- Cashew – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Behold: The revision that caused Das Megabyte to be banned from Wikipedia. (4th graf in the "Uses" section.)
- Richard Dreyfuss Slams “W” Movie, Calls Oliver Stone A Fascist (VIDEO) – owch.
- Topless Robot – MTV’s Splashpage Must Be Stopped – I love it when people who have little to no experience in journalism see fit to give advice on “real journalism.” Case in point: the editor of a site where the primary export is pandering, link-baiting Top 10 lists and snarky/sarcastic repetitions of the same 5-10 recycled topics. Yes, we get it — you’re snarky and you like 1980s toys and nostalgic geekery. You and 95% of the rest of the Internet, man. I’m supposed to take advice about “real journalism” from the site that brought readers “The 10 Star Wars Toys that Unintentionally Look Like Other Celebrities”? Really?
It seems to work well for them, though, so I usually don’t mind what passes for editorial content there. Heck, I even link to it here on my personal website now and then, and until this post, considered the editor a professional pal of sorts. To be honest, it’s hard not to take this one personally for that very reason — even with the backhanded qualification he offers up to Casey and I. It’s like telling someone, “You’re horrible at what you do,” and thinking it makes everything okay by adding, “but I’m sure you work hard.”
Sure, some of the articles on TR are quite clever, but it doesn’t take an editor’s eye to see that the author of this post is hardly qualified to define “journalism.” (This is me, offering to buy you an AP Stylebook and a dictionary, man — you know how to get in touch.) Every time he mentions the word “journalism,” I keep hearing Mandy Patinkin’s voice saying, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
The thing is, I’m not claiming to know everything about journalism myself (and no one should ever make that claim, for that matter) — I’m just saying that Topless Robot is the last place I’d go to learn anything about it. - Join the ‘Resistance’ – USATODAY.com – USA Today is giving out Beta codes for Resistance 2… I want!
- Top 10 controversial games | NEWS.com.au – Actually, a pretty decent list… I'm hard-pressed to think of any titles the list leaves out.
- The Comics Reporter: Another Veteran Staffer Leaves Wizard? – I enjoyed the heck out of working w/ Steve Blackwell. He was one of the only people who had been employed there for that long of a time and who actually lived up to what one hopes one's coworkers will be like at a place like Wizard. You want to have coworkers like Steve anywhere you work, believe me.
- Does Georgia’s celebration still sting? | Gainesville.com – THIS WEEKEND, THE REMATCH: "Moments after wasting LSU by 14 points on the Tigers' home field, the joyous Bulldogs stormed one of the end zones and celebrated with a lot of jumping and stomping on the turf.
The Gators, of course, have seen this from the 'Dogs before – a year ago in Jacksonville, as a matter of fact, when the entire Georgia team swarmed the field and celebrated in the end zone following UGA's first touchdown in the first quarter.
It was a controversial moment, one that has continued to have life over these many long months."
links for Monday, October 27th – Tuesday, October 28th
October 28th, 2008 by Rick · 4 Comments ·
Tags: links
4 responses so far ↓
1 Poe Ghostal // Oct 29, 2008 at 9:58 am
To be fair, Rick doesn’t use the word “journalism” once in the article, and he certainly doesn’t seem to be trying to “define” it beyond “information that isn’t deliberately misleading.”
I understand why you were offended by Rick’s post, but your rebuttal doesn’t make as much sense to me.
2 Poe Ghostal // Oct 29, 2008 at 10:00 am
Sorry, I meant Rob, not Rick ;) His last name trips me up sometimes.
3 RM // Oct 29, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Point given/taken, Poe. However, I think Rob’s assumption that the headline was deliberately misleading was unfounded. Much like Topless Robot does with its own headlines, we had some fun with the topic of the post with the understanding that most reasonable people would realize that the actress doesn’t actually want to play a “zombie catwoman” in the Batman sequel. The fact that it was Topless Robot, known for their snarky headlines, who was criticizing this post… Well, that seemed pretty ridiculous.
It’s a bit frustrating to see so many outlets play the “bad journalism” card so easily at a time when the ‘Net has made “journalism” such a fluid term. Questioning our ability to judge a post’s newsworthiness (as Rob did in the first graf) fell right into that category. I probably wouldn’t have batted an eye at the post had he not called out the site’s staff in the way he did.
You don’t think it’s a story? Post that on your site and open your echo chamber — that’s fine by me. Discussion is a good thing, after all. But when you call out the people on the site as being bad judges of news, writers of headlines and, essentially, trying to mislead readers? That’s a different matter entirely.
4 RM // Oct 30, 2008 at 8:35 am
Oh, and on a side note, I thought Rob’s post was particularly insulting given that I thought he was a pretty decent guy and considered him a professional colleague prior to that post. I’m not sure why he thought it was acceptable to use his professional website to take jabs at people who he could just as easily have emailed or, heck, instant messaged.
As I mentioned before, if he was simply criticizing the headline, that would’ve been one thing, but when he decided to use his professional website to lob criticisms at Casey and I about our editorial judgment, that seemed horribly unprofessional and, as far as I and many people who’ve contacted me about this post seem to think, it really came out of nowhere.
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