by David Burn | Jun 29, 2005 | Digital culture
This Is Not A Blog, a webzine produced by the Digital Journalism class at New York University in Spring 2005, contains several interviews with prominent persons in the online journalism sphere. Two that caught my eye provide deeper looks at Jim Romenesko and Kurt Andersen.
Andersen is a fan of blogs, but he says they need to be reinvented if they want to achieve clout in journalism. “The speed of blogs is great, but there are complex arguments and thoughts that can’t be compressed into 150 words. I am eager for the next moment in the evolution of blogs to happen, where there are people actually doing reportorial journalism in the blog form.”
He envisions a hybrid blog, whereby a journalist is paid to search out stories and blog about them, incorporating both traditional reporting and opinion. “So then it’s not just all like ‘Look at what this blogger said about this other blogger.’ It all becomes a bit of an echo chamber. The coffee gets pretty thin if you pour it through the grounds 10 times.”
Anderson maintained a blog for a short time on his own site, kurtandersen.com, but abandoned it last autumn while working on his new novel. He says he doesn’t have any spare intellectual energy to share with the world. “I did a few postings. And I’ve always known it could be a very addictive thing. It’s fun. Maybe it’s really old school of me, but I’m paid to write. So why am I going to write for free? Maybe over time I’ll develop a lot of second-rate thoughts to put on the blog.”
Romenesko, on the other hand, has no such quibbles with blogging.
Romenesko is dedicated blogger. He rises every day at 5 a.m. and immediately checks his e-mail and bookmarked Web sites for stories of interest. He later steps out to a nearby Starbucks (go figure), and hooks his computer up to a Wi-Fi connection to work from there, reading dozens of newspaper sites and blogs.
He usually heads home from Starbucks in the late afternoon—still posting until dinnertime—and goes to bed by 10 p.m., only to start the entire process all over again seven hours later.
Romenesko insists that he maintains a “real life” outside the blogosphere. “Of course, between postings I do ‘normal’ things—watch TV, read books, newspapers, magazines, go to movies, meet up with friends, dine out.”
Even so, maintaining three daily blogs takes a great deal of time and effort. So much so that he hasn’t taken more than two vacations in the last five years.
As a host of three blogs myself, I can relate to Romenesko best. Yet, as a writer of things other than blogs, I can see where Andersen’s counter point is equally appealing. For I can envision a day where I have more important and better paying things to write than blog posts. Like books, or screenplays or long-form journalism.
by David Burn | Jun 28, 2005 | Go Big Red
Flickr users, eatsdirt and nycarthur, have generously posted interesting photo sets from last weekend’s Coney Island Mermaid Parade.
According to ConeyIsland.com, “The Mermaid Parade is the nation’s largest art parade and one of New York City’s greatest summer events. The Mermaid Parade celebrates the sand, the sea, the salt air and the beginning of summer, as well as the history and mythology of Coney Island, Coney Island pride, and artistic self-expression. The Parade is characterized by participants dressed in hand-made costumes as Mermaids, Neptunes, various sea creatures, the occasional wandering lighthouse, Coney Island post card or amusement ride, as well as antique cars, marching bands, drill teams, and the odd yacht pulled on flatbed.”
by David Burn | Jun 27, 2005 | Lowcountry
The Unitarian Fellowship of Hilton Head Island hosted a service by Johnnie Mitchell this morning. Mitchell is a native islander who is passionate about the preservation and promotion of the Gullah culture. As part of her efforts, she has written extensively on Native-Gullah history and culture, and she co-owns De Gullah Creations at The Mall at Shelter Cove.
The church service was part of a larger celebration this weekend honoring Mitchelville—the first Freedmen’s village in the United States, formed in 1862 and called for by Union General Ormsby Mitchell. Descendents of the Mitchell family were in attendance this morning.
According to Organization of American Historians, former Secretary of Interior, Bruce Babbitt, on a visit to Beaufort in 2000 challenged community leaders to work together to provide opportunities for the public to learn more about Reconstruction era sites in the county. Including:
– the Penn School for former slaves founded in 1862 and located on St. Helena Island
– the Old Fort Plantation on the Beaufort River where the first African Americans assembled on 1 January 1863 to hear the reading of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
– the Freedmen’s Bureau housed in the recently restored Beaufort College
– the Beaufort Arsenal where free slaves in Beaufort voted for the first time
– the first Freedmen’s Village of Mitchelville on Hilton Head Island
– many other noteworthy historic buildings and archeological sites associated with the Civil War hero and Reconstruction leader Robert Smalls
by David Burn | Jun 25, 2005 | Go Big Red
Robert Patterson of Prince Edward Island, Canada has been busy readying a collabortive work space set to open Monday in Charlottetown.
The Queen Street Commons is an organized group to create and serve the common good of its members.
We come together to create the organizational power to obtain services in common that we could never afford on our own. We offer fellowship and community for those that work alone. We offer the opportunity to discover the value of interacting with others. We offer the opportunity to contribute to the common good. We offer a “Work Home”.
There’s something decidedly 1960s about these sort of collectivist operations. Which is what I love about them. If I were a poet/blogger/copywriter/journalist dude living in PEI, I’d want in bad. Hey, can I get a Canadian work visa as a freelance writer?
by David Burn | Jun 25, 2005 | Music
There are presently 1492 images on Flick with a “Bonnaroo” tag.
And Flickr user, Dannyboy, kindly offers a great visual recap of Telluride Bluegrass.
by David Burn | Jun 25, 2005 | Music
A Note About Dicks Pick 35: The Legend of the Houseboat Tapes
Although the Grateful Deads vault is enormous and impressively full, the band certainly doesnt have a tape of every show it played; in fact, they dont even have a copy of every show they recorded. Tapes drifted off in a variety of ways including Jerry Garcia handing them out And therein lies the story of Dicks Picks #35.
This spring, our archivist David Lemieux got a call from Donna Jean Godchaux-Mackay. It seems that in the late summer of 1971, just before Keith Godchaux began rehearsals with the Dead, Garcia handed him a big box of tapes and said, Here, this is our most recent tour. Learn our music. The irony was that Donna Jean doubts mightily Keith ever bothered to listen to them hed never listened to the Dead all that much before he auditioned, first with Garcia and then the rest of the band – he just had an uncanny innate facility for the music. In any case, he left the tapes on his parents houseboat in Alameda, CA, and there they stayed. For almost 35 years.
In the spring of 2005, Keith’s brother Brian and son Zion were cleaning out the houseboat, found the tapes, and gave them to Donna, whose jaw dropped. One call to Lemieux later, and the Deads long-lost missing tour from the summer of 1971 had resurfaced.
by David Burn | Jun 23, 2005 | Music
This is the album I most want to buy, at present.
“Pikeville, Kentucky, native Patty Loveless has occasionally acknowledged her mountain-music roots on her frequently excellent albums of mainstream country. Like too few of her 21st-century post-hillbilly peers could do, the singer makes Mountain Soul–an all-acoustic sampling of classics and a handful of new songs–far more than a nod to the style. Loveless’s clear voice and sensitivity to narrative lyrics have made ballads her most fertile ground, and here she turns in as consistently affecting a disc as she’s ever made. Even while celebrating a sound rooted in another time, though, Loveless takes an artistic chance or two: Darrell Scott’s long, downbeat story song “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” isn’t the record’s best cut, but it’s one of its most intriguing.” –Rickey Wright for Amazon.com
by David Burn | Jun 21, 2005 | Literature
Guardian Unlimited: Faced with that literary troublemaker TS Eliot, a York University academic called in the FBI and now claims to have cracked the case of how The Waste Land was written.
Lawrence Rainey, of the university’s English department, spent two years travelling across Europe and the US to sort out the sequence in which Eliot wrote the poem.
A sheaf of rough drafts for the poem surfaced in 1971 and Prof Rainey compared them with the letters and other writing that Eliot was producing in the years before its publication in 1922 – a task calling for forensic as much as literary investigation. He examined more than 1,200 leaves of paper, including 638 pages of letters, Eliot had written between 1912 and 1922, visiting 22 international libraries and several private collections in his two-year journey.
“When The Waste Land was published, its defenders insisted that the poem was planned from the beginning and that it was a poem of extraordinary unity. Now that we can trace the processes and the choices that Eliot is making, the poem turns out to be something quite different,” Prof Rainey said.
“The Waste Land was not a seamless whole, but something more radical. It is, at once, wild and unruly, violent and shocking and yet deeply compassionate,” he added.
by David Burn | Jun 20, 2005 | Go Big Red
Boston Phoenix reports that Domino’s Pizza founder, Tom Monaghan, has big plans for the community he’s building near Naples, Florida.
Ave Maria won’t be just a university. It will also be a new town, built from scratch, in which the wickedness of the world will be kept at bay. “We’ve already had about 3500 people inquire on our Web site about buying a home there — you know, they’re all Catholic,” Monaghan says excitedly. “We’re going to control all the commercial real estate, so there’s not going to be any pornography sold in this town. We’re controlling the cable system. The pharmacies are not going to be able to sell condoms or dispense contraceptives.” A private chapel will be located within walking distance of each home. At the stunning church in the center of town, Mass will be said hourly, seven days a week, from 6 a.m. on.
You know, it might be fun to be so insanely rich, that whatever crazy scheme you had up your sleeve, people would respond to it. I’m sure the contractors in S.W. Florida could give a crap why they’re building what they’re building. If this guy was serious, he’d take a page from the Mormons, and have only church members in good standing work on his projects.
by David Burn | Jun 19, 2005 | Media
According to a transcript of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show from Tuesday, the conservative commentator is, by his own admission, no journalist.
“I’m not a journalist. I’ve never pretended to be a journalist. For one thing I laugh. For one thing I enjoy life. You know, I’m not dour, I’m not filled with doom and gloom, I’m not a pessimist, I don’t dislike the country, and I don’t suspect my country’s guilty every time there’s some sort of international conflict. I’m not a journalist. But I am America’s anchorman. I am America’s anchorman and for nearly 17 years I’ve been doing play-by-play of the news here.”
“I never wanted to be a journalist. I’m an advocate. I’m a commentator. I mean, I do so much more than just journalism. I do tell people things they don’t know. I mean, that is the strict definition of a journalist. I even looked it up in the dictionary, just to be sure — you never know what the dictionary definition of a term is going to be these days — and it said: somebody who writes news for broadcast on radio or TV. So the broadcasters themselves are not journalists. The people who write it are, so the people who put the TelePromTer together for the evening news anchors are the journalists. Well, that’s according to the dictionary definition.”
Thanks to Fishbowl DC for the post.
