Who is What

Joe Klein:
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Thank you so very much for responding to commentary; it is greatly appreciated, and serves to clarify for news users your thoughts and intentions.

Does it count when Joe Klein wins his own thread? Or is that not kosher?

Hilarious. Thanks for the reply.
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Had no idea Feith "lights the menorah," as Adam Sandler would put it. If only I had more Nixon's keen instincts about this kind of thing...

Joe Klein:
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Here is a good interview with Business Week's Shirley Brady on (amongst other things) the value of journalist/commentariat interaction http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2009/10/businessweeks-shirley-brady-on-online-communities-and-crowdsourcing/ :

I'm constantly interacting with my colleagues to parlay reader feedback and suggestions to editorial. Part of this job involves standing up for the reader and voicing their concerns and desires (enough of them know me by now, and on Twitter, to email or DM me to express their views. My email address is also listed on our featured readers page.
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And another part is almost media literacy – involving readers in our journalism, opening up our process while inviting and respecting their opinions on a subject. You'll see our reporters on their blogs and on Twitter, for example, posing questions and gauging the sentiment on a story as they're reporting it. They're not only cultivating sources and building their own communities, but getting more informed about each story, and their beats, in the process. We create hashtags, put up daily polls and ask a lot of questions – it all helps inform editorial decision-making in terms of what will resonate with our readership.
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As for other news organizations starting to embrace reader engagement: hear, hear! It's been gratifying to see the New York Times name its first social media editor, Jennifer Preston, earlier this year; and impressive to see the variety and inventiveness of strategies employed by my peers such as Mathew Ingram at the Globe & Mail in Canada, Andrew Nystrom at the Los Angeles Times, or Andy Carvin at NPR, or to see what the Wall Street Journal is doing with Journal Community and the NYT with TimesPeople – all smart media organizations that understand the need to foster their communities in ways that breathe life into their brands, engage people with their content and enhance their mission and value proposition to the reader.
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As for crowdsourcing, as noted above, we actively solicit and value our readers' involvement and “invite them into our newsroom,” as John Byrne puts it, to inform our news decisions and editorial process. But I also believe that excellent journalism (reporting, writing and editing) has to be at the core of what BusinessWeek and other news organizations do, even as we open our doors to our readers. We're building community around our content, injecting readers into the mix, and shaking up any old notions (if they ever existed) that journalists have the market cornered on analysis and reporting – the Internet put paid to that idea, gladly.

Perhaps you can use this interview when trying to explain to your more antediluvian-oriented colleagues (as you attempted to rather comic effect during a Matthews show weeks ago) how the journalist/commentary dynamic informs new iterations of your profession --especially crowd-sourced fact-checking processes.

Because Pangaea existed approximately 250 million years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea

and homo sapiens (us) didn't arrive on the scene until about 200,000 years ago, give or take a thousand years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human

But in the end, we're all just a bunch of apes.

I'm surprised that you are unaware of the correct timelines in this case, neorationalist86, but it will be much better when you have this knowledge.

The "out-of-Africa" theory is simply such, a theory. It may have merit. Maybe not. The "multi-regional hypothesis," similarly, could be true. Such is the nature of dating sciences, they are far from concrete. With that said, let's say that hominds did, in fact, rise from Africa. This is not the same Africa that we know today. Human's have adapted and changed over time. There exist such great regional differences. Take a Korean, for example, next to a Namibian, next to a Scandinavian. Therefore, to say "we're all Africans," which of course has contemporary connotations, is simply a mischaracterization. There is truly no way of knowing what precisely an early hominid looked like. "We're all Africans" really is a rudimentary way of saying that we all stem from the same line, at some point in time, even though that line has been so deluded, so delineated, so vastly muddled, that to seek to paint a caricature of likeness is an egregious falsehood that denies current separateness, from culture, language, looks, down to the very core of our DNA. We are different. Embrace the difference. Cherish your tribe, among tribes.

Rustydog:
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You make some decent points, but it would be better if you acknowledged and went about denouncing and rejecting the Southern Strategy/Christianist wing of the Republican Party, much the way that Barack Obama (upon the prompting of Hillary Clinton) genially --but explicitly-- denounced and rejected the Nation of Islam.

Oh man. JC-san, if you honestly did this, I would seriously fly all the way to J-town just to buy you a few bottles of sake or whatever I could sneak into the country in my suitcases (tequila?). BTW when do we get to say omedeto to you and your other half?