tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41623625816794392352024-03-05T21:32:44.691-08:00Da BlogThe ONLY blog written by Morgan Wick.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.comBlogger50125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-45347638094364655012009-06-04T16:13:00.000-07:002009-06-04T16:13:55.639-07:00Let's look at the big picture.First, in order to keep Extra Innings the cable companies swung a deal that gave MLB Network wide distribution, not just on the Sports Entertainment Pack.<br />
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Then, Comcast and the NFL spontaneously settled their differences out of the blue, and Comcast agreed to give the NFL Network wide distribution as well. At the same time, Comcast also finally reached an agreement with ESPNU, and that'll involve wide distribution as well.<br />
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Now, in the past week, Comcast has engaged in similar distribution-broadening with the NHL Network, and now <a href="http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/278196-Comcast_Moving_NBA_Network_to_Digital_Classic_Tier.php?rssid=20065">NBATV</a>. (Although the NBATV deal was reported on as early as <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/memphis/stories/2009/03/02/daily5.html">March</a>.)<br />
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That doesn't even mention the end of the impasse between Comcast and Big Ten Network last year; outside the Big Ten footprint it was placed on the Sports Entertainment Pack.<br />
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So I have to ask: Is Comcast giving up on its Sports Entertainment Pack?<br />
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What's next? Will CBS College Sports or the FCS networks get bumped up? What about the Tennis Channel? Will new channels like GOL TV get added to make up for the losses? Is ESPN Classic getting bumped down, as was rumored? Could I even have the opportunity to get the mtn. outside that conference's footprint?<br />
(I'm certainly not complaining about the sudden jolt in options, and the ability to watch all the cool new stuff, especially on NFLN and ESPNU.)Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-4823793587614819852009-05-14T20:30:00.000-07:002009-05-14T20:30:47.796-07:00My take on the latest abuse photo controversyHonestly, as Orwellian as it sounds, we don't <em>need</em> to <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/12/prisoner.photos/index.html?iref=newssearch">see more abuse photos</a>. I think we can all agree that we did some scary bleep out there and leave it at that. No need to make people angry with the details, just promise we won't do it again.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-85650641595580137892009-04-30T20:01:00.000-07:002009-04-30T20:01:32.913-07:00It's not "swine flu" anymore.I want you to book it from <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UN_WHO_SWINE_FLU?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT">this moment</a>: if, in my entire lifetime (indeed all the way until the death of civilization), I see any potential pandemic referred to by a name that names them after an animal you can't get it from in any way, no matter how much it may make sense in some other way, they should be whacked over the head for their idiocy and proof of the old saying about what happens when you don't learn from history.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-15392369367258867902009-04-30T18:22:00.000-07:002009-04-30T18:22:28.192-07:00No more calling out the mainstream media for Favremania, mmmkay?The Jets <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4108844">released Brett Favre</a> from their "reserve/retired" list yesterday, an auspicious move considering so far as I can tell players on the R/R list don't count against roster or salary caps, but ordinarily a fairly routine move, at least for any player not named Brett Favre.<br />
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So naturally you'd expect plenty of "does this mean he's thinking of coming back?" speculation from ESPN and the like, and you'd expect the blogosphere to do plenty of "there they go again, obsessing over Brett Favre" and thumbing their nose because they're so above that...<br />
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...hold on, it appears the number 1 topic on SportsCenter's "Blog Buzz" segment this morning was Favre's release. Seems not even the blogosphere is immune to Favremania when <a href="http://www.profootballtalk.com/2009/04/29/plane-flies-from-minneapolis-to-hattiesburg-and-back-again/">a plane traveling between Minneapolis and Hattiesburg and back again</a> sends them going "OMG OMG OMG IT ABSOLUTELY <a href="http://awfulannouncing.blogspot.com/2009/04/here-we-go-again.html">MUST </a>HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH BRETT FAVRE BECAUSE HE IS THE ONLY PERSON IN ALL OF HATTIESBURG THAT EVER HAS TO TRAVEL OMG!!!!!11!!1!!!eleven!"Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-51276417174726242302009-04-18T16:11:00.000-07:002009-04-18T16:11:17.315-07:00Something I've been meaning to say since the news broke.There's been a lot that's been said about John Madden's retirement, and I could repeat everything that's been said about how beloved he was (not so much in my household, but that may be because he made all the obvious things he said obvious) or his alleged man-crush on Brett Favre or his impact on football and the broadcasting profession or his retirement's impact on NBC, the NFL and its network, and the careers of Cris Collinsworth, Al Michaels, and <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/30255145">Frank Caliendo</a>.<br />
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But let me just say this about replacement Collinsworth.<br />
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NBC was caught off guard by Madden's retirement, but they were not caught unprepared.<br />
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That said, I have to agree with what <a href="http://www.fangsbites.com/2009/04/interview-with-curt-smith.html">Curt Smith had to say about Harry Kalas</a>: "[Collinsworth] will succeed [Madden]. None will replace him."Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-73884649352138183472009-04-15T17:55:00.000-07:002009-04-15T17:55:50.530-07:00Random Internet Discovery of the Week, and other stuff<a href="http://ansiform.afraid.org/">Remind me to come back to this website sometime</a> and actually check out the offerings.<br />
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Not the RID: So apparently <a href="http://twitter.com/aplusk">Ashton Kutcher</a> has set up a bet with <a href="http://twitter.com/cnnbrk">CNN</a> to see which will be the first to a million Twitter followers. Normally I wouldn't have anything to say about it, but I was moved to comment by this remark shortly after issuing the challenge:<br />
<blockquote><a href="http://twitter.com/aplusk/status/1513657518">I just think its amazing that 1 voice can now be as powerful at an entire media network. thank you twitter!</a> / <a href="http://twitter.com/aplusk/status/1513666455">Thankyou social media. You have given an individual (all of us) the power/ truth back. That's something to compete for!!!</a></blockquote>Power of the individual my ass. The only reason you've got almost a million followers is because you're a celebrity and you know it, Ashton. Is Ashton Kutcher blowing the lid off news stories being ignored by the mainstream media? I didn't think so, and I doubt anyone is using social media networks for that purpose either. Instead Kutcher is "<a href="http://twitter.com/aplusk/status/1519042217">on here to connect w/ u w/ no filter</a>". Which is bullshit by itself, there's no way Kutcher is getting rid of the "filter" entirely, that's literally possible, any psychologist would tell you that, and monumentally stupid to the extent it is. It just means Kutcher handles his own image control.<br />
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(And why isn't <a href="http://twitter.com/britneyspears/">Britney Spears</a> getting involved, considering <a href="http://twitterholic.com/">where she</a> <a href="http://twitter.com/britneyspears/">ranks</a>? It's telling that the closest thing to "involvement" she has is rather <a href="http://twitter.com/britneyspears/status/1528392668">corporate</a>.)Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-52776577737467019752009-04-01T10:12:00.000-07:002009-04-01T10:12:33.712-07:00God must be playing an April Fool's joke.Is it just me, or is complaining about snow in spring becoming an <a href="http://morganwick.blogspot.com/2008/03/who-says-global-warming-is-myth.html">annual Da Blog tradition</a>?<br />
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I'd make a global warming comment, except I just got out of a class where the teacher told an anecdote about it snowing on <em>Tax Day</em> (well, today's Tax Day) in his youth.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-20080305772236808302009-03-30T13:51:00.000-07:002009-03-30T13:51:10.364-07:00Headslap.Headslap.<br />
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Headslap.<br />
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<a href="http://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/article/61982">If you're willing to put a channel on the sports tier, why not let it be ESPNU</a>? Or even better, why not let cable operators decide for themselves which channel to put on the sports tier? You're going to abandon Classic like that? Baby steps!<br />
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(Does this mean the end of Classic as an overflow channel?)Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-58762818161004757122009-03-13T15:06:00.000-07:002009-03-13T15:06:27.240-07:00Stewart v. Cramer: What the Media is Doing Unequivocally Wrong, No Matter What You BelieveWhy aren't real news people more like Jon Stewart?<br />
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<em>The Colbert Report</em> debuted in 2005. That means that <em>The Daily Show</em> had been earning rave reviews since well before that for its biting satirical take on the news that in some cases seemed better than the real news shows. Even before <em>The Colbert Report</em>, Stewart made a famous appearance on <em>Crossfire</em> a year earlier where he so called out the culture of news of the day it led to <em>Crossfire</em>'s cancellation. (And his show put out <em>America: The Book</em> the same year.) But news organizations have changed so little since then that TV news is arguably <em>poorer</em> for the loss of <em>Crossfire</em> as a place where liberal and conservative views would be forced to confront each other (and made stronger for it) rather than stay within their shelters of Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh. (I'd like to see some news network start a <em>PTI</em>-style show for news and politics.) As early as 2002, Stewart was rumored to be replacing David Letterman.<br />
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We've had Stewart helming <em>The Daily Show</em> for a decade now, and earning rave reviews the whole time, and a recurring theme of his tenure has been calling out and making fun of the mainstream media as much if not more often than politicians. (The media was a particular target of <em>America: The Book</em>.) And for being, as Stewart is wont to remind people, a "fake news show", its popularity still would seem to suggest it's something today's youth actually want in their news. So why hasn't anyone taken up the challenge? Why is journalism still as bankrupt as it ever has been in this decade? Why hasn't anyone become the "real" Jon Stewart, or at least taken up his grievances?<br />
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This came into focus for me while watching Stewart's <a href="http://blog.indecisionforever.com/2009/03/13/jon-stewart-and-jim-cramer-the-extended-daily-show-interview/">interview with Jim Cramer</a> last night. The interview went on so long that the unedited version had to be posted on <em>The Daily Show</em>'s web site, but really, the interview could be condensed into one or two sentences. Stewart called out Cramer and CNBC for not digging down deep in its interviews with CEOs and challenging them to bring the goods, instead of "trusting" them and then "regretting" trusting them so much later. More broadly, Stewart both cast doubt on the ethical standards of people like Cramer who have had experience with the shadier side of Wall Street and suggested that experience could be used to actually enlighten viewers, and wondered if CNBC's target audience was ordinary Americans looking to invest their 401k's or Wall Street insiders.<br />
This isn't new stuff with Stewart. Regularly he will show pieces of a real news network's softball interview with a newsmaker and ridicule it, or criticise the practices of the mainstream media in a similar fashion. But to flip it around, if Cramer were to come on an Anderson Cooper or someone else in the mainstream media, he wouldn't be so heavily pushed - even if he weren't a member of it. It says a lot that Stewart is doing a lot of the asking of truly penetrating questions and actual debate of guests in the media today.<br />
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Why do we have to tune in at 11 PM on the comedy channel to watch a comedian do it for only thirty minutes? Doesn't Stewart's popularity suggest there's a real market for real, hard-hitting journalism, not pandering and demagoguery?<br />
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Last summer after reading <em><a href="http://morganwick.blogspot.com/2008/08/announcement-of-truth-court-part-i.html">True Enough</a></em>, I decided I would start reading the two major media watchdog sites on both sides of the political spectrum, <a href="http://mediamatters.org/">Media Matters for America</a> on the left and <a href="http://www.newsbusters.org/">Newsbusters</a> on the right. I eventually stopped - I got the impression that Newsbusters was more obsessive about rooting out bias and had a larger density of posts, and for the first time I started semi-seriously considering the conservative claim of liberal media bias - but the impression I got from the sites dedicated to claiming the media was biased to the right or to the left wasn't that it was biased to either side. It was just incompetent.<br />
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That led me to <a href="http://morganwick.blogspot.com/2008/08/newsbusters-v-kilpatrick-et-al-part-ii.html">claim</a> that what was really needed was for the media to fight back against claims of bias from both sides and lay out why they're right after all. But part of the reason the media isn't fond of doing that is because it's all too fond of playing up the extreme differences between left and right. It's as much a willing participant as anything in the red-blue divide with shows from the likes of Lou Dobbs, Keith Olbermann, and Sean Hannity. (Bill O'Reilly and Rachael Maddow might deserve at least a little more respect from their respective other sides.) And there may also be the factor that the media really is falling down on the job. Certainly it's not just left and right complaining about it, or even minority groups like backers of third parties. Anyone you talk to will likely bemoan the loss of real journalism, of investigative journalism, of substantive journalism, of coverage of events that really matter rather than, say, <a href="http://morganwick.freehostia.com/webcomic/index.php?stripnum=418">Jennifer Aniston</a>, of any virtue of journalism that doesn't follow the almighty dollar.<br />
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The people running the news networks will likely say that sort of thing doesn't sell. I think the popularity of Stewart says otherwise and that, given an alternative to the sort of hollow, flashy, scratching-the-surface, substanceless journalism they're getting now, people will flock to it in a heartbeat. Certainly that's the sort of thing my mom likes best about Stewart; I suspect it's what America will find they like as well. (Although presentation matters; the fact it may matter more than content is how we got into this mess. Once, I was inspired by anti-American-media comments to check out BBC America's "World News America" and found it boring as hell. And not entirely free from schmaltzy human interest stories to boot.)<br />
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Newspapers aren't dying because they can't make money on the Internet, except in the sense they don't know how to capitalize on the Internet (and that they've been losing classified revenue to Craigslist). They may even be best off silencing their presses - besides the cost of the press itself, there's distribution and middleman fees to consider - as the print versions have really become loss leaders more than anything else. They're dying because they're so incompetent that two groups that have never been such bitter enemies nonetheless both hate their guts, and because they're getting new competition and scrutiny from blogs - and because they believe their "can't make money on the Internet" excuse for their struggles, they aren't realizing the real reasons and adapting and evolving to them. (I wrote more on this <a href="https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5214755505913496802&postID=9009021110864397481">here</a>.) Rather than getting better newspapers, we might end up with no newspapers at all. I mean, after decades of conservative accusations of media bias, how is it that the mainstream media is STILL doing stuff like <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2009/03/13/so-why-did-h-rodgin-cohen-withdraw-treasurys-no-2-press-curiously-not-cu">this</a>? Or <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/clay-waters/2009/03/12/michelle-my-belle-nyts-rachel-swarns-constant-fawning-over-first-lady">this</a> or <a href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200903130012?f=h_latest">this</a>?<br />
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I hear that a major reason we need to save newspapers is because of all the "financial resources" they have to do real broad-scale reporting. If newspapers want to keep those "financial resources" they need to come up with new and better reasons for people to patronize them. And as for television news, they're well overdue to take a long, hard look at themselves and figure out if they're really doing the best they can. Stewart may be telling them - in word and deed - that they aren't.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-71801325321178426022009-02-19T18:50:00.000-08:002009-02-19T18:50:55.908-08:00Webcomics' Identity Crisis Part V.5: The Debate RagesPart VI has little to do with the topic(s) that has (have) dominated the first five parts, but the debate on these things rages on. On the topic mostly of Part IV, Comixtalk points me to Valerie D'Orazio's <a href="http://occasionalsuperheroine.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-mainstream-media-gets-its-groove.html">rather doom-and-gloom scenario</a> for webcomics and the Internet in general, as well as Joey Manley's <a href="http://www.talkaboutcomics.com/blog/?p=1515">response</a>.<br />
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I have to imagine Manley didn't read D'Orazio's post very carefully. DC and Marvel are only ever presented as <em>examples</em> of companies that might take over webcomics; and even within the body of her post D'Orazio states that her scenario is more a prediction than a hope, no "backtracking in the comments" involved (though her simultaneous seeming exhortations to the mainstream media to adopt her plan could have easily confused Manley; she really is positing multiple predictions, either the "MSM" adopts her plan or they die). And Manley's claim "no one at DC or Marvel would have picked up <em>xkcd</em>" is mostly irrelevant; since it's so popular <em>now</em>, D'Orazio would argue, they certainly <em>would</em>. (But what happens to the Randall Munroes of the world <em>after</em> webcomics get corporatized? D'Orazio doesn't really elaborate.)Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-9082884824608498282009-02-17T13:39:00.000-08:002009-02-17T13:39:03.980-08:00A simple game of connect-the-dots.How was it possible that despite a far less compelling matchup than last year, including the until-recently laughable Arizona Cardinals, the Super Bowl <a href="http://sportsmediawatch.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-second-thought-steelerscardinals-was.html">still drew a bigger audience than last year</a>?<br />
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Amidst people crowing "when it's the Super Bowl the teams are irrelevant", I was wondering why more attention wasn't paid to the <a href="http://sportsmediawatch.blogspot.com/2009/02/super-bowl-xliii-draws-most-female.html">surprisingly large female audience</a> - which seemed to explain the large audience but gave me more questions than answers. Where did all these women come from all of a sudden?<br />
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I may have a <a href="http://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/article/61536">partial answer</a>, at least. (Courtesy <a href="http://www.fangsbites.com/2009/02/presidents-day-links.html">Fang's Bites</a>.)Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-40418651516088609682009-02-13T20:00:00.000-08:002009-02-13T20:00:01.394-08:00Webcomics’ Identity Crisis, Part IV: Rethinking Reinventing Comics, Part Two: The Problem with Micropayments (And the Place of Scott McCloud in Webcomics)<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<em>(Note from the author: I suspect this post is going to receive incoming links from well outside the webcomics community. If you've come here from one of them, you can get pretty well caught up by reading <a href="http://morganwick.blogspot.com/2009/02/webcomics-identity-crisis-part-iii.html">Part III</a> of this series from yesterday. That post will lead you to Parts I and II if you need to know more.)<br />
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I think that both sides in the "war" between blogs and the "mainstream media" have a lot to learn from webcomics.<br />
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<em>Sluggy Freelance</em> and <em>User Friendly</em> launched in 1997. <em>Penny Arcade</em> launched a year later, and hired a business manager in 2002. Blogger launched in 1999 (the word "blog" hadn't even been coined until 1997), same as LiveJournal, but wasn't bought by Google until 2003, the same year the modern WordPress launched. In some sense, blogs and webcomics have developed along much the same lines at the same time – but to some extent or another, webcomics artists have settled on a number of principles and lessons learned that both blogs and the "MSM" could stand to learn from. (In part, this stems from a strong community of webcomics commentary partly founded by Websnark that blogs mostly lack. I believe I've mentioned that just as there are multiple blogs keeping watch over the mainstream media, I'd like a few that "watches the watchmen" and monitors the happenings of what could become the <em>new</em> mainstream media. On the flip side, the MSM should study the most popular webcomics when trying to come up with a web strategy that works.)<br />
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To take one example, webcomics ended up greatly benefiting from Scott McCloud's advocacy of micropayments.<br />
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This came into focus for me Wednesday night, when I read a <a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20090210/1037343725.shtml">response to micropayment pusher Walter Isaacson</a> on a techie site that basically said, "we don't live in your ideal world", but didn't do much to explain the <em>reasons</em> why he was wrong... linked to from <a href="http://comixtalk.com/further_scatterbrained_thoughts_about_future_print_digital_comics">this Comixtalk article</a> that <em>did</em>, if only in brief form. McCloud was an advocate of micropayments and webcomics since at least 1994, and in <em>Reinventing Comics</em> in 2000, he advocated both with as much fervor as he could muster, seeing the former as the ticket to fortune for the latter. For years webcomic artists toiled with the holy grail of micropayments just over the horizon, having to endure a long string of broken promises along the way. As they fell, and as those broken promises ran out of excuses, we became rather familiar with where the economics of micropayments was going wrong. We already know what the newspaper industry is only now considering getting into.<br />
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McCloud proposed four reasons why people in 2000 tended to flee at the sight of anyone asking them to pay for content: "[they] will never pay for web content as long as they still feel like they're paying with their time; they won't pay as long as the quality of that content is low; they won't pay as long as paying is a hassle; and they won't pay unless the price is right". The first two (with "quality" here referring to "technical quality", not aesthetic) are explicitly based on bandwidth concerns and we may consider, or at least assume, them solved. Even as McCloud wrote, the third was at least becoming less hasslesome as people developed means for you to enter personal information once and then forget it without having to worry about it being stolen.<br />
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The point of micropayments was to solve that niggling last problem. McCloud predicted the price of a webcomic falling to just a few cents, because creators could keep 90% of that price instead of 10%. And in issue #6 of his online followup to <em>Reinventing</em>, <a href="http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/icst/index.html"><em>I Can't Stop Thinking!</em></a>, McCloud calculated that if Scott Kurtz - at the level of popularity he had in 2001, when he moaned about not being able to pay the bills! - had charged his readers only <em>25 cents</em> a month for <em>PVP</em>, he would have made a profit of <em>$73,000</em>! (Assuming, of course, such a charge didn't take readers away, which would never happen... and see below.) It's not like there are any issues specific to webcomics that would delay the implementation - webcomics are far less bandwidth-intensive than music, and it's not like it's more important for a webcomic creator to know your phone number than it is for a music site to know it. So what is it that makes micropayments ready for music but not ready for comics?<br />
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Again, part of the answer lies in the fact that McCloud was coming from a comic <em>book</em> model. McCloud envisioned a world in which the multitude of middlemen infecting comic books - publishers, distributors, retailers - would simply be wiped away, and an artist would be able to provide their stories without having to go through any barriers to entry and with the ability to keep 90% of the purchase price. McCloud was mostly concerned about a one-time charge, as I distinguished micropayments from subscriptions in Part IV.<br />
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(In <em>Reinventing</em>, McCloud noted that while digital information took a convoluted path from the creator's computer to the reader's, none of the steps in that path took any of the money... ignoring, as Sean Barrett points out in <a href="http://www.nothings.org/writing/upay.html">a 2001 response</a> to <em>ICST!</em> #6, the fact that all those steps are still run by companies and processing such transactions puts some strain on their networks as well. Barrett's response in general elucidates the issues surrounding micropayments - and several I won't get to - far more clearly and completely than I ever could, although I'd like to see an update to it considering I have much lesser doubts about his most serious point than I might have had at the time. I'm fairly confident it shouldn't be too much of a problem getting a simple cross-platform plug-in running with features fairly close to what McCloud advocated in <em>Reinventing</em> without modifying the browser itself, and if you've visited Wikipedia or Google with the StumbleUpon toolbar running, you know why.)<br />
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Due to its periodical nature, where one strip is released per day on a fairly regular basis, the comic strip model webcomics have evolved under is generally more suited to a subscription model than the exact sort of micropayments McCloud has in mind. Obviously in comics with a lot of continuity, the larger body of work could fall under McCloud's model, and there have been some comics, like <em>Narbonic</em>, that have experimented with a subscription model and charging for archive viewing, but I suspect they have been running into something more fundamental, something more pertinent to newspapers now considering micropayments, something McCloud touched on but never quite grasped, and underestimated at best:<br />
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<em>The psychological barrier against paying for something at all.</em><br />
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If you so much as charge half a cent for something, you'll lose such a proportion of readers that if you want to lose that same proportion again, you'll need to charge significantly more than a full cent, maybe something like a dollar.<br />
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The Internet is an amazing place. (One of my long-term goals is to write a book on just how amazing - which ideally I'd start writing by the end of this year, with how fast things are changing even now.) Almost anywhere you look, you can find anything from the latest news, to graduate dissertations, to the local weather, to book recommendations, to people's opinions on the latest happenings, to comics, to history, to funny cat images, to videos, to friends - all for free.<br />
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In an environment where just about anything you want is available for free, why would you want to pay one iota for, essentially, the same content? There needs to be a very good reason if you're going to do so, and among those reasons needs to be the idea that it comes in a form that isn't easily transferable. If all you're getting is GIF or even PDF images, what's stopping you from saving it to your hard drive and making it available yourself for free? (McCloud argues in <em>ICST!</em> #6 that at very low prices the inconvenience incurred isn't worth the savings, but while it may seem inherently ridiculous at one or two cents, at even five cents human nature can create enough of a disconnect between the thought processes of the pirate uploader, pirate downloader, and creator that people will upload out of pure principle, and penny-pinching surfers will take the bait. Remember, the "altruistic" motivation of saving strangers money isn't the only reason people pirate; among other things, there's the thrill of getting away with something.) Even beyond that, given a choice between a certain piece of content that's charging you for the privilege and gazillions of other similar pieces of content that aren't, where are you going to take your eyeballs, regardless of how good the pay content may be?<br />
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(Important note: This is based on my own experience. I don't have a real job, so I'm very miserly with every last cent. For all I know most people can and will throw pennies around like candy.)<br />
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In his 2003 essay "<a href="http://www.scottmccloud.com/home/essays/2003-09-micros/micros.html">Misunderstanding Micropayments</a>", McCloud argues that, while certain types of content like news and sports scores could be gotten from anywhere, and therefore no one would pay for something that someone somewhere could readily offer for free, art offers a unique experience you can't get anywhere else - as the person the essay was responding to put it, "only Scott McCloud can produce [a] Scott McCloud work" - and therefore, the artist has a sort of monopoly he can use to put micropayments on his work, even if they have to be just a couple of cents to render pirating inconvenient. But this is not a true monopoly; it is what economists call "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolistic_competition">monopolistic competition</a>", which basically means the creator has a monopoly over the specific <em>content</em>, but is still in competition with gazillions of other creators. If readers hear of a work, and find out they have to pay for it, they will look elsewhere for their entertainment; that whatever they find probably won't be exactly the same as what they passed up matters little to them, because how much of a big loss is it, anyway?<br />
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And a comparison to the most famous examples of monopolistic competition - brand wars like Coke v. Pepsi - isn't entirely appropriate either, because those brands have plenty of people who exercise brand loyalty, who will pay Coke or Pepsi for their product no matter <em>what</em> the price is. The equivalent in art would be a creator that had attracted such rock-star status and such brand loyalty that there are people who will do <em>anything</em> to get <em>every single thing</em> that creator puts out. Unless such a creator had attained that status in the "real world" of print, that probably means building a reputation for free first - and such "rock star" creators are, as you may guess, very, very rare, if existent at all, in the world of comics (or at least print comics).<br />
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(This is the answer to the question, "what makes micropayments work in music but not in comics?" - music has <em>literal</em> rockstars!)<br />
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Strangely, the information now held in books and comic books are, in a weird way, theoretically ready for the environment of the Web. For centuries people have been able to go to their local library and check out a book to read one time for free; even in bookstores people can at least try to breeze through a book in one visit, though some places look more fondly on the practice than others. (I initially did this with <em>Understanding Comics</em>.) It's only for especially long books, or books you want to be able to read again and again, that you actually buy them. But the Internet seems to imply an all-or-nothing paradigm; either you have to pay in order to read one word, or you shouldn't have to pay for any of it no matter how much of it you want. (I brought this up recently in the <em>Order of the Stick</em> forums in a discussion spinning from a question regarding the online-centric distribution of <em>OOTS</em> books.) Places like Amazon institute the ability to "look" or "search inside" <em>certain</em> books, but I don't think there's any real consensus on the best way to simulate it, and the <em>Narbonic</em> approach of only opening the latest page to anyone and forcing you to pay to read the very beginning seems like the reverse of the norm, and not as effective. (Since the free portion is knee-deep in continuity already.)<br />
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With the ability to sample something without buying it taken away, you suddenly have a paradox. If you're just getting started putting, say, a webcomic together, and you impose a cost on it, no one will want to pay for it without knowing going in whether or not it's good - even if you advertise its existence. You need to spend some time building a big enough brand so that people will pay for it no matter what because they need to know what happens next. But if you leave it free, you can't impose a paywall on it once it gets bigger, because people will revolt at the idea of paying for something that had been free - even a couple of cents, because of that psychological barrier - and will leave en masse, moaning about a creator that betrayed their trust and tried to take advantage of them.<br />
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A rockstar <em>work</em> is easier to achieve than a rockstar <em>creator,</em> but only the latter can impose a paywall and only on <em>new</em> work, and that presumably means having made plenty of money on the <em>old</em> work. In <em>ICST!</em> #6, McCloud suggests that people would be more likely to try out an unknown quantity if it cost them five cents as opposed to five dollars, but that comes across to me as a hand-wave to brush off the question. (Elsewhere in the same comic, he does suggest that comic creators would experiment with various pricing schemes, including the <em>Narbonic</em> approach of making bits and pieces of the comic available for free.)<br />
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By an accidental twist of fate, the Internet could threaten the very foundation of capitalism. Micropayments aren't only the answer to webcomics' woes, or even the savior of traditional journalism, but could get rid of <em>all</em> the problems that crop up anywhere one is caused by the fact that you do not directly pay to visit a website. Had they been ready to do so before the Internet began its rise to the incredible position it holds today, they might have become the norm almost instantly, and the Internet - and the world - would be a very different place. They're probably pretty close to being able to do so as it is, but because of the prisoner's dilemma, anyone would be insane to institute it - even in some brand new field that didn't exist before, lest that field <em>continue</em> not to exist.<br />
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(But if they were the norm, wouldn't that allow more gatekeepers to spring up, not only from big companies that have already built a presence or can wait out a period of low viewership, but from the micropayment agencies themselves?)<br />
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This is why I think McCloud, in all his debates with naysayers trying to paint him as killing the free internet, missed the point when he constantly claimed that micropayments didn't need to wipe out free content - because it kinda <em>does</em>. (Barrett said much the same thing by suggesting that if all the good free content on the Internet died off with "the success tax", as it was called in 2001 when getting a lot of readers mostly meant increased bandwidth costs, that might allow micropayments to take its place. But no one even talks about the "success tax" now - it has no Wikipedia article and the phrase doesn't even seem to appear anywhere in its 2.7 million articles - so that's out the window by now, although McCloud was still talking about it in "Misunderstanding Micropayments".) It's kind of sad, because in <em>ICST</em> #5 McCloud made the case that micropayments could allow for a greater quality of work if creators had to worry less about their money. Naturally, that could extend far beyond webcomics as well.<br />
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(Note: This post gets far more webcomic-specific from here.)<br />
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<em>ICST!</em> #5-6 (especially the latter) touched off a minor backlash, deservedly or undeservedly, in what amounted to the webcomics community in 2001, from people who accused McCloud of being overly idealistic and ignoring the issue of why micropayments have failed in the past, and also (because of other simultaneous events) supposedly ignoring the people already putting out webcomics - including what <em>Goats'</em> Jon Rosenberg called, paradoxically, "micropayments, in the form of voluntary donations like PayPal and the Amazon Honor System [that] help keep our sites running without restricting content." How can micropayments be unworkable and simultaneously the way you already keep your site running?<br />
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And Rosenberg wasn't alone; Jerry "Tycho" Holkins wrote a <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/22/">parody strip</a> and angry rant (consisting of one massive paragraph) on the <em>Penny Arcade</em> site. The rant is no longer in <em>PA</em>'s news post archives, but is reproduced in full in McCloud's <a href="http://www.scottmccloud.com/home/xtra/backlash-full.html">response to it</a>. McCloud saw both responses as stemming from frustration over something McCloud himself suffered: the inability for any of them to make a living off their online comics in 2001, despite the revenue streams they nonetheless had in donations and other things. McCloud had personal conversations with both creators, and both wrote later news posts clarifying and backing off from their positions. (Tycho's, once again, is out of the present archives but can be found <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20020606213328/www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2001-06-27">here</a>. The whole controversy also produced the Barrett response.)<br />
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Reading the controversy now, I'm struck by the fact that both Rosenberg and Holkins basically accused McCloud of ignoring their own efforts in the online marketplace, yet not only did McCloud do nothing of the sort (as he himself pointed out), they (especially Rosenberg) were the ones doing the ignoring - of the idea of one-shot long-form comics in the comic book mold that McCloud had in mind. Tycho's response post mentioned them, but Rosenberg encouraged McCloud to look into the then-extant webcomic funding schemes - "network subscription models, voluntary donations, and advertising" - without considering their salience to McCloud's topic. <br />
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A lot has changed since 2001. First, of course, <em>Penny Arcade</em> and <em>PVP</em> have both long since managed to find ways to not only make money, but become their creators' livelihoods. (It's worth noting that the country was in the <em>last</em> recession when all this controversy broke, making it far more difficult for everyone to make a living.) But secondly and more to the point, as I mentioned earlier, micropayments have come a lot closer to reality - if not even actually arrived. In 2003, McCloud learned about the impending launch of <a href="http://www.bitpass.com/">BitPass</a>, and finding it "the first micropayments system I ever liked enough to want to use it", joined its board of advisors, picked up the first stock he ever owned, and put one of his own comics behind a BitPass paywall as one of three starting vendors. McCloud had felt that the main obstacles behind getting a micropayment system off the ground were mostly bandwidth-related. By 2003, and even more so as the years progressed, that was no longer an excuse, and McCloud even wrote "Misunderstanding Micropayments" as a response to naysayers claiming that despite the failure of micropayment systems in the past, they were here for real this time.<br />
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On January 19, 2007, BitPass announced they were <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitPass">ceasing operations</a>.<br />
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(In some sense, this post, and series, is two years too late. Of course, then it wouldn't be topical outside webcomics now...)<br />
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They didn't give any reasons for the shutdown other than "circumstances beyond our control". I wonder if McCloud was still on the board of directors for the company at the time, or otherwise would have an insider perspective on why BitPass failed. (McCloud proceeded to make that original launch comic available for free, but that's hardly an "abandonment" of micropayments as his foil, Clay Shirky, <a href="http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/04/25/sorry_wrong_number_mccloud_abandons_micropayments.php">claims</a>. If you're wondering, I think I've encapsulated the core of Shirky's argument in this discussion.) Without the excuse of bad bandwidth, does McCloud still see micropayments as the wave of the future, or did the failure of BitPass shake his confidence?<br />
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And if it did, considering so much else about McCloud's vision for comics on the web is reliant on micropayments, or some form of payment system, how does that affect McCloud's vision for webcomics?<br />
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The mere fact that webcomics.com felt the need to ask the question about the infinite canvas that started Part III – that <em>anyone</em> would pay renewed attention to McCloud's address to TED here in 2009 – suggests to me that the webcomics community is still too obsessed with Scott McCloud. Even more so the fact that someone at Comixtalk still felt the need to debate micropayments rather than spread the word outside the webcomic community to the people who could best learn our lessons. Webcomics owes a lot to McCloud for sticking up for it in <em>Reinventing Comics</em>, not to mention for the medium of comics in general in <em>Understanding Comics</em>, but has yet to really realize that his theories have little relevance to webcomics today. Webcomics have moved on; the comic book format has adapted itself for webcomics and doesn't need the infinite canvas to do so. McCloud focused on infinite canvas, infinite canvas, infinite canvas and ignored, lightly touched on, or even disdained so much else that could be done with the medium on the Web. Even hypertext can open the floodgates for whole new frontiers of webcomics (admittedly in ways that could conceivably be done in Flash as well) rooted in the very same things McCloud hated about it. Yet in many ways, webcomics still defines itself in McCloud's terms and has yet to grow up and move on.<br />
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McCloud was surprised that <em>Understanding</em> spent several years in honeymoon rather than touching off the debate he had hoped; I wonder if the reason is because comics had been <em>so</em> completely disrespected, so completely ignored by potential critics, that what McCloud actually talked about, by accident, was the <em>baseline</em> of comics criticism, the part that's almost completely <em>indisputable</em>, the part that's taken as <em>given</em> and which all else is built on. Perhaps comics needed someone with as radical a vision of comics as McCloud to bring that into the open, but for anyone to focus on his later words (critically or uncritically) without offering their own independent opinions is hardly justified. Because of the fame he attained from <em>Understanding Comics</em>, McCloud remains webcomics' most famous defender, and he was a great one and brought a lot of benefits to webcomics for a while, but it's time to find a new one. Why didn't someone <em>other</em> than McCloud ever put out a book like <em>Reinventing</em> defending webcomics as perhaps even potentially artistically superior to print comics in some way, without wallowing in the infinite canvas? Where's Gabe and Tycho extolling the virtues of webcomics? Where's Scott Kurtz? Where's Ryan North? Where's David Morgan-Mar? Where's Eric Burns(-White), for crying out loud?<br />
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In some sense, very little of webcomics has really tried to test the domains of the medium, and has been more concerned about telling neat little stories for the masses, without so much of the trappings of great literature - even <em>Order of the Stick</em>, which I have called the greatest webcomic on the Internet, doesn't really aspire to much more than a neat story for the masses, with plenty of plot upon subplot but not much in the way of <em>subtext</em> or <em>meaning.</em> This is why people hate <em>Ctrl+Alt+Del</em>: because they don't <em>want</em> one of the most popular webcomics to be a bunch of popcorn, they want people to aspire <em>higher</em> than Tim Buckley, or else it's a waste of the medium. I can't help but wonder if Scott McCloud's myopic focus on the infinite canvas is part of the problem here, obscuring the view to a far broader idea of webcomics and allowing webcomics to wallow in the lack of imagination from whence it came.<br />
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Scott McCloud did a lot for webcomics, but now he is weighing webcomics down, a spectre that haunts the form and its conception of itself. It's time for webcomics to escape his cave, spread its wings, and fly – and discover its <em>own</em> new worlds in the process.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-59454039769640622182009-01-29T23:04:00.001-08:002009-08-14T16:38:48.696-07:00More football than you'd ever expect two days before the Super Bowl<a href="http://www.morganwick.com/2009/01/more-football-than-youd-ever-expect-two-days-before-the-super-bowl/">This post is now hosted only on the new site</a>.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-62454861084401678682009-01-21T18:19:00.000-08:002009-01-22T00:13:47.076-08:00Maybe this post is just to maintain my two-today pledge in my own mind.One thing that, when you think about it, is rather amazing about America is its diversity - not in race or creed or anything like that, but in the places people live. America is a big country - only Russia, China, and depending on who you talk to, China (and I'm not talking about Taiwan) are bigger. But in those other three countries there are pretty wide swaths of the country that are basically unsettled, and #5 on the list, Brazil, is a full million square kilometers smaller - and with the exception of the capital of Brasilia, the vast majority of the population is packed in on the coast. Australia is perhaps the only country that can compare to the US' size and uniformity (all other countries are a third the States' size at best), in that they have at least some major cities on the west coast (Perth, the capital of Western Australia, is fourth-largest), but even they have the Outback. The United States may have a lot of "flyover country", but fairly large cities like St. Louis and Texas' cities dot it, and even the Rocky Mountains have some sizable cities in Denver, Salt Lake, and the like. And on the UN's list of "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_urban_agglomerations">urban agglomerations</a>", only India has two entries larger than Los Angeles, or three entries larger than Chicago.<br />
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Perhaps as a result, we seem to take a lot of pride in our cities and really identify with them, especially since we tend to be further from other cities than in other countries. It also helps that our cities identify themselves more and stand out more. Sure, you might have heard of both Shanghai and Beijing, or even Mumbai and Delhi, but good luck distinguishing between them. But Los Angeles is the movie capital, Las Vegas is the gambling capital, Boston and Chicago are crazy about sports, Philadelphia and Boston are birthplaces of the nation, Miami is a vacation destination, San Francisco is known for the Golden Gate Bridge and liberalism, and so on. (I'm sure people in other nations will tell me the only reason I can't tell the difference between cities in the same country outside the US is because I'm an ignorant American, but bear with me here.)<br />
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We all identify with Americans, but in something that may be a holdover from the days when people identified themselves by their state first, the place we live is close behind. There isn't a monolithic culture across the entire country; America's too big for that. One thing Americans take for granted that, from what I hear, is largely unique is that we have one level of news broadcasts for the nation, but also another for each community we live in. Similarly, when it comes to sports teams we identify very tightly with a fairly small set of sports teams that generally associate with one general metro area, and for the most part, we root for the <em>local</em> team by default. I really am fascinated by it. The closest parallel in Europe might not be individual cities like London and Paris, but the whole countries within the European Union.<br />
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Anyway, I'm not sure where I was going with this, other than I wanted to talk about ESPN's <a href="http://www.espnmediazone.com/press_releases/2009_01_jan/20090120_ESPN.comRecruitsTeamofBasketballBloggerstoLaunchtheTrueHoopBlogNetwork.htm">creating a blog network</a> for local coverage of all 30 NBA teams. There's quite a bit of mileage out there in the "blogosphere" - you have blogs for specific topics, blogs for just about any league, blogs for individual teams, and so on. (Baseball and college basketball are presumably now demanding their own blog networks from ESPN.)<br />
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I was wondering if there were blogs out there covering a given city's entire sports scene - one for New York, one for Chicago, one for Philadelphia, and the like. I was shocked to discover that (at least for New York and Seattle) they were few and far between! Blogs covering individual teams, two at most, were FAR more common! I could understand that it might be stressful to cover too many teams in too many sports at once, but it can't be THAT stressful just to be a fan of the teams in your backyard, and certainly the reward of building a tight-knit community of fans would be worth it, don't you think? Even if you're uncomfortable covering two teams in the same sport that are probably bitter rivals, you could easily split the work with a sister blog or second writer, right?Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-41319586959348897592009-01-17T02:09:00.000-08:002009-01-17T02:26:24.874-08:00And don't forget, Sandsday Mail Call next week!There's a story behind <a href="http://morganwick.freehostia.com/webcomic/index.php?stripnum=364">today's strip</a>, and it has nothing to do with Patrick McGoohan.<br />
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When I did a <a href="http://morganwick.freehostia.com/webcomic/index.php?stripnum=47">Gary Gygax tribute</a> last year, I told myself that when other sufficiently geeky notable figures (or sufficiently notable figures period) died, I would do similar tributes to them. I did that to reassure myself, because even though numerous other webcomics, including such highlights as <em>Penny Arcade</em> and <em>xkcd</em>, did similar tributes, the fact remained that the only reason I was doing a Gary Gygax tribute was because <em>Order of the Stick</em> did one. <em>Order of the Stick</em> <em>never</em> does topical strips; the closest it comes tends to be throwaway references in early panels. Still, the fact remained that I was effectively letting <em>OOTS</em> write my strip, and I was able to live with myself better if I told myself that was not going to be the only time, that I had more in store.<br />
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I did not. By all rights I should have done strips on the passing of George Carlin or even Eartha Kitt. Nonetheless, I still let that Gary Gygax strip stand alone as my only tribute to a dead figure, one created solely to mimic another webcomic, and I decided not to let that stand by the time one year had passed since it was published, and before the one-year anniversary of the strip itself if possible.<br />
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Not to sound flip, but I debated about doing a strip about Ricardo Montalban and was starting to regretfully lean towards no before McGoohan died - saved me, you might say - and while he was still a marginal case for having the right combination of geekiness and notability, I decided that "The Prisoner" was close enough. It helped that I had a strip I was unhappy about (it's really incredibly disgusting and I need to take a hatchet to it before before I'm comfortable posting it) that I was hoping to bump out of the rotation. Besides, he passes the <em>xkcd</em> test, in that I'd be shocked if <em>xkcd</em> doesn't have its own tribute up by Monday. It's right up Randall Munroe's alley!<br />
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Also, while I'm here, I do not condone anyone using this strip to start wild McGoohan/Elvis/Hoffa theories. Or even getting the idea from this post.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-27507735267626942422008-12-31T18:00:00.000-08:002008-12-31T18:00:00.730-08:00Final Post of 2008: Year In ReviewBecause I just got a new idea and I'm breaking up my minor bowls into two posts, you're actually getting THREE posts each today and tomorrow!<br />
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Wow.<br />
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<em>Wow.</em><br />
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Can you believe that just happened?<br />
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I mean... this was a year in which, after eight years of Bush, a Democrat was elected President in <em>resounding </em>fashion. And in so doing became the first black president in the nation's history... after being completely unheard of four years ago (and arguably, not much better two years later). And running a campaign that was not only the culmination of a four-year trend of people's participation in political campaigns, but was almost a people's movement on par with anything coming out of the sixties. Almost literally, Barack Obama was no longer a candidate or even a person; he was a <em>cause</em>.<br />
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Speaking of his race, this was a year when - out of <em>nowhere</em> - after years of both groups being in the wilderness, it became virtually guaranteed from the start that either a black or a woman would garner a major-party nomination for President.<br />
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And both of those produced, by far, one of the most entertaining presidential campaigns ever.<br />
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This was a year that ushered us into what almost everyone is calling not a mere recession, but our worst crisis of the sort since the Great Depression... and it has a shot to be even worse than that, and upend everything we know about American society.<br />
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This was a year that produced so many great sports moments that ESPN had little to do but sit there, awestruck, and produce one single special, lacking any of the formatting of past specials, that proclaimed it simply "the Greatest Year in Sports", including an Olympics that produced too many moments to count, from the Opening Ceremonies to Michael Phelps to Usain Bolt and plenty more you probably didn't see. No "Top 10 Games" special as in years past, and I should have included the Ryder Cup in <a href="http://morganwick.blogspot.com/2008/12/predictions-for-sportscenters-top-10.html">my own list</a>. Probably at #8, bumping out #8 or #9. Seriously, I could have easily made it a top 20, and that may have been the problem.<br />
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And most of all, this was a year that produced a lot of turmoil in my own life... when I launched my own <a href="http://morganwick.freehostia.com/webcomic/">webcomic</a> and finally found a voice on Da Blog, when I found myself at a crossroads that will only begin to be resolved as we enter the new year.<br />
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It's kind of hard to imagine that such a chaotic year is finally coming to an end.<br />
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I had seen 2006 as a fairly pivotal year, but that was because of my interests: the ten-year-old UPN and WB networks finally collapsed into the CW (with its sloppy seconds joining a hastily-formed network that now, shockingly, is in far better position than the CW), the NFL started a new primetime paradigm with NBC, ESPN, and its own network, and the Democrats took both houses of Congress and set the stage for the retaking of the White House.<br />
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This was far bigger than that. This was my generation's 1968.<br />
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Depending on how much Bush's legacy holds up, this could prove to be the true beginning of the "twenty-first century", much like World War I was the true beginning of the 20th (and the end of the Cold War was arguably its end). In my own life, it seems like I've been 20 forever (are you sure I was only 19 when the Iowa caucuses happened, let alone when I launched Sandsday?), and I'm still going to be 20 for almost five more months! It's like the previous 20 years was just a prelude to this year forward in my life.<br />
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Here's to 2008, in all its wild wackiness, in all aspects of the game.<br />
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2009 has a heck of an act to follow.<br />
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It's going to be a mite awkward for it to sink in that it <em>is</em> 2009.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-37893967812764413022008-12-17T09:00:00.000-08:002008-12-17T09:00:00.739-08:00Double dose of the Random Internet Discovery of the Week! Yay!If you're interested in <a href="http://www.jacksonpollock.org/">fancying yourself a Jackson Pollock</a> and creating your own work of "art", have at it. There's something more profound I need to get to.<br />
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<a href="http://mcbias.blogspot.com/2008/12/blogging-for-dollars-in-recession.html">This post</a> (link courtesy <a href="http://awfulannouncing.blogspot.com/2008/12/create-caption-326.html">Awful Announcing</a>) takes a look at how the blog market could be affected by the present recession. It's mostly written from a sports blog perspective, especially <em>paid</em> sports blogs, but it has implications for everyone else who blogs, paid or not, employed by a third party or merely doing it themselves, whether for fun or profit.<br />
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It takes an interesting perspective: Although some, like the blog collective Gawker, think ad revenue is likely to decline in the current recession, the post itself talks to several bloggers and draws its own conclusion based on a study, and they seem to all agree that the recession could <em>help</em> blogs. Some people might decide that, needing to cut costs, the Internet might be one of the first things to go, but AA's own proprietor suggests the Internet might be one of the <em>last</em> things to go, because it has become so important to job searches - and thus could increase in importance to many people. Some of the bloggers talked to suggested that the blog population could rise as newspapers cut traditional journalists, making room for cheaper bloggers, and as laid-off workers of all stripes look for new lines of work.<br />
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Regardless of whether it becomes Great Depression II, this could be one of, if not the, most important recession in our history.<br />
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If some of these reactions are true, this recession could greatly accelerate the rate at which the Internet becomes the chief way people get their news, information, and entertainment. At the moment, the Internet is big enough that "old media" - newspapers and TV - are concerned about the impact of losing their audience to it, but not big enough that they're comfortable with making money off it. If it ever can get that big - and this recession could greatly hasten the day that it happens - newspapers and television as we know them could become as antiquated as the telegraph.<br />
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And as the Internet and blogging grows, it has the potential to change the very way we live. We may well look back on the first decade of the new millenium as a time of great flux and transition, when the Internet was still in its relative infancy, or at least childhood and was still taking shape, still taking the form that would shape the twenty-first century. One thing I neglected to mention when I listed <a href="http://morganwick.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-april-4-1748-french-were-embarking.html">a number of ideas I have and might like to work on</a> was a book coming out of my continual wonder at how dramatically the Internet has already changed our lives, and how it holds the potential to change our lives even more, affecting everything from the news to entertainment to politics to even the very underpinning of our economic system. I had been thinking about holding off on writing it until I had enough of a name that I would have any credibility whatsoever, but recent events - not least of which being the coming recession - have convinced me that <em>right now</em> is a unique moment in history in the evolution of the Internet, and "the fierce urgency of now" - to borrow a phrase from our president-elect - would seem to dictate that I get such a book written in the next couple of years, and preferably starting as soon as possible.<br />
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There's supposed to be a second part coming out today, "focus[ing] on reactions from bloggers who blog as a hobby (i.e. for free) and from readers whose blog-reading habits may be affected by the economy," and the post elicits reactions from anyone that would fall in either or both of those categories. I've sent this post to the blogger in question, but I want to hear from anyone that would have a voice in all of this, anyone who might use the Internet on a regular basis as an outlet, from YouTubers to webcomickers - not to mention, if possible, any advertisers who I imagine count for a significant amount of revenue. Send an e-mail to mwmailsea at yahoo dot com, or if you want to take it directly to him (and his second post encourages it), use the address on the sidebar of that page.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-44815557510458648572008-10-27T11:41:00.000-07:002008-10-27T11:49:16.810-07:00This is going to slow down my platform examinations even more, isn't it?In light of the anti-media comments coming from both sides in response to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/24/AR2008102402757.html">this article</a>, perhaps the exhortation at the end is of some import:<br />
<blockquote>But in a world, and a Web, full of analysis, opinion and "accountability journalism," what's missing is a neutral referee. Which is a bit like living in a world with a North Pole and a South Pole but no equator. If there's no one to set the standard, how will we know when we've crossed the line?</blockquote>But truly neutral, objective journalism may well be dead now, if it ever really existed, sacrificed to the altar of profit and, in the case of blogs, preaching to the choir. In today's media climate, it doesn't seem like it's worth it for anyone in the "mainstream media" to serve as a "neutral referee".<br />
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So I'd like to posit this proposal, and I don't know if I personally would be able to take part, but it's worth considering: A collective of blogs, bloggers, and other interested persons from all sides of the political spectrum that monitors the media - newspapers, TV, and blogs - and calls them on their BS, while also serving as a "new" AP, attempting to present the news of the day accurately, completely, and fairly from as many sources as possible.<br />
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Workable, or unworkable?Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-74573623861693070312008-09-26T11:28:00.000-07:002008-09-26T11:47:42.790-07:00Moving on...Sports Watcher later today. I hope everyone reading Da Blog or even Sandsday watches the debate tonight. Don't worry, <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CANDIDATES_DEBATE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-09-26-13-03-06">McCain will show up</a>. Apparently some of the people in the room trying to hash out that bailout effectively told him, "You know, why don't you just go off to that debate and we'll work things out on our own. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/26/debate.mississippi/index.html">Seriously, go. Now</a>."<br />
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Meanwhile, <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/W/WASHINGTON_MUTUAL_FUTURE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT">my bank just failed</a>!Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-75184429759333701912008-08-13T13:23:00.000-07:002008-08-13T13:25:15.192-07:00Random Internet Discovery of the WeekI know last week I promised a "Bonus Internet Discovery" but I subsequently realized I didn't really know what I was going to say about what I was going to talk about.<br />
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Wait... <a href="http://www.obleek.com/iraq/">Some Iraq casualties have been in Kuwait</a>?Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-34829148332257044742008-07-31T10:46:00.000-07:002008-07-31T11:46:04.936-07:00What? I never mentioned that I was an Aspie?By now you've probably, possibly, heard of Michael Savage's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Savage_%28commentator%29#Autism">remarks</a> calling autism the "illness du jour" and claiming that "99 percent" of autism cases are "a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out". The ensuing controversy led Slate to publish an <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2195766/">article</a> explaining how autism is actually diagnosed. And as a result, until recently the number one most e-mailed story (and still appearing on the list) on Slate had been... Gregg Easterbrook's <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2151538/">report</a> on a Cornell study suggesting a link between television viewing and autism. From <em>2006</em>.<br /><br />There have been a lot of proposed theories about the cause of the rise in autism diagnoses over the decades. Chemicals in vaccines were being loudly trumpeted until they were banned and autism diagnoses kept rising (and it was, in retrospect, kind of ridiculous anyway). Some people attribute increased awareness of autism's existence; others attribute the constantly broadening definitions of autism. Myself, I was turned on by a teacher I had in high school to what might be called the "Darwinist" theory, which probably explains some of my neuroses, both because the idea informs the neuroses and because the neuroses inform the idea: in the information age, so many of the jobs out there require logical processing skills, which autistics tend to naturally possess, so they tend to thrive and reproduce, whereas before they were too socially awkward to get laid. Asperger's syndrome is the future "norm" of the human race! Get used to it! (Would it be too conceited for me to refer to myself as <em>homo superior</em>?)<br /><br />The Cornell study, though, is especially interesting to me (protests in the comments and general part of a blame-television tradition aside) not just on its own terms, but even more so because of Easterbrook's explanation of it. Easterbrook, who had hypothesized a television-autism link even before learning of the study, further hypothesized that for millenia, the human race had been raised on three-dimensional images. Once infants to two-year-olds started being raised on the two-dimensional images of the television set, it warped their minds in who knows what ways.<br /><br />I would carry this one step further and suggest that autistics literally see the world differently - not merely process the <em>same</em> images differently, but literally see a <em>different picture</em> than a non-autistic. I can <em>see</em> out of my right eye, but I'm somewhat convinced it sort of "turns off" or at least runs on low power when my left eye is open. I can only wink my right eye - even when I think I'm winking my left eye it's the right eye that closes - and when both eyes are closed I similarly can only open my left eye without using my hands to hold the left eye closed. (I don't know how normal this is.) I also don't really see any difference in objects with depth when seeing with one or two eyes; similar to a painting that can give an illusion of depth, proportions and general shapes, not to mention lighting, can make the existence of depth clear even with no depth perception to speak of.<br /><br />Regardless, autistics serve a valuable role in society if their quirks and talents are properly nurtured and exploited, which is why I'm offended that <a href="http://www.wwe.com/shows/snme/generationrescuesnme/">the WWE is teaming up </a>with Jenny McCarthy's <a href="http://www.generationrescue.org/">Generation Rescue </a>charity, whose slogan is "autism is reversible" and which still believes in the rather-discredited mercury-in-the-vaccines and germ theories, and which supports giving "biomedical intervention" to kids as a means of fighting autism (including the "gluten-free diet" approach, which when tried on me, made my problems worse in the short term). By their own admission, "the cause of this epidemic of NDs is extremely controversial", and much that is on their web site is familiar blame-corporate-America rhetoric and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Rescue#Criticisms_and_responses">based on questionable research</a>, yet the WWE seems to be treating it as though it's as uncontroversial as the United Way or Salvation Army. (It doesn't help that WWE is advertising that McCarthy will be "stepping into the ring to fight autism" as though autism were on the level of cancer or AIDS.)<br /><br />(Oh, and don't ask me how I found out about this in the first place when there is shockingly little controversy about it, okay?)<br /><br />The real "disease" of autism lies with everyone who doesn't have it, in assuming that everyone fits a certain mold of the "ideal" or "normal" person until it's too late, and well thereafter. (Which is why I use my "about me" posts to give advice to people trying to deal with me, especially in real life.) Let's try and keep the uniqueness and talents of those with autism and related "disorders" instead of trying to get everyone to march in lockstep and become just like everyone else.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-8994361598304030702008-07-10T08:49:00.000-07:002008-07-10T09:03:11.798-07:00Quick thought on BrandgateWhy did Elton Brand <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3480691">go to Philadelphia</a>?<br /><br />It wasn't the money. He could have gotten roughly the same amount from the Clippers and more from the Warriors.<br /><br />It wasn't the exposure. There's a LOT he was getting from LA he wasn't going to get in Philly.<br /><br />By all accounts, it was to play in the weaker Eastern Conference.<br /><br />We are starting to see, finally, the evening out of the conferences in the NBA.<br /><br />(I can't wait for the Sixers to come to the Staples Center to play the Clippers or even the Lakers. What's the world record for loudest, longest boos ever to ring through an arena?)Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-82724689303870153502008-06-26T23:09:00.000-07:002008-06-26T23:25:28.017-07:00Keith Olbermann: Worst Person in the World!Fast forward to 3:03:<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="339" scrolling="no" src="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/25402317#25402317" width="425"></iframe><br />
"Obviously, those would have to be the kind of arms in use in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was passed; the musket, the wheelock, the flintlock, the 13th century Chinese hand cannon. Stuff like that!"<br />
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Yes, "stuff like that" all right. And when the First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press", it's talking strictly about things like speaking, whispering, shouting, yelling, printing pamphlets and newspapers, and other things in use in 1791. The Internet, television, radio, motion pictures, even the <em>telegraph</em>? Fair game!<br />
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I'd like to think Keith doesn't really mean this, although it's doubtful since it seems to be making a case that it's okay to restrict guns today because today's guns are so much more advanced. It would be insane to interpret the Second Amendment as saying we can't keep people from obtaining nuclear weapons. But regardless of whether he means it, rest assured the Right will hammer him for it.<br />
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The question is, did the Founding Fathers intend the Second Amendment to prohibit restrictions on common ownership of guns, regardless of whether that was for the purpose of raising a militia? I hope to answer that question in Truth Court, if not this weekend, at some point in the future.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-60162927459813019842008-06-23T01:02:00.001-07:002008-06-23T01:06:57.434-07:00What. The. BLEEP?So I just got done writing the post below about Websnark and I'm heading over to my mail service to make sure its proprietor is checking the accompanying strip because my life is self-promotion. I suck.<br /><br />So imagine my surprise when I see, on Yahoo Mail's list of headlines, <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/OBIT_GEORGE_CARLIN?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-06-23-03-14-37">this</a>.<br /><br />What the bleep?<br /><br /><em>What the bleep?</em><br /><br />George Carlin died?<br /><br /><em>George f'ing Carlin died?</em><br /><br />I mean... dude.<br /><br />I'm really aping Websnark way too much right now.Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162362581679439235.post-49869722458028647302008-06-19T20:00:00.000-07:002008-06-19T20:11:06.733-07:00Truth! What a concept!I'm not doing any more editions of the News You Can Use feature, unless of course someone paid me for it. It's another great idea that I think someone should take up as long as it's not me (like the NFL SuperPower Rankings). The next evolution of it might be something akin to a webcast where someone could recite the really important stories of the day.<br /><br />(Where's the best news source(s), between TV, print, and the Internet, for finding news the American people really need to hear, while still having a good balance of US news and not sounding like a liberal screed?)<br /><br />Anyway, as you may have noticed, I tend to link to the AP's web site (which I'm not sure they intend for real public consumption) whenever there's a news story I want to comment on, and now <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AP_BLOGGERS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT">the AP wants to talk with the Media Bloggers Association</a> for standards for quoting from AP stories. (I'm not sure I ever quote per se, but it might apply anyway.)<br /><br />The article talks about things like making sure the AP's guidelines closely follow fair use provisions, but I want to talk about more basic things, like a <a href="http://gawker.com/tag/associated-press/?i=5017053&t=who-put-these-bloggers-in-charge">backlash</a> by bloggers wondering where these people in the MBA came from, and some nasty accusations I've learned of that the MBA is a scam, or even a front for "traditional" journalists who have as much incentive to squelch blogging as the AP.<br /><br />So, in a Da Blog Investigative Report, let's try and separate fact from fiction.<br /><br />First, the backlash from bloggers has been wondering who the hell are these people and why they should have any claim to represent bloggerdom. From Gawker:<br /><blockquote><p>And who are they? It's hard to say, even after reading the group's site and searching for more information elsewhere on the Web.</p><p>The association obtained credentials for some bloggers to <a href="http://www.talkleft.com/story/2007/1/11/11928/3163">attend the Scooter Libby trial</a>. Founder Robert Cox claims the group "<a href="http://www.spj.org/news.asp?ref=722">makes available</a>" pro-bono legal services. There is some sort of <a href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/12/18/newsweek-media-bloggers-association-cause-ruckus">partnership with</a> <a href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/12/18/newsweek-media-bloggers-association-cause-ruckus">Newsweek</a>. Rabble-rousing blogger Jeff Jarvis <a href="http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/06/14/a-proposal-to-the-associated-press-a-link-ethic/">is a member</a>. But the association is a self-appointed representative of a hugely diverse group, and its legitimacy appears entirely self-assigned. Gawker Media, for one, is not aligned with the association, I am reliably informed.</p><p>The AP's decision to emphasize its meetings with this lone, opaque organization only makes its copyright crusade seem all the more surreal.</p></blockquote><br />Also arousing suspicion: A claim that the closest thing it has to a blog of its own is <a href="http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/theruckus/default.aspx">hosted by Newsweek</a>... a representative of "old media." Well, that's not completely fair; the MBA does host <a href="http://www.mediabloggers.org/robert-cox/">president Robert Cox's personal blog</a>, but seems to want to hide it, only showing a list of posts on the sidebar of some pages. Gawker commenter Triborough raised more red flags on the same post:<br /><blockquote><p>The group claims to be in New Rochelle, but a search of the NYS Department of<br />State Corporation and Business Entity Database doesn't have them listed. The whois info for the domain lists a P.0. Box in Philadelphia (looks like a possibly privately registered domain with things like olbermannwatch.com being registered to the same address) with the Pennsylvania Department of State's business entity database revealing zip. The phone number listed on the website's contact us page is in Arizona with the Arizona Corporation Commission database revealing no listing.</p><p>And this raises a red flag for us: <em>The Media Bloggers Association will be opening up registration for membership starting in Summer 2008</em>. Just send them your name and e-mail. Seems like a bit of a scam.</p><p>Then again it is about 1AM and are tired and feel like not doing any more research<br />into possibly dubious groups that I don't think anyone has ever heard of.</p></blockquote><br />Cox didn't do his organization any favors in their <a href="http://www.mediabloggers.org/robert-cox/ap-bloggers-and-self-appointed-groups">response</a> to the Gawker post:<br /><blockquote>Some kid named Ryan Tate has a snarky little post about our efforts to help a<br />blogger facing a legal threat over at <a href="http://gawker.com/tag/associated-press/?i=5017053&t=who-put-these-bloggers-in-charge">Gawker</a>. He claims to have tried to find out about the MBA by reading our site and searching the web. Here's a thought, kid. Pick up the phone and call us - our phone number and email is on the same site you claimed to have read.</blockquote><br />Yeah. Here's a thought: Instead of attacking him (which makes you look like even more of a shill to old media), why don't you answer why very popular blogs like Gawker don't appear to be represented in your organization, and why people have to call and e-mail you to find out information that virtually every other similar organization in the world puts on their Web site? You claim to represent bloggers, why don't you have some sort of membership roll on your Web site? Even listing some of the "very popular" blogs you claim to represent?<br /><br />The rest of the article completely ignores Tate's concerns in order to establish that the operator of the blog that started this mess did indeed contact the MBA for legal protection. I find it odd that the MBA would accuse Tate of "sneering" and "snarking" about them when Tate's post is not all that sneery and snarky, but the MBA sure loves to snark about what a punk kid Tate is! Gawker summarily <a href="http://gawker.com/tag/media-bloggers-association/?i=5017270&t=dont-mess-with-the-media-bloggers-association">counter-mocked them</a>.<br /><br />Meanwhile, Gawker commenters continued the march of evidence that something was wrong with the MBA, suspecting it of being a possible scam and being friendly with the AP. The evidence is collected <a href="http://gawker.com/tag/get-rich-quick/?i=5017681&t=is-the-media-bloggers-association-a-scam">here</a>, and here are some excerpts:<br /><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote>This is the group that the blogger behind Drudge Retort turned to when faced with legal threats from the Associated Press. AP backed down, but who knows what Cox and his MBA got from the blogger. And now this group is supposedly in negotiations with the AP to issue blogging guidelines that most likely will be stricter than copyright law even calls for.</blockquote><br />Cox has now written a <a href="http://www.mediabloggers.org/robert-cox/backstory-on-ap-drudge-retort-issue">post</a> claiming that there are several "misconceptions" about the case, and regarding the topic that now has people's panties in a bunch, claims:<br /><blockquote><p>A final note, there has been a lot said about the absurd notion that the MBA thinks it is representing "all bloggers" or that the AP is "negotiating" with the MBA. Ridiculous. We were approached for help by Rogers Cadenhead and, as we have done hundreds of times over the past four years, responded by offering him pro bono legal counsel and to set up a direct dialog with the plaintiff to see if the dialog could resolve the problem. We represent A BLOGGER and achieving an outcome acceptable to that blogger is our goal. Any discussion about how AP could better communicate its view of what is and is not acceptable is important and useful but secondary to the primary issue of getting to resolution for the blogger we agreed to help.</p><p>In looking back as to how that notion got out there, I see <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/business/media/16ap.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1213812183-/EIZv29k/zGS39zomyZ4hw">The New York Times article</a> which ran over the weekend. While the article was factually correct it mischaracterized what was going on in a way that caused a great deal of misunderstanding.</p><p>So, let me try to address that too. In wrapping up my call with Jim Kennedy I expressed my view that it seemed incumbent on the AP to offer bloggers a better understanding of what the AP did find acceptable, to offer some sort of guidance which might help bloggers operate in a way less likely to draw the attention of the legal department and thereby reduce the number of legal threats made against bloggers. Such a discussion is entirely in keeping with our mission as an organization. Looking back on it now it may seem incredible but I told him that if he was willing to come up with some sort of guidelines, the MBA would help promulgate them as much as possible. The concern being that no one would know the outcome of such discussions and so any guidelines they came up with would be a tree falling in the forest. Jim knew the MBA could help with such things because our members include quite a few widely read bloggers who would most likely have been willing to consider putting up a post about it if they were asked. Apparently Jim told The New York Times the he was going to meet with me per our conversation but the way that came out was that the sole purpose of the meeting was to negotiate guidelines for bloggers. That take on the conversation was then twisted into the absurd notion that that MBA was going to meet with the AP for some sort of binding arbitration to negotiate terms on behalf of all bloggers. Even after I picked up the phone and explained the actual purpose of the meeting - to sort out what to do about the outstanding DMCA Take Down Notices - some bloggers just continued to run with this absurd story in order to advance an agenda that I can assure you has nothing to do with resolving the case at hand.</p></blockquote><br />Um, here's AP's own story on the issue, which I linked to at the top of this post:<br /><blockquote><p>NEW YORK (AP) -- The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers' group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.</p><p>Jim Kennedy, the AP's director of strategic planning, said Monday that he planned to meet Thursday with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, as part of an effort to create standards for online use of AP stories by bloggers that would protect AP content without discouraging bloggers from legitimately quoting from it.</p></blockquote><br />Here's some advice for Cox: The best way to avoid the appearance of a "negotiation" would be to not "meet" with them at all. Having any say in what the guidelines are makes it look like a "negotiation". The New York Times has nothing to do with it. In certain circles at least, that WILL get equated with "negotiation" even if whoever is making the judgment makes it based on this fairly neutral AP story. Considering most bloggers hadn't heard of your organization before now, it's not likely you would have had much effect "promulgating them as much as possible". There is no such thing as a centrally controlled blog that every other blogger reads; blogs are the most decentralized concept on the Internet. The best way for the AP to distribute its guidelines would have been to <em>post them on its web site and include them on its articles wherever they are legally distributed</em>.<br /><br />Another reason why "bloggers continue to run with this absurd story"? They would actually prefer a "negotiation" to the AP unilaterally determining its guidelines! It seems obvious that Cox is out of touch with a blogging community that, by and large, sits far to the left of his own positions. (Cox also runs <a href="http://www.olbermannwatch.com/">Olbermann Watch</a>, a site criticizing MSNBC host Keith Olbermann.) Here's Gawker on the MBA working with the AP in 2007 on coverage of the Scooter Libby trial:<br /><blockquote><p>In return, Cox <a href="http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/02/digging_deeperap_warms_up_to_b.html">promised to keep bloggers in line!</a> “This is not the time to write a post titled ‘Dick Cheney is a [expletive deleted].’ We sought to address [the AP’s concerns] by saying we have a vetted membership of bloggers who’ve agreed to ascribe to certain ideals of what they’re trying to do. [The AP] has the kind of accountability that they want. I’m not going to control what the blogger writes, but if they get way out of line and embarrass the AP, they can be pulled from the feed.”</p><p>Goddammit Cox this is the time to write a post titled "Dick Cheney is a [expletive deleted]." If we can't do that, then what is the point of blogging?</p></blockquote><br />The blog community is far more anarchic and opinionated than Cox gives it (or himself - another Gawker commenter writes, "Cox is the guy who a few years ago tried to make his point about the New York Times "correction" policy by creating parody websites of their correction page and then was threatened with a lawsuit by the Times and then I forget what happened") credit for, and like capitalism, blogging works best when it's given free rein. It's a free market of opinions out there, and Cox and the AP shouldn't be trying to censor people who don't agree with his own right-wing views.<br /><br />Now on the other hand, if swearing is Cox's only concern, I have little problem with that and wouldn't help but wonder if Gawker is overreacting. Similarly, I'm not sure what the big deal is here either, unless the AP ends up restricting quoting so much it's ridiculous, which some bloggers fear. The AP should be able to present common sense guidelines most people will follow anyway. Cox claims this started because Cadenhead posted several entries that quoted AP stories in full, which seems ridiculous; you may as well just post a link in that case.<br /><br />But the <a href="http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/3368/ap-files-7-dmca-takedowns-against-drudge">posts in dispute now</a>, if they violated any rules, could breach the spirit of fair use and limit bloggers' ability to take certain parts of a story and perform analysis on them. And what the AP seemed to want in its first communique with Cadenhead is REALLY disturbing:<br /><blockquote>... you purport that the Drudge Retort's users reproduce and display AP headlines and leads under a fair use defense. Please note that contrary to your assertion, AP considers that the Drudge Retort users' use of AP content does not fall within the parameters of fair use. The use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few sentences only. This is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of "fair use." AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes "hot news" misappropriation.</blockquote><br />WTF? I don't even understand what this is supposed to mean, and the consequences for any interpretation are disturbing. And I don't understand why AP would even have a problem. Is not quoting the headline and lede of a story common practice even outside the world of blogs? Would not the AP want traffic to its member sites? Is the problem that the AP thinks that taking the headline and lede takes it out of context? Does the AP want MORE than this, or LESS than this? Or is the AP's problem with the comments associated with each item? I can't assess that since Cadenhead was required to take down the offending posts immediately, but he explains the issue better than I could:<br /><blockquote>I have no desire to be the third member of that club, but sharing links to news stories of interest has become an essential component of how millions of people read and evaluate the news today. When linking to articles, bloggers commonly include excerpts of the article for the purposes of criticism or discussion. Some AP member sites encourage this kind of reuse. Yahoo News, the source for two disputed stories, <a href="http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/news/sources/beta-31.html">invites bloggers</a> to use items from its RSS feeds. USA Today, the source for two others, includes a <a href="http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~r/UsatodaycomWashington-TopStories/~3/299766001/2008-05-28-bush_N.htm">browser widget</a> alongside articles that facilitates their submission to Digg, Mixx and other sites. Wade Duchene, the attorney who helped me win the <a href="http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/3119/victory-declared-battle">domain name arbitration for Wargames.Com</a>, says that what we're doing on the Retort is the "absolute definition of fair use."</blockquote><br />Cadenhead, obviously, is on the MBA's side, calling them a "blogger's ACLU" in a later post, which is to be expected since he is taking legal counsel from them. Commenters for Gawker disagree, seeing it as a "just an excuse to sell scared bloggers useless liability insurance." Your mileage may vary, but the ACLU doesn't unilaterally negotiate with some group on what guidelines they will set on searches and seizures that may or may not be broader or narrower than what the Fourth Amendment allows.<br /><br />There's some hysteria going around the Internet that the MBA is a scammy, right-wing organization that is claiming to represent all bloggers so that the AP can institute overly restrictive regulations. It's probably unfair to the MBA, but I'm not sure what to believe here. Is the AP going to lay the smack down by itself and let the MBA just be the messenger, as Cox claims, or are they actively negotiating even though most bloggers had never heard of MBA before now? If they are actively negotiating on rules the AP will expect to apply to all bloggers, sorry, but no matter what else you may claim, the MBA IS claiming to represent all bloggers if only de facto. And if the AP is going to impose its rules unilaterally on all bloggers, and most bloggers find them unacceptable (and if the MBA so much as says "we find this unacceptable" then it IS representing all bloggers in a negotiation, like it or not, and it probably SHOULD be claiming to), they'll <em>wish</em> someone had claimed to represent them and post their objections.<br /><br />If the AP IS "negotiating" with the MBA, they made a bad choice because it's apparent that the MBA needs to do some "negotiating" itself with the group it claims to represent. Certainly the MBA has made some bad PR moves rooted in not understanding most of the blogosphere or even the Web itself, such as making little about their organization available online, or being anywhere near as high-profile as the ACLU, or not taking any new members at such a high-profile time. People naturally fear what they don't know, and after reading about an organization they'd never heard of being treated as some sort of advocacy organization for all bloggers that was going to be the closest thing to an advocate the blogging community had for the adoption of the AP's guidelines, maybe they couldn't be blamed for lashing out. And given what little information is available, they also couldn't be blamed for coming to the conclusion that the MBA is a scam or an old media front group out to suppress those uppity bloggers. I would come to the same conclusion myself if it weren't for one thing: Cadenhead still trusts that the MBA is on his side, and he cites a<em> liberal</em> blogger as having referred him to the organization.<br /><br />I'll wait and see what the AP's ultimate guidelines are, but I hope the blogosphere isn't just trying to protect a mythical right to quote entire articles with maybe one word omitted. Instead of attacking the MBA, perhaps blogs across the Web should post what rights they refuse to have taken away from them, and what rights they think are just reasonable, and bring those posts to the attention of the AP and MBA. In addition to the right to post the headline and lede, I'd also like the right to selectively copy relevant passages from an article and comment on them as I see fit, without obviating any need on the part of a reader to read the article in full.<br /><br /><strong>Verdict:</strong> Let's wait for the AP's guidelines, the blogging community's reaction to them, and the first legal test of the guidelines. But while I'm certainly not ruling out that the MBA is part of an AP Master Plan, I'm willing to give the MBA greater benefit of the doubt than most bloggers, depending in part on the specifics of Cadenhead's involvement with them. It's very possible that the MBA has laudable intentions but not enough credibility to be an effective negotiating force. As strange as it might sound now, the MBA could come out of this episode with a greater understanding of the blogosphere and an actual legitimate role to play where bloggers see them as an organization they can trust as an ally against the distrustful, litigous forces of old media, not distrust as an ally of old media. Or the MBA could come out of it as Public Enemy #1 for bloggers everywhere.<br /><br />P.S. Why "Verdict"? What's with the "truth court" tag? Ah, that would be telling...Morgan Wickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09816659818434590943noreply@blogger.com0