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Stephen Dubner points to the post-script editor’s note on this New Yorker magazine article (scroll to bottom) in which a Wikipedia administrator that was identified in the article as “a tenured professor of religion at a private university” with “a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law” now turns out to be Ryan Jordan, a twenty-four-year-old who holds no advanced degrees and has never taught. Dubner, the author of Freakonomics, uses the incident to take jabs at both Wikipedia and the New Yorker writer.
Writes Dubner:
“For me, a more interesting question is the degree of (the writer’s) error: should she, e.g., have insisted on some verification of Essjay’s credentials, or at least omitted his academic claims. This illustrates, if nothing else, how journalists get lied to, pretty regularly.”
Good question, I agree. Historically, the New Yorker’s fact-checking department was considered the gold-standard of the magazine world. Perhaps Dubner’s question should be answered by the “Ask the Librarian” columnists over at the New Yorker-fan site, emdashes.com.
From the irony department: In doing a Google search for information about the fact-checking department at the New Yorker, I ran across this post from a blogger who wrote about the New Yorker’s article in great depth last July with such declarations as this, “The guarantee of truth that backs up New Yorker copy gives its content a much deeper impact.”
Bottomline lessons: 1. Students in the history department at Middlebury College should never cite the New Yorker in papers or other academic work. 2. The New Yorker is a gateway to facts, not a source of facts.
Disclosure: Still, I won’t be canceling my subscription anytime soon.
Update: Bonus links on this topic:
Chris Edwards (and a comment below).
Seth Finkelstein: “I’m tempted to go to certain A-listers and ask them, “NOW, with this blatant example right in front of you, do you understand my argument about what’s wrong with Wikipedia?”. But I know better, and in their way, I suspect they know better.”
Technorati Tags: magazines, wikipedia
I just discovered a new term. It’s a term I would have preferred not to discover. The term is “Powerbook narcolepsy” and it refers to Mac PowerBooks that randomly shut down. (It’s similar to “MacBook narcolepsy,” another term I’ve just learned.)
Macbook narcolepsy is something you will never see dramatized on an “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ad.
I learned about the term when my 17″ Powerbook G4 started randomly shutting down about 24 hours ago. And when I say random, I mean random. It can go for hours — like now, for instance — without shutting down. And then it will shut down every few seconds. Sometimes it merely goes into sleep mode. Other times, it dies. The rexblog director of hackology found a helpful post and comment thread on the CMXtraneous blog with plenty of suggestions on the causes of and treatments for PowerBook narcolepsy.
In the morning, he will try some of the non-invasive remedies we’ve discovered out on the Macosphere. However, he really loves it when fixes involve a screwdriver — the tool, not the drink. As for me, I’m hoping for a magic pill, maybe some iProvigil to treat it.
Technorati Tags: apple, mac
I’m using this post to check out the embedded video feature WSJ.com is using with the “video sidebars” it has started including with “free features.” This video accompanies a story about insurance-company provided driver-monitor cameras parents can put in their teenager’s car. I’m less than impressed with this specific sidebar as it merely repeats what is in the story. Indeed, if you watch the video, there’s no reason to read the story. I don’t think that’s the intent. (More on what makes a good video sidebar.) Having the ability to embed the video on another site is a key viral factor to making it work, so if you can see the video, the WSJ.com folks are doing that right. WSJ.com is using brightcove for the feature, by the way.
Technorati Tags: video
My news-reader and e-mail radar just lit up with news about the divorce of Vanderbilt’s chancellor Gordon Gee and his wife, Constance. Just for the record, the student-run InsideVandy.com, broke the story at 10:06 a.m. and (the following link may or may not be behind a pay-wall) NashvillePost.com had a story posted by 10:17 a.m.. As of 12:20 p.m., there is nothing on the front of The Tennessean.
Yesterday, the Magazine Publishers of America reported that during 2006, their members (consumer magazine publishing companies) had announced over 150 digital initiatives. These “digital initiatives” include the launching of “online social networks, enabling user-generated content, and (introducing) more blogs, mobile applications, podcasts, and video content for websites and cell phones, reaching and serving their readers across all emerging digital channels.” Many of these are very creative ideas and I have mentioned several on this blog. However, I can not recall them being referred to as “digital initiatives” until now.
From now on, I guess MPA will announce the launch of magazines as new “analog initiatives.”
The intent of highlighting such “initiatives” by magazine publishers is obviously well-intentioned. And many of those “initiatives” are quite impressive. However, by using the term “digital initiative” to describe them, the MPA broadcasts a perception that its members view the Internet as a foreign world — a place where one must send scouts and launch initiatives.
Granted, the name “Magazine Publishers of America” does paint one into a corner. Nicholas Negroponte, a famous digital thinker who once invested personally in the launch of the analog initiative, Wired Magazine, wrote a prescient essay in the January, 1995, issue of that magazine called “Bits and Atoms”. Read it and remember this was 12 years ago. 1995. It was published in a magazine. In it (once more, remember, he’s writing 12 year ago), Negroponte explains how even smart people place a different value-system on “atom” things vs. “digital” things. He writes, “Companies declare their atoms on a balance sheet and depreciate them according to rigorous schedules. But their bits, often far more valuable, do not appear.”
It is now 12 years later and where are we? Several “digital” companies that didn’t exist when Negroponte wrote his essay have market capitalizations far beyond that of any “atom” media company. And we’re supposed to be impressed with the launch of 150 digital initiatives? That’s crazy. I read about 150 new digital initiatives a week merely by subscribing to the RSS feed of TechCrunch and PaidContent.org.
As longtime readers of this blog know, I am a great lover of magazines. I strongly believe in the future of magazines. However, since before Negroponte wrote that essay, I have never perceived of the “digital world” as a foreign place. Magazine companies are great creators of brands and engaging experiences. Magazine companies are filled with the most creative, passionate people I know. However, as long as they are run by people who view “digital” as being something you approach with “initiatives,” they are stuck in 1994.
(Disclosure: My company is a former member of MPA and I am a fan of the organization. The organization is comprised of consumer magazine publishing companies. Our company is a member of two other associations that focus on other facets of the magazine [and bit-media] world.)
Update: Susan Mernit blogs today about a new digitial initiative — although she’d never use such a term — from TV Guide: Jumptheshark.com. She’s impressed. And when Susan is impressed, I’m impressed.
Technorati Tags: magazines, publishing
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Magazines delivered via mail are facing higher costs and potentially thinner margins as a result of new postal rate increases, but the hike is not nearly as bad as some publisher industry executives might have feared.
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Dave Winer is delaying the purchase of a MacPro to see if Apple will announce a Sony Vaio-like MacBook with a 6-hour battery life. “That might be the last laptop I ever buy.” he says. Me too, I say.
BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum is picking up the meme regarding Al Gore’s carbon usage at his home in the “posh” Belle Meade area of Nashville. As I live in Al’s ‘hood, I’d like to clarify one thing about his carbon use. It may be true that his kilowatt hours of electricity and lbs. of natural gas have increased since the movie Inconvenient Truth came out, but I’ve noticed that he’s added lots of trees and bushes to his lot, as well. So, to be accurate about his carbon footprint, I think you’d have to consider those in your calculations. And while I’m not a carbon-neutral nut (however, I’m a zealot for alternative energy sources), I think it would be easy for Gore to balance out any carbon consumption issues he might face by planting a few acres of trees on his farm land southeast of Nashville.
 Last week, I was coveting that new high-end camera from Canon so much, I completely missed the news about a PowerShot camera (the type I carry with me all the time) coming out next month that is “camcorder-like” for around $500. (Imaging Resource preview.) Who knows? This may turn me into a video blogger.
(via: Gravitational Pull)
Here’s one for the crack team at Snopes.com. Surely it’s a prank.
The Fortune magazine tech blog (did you know there was such?), The Browser, says that Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Executive Committee and CEO of Google, has a typo on his business card. The misspelled word: Chariman.
Please, before this meme sweeps through the blogosphere and becomes defacto fact, someone at Google or Snopes.com get this rumor smoked out. Is there really such a card with such a typo? Sounds like a prank to me.
More important, this may be a good indication of why you’ve never heard of The Browser, and you have heard of TechCrunch or ValleyWag.
(via: BusinessPundit.com)
I just Googled the words and discovered there is no such thing as a “friendsitute” and no such occupation as “friendstitution.”
However, I think the world’s youngest profession should be called those as the New York Times has a story today about the service, Fake Your Space, that will rent you ‘friends’ for your MySpace profile page for 99¢ per friend, per month. Dave Winer calls it a “fantastic business model.”
Key item in article: “MySpace and other social-networking sites appear to have no rules prohibiting Mr. Walker’s idea.” Why would they? When the goal is to generate more page views and get more accounts registered, why do something that would limit the site to actual people? How many people on MySpace are actually who they say they are?
Sometimes when I come up these words, I will register the domain. However, other than coming up with the term, this is one I’d like not to be associated with in on-going way.
Technorati Tags: friendstitution
Despite my many previous promises of no more posts about the longest-continuing story appearing on this weblog, I felt the need to link to free WSJ.com article about the re-re-launch of Radar as it is the first time I have ever seen a “video sidebar” in a WSJ.com article.
For the record, I hope the magazine is a big success. Heretofore, however, its hype-to-success ratio far surpasses any magazine in my memory. During previous over-hyped launches (potential writers for this magazine pitch stories about it to every reporter in their contacts), I exhausted everything I could ever have to say about the magazine, except to observe that this time, they started with a blog — and did a great job with it. Previous iterations displayed very little online savvy. Perhaps having the blog as the center of the brand and franchise may be the charm that makes the third time ’round a success.
Technorati Tags: magazines, video, video sidebar
As I have been saying for a while, the business model of Google (or at least a significant chunk of it) is that of an advertising sales representation company. A sales agent, if you will. Sure, Google is a media company and a technology company that dominates search and also has created all manner of cool stuff. But as this article in the New York Times about new advertising deals Google has to embed video ads on major media company sites, when it comes to their relationship with media companies (traditional and new), they are not viewed as “the enemy” but as a revenue stream. A bigger and bigger stream.
Like independent advertising sales reps, Google sells ads that appear on the websites of media they do not own. (In their case, they also have plenty of owned inventory their ads appear on, as well.) They take a commission (I’ve seen it estimated from 20-30%, depending on the volume of advertising) in the manner of an independent sales rep. They now have a large sales force calling on media buyers and product marketers — just like independent sales reps.
In the past when I’ve pointed this out, I’ve had some really smart people respond with insightful reasons explaining to me why Google is the enemy of media sites. Others have pointed out that Google is the hot air inflating the current bubble of Web 2.0 startups: if Google stumbles, the bubble bursts. If Google hiccups, we’ll all die of pneumonia.
I am not wise enough to figure all of this out. However, I’ll keep cashing the checks* until I do.
*While no ads appear on this blog, I am associated with some other websites that do derive revenue from Google Adsense. I like the checks they send, but they are not a significant portion of my company’s overall revenue. But the stream grows bigger each month.
Technorati Tags: advertising, google
 Whenever I read that some research company has conducted a survey of 379 random individuals and has discovered that consumers won’t pay $500 for a new Apple gizmo, it makes me wonder what rock these research people live under. These phones are NOT intended for consumers, they’re intended for cult members. And the cult is whipped up with anticipation. Within a few moments of its airing, MacRumors was pointing to a wide array of “coverage” of the iPhone teaser ad premiering on the Oscars tonight. Not exactly the 1984 ad, but clever enough — and a lot sweeter than the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads. Within moments, the Macosphere had mirrored the ad in multiples places, identified 32 of the actors who appear in the ad (it is a series of movie and TV clips of actors saying “hello”) and the music had been identified and linked to on iTunes. I know I’m counting down the days to June.
Later: From a couple of emails I’ve received informing me on the wonders of the iPhone, apparently some drive-by readers of this post don’t realize I’ve been served Kool-Aid by the man.
Still later: Apple has now posted the ad.
Even later: Just for clarification purposes for those cult members who have found this post via the kind folks who have pointed this way: I plan on purchasing an iPhone as soon as they are available. No one needs to convince me how great they will be. I have owned Macs since 1984. Apple commercials work on me.
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone
And the Oscar for best redesign of a website I thought would never be redesigned goes to Internet Movie Data Base. You may not notice the redesign on the front of the site, but the new look and structure is very apparent on an interior page like this: Scent of a Woman (1992). What’s next? A new look for Craigslist?
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