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MediaShift

Your guide to the digital media revolution, with host Mark Glaser.

Econ Bloggers Gain Clout in Financial CrisisOctober 30

Late last month Dean Starkman, a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review, penned a scathing piece titled "Ouryay Eatbay Just Ewblay Upyay." The essay is addressed to members of the mainstream business press and proclaims dramatically in the opening paragraphs that their beat "just blew up." Starkman wags his finger at economic reporters, chastising the business beat as a group for failing to warn us of the coming crisis before the rug was pulled out from under our feet.

"From a journalistic standpoint, what we are experiencing today is the equivalent of the city hall reporter arriving for work one day to find the mayor and city council being led out in handcuffs," he wrote. "If the business press were, say, a nuclear industry reporter, this is having most of the reactors on your beat melting down to China. What to tell the boss?"

As mainstream reporters have struggled to cover the crisis, a group of bloggers focused on the economy has risen to prominence over the last few years, diving in-depth into complex economic issues in a way unseen in the sound-bite-driven mainstream media. In recent months, many of these econ bloggers have seen their web traffic double as people scramble to understand the crisis and how the government, with its monolithic bailout legislation, is going to fix it.

Mark Thoma, an economics professor at the University of Oregon, experienced si

6 Ways Authors Can Succeed by Self-Publishing BooksOctober 25

When blogger Sramana Mitra finished writing her new book, she could have done what a lot of writers do: pitched it to publishers, waited months for a reply, shopped it around, waited some more, gone through rewrite, and waited some more...

But for a book about web technology and online business, she decided to go another route. She decided to self-publish.

"I have partnered with Amazon, and Amazon is paying for all sorts of things," said Mitra, who published her book "Entrepreneur Journeys" through Amazon's BookSurge service. "And, they have the ability to market and merchandise online. They can also easily reach the technology/business/entrepreneurship audience that I am interested in, because they're all online."

Mitra isn't alone. Once dismissed as "vanity publishing," self-publishing is today getting a second look from many aspiring authors as new technology makes it a more viable alternative to traditional publishing.

Traditional self-publishing essentially let you borrow a printing press: If you paid for it, they'd print almost anything. For several reasons, the process left something to be desired on the author's end. First, it usually required an author to bear the costs of an entire print run -- leaving

How 'Follower Spam' Infiltrated Twitter -- and How to Stop ItOctober 23

When using the micro-blogging service Twitter, by default you get email notices whenever anyone signs up to "follow" you (when you follow someone on Twitter, their Twitter posts, or "tweets," display on your main Twitter page, along with Tweets from everyone else you follow). A few weeks back, I noticed that I was getting inundated with new followers with names such as "moneymadman," "getgooglewealth" and "make money online." One of the charms of Twitter is that you only see tweets from the people you follow, therefore making Twitter a safe haven from spam. At least, that's what I thought.

That inundation of new followers gave me insight into the world of "follower spam" on Twitter, which has been a growing problem since last spring for the nascent service. The way it works is that an online marketer sets up a Twitter account and then asks to follow hundreds of people, hoping that some small percentage will follow them and see their commercial messages -- and then click through to buy a product.

While there is nothing illegal about this practice, it gets to be annoying for people who have to sift through their list of followers to see whether those people are spammers not worth following or colleagues they might want to follow. The growth of spam on Twitt

China Blocks Blogs, Search Results on Tainted Milk ScandalOctober 23

The evidence is accumulating. The censorship imposed on the Chinese media about the contaminated milk scandal has had disastrous consequences according to Reporters Without Borders. Last July, a journalist working for the investigative weekly Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekend) gathered reliable information regarding a wave of hospitalizations of new-born babies, with four killed and 53,000 sickened. These illnesses were linked to powered milk made by Chinese dairy company Sanlu. The writer's editor, however, decided not to publish the story for fear of government reprisal. As a result, China had to wait until after the Olympic Games, until early September, before another news outlet dared to publish this explosive news.

Fu Jianfeng, an editor at Southern Weekend posted a damning indictment on his blog after the scandal became public in September:

Actually, our reporter He Feng had received the information at the end of July that more than 20 babies were hospitalized for kidney stones in Tongji Hospital, Wuhan city, Hubei province as a result of consuming the tainted Sanlu milk powder. But for reasons that everybody knows, we were not able to investigate the case at that time because harmony was needed everywhere. As a news editor, I was deeply concerned because I sensed that this was going to be a huge public health catast

How Political Diarists Power RedState, Daily KosOctober 22

In October of last year, a man named Leon H Wolf published a post on the front page of influential conservative blogging community RedState titled, "Attention, Ron Paul Supporters (Life is REALLY Not Fair)." One of a handful of bloggers who run the site, Wolf and his blogging colleagues decided to virtually ban all promotion for then-presidential candidate Ron Paul "in any way shape, form or fashion. Not in comments, not in diaries, nada." The only exceptions to this, he wrote, were for people who had accounts that were more than six months old.

"Now, I could offer a long-winded explanation for why this new policy is being instituted, but I'm guessing that most of you can probably guess," he wrote. "Unless you lack the self-awareness to understand just how annoying, time-consuming, and bandwidth-wasting responding to the same idiotic arguments from a bunch of liberals pretending to be Republicans can be."

RedState is one of the earliest examples of so-called "diarist" blogs, where virtually anyone can sign up for a free account and write for a blog hosted on the site. Some have labeled such sites "mullet blogs," in that they each have a small number of administrators who are able to post entries to the front page and a much larger number of back-end diarists who have to struggle much harder to get any