"If I were advising President Bush, given how the public feels about him right now, I think patience would probably be something that I would encourage," says Paul Bogaards, executive director of publicity for Alfred A. Knopf, which in 2004 released Bill Clinton's million-selling "My Life."
Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions. Viewed as such, blogging may “die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.
Since the Clinton years, this has been the era of the permanent campaign, with the line between running for election and running the country practically erased. Bush took Karl Rove into the White House, turned policy into an arm of politics, and governed the same way he campaigned: treat the press as an out-of-favor interest group, control the message at all cost, repeat it incessantly regardless of changing facts, admit no mistakes, show no uncertainty, reward loyalists, and ignore critics or else, if necessary, destroy them. This approach to what’s known as strategic communications won Bush two elections; it also helped destroy his Presidency. Campaigning and governing are not the same. They are closer to being opposites.
Lord Judge of Draycote, the most senior judge in England and Wales, said of young jurors: "Most are technologically proficient. Many get much information from the internet. They consult and refer to it. They are not listening. They are reading."
"One potential problem is whether, learning as they do in this way, they will be accustomed, as we were, to listening for prolonged periods," he added.
ONE VOICE - ONE VISION
Our aim is to be an effective and influential voice for the xxxxx community.
Our vision is of a dynamic and vibrant industry, operating to the highest standards of professionalism and responsibility towards our staff, xxxx, customers and local community, and within a supportive regulatory and fiscal environment.
To achieve this, we will seek to establish positive relationships with a range of key opinion formers and policy makers, as well as other trade bodies. Our policies and campaigns are developed by members, for members, to deliver real bottom line benefits.
By working together and pooling our resources, we can achieve the recognition and respect our industry deserves.
Isn't this a potential privacy nightmare for libraries? Will Google compile personally identifiable information (via a login to Google Docs or some other service) of terminal users? Will Google collect search and usage data from these library terminals to "improve" searches? Will such data be open for study by the publishers? Scholars? How long will Google retain such data, if it compiles it at all?
Cameron and his best friend George Osborne, who are toffs in the true English sense of the world, had attempted to portray themselves as fresh, modern, and not associated with the Conservatives’ sleazy past. They both went to Eton, Britain’s most elite public school, where Prince William and Prince Harry were educated. Yet here was Osborne, who has led an incredibly rich and privileged lifestyle, talking dodgy donations with a Russian oligarch. In a year’s time he could be custodian of the nation’s finances.
Pierce never went to university and cut his teeth on local papers.
Currently Assistant Editor of The Daily Telegraph, he also regularly appears on TV and radio.
The accounts are neither fully conclusive nor broad enough to settle the many lingering disputes over blame in a war that hardened relations between the Kremlin and the West. But they raise questions about the accuracy and honesty of Georgia’s insistence that its shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, was a precise operation. Georgia has variously defended the shelling as necessary to stop heavy Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages, bring order to the region or counter a Russian invasion.
"One of the things that has been conventionally done is to compare George W. Bush to Harry Truman, both of whom had upon leaving office dismal approval ratings and of course as it is well known by now, Harry Truman's reputation has, by virtually every account, not only improved, but I would say escalated nearly to the top of the list of greater American presidents," Kellerman added.
The editing tricksters of YouTube helped defeat McCain whenever it starved him of context. Surrounded by peers, contemporaries, buddies, colleagues, fellow veterans — men like himself — McCain might have made more sense.
Sound effects made these all come across with dramatic impact. Buck's psychic destruction ray was really a Schick electric razor held at just the right distance from the microphone. The sound effects crew could also simulate anything from a regiment of marching robots to a scary rocket-ship crash.
...Barack Obama wanted to know whom Mr. Doerr would recommend for chief technology officer of the United States, a position that Mr. Obama has promised to create. Mr. Doerr’s first choice was Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, in which Mr. Doerr invested early on. Mr. Joy is now a partner at Mr. Doerr’s firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Mr. Doerr said it would be a sacrifice to lose him to the Obama administration, but that “there is no greater cause.”
In the US "shock-jock" populist talk radio of the Howard Stern school has overwhelmingly been rightwing and partisan regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans occupy the White House. We have nothing so vicious (or vacuous) here. Indeed, the dominant BBC is often criticised for being culturally liberal as well as politically nihilistic, sometimes rightly so.
Jon Cruddas, a Portsmouth comprehensive school boy, who has moved up in the world far enough to have been a Downing St aide, now MP for Dagenham, is always banging on about the white working class being excluded from New Labour's multicultural meritocracy.
...the first ebook to contain an embedded music soundtrack. The soundtrack was compiled by African Dope Records to suit the mood and feel of the book's storyline. Arthur Attwell, Publishing Director of Electric Book Works says "To be worth buying and reading, an ebook should offer something that the print book can't offer. Ebooks offer many possibilities, including sound, links, colour, interactivity, and an almost unlimited number of pages. It’s important to take advantage of these."
Now can we please not risk any more catastrophes by letting this administration stick around? Just scrap the transition and let President Obama clean house right away like the Brits do at Number 10 Downing Street? In the country of my birth, the Prime Minister kisses the Queen’s hand and he’s in and the loser is on the way out with no time to make off with the silver.
Journalism is truly dead, and the situation may get worse with a liberal Congress, pushing the Fairness Doctrine, and a new administration that has shown a penchant for denying access to those who ask tough questions or have a dissenting opinion. We can only hope that the new president has the wisdom and courage to protect the First Amendment and a truly free press.
The coming change is driven by two things: (1) E-ink, (2) Publishers and retailers investing in digital distribution infrastructure. The ebook reading experience is getting better, in the form of the Kindle, Iliad and Sony Reader. The iPhone is a strong contender, as are all next-generation smartphones.
Kindle has the huge advantage of its wireless connection. Barnsley sees this as enabling the one thing that’s really changed books in the last decade: impulse shopping, as seen in Tesco’s and Asda, and in bookstores’ 3 for 2 offers. That’s the future. Imagine watching Cranford on the TV, and immediately downloading the complete works of Elizabeth Gaskell - “instant bedtime reading”. This impulse buying is the most significant development in bookselling.
...for now, we believe books made of paper still have a substantial advantage over the screen for sustained reading of a linear narrative.
Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —
a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,
parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked
cotton
forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is
a tense
court of bespectacled owls and, on the field's
receding rim —
a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plough continues on this lined page
beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's
black vengeance,
and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,
heart, muscles, tendons,
till the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure
light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.
Along the way, I think, something has been lost. It's the same thing my mother lamented as she watched my generation abandon the newspaper - common ground, common spaces - a common set of facts around which we as humans can gather, debate, and connect. And therein lies an opportunity, I sense, to create a new kind of search that is in fact 'not' personalized, but rather socialized - shared and common to all.
...the applications would span “everything from enhanced home broadband networks, to intelligent peer-to-peer devices, and even small communications networks.”
Another FCC commissioner, Jonathan Adelstein, claimed the new spectrum would support a “third pipe” to the home, a new channel for broadband to compete with existing services from telecoms companies and cable operators.
And a third, Deborah Tate floated a number of potential uses, including this: “Communities of users may find they are able to communicate seamlessly through mesh networks rather than traditional phone lines.”
Asking political bloggers to "add value" is to misunderstand the relationship between a free press and politicians. Take a memo Ms Blears, we are not here to "add value", or do what politicians want, Guido has his own values and aims to hit back at political hypocrisy and lies. Politicians make laws, so they should be held to account, to a higher standard. The Nick Robinsons, Peter Riddells, Michael Whites and Steve Richardsons of the world don't do investigative digging, they report back their impressions from their lunch meetings. They re-package and interpret spin from the party machines. That is how they "add value". They are what Peter Oborne memorably described as the "client media".
"He's run a campaign where he's used very modern tools, spoke to a new coalition, talked about new issues, and along the way, he's reinvented the way campaigns are run," says Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the nonprofit think-tank NDN, and a veteran of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. "Compared to our 1992 campaign, this is like a multi-national corporation versus a non-profit."
Ironically, it was McCain who first saw the internet's potential in a presidential race, running an experimental set of targeted banner ads during his doomed 1999 primary battle against George W. Bush. But eight years later, Obama finally teased out the net's full potential as an election tool.
The campaign's commitment to online organizing took shape during the primaries, when it hired online director Joe Rospars, a veteran of Howard Dean's web-heavy 2004 campaign, and lured Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to build its own social networking site, myBarackObama.com.
Get ready for a fight in this country over the political narrative. The Government will argue that it has a new progressive left ally and that McCain, who visited the Tory conference, was defeated by the left. The Conservatives will argue that time for a change defeated it's no time for a novice.
After she voted in her hometown, Gov. Sarah Palin was asked if she had any regrets about the campaign, CNN reported.
Palin bemoaned "the state of journalism today."
If a holy Hindu man can,
If a gangly Anglican can,
If in Lesbos, a pure Lesbian can,
Baby, you can can-can too.
Right-wing critiques of the press are usually filed by ideologues who, rather than trying to improve journalism, are trying to eradicate it, which pretty much sums up the work being done at NewsBusters.
I was reminded of that while reading this utterly predictable complaint about how the liberal media is (surprise!) going to cost John McCain the campaign. Specifically, the NewsBusters item details how when polled informally, journalists as a group often vote Democratic. And, of course (goes the Newsbusters thinking), because they vote Democratic that means journalists report Democratic, whatever that means.
“I think we’ll be analyzing this election for years as a seminal, transformative race,” said Mark McKinnon, a senior adviser to President Bush’s campaigns in 2000 and 2004. “The year campaigns leveraged the Internet in ways never imagined. The year we went to warp speed. The year the paradigm got turned upside down and truly became bottom up instead of top down.”
“So what?” Those two cavalier words alone speak to the larger problem. Who cares if “80 percent or more of journalists covering the 2008 election” will vote for Barack Obama? Journalists, their editors, management, the candidates and the American people should care.
Obama urges engagement and dialogue "with our enemies as well as our friends". He stresses the importance of restoring America's standing abroad. McCain does not say so directly, but he casts the rest of the world as an essentially hostile arena, a vast "Out There", full of menaces that America has to stare down. In a spirited stump speech - "The Mac is back!" - delivered in Springfield, Virginia at the weekend, the only references to the world beyond US shores were to dictators, and to Obama's refusal to use the word "victory" when discussing American involvement in Iraq.
Over time, and through much argument, a rough consensus emerged that recapitalizing the banks was ultimately the most likely approach to work. And sure enough, that's what ended up happening. Now, there is no clear paper trail linking the econoblogosphere to Hank Paulson's change of heart, but it would be foolish to argue that his or Ben Bernanke's economic pronouncements did not receive withering peer review.
When asked to speculate further on why fewer British teenagers now display mature reasoning, Professor Shayler [of King's College, London] eschews local explanations and puts the blame squarely on television and computers. They take children away from the physical experiences on which later inferential skills are based, he thinks, and teach them to value speed over depth, and passive entertainment over active.
The Mail doesn't care. It reliably sets its face against what it sees as modish and insincere. It offers a view of the world - that everything has gone downhill since the 1950s, when women stayed in the kitchen, sex was saved for marriage and homosexuality was shameful - that is now rarely found elsewhere, not even in the Telegraph as that paper strives for a younger, trendier audience. It understands that one of a newspaper's functions is to give its readers a sense of security, belonging and simple values in an increasingly complex and unsettling world. The Mail is a supremely confident paper. Where others, trimming to focus groups, muffle their message, the Mail projects it relentlessly, and with great technical skill, from almost every page.
Nearly three times as many people ages 18 to 29 mention the internet as mention newspapers as a main source of election news (49% vs. 17%). Nearly the opposite is true among those over age 50: some 22% rely on the internet for election news while 39% look to newspapers. Compared with 2004, use of the internet for election news has increased across all age groups. Among the youngest cohort (age 18-29), TV has lost significant ground to the internet.
The rags-to-riches story—that staple of American biography—has over the years been given two very different interpretations. The nineteenth-century version stressed the value of compensating for disadvantage. If you wanted to end up on top, the thinking went, it was better to start at the bottom, because it was there that you learned the discipline and motivation essential for success. “New York merchants preferred to hire country boys, on the theory that they worked harder, and were more resolute, obedient, and cheerful than native New Yorkers,” Irvin G. Wyllie wrote in his 1954 study “The Self-Made Man in America.” Andrew Carnegie, whose personal history was the defining self-made-man narrative of the nineteenth century, insisted that there was an advantage to being “cradled, nursed and reared in the stimulating school of poverty.” According to Carnegie, “It is not from the sons of the millionaire or the noble that the world receives its teachers, its martyrs, its inventors, its statesmen, its poets, or even its men of affairs. It is from the cottage of the poor that all these spring.”
Today, that interpretation has been reversed. Success is seen as a matter of capitalizing on socioeconomic advantage, not compensating for disadvantage. The mechanisms of social mobility—scholarships, affirmative action, housing vouchers, Head Start—all involve attempts to convert the poor from chronic outsiders to insiders, to rescue them from what is assumed to be a hopeless state. Nowadays, we don’t learn from poverty, we escape from poverty...
But for all that scrutiny of its content, in the end it may be the BBC’s global commercial activities that finally prompt changes in the way it is funded – with implications for other broadcasters, production houses and content providers around the world.
With 21 offices from Los Angeles to Sydney and Mumbai to Tokyo, Worldwide operates 36 channels reaching 285m homes, makes its own programmes in several languages, sells 60 magazines in 57 countries as well as DVDs and audio books by the million, and manages one of the planet’s most popular websites. Programmes such as Doctor Who, Top Gear and Dancing With The Stars are broadcast on BBC-branded channels and sold to others.
All are part of the raison d’être of Worldwide: to exploit the BBC’s content and make money on behalf of the 25.3m UK householders who pay £139.50 a year for a television licence. Some £200m-£250m goes back to the BBC each year, including direct investment in programming.
But other Worldwide activities are less obviously linked to that purpose. For instance, it publishes editions of Hello! and Grazia magazines under licence in India. Recently, Worldwide bought minority stakes in three UK production companies and one in Australia. Most controversially, it paid £75m for a 75 per cent stake in Lonely Planet, the travel guide company, hoping to use the brand to market thousands of hours of BBC travel and natural history programming.
This situation lends a feeling of unreality to the proceedings as we begin to measure the time until Election Day in hours. It is the elephant on the campaign plane. No one is letting on. Journalists aren't supposed to. Plus, we've been wrong so often, and politics can be so unpredictable, it would be dumb to say that Obama is going to win big.
In the mid-19th century, an angry not-so-young man, wishing to write his “complete representation of reality” had been, in the words of biographer Francis Wheen, “pushing out beyond conventional prose into radical literary collage — juxtaposing voices and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors’ reports”, injecting his long, detailed narrative with hardboiled newspaper reports as well as using devilish metaphors (a favourite of mine from an earlier publication: “...all that is solid melts into air” to describe dislocation).
In a way, Gomorrah, with its contemporary descriptions of “capital [being] dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour” is the mini Das Kapital of our times. And to mistake Saviano’s masterpiece as just ‘journalism’ would be to mistake Marx’s tumultuous classic as simply ‘economic theory’. It might not be everything that’s fit to print. But that’s our problem of defining the ‘fitness’ of things.
On any given night, there are two distinctly, even extremely, different views of the presidential campaign offered on two of the three big cable news networks, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, a dual reality that is reflected on the Internet as well.
On one, polls that are “tightening” are emphasized over those that are not, and the rest of the news media is portrayed as papering over questions about Mr. Obama’s past associations with people who have purportedly anti-American tendencies that he has not answered. (“I feel like we are talking to the Germans after Hitler comes to power, saying, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t know,’ ” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, told Mr. Hannity on Thursday.)
On the other, polls that show tightening are largely ignored, and the race is cast as one between an angry and erratic Mr. McCain, whose desperate, misleading campaign has as low as a 4 percent chance of beating a cool, confident and deserving Democratic nominee in Mr. Obama. (“He’s been a good father, a good citizen, he’s paid attention to his country,” Chris Matthews, the MSNBC host, said Wednesday night in addressing those who might be leaning against Mr. Obama based on race. “Give the guy a break and think about voting for him.”)
...these are the quotes Rutenberg picks to show how similar the coverage on Fox and MSNBC is--one arguing that you shouldn't vote against a candidate based on his race, and the other comparing that candidate to a genocidal dictator.
For £14.3m we could employ 677 nurses, 695 teachers or 596 coppers.. but we get 50 money-grabbing BBC fat cats
How are you enjoying the BBC witch trials, in which the Daily Mail has so brilliantly inhabited the Joseph McCarthy role? Naturally, were it all to stop now, the paper could take a curtain call, and bouquets, and offers of guest spots at the Salem Temperance Festival. Yet one can't help feeling the past week is just the start of a play in three acts, which begins with something genuinely nasty happening in the woods, but quickly subsumes all manner of innocents. Oh, for an Ed Murrow to lay bare the hypocrisies, contradictions and self-interest that lie beneath the witchfinder general's demented pursuit.
In the course of their on-air conversation, the pair joke that, near their telephones, most grandparents have photographs of their grandchildren sitting on a swing, so they decide, laughing hysterically, to point out to Mr Sachs that Brand "enjoyed" his granddaughter on a swing. They say many, many other targeted, horrible things.
In short, they think through all the permutations of mental pain that can be inflicted, and inflict them.
When the Abu Ghraib atrocities against Iraqi prisoners filled our media, people rightly noted that the torment consisted not in physical pain, but in humiliation.
The humiliation was increased by photographing the acts. The torturers thought that what they did was funny. They were arrested, dismissed from the US armed services and imprisoned.
Jonathan Ross was doing essentially the same thing. He thought it was funny to use his power to torment someone mentally, and to let other people witness the torment. His punishment so far is to earn £4.6 million this year from the BBC, instead of £6 million.
At a time when taxes are rising, it would be a political winner for a party to promise the abolition of the licence fee, but of course this won't happen. Conservatives and Labour alike are terrified of the way the BBC would trash them if they did.
So it falls to us, the public. We do not have the power to stop Ross and Co by switching off. Time, then, to revolt.
My own modest contribution will be as follows. If Ross is still in post when my television licence next comes up for renewal, I shall keep my television, but refuse to pay the fee.
Instead, I shall hand over the £139.50 to Help the Aged, and wait for Mark Thompson's detector van to come to my door.
In psychiatric parlance, rigid polarities like those the President has made time and again are regarded as pathological: 'splitting'. The patient is unable to tolerate ambiguity and insists on viewing the people in his life through an 'all good' or 'all bad' lens. Bush and his cohorts have been masterful splitters, employing a language that gives no room for exchange and necessarily distorts reality, which, unfortunately, is usually murky. This kind of speech does not recognise an interlocutor, a real human other. It is speech without empathy, and it is startlingly similar to the rhetoric of the Muslim radicals who spew venom on the West and 'the enemies of Islam'.
Novelist, essayist and poet whose most recent novel, The Sorrows of an American, came out this year. Married to fellow writer Paul Auster.
