Beyond Blogging: How Twitter is Changing Journalism
Last week, I spoke at the National Lesbian & Gay Journalist's Convention, along with Shana Naomi Krochmal in a workshop on using Twitter in journalism. It was a fun and exciting overview of the techniques freelance and staff reporters can use to make Twitter work for them-- as well as the occasional Matthew Mitcham photo thrown in for dramatic effect.
I think it went pretty well and we've ben asked to do the workshop in L.A. in the near future. If you have any comments or further thoughts on twitter and journalism, or how "social media" is affecting reporting, let me know. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter here.
David Lynch, rejecting the revolution. I think he's right, by the way. Why waste your time watching something designed to be seen on the big screen on a tiny phone? What he misses is that you don't blame the medium. Just as filmmakers decried TV before shows like Soprano's and Six Feet Under and Lost found what's artful about the medium, so it goes with mobile media. Porting Mullholland Drive to your iPhone is a waste, but there's a great artful phone film out there-- it just hasn't been made.
New mediums are everywhere these days. They call for new ways of conceiving and telling stories. Get real.
I suck at video games. The only shoot em' up I was ever any good at was Mega Man 3 and maybe, Time Bandits at the video arcade. But, I love Will Wright and Maxis games. The appeal of games like Civilization and The Sims is that they engage your imagination in the same way reading a book does. In Civ, I would imagine my Babylonians, who had lived in isolation on an island continent for a thousand years, responding to the arrival of the first English explorer by saying "Well, they're going to have to go" and then waging a war of extinction to serve as an example to the rest of the world. In The Sims, I would create characters inspired by my friends that would all hit on our neighbors, The Goths.
Now, Maxis and Will Wright are releasing the ultimate "god game", called Spore. Coming in September, the game is actually five-in-one. You start with single cell organisms and wind-up as a spacefaring terraforming super society. In anticipation, Maxis has released a free demo of the Spore character creator. It's a fascinating system that allows you to create a huge diversity of creatures, but simply and intuitively. The character creator is just the beginning and the creatures you create will wind up in the final game, as Maxis plans on seeding planets with user-created animals. In the meantime, the software allows you to upload your animal and even directly create a YouTube video of the lil' critters.
Check out my first attempt at creating life in the video above. I've named it the Japhex. It's highly predatory, but also charming. Also, it has a thing for hip-hop.
My goal this week is to "take chances" as those of you following my Twitter account already know. Here are some great ideas worth looking at and thinking about to get you thinking about what kind of chances you might take this week.
My favorite chef, Mark Bittman talks about "What's Wrong with What We Eat" via TEDTalks. Thanks to Corey for pointing this out. If you like this, I recommend checking out Bittman's Minimalist column in the NYTimes. Us foodies read a lot of recipes, but these are ones I find myself actually cooking. He also has his own blog, Bitten.
Cut down on the Ron Popiel automated iced chai latte makers and specialized glass cleaners (one for tinted, one for clear!) by embracing Urawaza, the Japanese habit of utilitarian thriftiness. Clean socks with marbles, Thanks to Nick, for this one.
Spanish designer Agustin Otegui is rocking my world right now. From creating a nano skin of mini wind turbines that could clad a building and generate power to a chair made out of two shovels, he's finding elegant solutions to complex problems. I found this one all on my own.
And finally, if you want to really blow your brain, listen to Susan Blackmore talk about one of my favorite topics: memes.
Are any of you keeping up with the YouTube experiment Rivers Cuomo of Weezer is doing? Back in March or so, Rivers called on YouTube viewers to come up with a song title (originally "80s Radio") and then led them through the process, inviting would be rockstars to offer up chord structures, lyrics, bridges and adjustments. The result isn't so much music by committee as it is, "Rivers picks what he likes and you all go with it", which means the result, now called "We're Turning Up the Radio" doesn't totally suck. In fact, it's sort of rad.
But what's more rad is the sort of master class/ throw the baby bird from the nest aesthetic the experiment's taken on. Hundreds of people each week audition their ideas before Prof. Cuomo through YouTube videos, which people then comment on themselves. It's sort of Darwinian, with each new generation of the song spawningmutants. But it's all collaborative in the best sense of the word; that the song sounds sort of like a Weezer song isn't much of a surprise, but it has no one author who can claim credit. Cuomo actually makes a great, if eccentric teacher. He's unafraid to say when something doesn't work and quick to praise when it does. This is the kind of stuff that makes the Internet such a cool place to live in.
Shortly, Rivers promises to "offer the song up to the lions", whatever that means. Stay tuned.
Asked for a reason he actually opposes gay marriage, anti-gay marriage lawyer Dan Schweitzer flounders before Bill O'Reilly, comparing gay and straight relationships as being as different as winter and summer. Bill-O, after trying to give the guy as many opportunities to come up with a reason as possible concedes that all the justifications are lame and bigoted. I know this has been up for a bit, but if you haven't seen it, you should.
Weezer Gives Chris Crocker an Extra 15 Seconds of Fame
Which should be enough for me to dismiss them forever, but c'mon! It's Weezer. It's the You Tube-eriffic "Pork & Beans", the first single from the Red album, out June 3rd. I hope Rivers deloused after giving Crocker a hug. That kid doesn't need a hug. He needs a nice long stay in a sanitarium. Think I'm being mean? Here's what the kid's been up to lately.
Your editor says, "Hey, here's all the downloadable music from SXSW. Write a review. By the way, that's 48 hours of music. Have fun!" What do you do? Well, if you're Paul Ford, you make each review just six words long. Check out Ford's minimalist music reviews here. They work brilliantly. For Seeing Things' "Eat Skull": "But I'm not hungry for skull" and People Person's "Pissed Jeans": "Claims adjusters secret noise side-project." Ford also keeps his Twitters to only six-words each.
Any writer worth their salt will tell you it's far easier to write more than less. The game is to score the biggest punch in the fewest words. Though, Proust's In Search of Lost Time sort of proves me wrong; reduce it to six words-- A Madeline! Holy shit, I remember" and you lose-- something.
While I'm not wholly convinced that the Facebook glitch everyone's talking about lists the people who view your profile the most, anecdotal evidence indicates it definitely indicates something. Unfortunately, those douchebags at Facebook have shut the feature off, so if you didn't grab em', they're probably gone. Here are my top stalkers:
An ex I'm still friends with.
This guy I know is totally into me, but hasn't gotten around to saying so.
My hiking partner.
The guy who introduced me to my ex (not #1).
A network TV producer.
UPDATE: This commenter on All Facebook seems to have the most plausible sounding explanation: "I've got a friend that works at the Facebook HQ in Palo Alto. She says it turns out it actually was a coding error on the part of facebook. It was meant to call up the 5 most searched names, but it pointed to the wrong place on the FB servers and called up the 5 people that search for you most. Since its not common knowledge that FB keeps this info outside of your profile, the PR team had to do a little clean up work."
Imagine for the moment that instead of being a bloviating, gossip and porn-filled time sink, the Internet were a giant game with teams creating and re-appropriating content and services to find new and novel ways with connecting with strangers and you'll get an idea of what ZeFrank's latest venture, Colorwars 2008 is all about.
I've been trying to figure out how to explain Colorwars for a week or so now. Users sign up by following "teams" on Twitter and then engage in various contests. Games so far have included a virtual game of rock, paper, scissors, bingo and a nerd rap. Upcoming challenges include a Gogle Earth scavneger hunt and smack talk haikus. And there are prizes; Jet Blue gave out free tickets in a recent contest. But the point of the game, already a darling of Web 2.0 types is to get people to play with each other and instead of developing elaborate new tech to do it, use exisiting tools like Twitter and GarageBand.
That's the wonky explanation I've been trying to avoid. So let me just walk you through it.
Then I started playing games. For instance, there's a game called YoungMeNowMe where you take a picture of yourself when you were young and restage it. Here's my entry.
Another game invites you to design your own merit badge, which as an Eagle Scout, I couldn't pass up. Presenting the Irony Merit Badge:
And finally, one of the contests going on right now is to create remixes of the Nerd Raps. I was aiming for a Gnarls Barkley-sound (that's me doing an embarrassing falsetto), but sort of wound up with Moby. Someday I'll graduate to Cee-Lo. Click on the photo below to listen:
Not all of the contests are this involved, but while I love that my work requires me to use my creativity, it's a lot of fun just play around and goof off now and then. At the same time, I'm connecting to other like-minded people and seeing how they respond to the challenges. The YoungMeNowMe photos, for instance, are amazing.
Colorwars is ongoing and you can join with no commitment. If this sounds super-rad (it is!) I would love for you to join Team IKB, but you can join any team here. All you need is a Twitter account (which you should have anyway--it's this month's Facebook).
Here's some of what I've been working on this week:
An interview with Arthur Dong, director of Hollywood Chinese, a fantastic documentary about the Chinese-American experience in Tinseltown. I could have talked to Arthur for hours-- a really funny, fascinating and thoughtful guy. (The Advocate)
A QnA with photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Sort of got me thinking about how the media's job is to define and label things (this is a trend, it is about these kinds of people, it fits into this category) and fine artists are all about introducing ambiguity and challenging the nature of the boxes we stuff things into. Not that any of that shows up in the piece. (Popnography)
The 400 pound gorilla this week is my big feature story on "The Boys of Buzznet", Jeffree Star, Clint Catalyst and Matthew Lush. I'll probably write another blog soley about the backstory to this piece. For the moment, I'll just say I'm pretty proud of it and really thankful for my editor, Shana. (Out.com)
Ryan Adams has a blog. It's called "Foggy". He started the blog, it turns out, because he's very lonely now that everyone he's ever loved has rejected him. But he's okay with it. "I hope I die alone and under a lot of work" he writes, adding "I am better for myself and other alone." Other tidbits include the fact he never dated Alanis or Winona, that he's pretty sure he's going deaf and that he's been two years sober. As far as awkward self-confessional blogs, it's pretty good.
Unfortunately for us, blogging only made Ryan's loneliness more acute and yesterday, he decided to say goodbye to Foggy, and to us in the video message above, about how miserable he is, how he can never be loved, set to slow piano and intercut with barren trees in Rockefeller Center. Now, I love Ryan Adams' music. I love that he's pretty fucking sure he's the best rock star on Earth and I myself have been known to engage in some maudlin public self-excoriation from time to to time. But Ryan Adams really needs to learn the power of chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.
More Points if You Cry Alot and a Few More if You Cut Yourself
Okay, cutting your wrists is stupid, but blaming some cultural movement for it is stupider. See: Punk rock, Kurt Cobain, hippies, flappers, The Sorrows of Young Werther. On a related note, I'm totally fascinated with the way teens now identify themselves by musical demographics-- emo scene, punks, rockers, etc... It's like The Warriors as played out on MySpace.
A fantastic video of a panel discussion on Britney, but especially on the difference between the regular media and bloggers. Perez haters will enjoy this, the rest of you will find it interesting. I love that the NYU School of Journalism is having serious conversations about the journalistic ethics of the paparazzi and the "parasites" who "steal" stories. The interesting thing for me as someone with a foot in both traditional media and blogging is that a real distinction is made between reporting, which involves gathering, researching and verifying a story and blogging, which is almost exclusively commenting on the work of others.
Like a lot of great things about the publishing world, I was introduced to Gourmet by my old editor and boss, Alex Cho. We liked to talk a lot about what makes a great magazine; how a good mag had to cut both deep and shallow, how it should reflect its audience, but also challenge and engage it, how to be stylish and fresh without sacrificing the illusion of institutional heft. Editing's a pretty misunderstood job (most people mistake it for copy editing), but a good editor is like a conductor who knows that the score is illuminated not just by balance and harmony, but by counterpoint and dissonance. Alex stood by my door holding a copy of Gourmet in his hands and declared, "This is what a magazine should be."
Being a food lover and half-decent chef, I've been reading it ever since, but it's as an editor that I get my deepest satisfaction from its pages. It's everything you want from a magazine; the editorial photoshoots make a rack of lamb look more comely than any centerfold model could aspire to. The thematic unity of each issue; for instance, this month is focused on French Bistro cooking is thrilling because it's not slavishly devoted to the topic. For instance, the main feature is about what you'd expect: coq au vin, profiteroles and steak frittes, but you would never anticipate Francis Lam's essay on his obsession with creating the perfect omelette or a story about how the people of Perche, France are developing their own terrior of baguette (of all things) as a way to fight off the pressures of globalization. And at the end of each article, there's always recipes, reminding the reader, "Oh yeah, this is a food magazine".
But it's a magazine not about making food, rather it's a magazine about taste. It's menu's take you away to exotic locales. The roasted garlic souffle is presented in a way that's aspirational; the implicit promise is that in preparing it, you will be whisked, on some psychic level, to the fields of Provence. This is what all magazines do; they're aspirational mirrors. People read newspapers for the news, they read magazines to reflect who they are, or wish themselves to be. Ask someone to name three magazines they read and you'll be well on your way to knowing the soul of that person. People who don't read magazines or worse, cite Time as one of the magazines they read, should be disregarded.
But back to Gourmet. It works because its aspirational, but it also offers up 15 minute meals and isn't afraid to tell you to use a frozen bag of fries now and then. It cuts shallow as well as cutting deep. It also has institutional quirks. My favorite magazine quirk is The New Yorker's insistence on diaeresis marks over double vowels, but Gourmet's seems to be a fascination with Calvados, that is apple brandy. It's constantly offering up deserts with whipped cream infused with the stuff and seems devote a paragraph or two every other month to extolling its virtues. It's these sort of little details that turn readers into raving fans. It's subtitle is "The Magazine of Good Living" and it's sort of a joke because you'll never see an article about yachts or fast cars or the fashions of Milan in its pages, just food. Because for Gourmet, what else could good living require?
The New York Times Answers My Question About William F. Buckley
I asked Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The Times Book Review and Week in Review, who is writing a biography on William F. Buckley:
"Who in your -- or perhaps Buckley's estimation should you know it -- carries on his legacy of intellectual conservatism? If you had to nominate someone to ascend to the lectern of Buckley, who would it be?"
4 a.m. EST - Castro Resigns, Miami Herald Asleep at the Wheel
From Nick: "You want to see the mark of a truly horrendous newspaper, go to MiamiHerald.com ASAP. Then go to any other news source. I took a screen shot of the Miami Herald page in case they cared to, by the time you read this, note that Fidel Castro stepped down. This is the news story Miami has been waiting for for decades and their excuse for a newspaper can't even be bothered to update their page."
Also: Holy Fucking Shit on Tacos! Castro's resigned!
Corrections to the L.A. Times: Smells Like Typo Spirit
Nick knows how much I love the L.A. Times' penchant for poor copyediting and sent me this, writing, "The 1990's seem so quaint in hindsight! Check caption."
Everyone's getting in on telling their stories about why they're voting for Barrack Obama at YouBama. The site's owners, two Stanford students unaffiliated with the Obama campaign, describe it as a way "to democratize the election campaign process...voters can say what they want, how they want. Then they vote on the videos so the best ones rise to the top."
And the Award for Best 'Fuck You World' EVER Goes to
16 year old Corey Worthington n'e Delaney of Australia, who threw what sounds like the most freakin' awesome party his Oz upper-middle class tract home development's ever seen. Interviewed on national TV in fur jacket opened up to sunburned nipple-pierced chest, rag doll yellow hair covered with a rainbow-brite-inspired ball cap (I think it's actually a Yankees logo) and his eyes covered by a pair of famous sunglasses, Corey politely declined to engage in the ritual act of public self-flagellation that's expected of the interesting and unique. In short, the dude's a fucking legend.
Sadly, what will happen now is he will do a few shows in Australia, then be flown out to L.A. where he'll show up on a bunch of network shows before E! offers him a deal to produce "Corey Worthington's House Party", which will catch "all the insane action of being fresh and wild down under, hosted by the man with the shades, "Corey Worthington". Paris will guest star. Corey will then start wearing designer versions of his outfits, get really shit-faced at Area all the time before winding up at 22, a drug addict with a low-rent clothing label that retails at stores in WeHo and Chelsea.
But before his famous sunglasses stab out his eyes and devour his soul, Oedipus-style, let's take a moment and give Corey his due. He's awesome, he's stylish and for the moment, doesn't give a flying fuck what you think.
Yeah, I know you thought I abandoned this, but you were wrong. To close out the year (and to give you folks something to read while I finish up scripts), tMR is listing the "Top 20 Trends of 2007". But I need your help putting them in order. This'll be done with a cool poll you can vote on. And there will be prizes. I'm serious. If you have a suggestion for a trend, email me.
2007: A Ten Letter Word for Facebook
Sure, Facebook's awesome -- it's 99.9% less ugly than MySpace, you're not bombarded by girls in bikinis offering you Macy's discount cards and it's not, as of yet, owned by Rupert Murdoch. But as cool as that newsfeed is and as much as we love being bitten by vampires, zombies and werewolves, the killer app for Facebook is Scrabulous.
Scrabulous is , as you may have guessed-- a game that resembles the Parker Bros. game Scrabble to a degree that Parker Bros. could sue if it wasn't for the excellent P.R. the online game gives to the real thing. Created by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, two Indian graduate students; Scrabulous has been around for two years at its own site. But it's the Facebook incarnation of the game that's become fantastically addictive, gaining the attention of both The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The brothers run both incarnations as a hobby.
Why? Playing Scrabulous on Facebook is a lot like playing Scrabble in real life-- it takes some degree of concentration, you can chat with the other players and you can make a move in under five minutes, usually. It's the perfect work time distraction: you get your mind off the task at hand, get to socialize, but it's not very committing. Chatting online and browsing the web are popular Internet work distractions, but can easily become time sinks; while you could still waste your time at Scrabulous, the turn-based nature of the game makes it more difficult to do so. At the very least, it's more fun than listening by the water cooler to your co-worker talk about his bender last night; more efficient, too. You can tell your boss I said so.
Still sick (less so, but my throat is scratchy enough to prevent podcasting and I seem to want to nap constantly), but I know how fickle my readers are, so here are some awesome things I've been doing in between my delirium tremens. Like the title says, these things will swallow up your day, not that you were doing all that much to begin with:
Jericho: the complete first season online. All the major networks have video on demand versions of their major shows. It's pretty frikkin' awesome. Brought back from the dead by a major fan drive, apoco-drama Jericho will air seven new episodes sometime soon (depending on the writer's strike), but you can catch-up on the first season online.
Truth be told, the show takes a long time to warm up and the producers seem to miss the fact that the reason we love Jack Bauer is because he's a bad ass, not a guy just looking to fit in at the bake sale, but once the town next door goes all Lebensraum on Jericho and we see that the army's wearing a new version of the stars and bars, the show goes nuts.
My proposal is for something I call Riverside Park-- using the footprint of San Francisco's Candlestick Park in the railroad area north of Cesar Chavez Boulevard. It's extremely close to Union Station, could be connected by a "game day shuttle" and once you moved the L.A. County jail out of the area, you could infill the project with mixed-use retail and hi-rise condos. It could then be the third anchor for downtown, continuing the sweep from L.A. Live through Grand Avenue, as well as a catalyst for L.A. River development. What's great, though is that this map gets you thinking about these things.
Also, while I despised the 30-second "lightning round" imposed on candidates at last nights Democratic Debate, the guy on fire (and by my estimation, the most straightforward and Presidential) was Joe Biden. Check it out:
Avast, I'm lost in a miasma of internet confusion! Yesterday, I had my first internet crazy show up on the site and had to spend the time I was planning for podcasting, installing security software onto the site. Arrrr.
We're truly living in a golden age, matey's. What with coolness being directly proportional to the scarcity and difficulty of accessibility of a group to the "mainstream", smart is the new cool. You heard it 'ere first, landlubbers.
Thusly, Challenge #1 is this: In the comments, link to something that is not stupid. The goal is to convince Oscar to take off those fishnets, go on The View and punch Sherri Shepard in the face. Or mainly, to cheer me up. The best one ("best" here being a subjective measure of me not wanting to walk the plank) gets a prize and the title "First Mate". Savey?
Hurray for having something newsworthy to video blog about. My take on Kenneth in the 212's decision to post naked photos of Thomas Roberts. There was a rumor going around at the NLGJA Conference that he had these photos and was planning on releasing them. Why?
Sorry for the long delay in posting. As you might know, I spent the last few days in San Diego at the National Gay & Lesbian Journalists' Association National Convention. I met Logo's Jason Bellini, and we got into a whole discussion about blogging and video blogging, especially, which inspired this, my first video podcast. It only took about 3x the amount of time I hoped it would.
In today's podcast, I cover the first day of the conference, which is the LGBT Media Summit, focusing specifically on gay media.
I keep meaning to mention this: I have an interview with Dan Kurtz of Dragonette in the current issue ofInstinct. It's probably one of my favorite interviews. It doesn't hurt that they're a fucking awesome band.
If you're in San Diego next week, I'll be speaking on a panel at the National Gay & Lesbian Journalist's Association (NLJGA) Conference. The panel is called "Surfing Tips: Avoiding Online Riptides" and is about the whole "Is blogging journalism?" debate with forays into what sort of standards traditional media should set for freelancers, etc... It's moderated by none other than Nietzschean superman Ben Patrick Johnson. It's on Thursday at 10:15 a.m. My plan is to blog while doing he panel, because you gotta have a gimmick. I'll be covering the conference throughout next week.
Very sneaky article by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times about robots called The Real Transformers. I'm a big robot dork, so it was great to read about the sociable robot revolution. I knew about Kismet, but knew nothing of Mertz, Leo and Domo, a robot who is basically all arms and was my favorite. There are YouTube clips throughout the article and watching Domo slowly stick a bottle of whiskey into a Styrofoam cup all on his own (see above) is thrilling because the movement is fluid and yet so dumb.
The article is sneaky because while it does an excellent job of catching the casual reader up on current trends in robotics, it's really a feint to get into a deeper discussion about human emotions and consciousness. Read the article for yourself. It argues that current robot development, which has by and large abandoned the idea of creating a "thinking brain" A.I. in favor of creating robots which express human-like behaviors, is so successful because in reality, that's what humans do. Fake it till you make it, baby. 'It', here means "a soul".
There's a trend right now in philosophy to take a mechanistic and adaptive view of human intelligence. Oh, that sounds boring. Okay- so scientists nowadays are pretty certain that there is no "you". Daniel Dennett leads the pack on this- arguing in Freedom Evolves(probably the world's only page-turner about free will) that rather than the old-fashioned notion of a solid cohesive "self", the reality is that the thing you look at in the mirror every morning is made up of millions of little programs, behaviors, learned reactions, embedded flight or fight instincts, etc...
This ad hoc homminem theory doesn't deny the complexity of human experience, but it does reject that the human consciousness is one blended smoothie of self-awareness. There is no sum to our parts. Our perception of self is powered by the same ability we have to see animals in clouds and it's just as illusory.
It's taken me a long time to come to agree with this. The whole of Western culture is built on the nobility of the human soul. Not to mention, I can be pretty egotistical. There's something downright inhuman about stripping away the soul, to admit that our emotions aren't coming from some Apollonian well of spirit, but rather from millenia of trial and error by our ancestors (well, the ones who managed to breed). If you believe in evolution at all, however-- you can't hide from it. Art, poetry, music, greed, betrayal, kindness and imagination all resulted from the same process that gave us the opposable thumb.
There are all sorts of interesting questions posed by this world view. For one, if the Rube Goldberg contraption we call consciousness really does result from the same adaptive processes of evolution, then how does our own altering of the environment effect that? For instance, the Internet and the digital age in general has changed the way we communicate and has reshaped our social environments dramatically. As we adapt to these new technologies, are we reshaping our intelligence, reasoning and behavior? That is, are we reprogramming our brains? Are we changing the definition of human?
I, for one, take a bit of peace from the idea that I'm soulless. My failings are not the result of corruption, but faulty adaptation. It doesn't divorce me from being responsible for my actions and behavior, but it does allow me to be more self-aware and hopefully spend less time bemoaning my fate and more time adapting to and changing my environment, and making informed choices about integrating successful strategies and jettisoning those which don't work for the situation at hand.
I don't think (end of statement?) that this is a call to be a self-serving opportunist. It's a call to look around at the world and at yourself and decide (based on you know, all the cognitive resources you've picked up along the way) who you want to be and where you want to be and figuring out how to achieve those aims.
Just how smart is Sen. Clinton? In a first for any presidential candidate, she announced her candidacy on the web today and in her announcement tells us that she wants to start a dialogue with America-- and she's going to start with a series of video chats next week.
Now, political bloggers have a tendency to overstate their power, but they are a real force and Hillary's meeting them on their own turf. Hillary could have announced her candidacy anywhere--picking the 'Net is genius. The "conversation" approach was exactly what she did in her New York race and it worked like gangbusters. Let's see how it does on a large scale--and online.
If you wish to take part in Hillary's webcasts (Jan. 22, 23, 24 4pm PST), sign up here.
From Nick: "You want to see the mark of a truly horrendous newspaper, go to MiamiHerald.com ASAP. Then go to any other news source. I took a screen shot of the Miami Herald page in case they cared to, by the time you read this, note that Fidel Castro stepped down. This is the news story Miami has been waiting for for decades and their excuse for a newspaper can't even be bothered to update their page."
The Feds raid four L.A. area museums as seen on the NYTimes website.
Just how smart is Sen. Clinton? In a first for any presidential candidate, she announced her candidacy on the web today and in her announcement tells us that she wants to start a dialogue with America-- and she's going to start with a series of video chats next week.