Tag Archives: blogging

Blogger axed for knocking White House/YouTube partnership

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If this is the sole reason CNET sacked this tech blogger (link, excerpt, below), it strongly suggests that the tech publisher (as I have seen so many do in the past 15 years) were afraid they’d “lose access.”

Nothing frightens news outlets more than telling a story, however accurate or truthful, or important to regular folks, that will keep them off of Air Force One, or out of the press briefing room, or cost them a potential advertiser.

I once experienced similar intimidation from an editor at a news organization, after I wrote about a Homeland Security spying scheme, and DHS commissioned a hit piece by a trade hack against mine. Fortunately, that editor’s superior showed some backbone, and backed up my reporting.

It comes as a surprise, then, to hear that CNET will no longer carry Soghoian’s blog. While Soghoian’s confrontational style and irreverent approach may have been factors, it appears the decision to drop his blog largely stems from a minor kerfuffle over a headline. A Soghoian post initially titled “White House Ditches YouTube After Privacy Complaints” brought loud denials from the YouTube and the Obama team. The Obama folks belatedly said that their use of non-YouTube video was only an experiment, a possibility that Soghoian mentioned in his article.

via CNET Axes Blogger Who Exposed Whitehouse.gov Privacy Issue | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

That said, EFF also suggests that Soghoian’s strongly worded headline might have been part of a pattern of pushing the wrong buttons over at CNET.

No Picnic: Marketers plan for the future

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Photo: A different kind of picnic in Amsterdam. CC Mark van Woudenberg (http://flickr.com/people/mindcaster-ezzolicious/)

The speeches by leading futurists, celebrities like Sir Richard Branson, the yoga classes with Woody Harrelson: Picnic in Amsterdam is a great big party for the global technorati.

Futurist speaker Adam Greenfield at the conference next month will address the loss of privacy and independent thought caused by ubiquitous computing devices.

In an interview at the Picnic website, Greenfield describes how a mobile device might present you with map, minus a route through a bad neighborhood. In other words, it has already done some of your thinking for you.

Greenfield, a former PSYOP sergeant in the US Army’s Special Operations Command, is now head of design direction at Nokia.

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Blogging kills

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Bloggers’ hearts are giving out under the strain of chasing stuff that’s already been reported.

In other words, geezer journos are playing a game meant for young people.

I turned 41 on April 1. So imagine the pang I felt in my chest when I read that tech blogger Om Malik nearly croaked at the same age last December. (Malik’s WordPress avatar has him chomping on a cigar. I am a former cigar and pipe smoker myself.)

And just yesterday, I ran into a friend, a veteran newspaper editor, who sees–somewhat perversely–an “opening” for himself as a blogger.

Here’s what my friend said: Young journalists are not interested in blogging. They are after the trends. They want to write the “big picture” stories. That’s where he steps in (hand to heart, staggering, with a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue.) He can break stories as a blogger!

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop – New York Times
Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.