Secrets of the City

More on the ethics discussion.

And also: Journalism Braindump, and Other Oddities

I think Bob Collins made a poor choice choosing Metroblogging to do the “official” live blogging. Seems they were more interested in snark and “verbal spitballs” than covering the actual event.

Plenty of “attitude” to go around in both camps, David. but a few good moments shown through later in the evening when the audience became involved.

I really enjoyed the ethics forum last night, and note that we actually covered a ton of key comments from Gillmor and audience members. Our expectation that this would be a discussion and not a “one person talking to 100″ was not met and so reflected in the moment.

There was free wifi, so next time I encourage every person in the room to liveblog/tweet/etc.

I just wish the live blogging had been more about covering the event, and not the snark. I haven’t found a transcript, or other live blogging source, so I’ll have to take yours (bob and Greg) and other blog comments on that.

you can watch the event at the uptake

liveblog without snark is like newspapers without editorial pages — who wants to just read the news and skip the viewpoints?

Our commentary was more complementary to the live audio and video than serving as a transcript, but I can see how some may have been looking for that.

You can watch it archived here: and could have streamed it live via MPR at the time.

you can watch the event at the uptake

liveblog without snark is like newspapers without editorial pages — who wants to just read the news and skip the viewpoints?

I probably shouldn’t do this, as I’ll annoy mb and chuck, but the uptake feed is useless to me.

I’ll take reading the news (or traditional broadcast).

Now that I’ve said it, go ahead and discuss the forum as you wish. I’ll just sit the rest of it out, which is too bad, because it sounded interesting, and the topic is definitely interesting, but I don’t have a big enough picture about the event and what was said to be able to further comment on it.

Those are NOT rankings. Read the sidebar header, for crying out loud. The rankings are in another sidebar.

Re: Bob Collins Why does MPR remove comments from their blogs when the comment is relevant to the post? I’ve heard this complaint from several people and I’ve seen it happen.

That was one of my questions.

It was based on experience and an email from s4xton.

I don’t think the question was really addressed with “unless it contains an uncivil diatribe in which case there’s no such thing as relevance.”, since the times I’ve seen it done the comments were neither uncivil nor diatribes.

Also, I did state “relevant to the post” and it more a question about MPR policy than Bob’s blog; since MPR was hosting a Journalistic Ethics panel.

I have had problems with my comments on MPR sites before. I presumed the problems were of a technical nature, now I’m not so sure.

Cristina – I assume you’re talking about my “Who’s viewin’ who” commentary.

Aside from how silly/weird it is to discuss sidebars that aren’t sidebars at all online, your sidebar says this: “The sites they named are ordered below roughly from most- to least-mentioned” – how is that not ranking?

I have had problems with my comments on MPR sites before. I presumed the problems were of a technical nature, now I’m not so sure.

I wondered the same thing, until I saw comments be posted for 24+ hours and then disappear.

cristina, I figured it would be fun to throw some data at the informal survey to see what that looked like.

I assumed they were rankings when I read this, “The sites they named are ordered below roughly from most- to least-mentionedor, if you will, from the usual suspects to some intriguing lesser-knowns.”

It sounds like they were ranked, roughly, based on how often they were mentioned.

We asked about 7 people (mentioned in the article) to let us know where they get their local news online. I’d hardly call that a ranking of any real kind. I just want everyone to be clear about the fact that this was not intended as an official ranking, but as a way to introduce some additional local news sources. That’s all.

The language was a little confusing. The sidebar’s description doesn’t make it sound a though the sidebar was based on an informal survey of the participants in the story, but instead that it was a larger survey of local online media people. Perhaps I’m just getting hung up on the word “bevvy.”

In the meanwhile, MnSpeak’s own Rich debuts his political blog at Rake. Worth checking out.

Gotcha, Ed. Actually, you’re info was indeed interesting. Thanks.

Oops. I changed that sentence half way through and left a “you’re.” Ouch!

Thanks Max for putting these two pieces together.

Ed: I like the stats, I’m working on a user engagement formula, and technorati stats are part of the equation. It’s fairly clear that marketers, like me, prefer engaged content consumers, than passive content consumers. Compete.com stats for traffic are great, but most of the top sites lack any engaged content consumer. Mnspeak is a great example of a small be engaged audience.

Chuck: Are we still talking about blogger ethics? Gawd! Doesn’t everyone know by now that DeRusha gets all his stories from us? I kid.

I think Bob Collins made a poor choice choosing Metroblogging to do the “official” live blogging. Seems they were more interested in snark and “verbal spitballs” than covering the actual event.

The point of the liveblog wasn’t to transcribe. So since you can’t listen to the livefeed or watch the video, I don’t know what else to tell you.

If you thought the liveblog was painful to read, I’d say it’s a pretty good reflection of how painful it was to sit through the forum.

It’s actually pretty hard to capture the conversation and stay engaged in the discussion. The liveblog captured our on-the-spot reaction. And now that we’ve all slept on it, there’s plenty of reflective discussion ongoing. So read through our comments, Bob’s comments at MPR, and Chuck’s comments.

Had we not been asked to liveblog it, I probably would have liveblogged it anyway, and there would have been a lot less there, because I would have listened a little more and gone for broader concepts.

My biggest beef is that the structure of the forum somewhat discouraged audience participation.

@taulpaul – That’s an interesting point on engagement. I did a technorati search on my blog (which doesn’t use technorati) and it ranked at 112 blog reactions.

I won’t list at all on Compete.com, as it just lists blogspot, but on average I get a few hundred uniques a day.

Now if you look at the engaged users I’d bet pink slips I’d beat atleast 50% of that list.

I’m sure the same can be said of many local sites not mentioned on that list.

Now if you look at the engaged users I’d bet pink slips I’d beat atleast 50% of that list.

No one calls me out? Not even on outdated vernacular like “pink slip”?

That hasn’t happened since diggity-odd six,bet’s off.