Bob Stepno's Red Liner

A few weeks ago, a Thursday night blogger meeting was talking about
“scraping” news from Harvard websites so that their contents could be
read in RSS aggregators as well as Web browsers. I’ve just discovered
that O’Reilly publications has  a related chapter  online as
a sample from  a new book, Spidering Hacks.
If the book was mentioned that Thursday, I didn’t catch the title. In
any case, the extracted chapter may not have been  posted online
at that point. Somewhat technical  Thursday-nighters and online-news researchers may find it useful. Authors  Kevin Hemenway and Tara Calishain
devote several chapters to blogging and RSS feeds, and say the book is
for “developers, researchers, technical assistants, librarians, and
power users.”

Hack #24: Painless RSS with Template::Extract

Scraping Up RSS News …

Even at journalism schools, promotion and tenure committees don’t routinely read weblogs.
A good sampling of what they do read is now online as a searchable
database, Prof. Carolyn Stewart Dyer’s Iowa Guide to Scholarly Journals in Mass Communication and
Related Fields.
The online edition (HTML and PDF) is at this address: http://fmp2.its.uiowa.edu/iowaguide/

To skip the “book cover” page and long database URLs, I made a
couple of shortcuts that actually can be typed by a human or e-mailed
without breaking.
— The table of contents: http://tinyurl.com/voxz
— The list of journals: http://tinyurl.com/vp1n

(more…)

Scholarly Publishing About Communication …

“The
Internet and Political Campaigns — What Impact Will it Have
in 2004?” is the topic of a symposium Wednesday
at the Johns Hopkins University.

       Panelists: Michael B. Cornfield, research director
of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at
The George Washington University; R. Rebecca Donatelli,
president of Campaign Solutions and lead Internet consultant
to the McCain for President campaign in 2000; Laura Quinn,
managing partner at QRS Newmedia Inc. and former deputy
chief of staff to Al Gore; and Harrison “Lee” Rainie,
director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project and an
expert at the use of the Internet in American society and
culture.

       Moderator: Alexis Rice, a fellow
in the Center for the Study of American Government at
Johns Hopkins, the creator of www.campaignsonline.org and the author of a recent report on
web blogs, entitled, “The Use of Blogs in the 2004
Presidential Election.”

Blogs, the Internet & the 2004 Presidential Campaign …

…The Truth by
Terry Pratchett, that is. This fantasy novel has a wonderful way of
raising issues relevant to journalism (or weblogging). Things like, “How
did some guy, because he had access to a notebook and a printing
press, have all this power?” or “Who are you
answerable to when you are working on a newspaper?” and  “What is
the truth and do you know
it when you see it?” (As a bonus, you find out why photojournalism
might be a risky career for a vampire… It’s a very funny book.)
Other bits: New England truth-seekers now have an accredited journalism-education program for the first time, at the University of Connecticut. Just in time — the status of journalists can use some help.

Finding The Truth …

I didn’t get to as much of BloggerCon
as I’d hoped to, just the last afternoon. But, heck, these were
bloggers… There are enough reports on the event to fill in frosty
autumn nights for a month. Meanwhile across campus, Harvard’s Nieman Reports has just published its own article on blogging and its relationship to journalism.
Back at BloggerCon, here are some of the accounts of the weekend on my already overwhelming reading list. (more…)

Of and By BloggerCon: Participatory Journalism …

For a possible summer 2004 panel discussion at a journalism education conference…
How can “mass communication” scholars look at weblogs? Should journalism educators be teaching future professional journalists about blogs? Should we be teaching future bloggers about journalism, from fact-checking and headline-writing to libel law?

This is my first draft of a panel proposal… Comments appreciated…

Weblogs, newspapers and political coverage:
New roles for professionals in a world of amateurs?

1. Blogs by opinion columnists (everyone an “instapundit”?)
2. Blogs by reporters (with or without gatekeeping editors!?)
3. Blogs to invite public tips and comments (participatory journalism or token “interactivity”)
4. Blogs as something to cover. Identifying important voices versus “blogrolling”? Who has time to read this stuff? How do you sort out grassroots and astroturf?
5. Using blogs and Web linkage to supplement newspapers: Linkage to document opinions with facts, link opposing opinions for public debate

Growing version of this item.
Earlier related weblog entry

What should journalism schools teach about blogs? …

While alternating between online conversations about blogging and
journalism and the values of both, I fell into a journalism-professor
listserv discussion of Hollywood movies that show good (and bad)
examples of traditional journalism values at work. Suggestions ranged
from the obvious “All the President’s Men” to the adventures of sleazy
tabloid reporters in the Roaring Twenties.

I’ve turned part of the discussion into a blog item, and invite comments to expand the conversation. (Please follow this link, or the headline above, not the “comment” link on this message, thanks.)

Now when will we have the first “Valiant Blogger Saves the Day” movie? (For that question, feel free to leave the comments here!

Hildy, you’re a blogger? Newspaper movies… …

Miami Herald reporter Richard Pachter noticed that Matt Drudge’s website is mostly links to stories on other sites, so he asked whether Drudge considers himself a blogger. ”Nope,” Drudge said. “Sounds too much like booger.”
He also said he’s “a newsman and not a journalist… nor a cyber this or that.” For more details, including Drudge’s estimate that he makes a very non-blogger (and non-journalist) $1.2 million a year, see the Herald story.

Not a Blogger; Not a Journalist …

This is mostly coincidence, but a convoluted anecdote about a New York Times correction, problems with ambiguity in identifying an information source, and a couple of timely “tool pages” from the Project for Excellence in Journalism all might be useful for webloggers wrhting about election campaigns and more…

Covering Politics and Making Stories More Accurate …

Years ago, a book titled An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton had a wonderful time with old and new collective words (“a clutch of vampires,” “a lot of used car salesmen”). I’ve forgotten whether “a scribble of journalists” was from that book. In any case, it’s fun to see bloggers trying the same game.

My first ideas were “babel” (suggesting a confusing tower of mixed voices, not the more negative “babble”) and “boggle,” my state of mind after too many hours at the keyboard.

Then I thought of William James’s phrase about the “bloomin,’ buzzin’
confusion” of things… and decided that in the blogworld, any of those
three words fit. On a good day, you might face a bloom of bloggers…
on an average day, a buzz. But beware the babel and boggle!

What do you call all these bloggers? …