these thoughts came immediately after reading the NY Times’ sad attempt to explain how the “newspaper of record” managed to lose its integrity.
1. looks to me as if the media (ny times) has become the news and the blogging community are functioning as the real journalists. can anyone reading this blog, who has been following the judith miller situation say they didn’t go to the blogosphere today to get a decent handle on how to parse what the Times just did to “cover the Judith Miller” story.
2. i want a juan cole equivalent for the judy miller story; someone who specializes in the working of behind-the-scenes washington and who knows enough about law and history to put each day’s events in perpective. at the very least i want someone to present me with the ten most useful accounts on the web so that i can triangulate the problem.
3. perhaps it would be a good thought experiment to try to come up with interesting ideas of how to organize references on the web to the judith miller situation. how would you present an overview of the references?
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Regarding no. 3: the Times attempted to deal with the confusion of the issue with an interactive timeline – the print edition actually referred people to the website. It helps somewhat, but the shear amount of information in there is too much. You can’t see all the events on the timeline at once, which is vexing, only a number of different sorts of views, and none of them really gives a decent overview of the story.
Since the Times is such an integral part of the story (whether they like it or not), I think we’ll have to wait for their piece and then look for reactions from others. One place I’ll be watching is http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/thepubliceditor/publiceditorswebjournal/index.html?offset=17&fid=.f779788/17
and also the Columbia Journalism Review.
this morning’s brian lehrer show was introduced with an audio segment of chris wallace asking condie if she had anything to do with smearing j. wilson. a question she, obviously, evades. lehrer’s guests were susan estrich (usc law professor) and greg mitchel (editor & publisher.) brian has a blog, and this is the link to his top stories today:
“The Times spills the beans on Judy Miller, raises questions about self” (Editor & Publisher)
this is how i see it: we all read the time’s article. your post points at the role of bloggers as journalists. dan’s comment to your post refers us from paper to web. i went from radio to web. are we already “triangulating” the problem? a judicious consumer of media seems to get it, doesn’t he…