Many apologies for the drop-off of links in the past few weeks, something’s broken in delicious’s auto-post feature and I’m working on fixing it. In the meantime, you can follow my links here or follow me on Twitter to get links and chatter.
Happy New Year!
Looking for someone smarter than me to work with me on my new adventure.
Please pass this one to your friends, other email lists, etc. I’m looking to fill this job ASAP, so if you’re interested please don’t hesitate to contact me.
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Deputy Editor for Yahoo News Blogs
Looking for an experienced, agile, details-oriented blog editor to manage a team of professional bloggers. Working with the Editor, this person will oversee story selection and creation of original reporting and curation for the largest news audience on the web.
The ideal candidate has extensive online media experience (blog experience preferred), experience managing reporters and the ability to create media that appeals to both expert and popular audiences.
This person must have knowledge of and interaction with outside entities, especially those in the news blogosphere, and comfort interfacing with other parts of Yahoo’s organization, especially Yahoo’s homepage.
Responsibilities:
* Providing oversight to ensure that blogs are following style, meeting standards and serving our audience
* Generating, developing and executing content ideas and strategies
* Monitoring Yahoo! and the Web at-large for story and source material
* Fielding and attracting quality tips and inquiries from editors, PR types and outside entities
* Providing photo assistance and guidance with regard to gathering, editing and crediting
* Tracking, analyzing and driving results
Requirements:
* Five-plus years experience in online media, experience in blogging specifically is a plus
* Exceptional copyediting skills and attention to detail
* Strong grammar and communication skills and command of language
* Familiarity with SEO, RSS, Twitter, Facebook and other social media
* Basic HTML and Photoshop skills, experience with blog publishing and content management systems
For those of you who accidentally turned off your Google alert on my name, a quick round-up of the pick-up of my announcement on Wednesday that I’m heading to Yahoo:
Thanks for caring folks! Now back to your regularly scheduled programing of links about other things more interesting and less me-y.
Some big, and bittersweet, news for ya: at the end of next week I’m going to be leaving TPM, my home for the last three years.
I’ve accepted an amazing offer from Yahoo to build, staff and run a new news blog. It will be a combination of curation and original reporting, with gregarious linking and sharp, smart writing. In other words, for the folks who read this site for meta journalism news, I’m going to be building a team to bring the most popular news site in the United States into the news link economy.
Needless to say, only an opportunity this intriguing could have possibly lured me away from TPM. My love for the company, for Josh, and for the team he’s built isn’t something that will ever go away. I’ll always be thankful to Josh for the opportunities he’s given me and proud to have contributed to building the site into what it’s become (when I started there, it looked like this). I’m sure TPM will remain a cutting edge producer of engaging, important journalism for years to come.
I’ll have more to say about the Yahoo project as things develop in the weeks to come. The blog’s name and the brilliant writers who will grace its pageviews are TBD. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have ideas for either.
In the meantime, if you always thought “I could do Andrew’s job way better than he does,” I highly recommend you apply for one of the two new job opening’s on TPM’s publishing staff: Deputy Publisher/Publisher and Social Media & Publicity Associate. Details are here.
Late update: A clarification: my use of the word “site” instead of “blog” made some folks think this would be a new, independent website for Yahoo. Thankfully, it won’t be, and will live at Yahoo News and benefit from the enormous audience and resources they’ve already built up (hence the exciting “bring the most popular news site in the United States into the news link economy” part). Apologies for the confusion.
Later update: I need name ideas!
Went on GritTV again yesterday to discuss the day’s news with Michael Musto of the Village Voice and and Esther Armah of WBAI. Enjoy.
Went on the wonderful GritTv yesterday to discuss the week in news:
A little after the four minute mark:
A quick point related to my Tuesday post “The New York Times and the rules of war.“ When I write that part of the Times’ problem is that they developed “a journalistic ethos of detachment,” I’m not arguing that The Times needs to drop their aspirations to objectivity.
Rather, I’m arguing that they should stop thinking objectivity and detachment are the same thing. They can aspire to not favoring conservative or ideological argument and aggressively engage simultaneously.
Look at what Campbell Brown is trying to do. Sounding like a blogger, she’s dismissing the false objectivity of “equal time,” if the arguments being reported on aren’t equally based in fact. She’s styling herself as someone who’s willing to call bullshit when she sees it (exhibit A: taking apart Tucker Bounds when he absurdly tried to defend Sarah Palin’s national security cred). And, unlike The Times, she’s doesn’t cowardly use euphemisms when pointing out race-baiting. She’s describing reality, without biasing any ideology, as she clearly as she can. Not standing back from it to avoid controversy.
The result? She’s doing her journalistic duty and creating political problems for people who lie and smear and going viral in the process.
Nothing she’s done has actually been liberal or conservative. In this case McCain/Palin have just been in more need of truth-squading. But traditionally, she’d be backed down by CNN execs cowed by political pressure from the Right and the prospect of losing the appearance of objectivity. But so far, probably because it’s been good for business, she’s pushing ahead.
The New York Times, naturally, ran a story claiming she was “tacking toward commentary.” They’d be wise to watch her and realize that distinguishing between lies and falsehoods and forcing the liars to pay a political price isn’t “commentary,” it’s just good, engaged, journalism.
During the Revolutionary War, the British Army had a difficult time because of its strict adherence to what it believed were the proper rules of war. They lined their men up, made their intentions clear to their enemy, marched them to the battle field, and engaged head on. Their tactics were so predictable and gentlemanly that aristocrats would watch the battles with picnics and parasols from the tops of surrounding hills, unafraid of harm.
The American colonists used the Brits’ predictability and tactical captivity against them. Knowing they couldn’t compete with the huge British Army head to head, they improvised guerrilla tactics: ambushing their opponents from forests as they marched by, attacking from behind and then quickly retreating to avoid taking casualties. The British found themselves fighting with antiquated rules born of antiquated tactics enabled by the fact that they had such sheer size that they hadn’t previously needed to evolve.
I give you, The New York Times.
Bill Keller is concerned that the in-depth political reporting and analysis of The New York Times doesn’t have the impact that it used to. He tells the New York Observer:
“It’s obvious, and no crime against humanity, that the world has many, many places to turn for information, misinformation, analysis, rants, etc,” wrote Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, in an e-mail. “We—The Times, The Washington Post, Politico, the news outlets that aim to be aggressive, serious and impartial—don’t dominate the conversation the way we once did, and that’s fine, except it means some excellent hard work gets a little muffled.”
Blood, sweat and tears poured into a perfect Sunday A1 story, unless picked up by a politician for an attack, pundits to further a narrative, or partisan bloggers to feed the base, are simply wasted. In this new media era, the sheer, predictable brute force of The Times doesn’t pack the punch it once did.
In this new era of a proliferation of voices, everyone else has improvised. Those that couldn’t rely on over a million print readers a day, 1.5 million on Sunday, and another 17 million a month online had to develop guerrilla tactics to be heard. Cable television entertains. Bloggers mobilize and make trouble. Politicians lie, and joke, and spend millions of dollars running mini paid-media empires of their own. Like the American colonists, they realized they couldn’t compete playing by the rules, so they changed them.
But The Times, and other big media companies that had relied on their distribution oligopoly to control the discourse haven’t learned tactics to have an impact in the new media system. They just print the story and then stand back and hope. Previously, their information dominance alone would do the trick. No longer.
And worse, their old brute force model allowed them to develop a journalistic ethos of detachment that prevents them from saying in anything other than a boutique paper that they care about whether or not their journalism has an impact. They haven’t learned to engage and don’t seem to know that they need to.
Keller doesn’t realize that it would be a lot more effective to take his messages to his millions of readers than to The New York Observer’s 51,000. He doesn’t realize that if they write the story once and no one cares, they can just write it again and criticize people for ignoring it. He doesn’t realize there are many ways to have an impact if he can bring himself to admit that that’s the point, and that The Times’ detachment does it no good when it’s ignorable.
If the battle were independent media as guerillas and The Times as the Brits, I would be happy to have them flail indefinitely. But, independent media isn’t alone at having improvised models for impact. As embodied by the Bill O’Reilly’s of the world taunting and ranting their way to prominence, or Barack Obama’s campaign releasing a 13 minute long propaganda documentary that in only a day has been viewed by 600,000 people, people who aren’t commited to truth first and foremost are gaining strength in this media system as well.
The Times is certainly an imperfect institution, but it’s important that they accept the new media system and engage it. It needs to embrace the diversity of the web and push it to be more accountable, more truthful, more substantive. And it can’t do that marching in a straight line.
Welcome to the new site.
This is the fourth iteration of my personal blog, but the first hosted at Andrewgolis.com. The design is actually a throwback to the second iteration of the site, hosted at blogspot back in 2006. My hope is that it’s clean and simple and readable. I’m sure I’ll be tweaking as I go, but I love it out of the box too.
Everything you read at my old wordpress site – new media analysis, political musings, and youtube videos – will be here. Enjoy.