Bion, Frogs And Twitter

Glad you showed up today MS.
I really thought your H1N1 story was excellent.

The kind of story that magazines do best. In depth reporting.

Michael Scherer:
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which is likely to be good news for the reporting industry
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It's fantastic news for the reporting industry, absolutely.
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It means that nobody in the conservative blogosphere (or anywhere else, for that matter) will be linking to any pieces holed up in Murdoch's new online prison yard, so he'll get no traffic, and be unable to get anything approaching the best rates for online advertising.
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Plus, people won't be as likely to confuse the appearance of News Corps' "reporting" with real reportage, since nobody will be allowed to talk about it online.
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I'm assuming that (once Twitter's back up again) ol' Rupe will have his crack legions of attorneys combing the Tweet-o-sphere for links to "stories and photographs being copied elsewhere". I can't wait until nobody ever quotes copy from a News Corp piece ever again, lest they give all of those newly retained lawyers an opportunity to earn the princely pay involved in "..asserting our copyright at every point", as Murdoch puts it.
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Bravo, Rupert Murdoch and News Corp for such amazing, innovative, reality-embracing brilliance! Sue the public! It always works!
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I wonder how much he's paying legions of top technologists to invent schemes to embed DRM into the WSJ Online's copy as we speak? That's sure to be a success!

Clearly an attack from the Twitter-hating White House...

http://www.political-buzz.com/

Scherer: great job on the golf story, excellent journalism, the type we expect from Time. But, wouldn't it be more exciting to be a a sycophantic "reporter" for him? Who knows, you might get a ride in a submarine!
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In other news, Alex Koppelman lied.

He said News Corp would avoid a migration of readers to free sites by "making our content better and differentiated from other people

He's no doubt refering to the likely the inclusion of the 'page 3 girl' feature..

He always was the innovator.....

@MS: On a related note, read this, which is likely to be good news for the reporting industry...

Really? You'll find that opinions vary on that point:

Newspapers have had 15 years since the launch of the internet browser to reimagine and rebuild themselves for the reality of the post-Gutenberg age. But they didn't. Now they are trying to reclaim old business models for a new media economy — a link economy, I call it, in which links give content value. Cut yourself off from links, behind pay walls, and you cut yourself off from the internet and its real value.

It will be interesting to see if Murdoch (and Newsweek, for that matter) can succeed where the NY Times and Salon could not.

Hackers are terrorists.

"I Heard It Through The Grapevine" : Marvin Gaye.

"I Heard It Through The Carbine" : His dad.

Michael, I do buy TIME regularly (if not every issue) at Kroger but I'll subscribe IF your issues come with hot pics / spreads of the fellow bloggers - even if this hurts my dentist (no reason to read the issues there if I have my own subscription). After all, as pointed out here before, some people read mags mostly for pics. More of your recent posts have had a good poetic beat to them (no iambic pentameter, alas). Write a book of poetry please. I'll buy an autographed copy. And make KT write her book too. Also.

Rupe's missing a bet here. I'd pay a decent sum if I never again had to see any of the crap from his conglomerate.

"The boys throw rocks at frogs in jest, but the frogs they die in earnest."

In the meantime, the two stories I wrote this week for the newsstand copy of TIME, one about President Obama's golf game, and one about the White House preparations for a widely expected outbreak of H1N1 flu this fall, are now online, two frogs as yet unstoned.

Oh man. That really got to me, Scherer. I've been thoughtlessly cruel, haven't I?

Not to be unkind, though, you have a couple of slight factual errors in your golf piece:

George W. Bush played the way his father H.W. did, like a race against time, until the last years in office, when the son banned himself from the game because he didn't want to send the "wrong signal" to the mothers of the Iraq-war dead.

But the facts as related by Agence France Press, which you can factually check with your colleague, Mr. Mark Knollerpedia of CBS News, tells it thus:

(AFP) – May 13, 2008 WASHINGTON (AFP) — US President George W. Bush said in an interview out Tuesday that he quit playing golf in 2003 out of respect for the families of US soldiers killed in the conflict in Iraq, now in its sixth year. "I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," he said in an interview for Yahoo! News and Politico magazine.

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf," he said. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them."

The US president traced his decision to the August 19, 2003 bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad, which killed the world body's top official in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. "I remember when de Mello, who was at the UN, got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life. And I was playing golf -- I think I was in central Texas -- and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, it's just not worth it anymore to do," said Bush.

Bush's last round of golf as president dates back to October 13, 2003, according to meticulous records kept by CBS news. On the day of the bombing two months earlier, he had cut short his golf game at the 12th hole and returned to his ranch in tiny Crawford, Texas.

Not exactly a stoning, I hope.
And I'm sure HE remembered it that way.

Source: Bush: I quit golf over Iraq war.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/technology/internet/08twitter.html?_r=1&hp