Personal Publishing lecture notes

Brian Carroll | Berry College | Class Homepage

“It’s easy to write poorly, but it’s hard to write poorly every day . . . It’s hard to write every day.” Rebecca Blood.

Weblogging and Webloggers
A Weblog or blog is a Web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts arranged in reverse chronological order, so that new entries always appear on top. Blogs can resemble personal journals or diaries in some ways, but we are interested here in those dedicated to news and issues rather than personal events and thoughts.

The content and purposes of blogs vary greatly—from links and commentary about other Web sites, to news about companies, people and ideas, to diaries, photos, poetry, mini-essays, project updates and even fiction.

The best of breed create for their readers “targeted serendipity,” as Blood calls it, or a shared point of view pointing to information and information sources a reader perhaps did not even know he or she wanted to see.

At the very least, blogging is an exercise of expression, or one individual making his or her views public. Increasingly, though, blogging too is also an expression of community, allowing individuals to communicate, share news and swap photos.

A Weblog is not a communal space because it is the sole responsibility of one individual, but blogging affords an opportunity for social networking. It is not uncommon for a Weblog editor to ask for, and receive, advice or help from his readers.

artifact 1: musicplasma

artifact 2: the Weblog of Joshua Micah Marshall got a lot of attention in December 2002. In the wake of then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s statement that the nation would have been better off had Strom Thurmond been elected president in 1948, a campaign in which Thurmond ran on a segregationist platform, Marshall revealed that Lott had a history of making what could be described as racist statements. Lott previously compared court rulings in 1981 upholding affirmative action programs at colleges to the dating ban between black and white students at Bob Jones University, according to Marshall in his blog, Talking Points Memo. The media elite picked up on Marshall’s analysis, piecing together Lott’s record, and made it a national issue that ultimately deposed Lott as majority leader. This was a major league moment for Weblogs, still considered by many at the time as a minor league publishing option.

story on Lott | Marshall’s post

artifact 3: Memogate
Marshall politically is on the left. On the right, conservative bloggers first called into question the authenticity of four documents presented by Dan Rather of CBS News on “60 Minutes” purporting to be from President Bush’s commanding officer in the Texas National Guard. The documents described efforts to get preferential treatment for the future president. Bloggers pointed out that given the equipment on which the memos were composed, they couldn’t possibly have been written in the early 1970s, as alleged.

Just hours after “60 Minutes” aired, a man using the name Buckhead (he lives in Atlanta) posted a comment on Free Republic. He observed that the CBS memos, which had been posted online, had been typed in a proportionally spaced font that was unlikely to be found in a 1972-era typewriter. A blog called Power Line written by three lawyers, reprinted Buckhead's speculations, along with comments from readers who claimed knowledge of IBM typewriters, fonts and superscripting. A reader who'd been a Navy clerk/typist and another who'd been an Air Force personnel manager weighed in on military typewriters, paper size and procedures. Power Line's initial post soon listed 605 trackbacks, meaning that 605 other online sites linked to the blog’s analysis.

CBS and Dan Rather stuck to their story. Rather:
“The story is true. The story is true. I appreciate the sources who took risks to authenticate our story. So, one, there is no internal investigation. Two, somebody may be shell-shocked, but it is not I, and it is not anybody at CBS News. Now, you can tell who is shell-shocked by the ferocity of the people who are spreading these rumors." September 10, 2004.

The episode is amazing for many reasons, including the fact that it pitted traditional, legacy, mainstream media against new media, specifically blogs. And the blogs won. A few days after “60 Minutes” made its claims, a former CBS executive vice president, Jonathan Klein, sneered at CBS’ critics who claimed the old memos had to be modern forgeries written on a computer: “You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances (of professional journalists) and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing,” Klein told Fox News on Sept. 10, 2004.

Bloggers became reporters. Thousands of blogs picked up the story. Type designers, IBM employees and former military clerks joined the debate. Legacy or mainstream media joined in, as well. Professional journalists interviewed document experts, who raised the same questions as the bloggers. Then CBS’ own experts said they’d never bothered authenticated the memos. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted, many mainstream journalists were reading the blogs to track the discussion and find sources.

“The Internet has empowered ordinary citizens to become fact checkers and analysts. People with a wide range of experiences can collaborate online, sharing knowledge, sources and ideas, and challenging each others’ facts,” wrote the Chronicle’s Joanne Jacobs.

Traditional media’s big newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Dallas Morning News, all have blogs in what has become standard journalistic practice, and the Associated Press and CNN launched their first Weblogs for the Democratic National Convention in July 2004.

The Associated Press launched its first Weblog ever for the convention, with veteran salt Walter Mears at the helm. CNN.com launched its first blog, a group effort by producers at the confab. The respected National Journal started a group blog that was open to the public (their site is usually subscription-only).

And MSNBC's "Hardball" with Chris Matthews took the cake with a star-studded group blog that includes posts from NBC News' Andrea Mitchell, former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, and conservative pundit Pat Buchanan (but no Matthews). Geez, even CBS anchor Dan Rather had an online "journal" with observations each day.”

The software
Like Rebecca Blood, Meg Hourihan is a blogging pioneer. She co-founded Pyra, which put out Blogger.com, a software for bloggers, until Google acquired the company in May 2003. Hourihan wrote in one of her essays about an important bond among bloggers, confirming the inextricable relationship between the underlying technology or technologies and the form:

“If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share - the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling social interactions we associate with blogging . . . And we’re united by tools, whether we use Blogger, LiveJournal, Radio UserLand, MovableType, or a custom job that’s a labor of love. Webloggers often use tools to facilitate the publication of their sites. These tools spit out our varied content in the same format - archives, permalinks, time stamps and date headers.”

Blogger.com software is one of a growing group of tools available that automate the blog publishing process without requiring its users to write any code or install any sort of server software or scripts. Instead of hand-coding blog posts, blogger.com uses forms or templates. After submitting them to the server, the results – posts – are published. While Web site publishing has long been available to anyone willing to learn HTML coding or WYSIWYG design, the advent of Weblog software has given millions of individuals a simpler way to maintain Web pages.

Blogger, Greymatter and MovableType are some of the more popular blogging software tools. Some, like Blogger, are remotely hosted, while others, such as MovableType, are user-installed on the user’s own computer. Those who become bloggers can be HTML novices or experienced Web designers, first-time writers or professional authors.

artifact 4: Movable Type

A husband-wife team started Movable Type in October 2001 by first making available their Weblog software available via the World Wide Web. Ben and Mena Trott describe their software as a “web-based personal publishing system.” Through 2000 and early 2001, Blogger was the visible leader in blogging, garnering a lot of press and thousands of new users. But the company behind Blogger, Pyra, burned through its funding and the creative group behind Blogger dispersed. Only co-founder Evan Williams remained to run the service. Experienced bloggers began to convert their Weblogs from remote-hosted Blogger to server-side software such as Greymatter and Movable Type.

The Movable Type software is free. To use it, a user installs the software on the same server hosting that person’s Website. This process of installing and configuring the Movable Type software can be confusing to a user with little experience in Perl scripts or directory permissions. The Trotts, though, provide documentation (installation instructions and a user manual) that is both detailed and clearly written.

Movabletype.org includes a Support Forum (using freeware from www.ikonboard.com). On this bulletin board, novices and pros interact, sharing hints, tips, tutorials and links to previous solutions. Ben and Mena also are present, but so too are other forum administrators and frequent contributors. The Support Forum includes a Request a Feature board, where users share their ideas for future features of the software. The Trotts have incorporated some of these requests, and other users frequently suggest alternative tools or solutions. Movable Type incorporates many of the blogging features offered by other software or Web services. These include:

• Web interface
• one-button posting and publishing
• permalinks (permanent links to each individual post)
• comments system
• flexible archiving options
• trackback

Is it journalism?
There is much debate on this since Weblogging, in contrast to traditional journalism, is interactive and very personal. Blood is of the opinion that blogging is not journalism principally because Weblogs have no gatekeepers. She says the Weblog’s greatest strength – its uncensored, unmediated and uncontrolled voice – is its greatest weakness, and what distinguishes it from traditional big media journalism.

Is a blogger a journalist? Is everyone with a camera a photographer? And what happens to journalism when every reader can be a writer, editor, producer? These are some of the questions being debated, and no clear consensus has emerged.

It can be said that blogging and journalism have different mandates. For blogging, the values include expression, diversity of voices, speed, transparency and decentralization. In journalism, the values are more about providing a filter for information, editing the content, fact-checking, ensuring accuracy and fairness, setting the agenda and centralizing news dissemination.

Blogging’s priority is to publish, then to begin filtering.
Journalism’s priority is to filter, then and only then to publish.

Blogs bring journalism checks on sloppy, erroneous and incomplete coverage and reporting. Journalism brings blogs most of the fodder for the postings. Without print journalism, there would be few blogs of import. Most blogs are utterly dependent on journalism. They react to it, comment on issues, events and people in coverage, and provide context.

There are many examples of journalism’s embrace of blogs. Reasons:
• Connecting with audience(s) and building trust. News organizations like MSNBC, Dallas Morning News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Houston Chronicle and others are using blogging as one of many channels through which to flow editorial content. It helps make these organizations more accessible, answerable and transparent.
• Pushing the envelope. Blogs expand the boundaries.
• Providing context, notes and content that don’t make it into the publication. Blogs make room for content that doesn’t neatly fit into traditional media.
• Using ideas and opinions first emerging in the blogosphere. It has to do with tapping into this new networked media ecosystem. The froth of engagement.
• Building community, one of the buzzwords in journalism. Readers become active partners rather than passive consumers. Gives readers a stake in the process and its product, increasing loyalty and understanding along the way. Do not underestimate word-of-mouth referral power in this new media ecosystem.
• Giving reporters and writers, who by nature love to write and to express themselves, another avenue for that expression.

Media’s embrace
Though there are many skeptics, blogs are becoming more abundant in traditional big media journalism, which sees them as part threat, part opportunity. Not surprisingly, journalists see in blogs opportunities for a type of commentary and an immediacy and intimacy impossible with or through other forms. Two examples of this adoption trend are a blog by the Virginian-Pilot covering the Malvo-Muhammad sniper trials in Virginia and a blog at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer from the reporter who covers Microsoft.

artifact 5: Kerry Sipe blogged throughout the sniper trial from the media room in the Virginia Beach municipal center. He tracked everything from jury instructions and testimony to John Allen Muhammad’s mood. Connected to the courtroom through closed-circuit video and the rest of the world through a wireless Internet connection, he published posts that went immediately online at his newspaper’s Web site. The judge barred video coverage of the proceedings, so Sipe’s minute-by-minute updates gave readers the closest thing they had to real-time news.

Sipe is the Virginian-Pilot’s online news coordinator and one of a number of writers using a new tool to report the news. Along with Sipe’s unfiltered copy comes an unfiltered experience, which raises the “is it journalism” debate.

This kind of reporting leaves the burden of assessing the news to readers, a job many say they’d prefer to take on. It also guarantees that drama is never contrived. Sipe’s blog is just one part of The Virginian-Pilot’s trial coverage, and that’s an important point. Blogs are not necessarily replacing other forms of journalism, but they are adding a new, unique layer of coverage. Other Virginian-Pilot writers covered the story in more traditional ways.

artifact 6: A blog launched by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2003 accomplishes a different purpose. Written by Todd Bishop, the blog is a daily extension of an important Seattle beat covering software giant Microsoft.

The business writer believes the print edition and traditional Web site are still the proper places to break news, but now he has space to follow up on print stories with information that doesn’t require a full story. His blog also has become a place to give readers valuable context.

"For example,” he said, “after writing a story about liability for software flaws, I posted an entry that gave readers access to a lot of the material that helped me understand the issue and put the story together.”

Bishop’s posts have helped him collect sources for future stories, people he says he wouldn’t have found without the blog. One reader emailed him in response to a post about Microsoft’s software patching strategy; that reader turned out to be the person responsible for patching his own company’s PCs. The next time Bishop covered the issue in print, he contacted his new source for comment.

artifact 7: Tsunami Blogs

artifact 8: Pro-American Iraq Blogs

Personal Publishing
Paquet provides a multi-faceted definition of personal knowledge publishing, which includes Weblogging as its most prominent and popular method:

1. Personal editorship
The content of the site is under the responsibility of a single person (although visitors may post comments in designated sections) and to some extent reflects this invidual’s personality. Whereas the creation of Web pages may be outsourced, someone else can’t run a person’s Weblog, because then it would be the other person’s Weblog.

2. Hyperlinked post structure
The site’s content consists in typically short posts that feature hypertext links referencing material outside the site. These may be links to news items from sources such as CNN.com or the New York Times Online, or to other Weblog posts, or to primary source documents, like legislation or court decisions. The selection of links is entirely up to the editor, who may link anywhere on the Web. There is also no prescribed length for a post. Some posts simply consist of a single link to content elsewhere, but most include additional information and/or personal commentary on the issue under discussion. The presence of links is what distinguishes the Weblog from the online diary, in which an author mostly recounts personal events and thoughts, and which is not especially relevant to anyone outside the author’s circle of friends. “Link choice is voice,” Blood wrote, and anyone who says otherwise simply has not grasped the essence of hypertext.

3. Frequent updates, displayed in reverse chronological order
A Weblog is a continuously-running publication, much like a daily or weekly newspaper. The latest posts (the freshest content) appear at the top of the Weblog's main page and older content appears further down. This characteristic creates an expectation of updates that incites readers to visit the site on a regular basis. A relationship is established between author and reader and it is strengthened with each visit. This probably marks the most fundamental distinction between Weblogs and personal Web pages or “home pages,” which are seen once and seldom revisited.

4. Free, public access to the content
The site’s contents are freely accessible via the World Wide Web without restriction or requirement, such as payment or membership. This is often taken for granted on the Web, but it distinguishes Weblogs from commercial forms that make sharing more difficult.

5. Archives
While older posts may disappear from the front page, they are archived and may be accessed elsewhere on the site. Each post is assigned a permanent hyperlink or permalink that makes it possible to reference older material.

Downside
Blogging and bloggers have not been universally embraced. Bloggers have been accused of cliqueishness, narcissism and navel-gazing. Entries often seem to be largely by one blogger about another. There is a tendency of some to talk only about themselves, which is part of the attraction to the form.

Other forms of personal publishing
In addition to the blog, personal publishing formats include notebooks and filters, though the terms and their definitions are negotiated and contested.

A notebook has longer, more focused content than blogs typically contain. According to Blood, personal entries in notebooks often are in the form of stories and usually are more highly edited than are blog entries. They are not online journals, however, which pre-date both blogs and notebooks. Online journals are online versions of paper-based journals, with very personal entries and usually a chronologically organized record of events. Notebooks typically have one entry per day, but they are more centered on ideas, themes and concepts.

A filter focuses on a specific topic, including links to and an archive of information related to that topic. In focusing on a topic, filters are less a reflection of their developers or editors. They are more about knowledge, expertise and topic-specific intelligence. Again, the distinctions are general and fluid. Each of the categorizations are malleable and adaptable, often defined in hindsight once the personal publishing concepts have been operationalized, or once a new software introduces new functionality.

Weblog ethics
Though Webloggers are proudly individualistic, a code of ethics has been forming among the blogging community. Rebecca Blood codified the relatively few principles of good blogger behavior in her book, The Weblog Handbook (2002, 114-120):

1. Publish as fact only that which you believe to be true. If a statement is merely speculation, it should be so stated.
2. If material exists online, link to it when you reference it. Readers can judge for themselves and a founding principle of blogging is exercising freedom of expression and the marketplace of ideas. Online readers “deserve, as much as possible, access to all of the facts,” Blood writes.
3. Publicly correct any misinformation. Typically entries are not re-written or corrected, but later entries should correct inaccurate information in those earlier posts. Inaccurate and erroneous information on other blogs also should be corrected in the spirit of the greater blogging community’s responsibility to one another and to its readers.
4. Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete any entry. “Post deliberately,” Blood advises.
5. Disclose any conflict of interest.
6. Note questionable or unbiased sources.

The Weblog “movement” is about five years old. It is still changing and evolving. Certain conventions have emerged, however, and the concept of personal publishing, or of a blog being the sole responsibility of one person, is one of the blog’s chief hallmarks. Graphics and photography and adoption by traditional media, including newspapers and TV stations, are areas in which Weblogging is changing most. Personal publishing represents one of the more interesting, evolutionary applications of the Web and is, therefore, worth watching. The networking capabilities of the Internet are re-shaping society and culture. Michael Lewis wrote about the reasons:

• Creativity almost always happens at the edges of society and not in the center
• The Internet enables small groups or even individuals to undermine elites

A new media ecosystem is emerging. Personal publishing, moblogging, thumb tribes, citizen reporting and Weblogs are emerging organisms in this new, networked ecosystem.

Sources:
Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, Meg Hourihan, We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs, Hungry Minds, Inc., 2002 (see especially chapter 3, available at http://www.blogroots.com/chapters.blog/id/8).

Rebecca Blood, The Weblog Handbook, Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2002

Anton Zuiker, http://www.zuikerchronicles.com

Examples of good blogs:

Dave Barry, humorist
http://www.davebarry.blogspot.com

David F. Gallagher - lightningfield.com
www.lightningfield.com

Dan Gillmor, technology columnists for the San Jose Mercury News
eJournal Weblog
http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor

John Hiler - Microcontent News
www.microcontentnews.com

Josh Micah Marshall - Talking Points Memo
www.talkingpointsmemo.com

Jenny Levine - The Shifted Librarian
www.theshiftedlibrarian.com

Steve Outing, Poynter Institute
Outing’s E-Media Tidbits: http://www.ponter.org/tidbits

John Romensko, Poynter Institute
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45

Seth Schoen - Consensus at Lawyerpoint
http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/

Eric Volokh’s The Volokh Conspiracy, law blog
http://volokh.com/

Donna Wentworth - Copyfight and GrepLaw
http://www.corante.com/copyfight
http://grep.law.harvard.edu