Tag: New York Times

More Funky Feeds

I swore to myself I was not going to write anything more about the 2003 RSS Wars, but this section from Dave Winer’s RSS 2.0 Political FAQ was too good to pass up,

If we were to go the opposite way, with every source of feeds inventing their own replacements for core RSS 2.0 elements, the cost to enter would become increasingly high, and it becomes more likely that programs will express compatibility in terms of products, not formats. Then you’d have to use one aggregator to read BBC feeds, for example, and another to read SF Chronicle feeds. So “funky” is anti-interop; and “not funky” is pro-interop.

Okay, he has a point. Can you imagine, for instance, if you could only read the RSS feeds of something as important as the New York Times in just a single aggregator? That would really suck, wouldn’t it?

Thank goodness the anti-interop feeling in the RSS community is strong enough to prevent something like that from ever happening.

More Jayson Blair Corrections

The New York Times posted a list of corrections to 10 stories written by Jayson Blair. This one made me laugh out loud,

“The Coolest of Months, So It Seems”
April 29, 2000

In this article, about unseasonably cool weather in April, 2000, Mr. Blair quoted Edmund Florimont . . .

Okay, that’s just weird. I can understand the motive behind making stuff up about the sniper case to land your stories on page 1, but Blair couldn’t even write a throwaway piece about unseasonably cool weather without resorting to his bag of tricks? That’s pathological.

The Accuracy of Weblogs vs. Traditional Media

Joanne Jacobs finds a pretty major gaffe in a New York Times story. The story is about a Florida law that requires third graders to meet certain assessment outcomes or be forced to retake the third grade.

Times writer Michael Winerip claims that,

Florida has set a national precedent, giving the adults who know these third graders best — their teachers and principals — absolutely no say in who will be kept back.

But Jacobs points out that in fact, a child who fails the test can still be passed on to the fourth grade if both his or her teacher, principal, and the superintendent all agree that the child is reading at the 3rd grade level.

In the whole “are weblogs as reliable as traditional media” debate, weblogs aren’t looking half bad these days.

Where’s WinerLog When You Need It?

I can’t be the only person who laughed out loud reading Dave Winer lecturing the New York Times about it’s lack of inclusion in Google. A Times story complained that blog entries come up before Time stories in Google searches. But Winer points out that it’s The Times’ own damn fault because it is telling Google not to index it.

Hmmm . . . I seem to remember a couple years ago that Winer was having a fit because Google had stopped indexing Userland-related sites. When another developer tried to point out that, as with the Times, the problem was not with Google but rather with Userland.

Rather than take that to heart, Winer went on one of his patented fits accusing the helpful independent developer of not knowing what he was talking about and other sorts of hateful invective. Of course, when it turned out that Userland itself was responsible for the Google de-indexing, Winer didn’t offer even a hint of a public apology.

Winer should count his blessings that the Times (generally) doesn’t play the game that way.

Jayson Blair on the Real Story of What Happened at the New York Times

Jayson Blair is certainly the leading contender now for the Worst Word Choice of 2003. Newsweek managed to obtain a brief interview with Blair for story on the his problems at the New York Times which includes this howler (emphasis added),

I canÂ’t say anything other than the fact that I feel a range of emotions including guilt, shame, sadness, betrayal, freedom and appreciation for those who have stood by me, been tough on me, and have taken the time to understand that there is a deeper story and not to believe everything they read in the newspapers.

Ouch — well, I guess he should know better than anybody.

Inaccuracy: Weblogs vs. Newspapers

In most of the conversations I have with the occasional media person or associate about weblogs, the one thing that always comes up is how can people possibly know whether or not weblogs are accurate. It doesn’t help that Jayson Blair’s errors have now been exposed.

Blair, of course, wrote for that daily weblog known as the New York Times, and actually reporting on events was too hard so he plagiarized stuff from other newspapers or simply made things up. And even though the NYT had to issue numerous corrections to stories by Blair that should have tipped them off, they kept letting him plug away until another newspaper complained of an obvious case of plagiarism.

The real problem is that although “don’t believe everything you read” is so commonly heard that it is a cliche, the fact is that many people do assume that since the newspaper they’re reading is well-packaged and presented and obviously has a serious organization behind it, that what’s printed in it must be true.

In fact, it was the New York Times who gave America the biggest liar ever to appear in a mainstream newspaper — Walter Duranty. Duranty was the Times’ start reporter in Soviet Russia where he became a shill for Stalin’s regime. Duranty perpetrated a number of lies in the pages of the Times. He put the paper on record as saying the Ukranian famine simply wasn’t happening, although he knew this to be untrue. He reported on the Show Trials as if the absurd plots spun in Stalin’s rigged courts were real and the defendants guilty of the bizarre crimes they were accused of.

And not only did Duranty spin lies for the paper of record for over 10 years, but he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his deception — others in journalism looked at his lies and gave him their most prestigious award for it.

Which is why I always find it annoying when someone like Dave Winer refers to his critics as “weiner boys” and simply ignores even polite criticism and suggestion. Much better to allow a thousand weiner boys to bloom than perpetuate the sort of insulated environment that allowed Duranty to win American journalism’s top prize.