Sniper-blogger grills Taiwan reporters
“Even Reuters’ Ralph Jennings — of whom I’ve been extremely critical for getting the story very wrong when it comes to Taiwan — tells us that ‘half a million’ attended the protest,” a blogger wrote in October after seeing the Reuters’s write-up of an opposition-led demonstration in Taipei against President Ma Ying-jeou.
China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan. Ma, Taiwan’s president, likes China. The opposition and the blogger don’t like either.
I poured a beer to celebrate because I had it right, up from a score of “lies” that the same blogger gave me on a story earlier that year.
Not all of us get off so easy. The blogger would write up a former Taipei-based BBC correspondent for “vague and inaccurate descriptions,” one of the friendlier grades given to the British TV network’s Taiwan coverage. The same commentator gave the China Post, a local English-language paper, a score of “Nazism.”
“The facts that are always ignored when AP sells its mendacious stories about Taiwan,” the blogger added. And a one-time Taipei bureau chief with Bloomberg was labeled “China-centric,” with the word “China” in red type.
Getting blog-flogged is as much a part of being a 21st-century reporter as interviewing and writing. But none of the numerous transparency-wary reporters I know here can name the blogger who names us. Maybe it is one of us, someone quipped at a foreign correspondents club meeting. Maybe it’s you, I said. Maybe it’s you, he replied. Another correspondent said she once got into a debate with the blogger about her low grades, but still never learned the other party’s identity.
The blogs that offer Taiwan-based reporters this free publicity identify our sniper only as Tim Maddog, a member of the “education industry” in the central Taiwan city of Taichung. One website lists Michael Turton, a fellow Taiwan blogger, who some correspondents know personally, as a collaborator. But Turton says he doesn’t know who’s mad-dogging us.
Huffington Post top indy political blog for traffic
Political Web sites and blogs compete for scoops and eyeballs with an intensity rivaling the presidential candidates, so the Internet traffic figures released Wednesday by industry tracker comScore are likely to provide some bragging rights.
The winner is… HuffingtonPost.com – founded by commentator Arianna Huffington, the site led among stand-alone political blogs and news sites with 4.5 million visitors in September, comScore said. That was way above the site’s tally of 792,000 in the same month last year.
It was followed by Politico.com with 2.4 million visitors and DrudgeReport.com with 2.1 million. The biggest gainer among the top five was realclearpoltics.com, a clearinghouse for commentary and polls that has become a must-read for the politically inclined. Its traffic surged almost six-fold from last year to 1.1 million visitors.
One of the few sites to see its traffic decline was FreeRepublic.com, a conservative-leaning site, which was the fifth most-visited destination but saw its traffic dip slightly to 987,000 visitors. Do the traffic numbers offer a larger comment about the ardor or optimism of either Democrats or Republicans in this election cycle? That’s a debate that’s probably better left to the pundits.
(reporting by Gabriel Madway)
Obama won in Indiana by 0.9% — the first time for a Democratic Presidential candidate since 1964. Massive voter registration and early voting helped. So did the recession. But Obama would not have won had a network of grassroots Hoosier volunteers not decided to try to close the gap in heavy rural Republican parts of the state from the 70-30% margins of defeat for Gore and Kerry to roughly 55-45% margins of defeat and even to Obama victories in impoverished southwestern Indiana counties and Terra Haute. A salient issue is whether the strategy of heavy campaigning in strong rural Republican areas might be successful in other solid red states like Mississippi and South Dakota where McCain won. Lawrence J.Friedman, Bloomington, Indiana
Death comes for the archblogger
At the risk of stating the obvious, everybody’s blogging about New York Times reporter Matt Richtel’s story about how the stress of 24-7 blogging is thinning the herd of Internet scribes.
Here’s his evidence:
Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.
And here’s the cause:
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
And here are the symptoms:
Weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
The death of these men its so cruel…Journalism could be a beautiful career, but the stress of the field when overwhelm those are pacionate about it..
It may not make life easier – but aren’t the sniper’s objections justified?