Category: Metablogging

Request for help: US Quality press ?

John Quiggin13 Comments

I’m busy writing an academic paper on blogging, wikis and so on, which will form the basis of my presentation at the forthcoming Adelaide Festival of Ideas, and as on past occasions, I’m hoping to enlist the help of readers as unpaid research assistants.

I want to compare blogs (or rather plogs) with the mainstream press alternatives, and I’ve started by comparing Australian political blogs with the alternative provided by the quality press, which I say is generally agreed to comprise four newspapers (Age, Australian, Australian Financial Review, and Sydney Morning Herald) [more over the fold]

My question is whether there is a similarly agreed notion of the quality press, applicable to the United States. I read fairly widely, both Internet and print sources, and the only papers I see mentioned regularly are the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune and LA Times. Are there others that are similarly taken seriously, or is the whole idea of “quality press” inapplicable given the greater dominance of TV?

<b>Note</b> I imagine most readers will find at least one paper listed above objectionable. I’m going to delete comments bashing particular papers on the grounds of ideological bias, stupid columnists and so on. I’m only interested in whether the paper is taken seriously, either as a source of useful analysis or as a target for criticism.
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Blog birthday

John Quiggin31 Comments

This blog is three years old today. I hinted at this anniversary in yesterday’s Monday Message Board, and Chris Sheil was the first to guess what I meant.

Three is an advanced age for a blog. Only a handful of those who were around back then are still going. Tim Blair, Rob Corr, Jason Soon and my blogtwin Tim Dunlop are among the hardy survivors.

It’s not hard to see why people stop blogging, but also why more and more people are blogging and reading blogs. It’s exciting, exhausting, useful and very demanding on time and attention. Although I’ve had moments when I’ve been sick of the whole business, mostly I’ve enjoyed it very much. Thanks to all my readers, fellow bloggers and especially to those who’ve commented on the blog, regularly or otherwise.

Fact-checking in the blogosphere

John Quiggin120 Comments

One of the benefits that ought to arise from the existence of the blogosphere is that of fact-checking. False claims can be refuted quickly, and, we might hope, not repeated thereafter. Sadly it doesn’t seem to work out that way, as the following examples show.

Tim Blair points to yet another repetition of the “plastic turkey” story, this time in Pravda. Not surprisingly he’s frustrated by this.

Meanwhile, the claim that bans on the use of DDT in anti-malaria campaigns have cost millions of lives, has been repeated yet again, by Miranda Devine in the SMH, and Rafe Champion at Catallaxy.

So in the interests of accuracy and bipartisanship, let’s get the facts straight

* In his visit to Iraq in November 2003, Bush did not pose with a plastic turkey, as has been often claimed, but with a decorative, real “show turkey” not intended for eating. The “show turkeyâ€? is a routine part of the presentation for the soldiers eating in the mess hall, so there’s nothing surprising about the fact that Bush posed with one.

* DDT has never been banned in antimalarial use. The main reason for declining use of DDT as an antimalarial has been the development of resistance. Antimalarial uses have received specific exemptions from proposals to phase out DDT, until alternatives are developed. Bans on the use of DDT as an agricultural insecticide, promoted by Rachel Carson and others, have helped to slow the development of resistance, and therefore increased the effectiveness of DDT in antimalarial use ( links on this here

If Tim is willing to make the same points, maybe we’ll get somewhere on this (begins holding breath).
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Overzealous comment moderation

John Quiggin

Quite a few recent posts have triggered either moderation or an apparent bug producing an error of the form

Precondition Failed

The precondition on the request for the URL /wp-comments-post.php evaluated to false.

Investigating, I found that my moderation wordlist included such items as “casino” and “pharmacy”, frequent occurrences in comment spam, but also in ordinary posts. I’ve deleted them, but “casino” also seems to trigger the Precondition Failed bug.

Since the move to WordPress 1.5, the inclusion of the “Nofollow” tag in links means that they no longer count towards Googlerank. This seems to have reduced comment spam, but not eliminated it. I’m going to trim my list and see if I can found out what gives with the “Precondition Failed” problem

Canals and powerlines

John Quiggin41 Comments

It’s nice when blogging pays off in the form of published output, but it rarely happens as quickly as this. On Tuesday night Ken Parish alerted me to an amazing infrastructure proposal, similar to Colin’s canal. The plan is for a 3000-km transmission line connecting Darwin to the National Grid. Even a cursory examination was sufficient to show that the economics of this idea were crazy, and some late-night work produced an analysis ready for publication in today’s Fin (article over the fold).

I’m grateful to Ken for pointing this post out to me in the first place, and to commenters Robert Merkel and Derrida Derider (both regulars here) among others, who raised points that help me clarify my argument. Unfortunately, you can’t give this kind of credit in an opinion piece, but I can do so here. This is the kind of thing that shows the power of blogging.
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Why bother reading the papers?

John Quiggin21 Comments

Jack Strocchi points me to this piece by Tony Parkinson in the Age, which tries to score some points on the number of deaths caused by the Iraq war. Not only does Parkinson get nearly every point in the debate wrong (he misdescribes confidence intervals, fails to note that the UN study he’s touting covered only the first year of the war, ignores the difference between direct war casualties and “excess deaths” and so on) but he’s presenting as news an issue that was covered exhaustively in blogs weeks ago (you can start here and work back. As usual Tim Lambert does the heavy lifting. For a review of the earlier debate, see Daniel Davies at CT. For a more defensible version of the case Parkinson is trying to make, go here.)

I think we can add this to the list of issues where you’re better off getting your information from blogs than from the “quality” press.

The NYT goes cash for comment

John Quiggin6 Comments

ViaTimothy Noah at Slate, I learn that the NYT is going to start charging for access to its opinion columns. It’s not clear whether, and how, bloggers will be exempted from this – the NYT provides blog access to the archives (otherwise pay-per-view) through its RSS feeds

Speaking as a reader, I wouldn’t want to pay for the NYT Op-Ed page. The Editorials are worthy, but not very exciting. Of the columnists, only Krugman is consistently excellent, and most of his columns consist of necessary repetition of important truths well-informed readers are aware of, but most commentators are unwilling to harp on for fear of being called “shrill”. Kristof, like the little girl in the rhyme, is very, very good when he’s good, but that’s not always. And Herbert is steadily good, if sometimes overly earnest. After that, there’s a long tail, with columns more often useful for mockery than for endorsement.

As a blogger, there’s no point in paying for something if you can’t link to it. That’s why the WSJ is so thoroughly marginalised in the blog world. So unless the NYT finds a way around this, they’ll be cutting themselves off from the most active part of the public debate, and presumably missing out on quite a few potential readers.