guidelines to take effect would be like giving the government a no-knock warrant to investigate hundreds of thousands of blogs and hundreds of millions of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter users for … saying nice things about goods and services. Cleland tells Ad Age that a restaurant employee who gave his eatery a good review on Yelp would have to disclose. Given the billions of opinionated postings on the Web, there would be no end to FTC’s work.

Because of a pesky thing called the First Amendment, the guidelines don’t apply to news organizations, which receive thousands of free books, CDs, and DVDs each day from media companies hoping for reviews. But if the guidelines don’t apply to established media like the New York Review of Books, which also happens to publish reviews on the Web, why should they apply to Joe Blow’s blog? Regulating bloggers via the FTC while exempting establishment reporters looks like a back-door means of licensing journalists and policing speech.

Additionally, I would offer that these guidelines smack of unnecessary governmental overreach and the worst components of nanny-statism.

I mean, look, there is a fundamental difference between what the FTC is proposing here and the kinds of protective measures that entities like the FDA and the EPA provide on issues that involve a broad range of complex and dynamic factors that can have both insidious and far reaching impacts if not taken into consideration. Which is to say that I’m not going on some kind of knee-jerk anti-regulation rant. There is good use for many of the regulations we use to protect individuals from negligent to malicious behaviour on the part of a host of actors in a variety of fora.

But part of what I think the FTC is essentially saying here is that people are just too dumb to take into consideration that people who blog and Twitter and otherwise utilize the host of social networking platforms that are out there may not be the best source of information when considering important purchases. That being the case, the FTC had better step in to provide measures to protect the unwashed masses against their own ignorance. For all my support of government involvement in areas of people’s lives where said involvement makes some degree of sense, this sentiment strikes me as the essence of low-balling individual capacity for critical thought into a dependence on the state that, over time, fundamentally erodes the expectations we have both of ourselves and our fellow citizens.

As Shafer also notes, the FTC has done some important work around issues of credit card fraud and anti-trust law, so it’s not as though I’m suggesting that the agency as a whole ought to be condemned. But this particular step strikes me as lopsided and wholly unnecessary and, as such, deserves to be met with the same kind of derision upon which its underlying premise seems based.

I think I made too strong a case in my True/Slant post yesterday.  I have this tendency to go further than I mean when laying out a critique.  It’s a tick.  What can I say?

In any case, I decided to spend some more time over there, to better understand how the site works, and to get more of a feel for what it’s doing or trying to do, and what it may be achieving despite my initial doubts.  But first, I wanted to post this comment from Justin Gardener (of True/Slant and Donklephant) because it makes a lot of good points that counter what I had to say yesterday:

There are a total number of 215 contributors on the site. They blog in many different verticals, 18 in total. So starting off with just a few high profile bloggers and ignoring the rest doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because you have too many single points of failure. Best to allow more folks to blog and see who rises to the top.

Case in point, if you look at the front page you’ll see that Kate Klonick is at the top of the views for the past 5 days. That’s because she broke an exclusive about Mary Cheney having another child. But usually Kate doesn’t get that much traffic since she blogs more infrequently. So by having a bunch of other contributors beyond the Taibbis you can fill in the gaps and possibly catch lightning in a bottle and get a bunch of traffic sent your way.

The results speak for themselves. Just take a look at the Quantcast stats (http://www.quantcast.com/trueslant.com). The site is getting 1.6M page views a month. Culture 11 never got anywhere close to that. And just judging from my own blog on T/S, the conversations are certainly worthwhile. Especially when you talk to fellow contributors.

As to your other points…

- New media is niche oriented, sure, but think of the biggest sites out there and how they encompass many different niches. And, as mentioned, there are many different categories on T/S. Trust me, you may have a feed reader a read a bunch of different blogs, but most folks don’t use that tech or don’t want to have to visit 50 different websites for their news. They’d rather go to one. That’s why Yahoo, MSN, Google are so popular.

- True/Slant’s name alone suggests that you get the facts and somebody’s opinion. Nothing too complicated there. And, respectfully, the two sites you cite have pretty poor immediate branding. Sure, Daily Kos is now known as the bastion of progressivism, but the name says nothing about what it’s all about. And Takimag? I think you get my point. Which ties into the next bullet…

- True/Slant folks are very opinionated, but there are many different POVs. I would think that you, of all people, would appreciate that since I think we both count ourselves as folks who run sites that welcome a multitude of opinions. So the publication’s position is that there are many different positions. Which means, at the end of the day, you can make up your own mind.

- True/Slant really isn’t a social network, nor do I think they position themselves as one. Sure, people have to join the site to comment and they can follow their favorite authors, but those are just ways to form a community…which I believe is different than a true soc net (although that’s a bit of inside baseball semantics disagreement so point taken).

Yes, after reading Justin’s comment I admit I felt a bit abashed.  And rightfully so!  He’s right on many, many counts.  The diversity of opinion and political views and topics is rare on the net, and rather than point out how this is a failure, I should be glad that it’s happening at all.  Likewise, the traffic numbers Justin sites are very good, and pretty much lay waste to my argument, as well as any comparison to Culture11 in terms of traffic.  Next time I should do my homework. [Read more →]

[UPDATE - In true, tail-between-legs fashion, I have walked back significantly from this post here.  I didn't do my homework, and I overstated my case.]

I have to admit, I’m not a big fan of True/Slant.

Essentially it’s a massive group blog, or blog syndicate, or rather a big site with lots of and lots of bloggers entrepreneurial journalists, where readers can join up and be part of the “community.”  Marketers are also part of the “community” which is the real slant to the whole project.  According to the about page, “Marketers express their corporate voice through the T/S Ad Slant using the  same tools available to contributors.  T/S Ad Slants are fully transparent, with marketer-created content clearly labeled to maintain the integrity of the conversation.”

But in many ways, True/Slant combines all the worst ideas in new media into one great big failure.  Culture11 was a success insofar as it brought unique voices and open minds together in one publication.  It was popular because as a site it welcomed discussion.  Its failures, though, were manifold.  The social networking “community” it attempted was a flop.  I have yet to see a successful attempt at social-networking/professional writing hybrid.

And C11 was too ambitious by far, trying to be too many things before taking care of the fundamentals.  It never reached the level of aesthetic quality or usability that a modern site should aspire to, something True/Slant, to its credit, seems to be doing somewhat better at.  Other than this, however,  True/Slant has taken C11’s failures and run with them. [Read more →]

Freddie and Will have both written about the impending doom of the newspapers.  I’m not sure I share their skepticism – after all, so long as there is a demand for news, there will be a supply for that demand.  The delivery may change, but the news itself won’t go away.  It may grow more limited with a more limited demand.  Or we may all be surprised and as the transition away from dead tree news takes place, we may see the news organizations coming up with better ideas to increase revenues online or new models with which to distribute printed papers.

It’s not that I’m eternally optimistic, it’s just that I do believe that where there’s a desire for a product, said product usually shows up.  And I don’t see the demand for news changing so much as I see a change in demand for how that news is delivered.  It’s in the delivery that old media is off their game.  People still want the product.

So off the top of my head, here are some ideas that newspapers could try, and some predictions that I think aren’t really so gloomy as my brothers here at the League are counting on: [Read more →]

At his new digs, Conor Friedersdorf has a good partially anecdotal post up about those who have been in the know about the ongoings in Iran and those who have not. Conor notes that of the two groups of people with whom he had occasion to spend time over the weekend as events broke in Iran, it was the blogging-set who were up to snuff on what is undeniably a world event of importance and those folks who tended to rely on more traditional means of information consumption had barely a clue of the stirrings in a geo-political hot spot.

Conor is certainly not alone in noting and, in some cases, chastising cable news for its utter lack of action in covering Iran’s political upheval. Here at the League, E.D. voiced his own surprise and exasperation at the lack of information flowing through the mediums by which a ubiquitous number of people continue to garner information about the world outside of their lives. I’m not about to go to bat for the mainstream media here, but there is a cautionary note in Conor’s piece about blogospheric know-it-alls that I think bears further scrutiny.

Namely, we wayfarers of the blogopsheric highways and byways need in some, perhaps many, cases to temper our pride around being “in the know”. [Read more →]