PhotoDude.com

Thu. Dec 30, 2004

To The Star Tribune

I have a whole lot to say about the State of Blogs in 2004, and how it is far uglier than the apparent rose covered crown bloggers have placed on their own heads. Then along comes someone in the media to make bloggers look positively saintly.

We all know that every year Time magazine names a “Man of the Year.” Well, this year, they also named a “Blog of the Year.” This apparently got completely under the skin of a few “traditional journalists,” including Nick Coleman of the Star Tribune, who proceeded to write one of the nastiest pieces of work I’ve read in anything that didn’t claim to be a tabloid. Or a blog. It’s been linked all over. But the response the guys at Powerline got from Coleman’s editor is so stunning that I just had to write to the Star Tribune. Here’s that letter:

I wanted to commend you for allowing Nick Coleman to be a blogger. Though he rants about those Powerline bloggers who he claims operate “without oversight, disclosure of conflicts of interest, or professional standards,” it seems clear the oversight and professional standards under which he operates are equally weak, or even non-existent, given the factual inaccuracies and gross assumptions he emits in his blog, er, column. Powerline says “I asked the editor what standards Coleman’s column was subject to at the Star Tribune. He said he didn’t know…“

Pot, kettle, black.

But aside from that, rest assured that the stain on the Star Tribune brand has run all the way south here to Atlanta. You see, your man Coleman has decided to joust with bloggers who, collectively, have daily readership equal to or greater than your approximately 380,000 (there’s one lowly law professor in Tennessee who has almost half your daily readership by himself, and he’s been talking about you).

And you may not care about someone like me hundreds of miles from your location. Which would only give further evidence how out of touch you’ve become with your current professional reality. You can focus on your location, but you are read everywhere. And judged everywhere, too.

When your man Coleman asks “does Powerline or its mighty righty allies take money from political parties, campaigns or well-heeled benefactors who hope to affect Minnesota’s politics from behind the scenes? We don’t know, and they don’t have to say” ... he might just as well have asked “do the authors of Powerline engage in sex with goats? We don’t know, and they don’t have to say.”

If that kind of opinion column meets your journalistic standards, well, welcome to the world of blogging! And in the world of blogging, your man Coleman is what we call a “troll” or “link whore” ... someone who will say anything to get attention and links, even write potentially actionable statements … about lawyers.

He’s doing a helluva job at it, too. Check your site stats. And you might also forewarn your legal staff. They’d appreciate the heads up.

But you really don’t need me to tell you all of this. You already have someone on your staff who could clue you and Nick into this whole Internet thing, how it works, and the damage you’ve done to yourself. He’s very web savvy. He’s one of your columnists, too.

Of course, we’re talking about a newspaper that won’t let you view their news stories or columnists on their web site without an onerous registration process, and it’s nearly pointless to link to their pages, as all content disappears from the site three weeks after publication. The link to Coleman’s column above is a guaranteed 404. No matter what he has to say, in three weeks, it’s vapor.

So I think we can probably toss Coleman onto the existing pile of evidence that this is another newspaper that does not yet understand the web, or how best to benefit from it. But, Geez Louise, will someone at the Star Tribune please light a match, because the latest evidence is stinkin’ up the whole web.