Monday, January 09, 2006

Rebranding blogs (of war)

From the blog of Donald Sensing, "concentrating on foreign and military policy and religious matters." Mr. Sensing took early retirement from the US Army in August 1995 at the rank of major to:

answer my call to ordained ministry. I began classes at Vanderbilt Divinity School the same month. I have served full-time as a United Methodist Church pastor since 1997. I was ordained an elder in full membership of Tennessee Conference of the UMC in June 2002.


Anyway...
Late this week I received this email:
From: “Charlie Kondek”
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 3:17 PM
Subject: Exclusive Contact from the Army

Hi, Donald. I’m writing from a PR firm on behalf of the U.S. Army. We’re contacting a few bloggers to test a new outlet for public information. The Army believes that military blogs are a valuable medium for reaching out to soldiers. To that end, the Army plans to offer you and selected bloggers exclusive editorial content on a few issues you’re likely to be interested in. If you do decide you are interested in receiving this material, whether you choose to write about what we send you is, of course, entirely up to you. (I notice you’ve been on a blog sabbatical for a while so am not sure where you stand there.)

Like I said, we’re only contacting a handful of bloggers at this time. If you are interested, please let me know, and we’ll send you further information as it becomes available. Either way, thanks for your time.
____________
Charlie Kondek
Account Executive
Web Producer
Hass MS&L

My response was, “Count me in.” I spent long enough in Army Public Affairs to know when I’m being fed baloney. But the colonel who emailed Glenn is right – this is long overdue. And I predict the Post and others of the dinosaur media will scream bloody murder. I don’t care. They’ll say we are biased, as if they are not. As Glenn wrote, “I’m glad that the folks at the Times and the Post are “true believers” in objective reporting. Now if they’d just become true practitioners thereof… .”

But I am biased, I freely admit (another difference between bloggers and the MSM is we admit we have a point of view. They do, too, but pretend they don’t).

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