Comments on: The state of the media address

By: Sophocles

Sophocles — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:54:28 +0000

Nice

By: Moe Zilla

Moe Zilla — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 05:07:36 +0000

Immediately after the address, this article got comments FAIR’s Norman Solomon, author of the new book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

The interviewer ultimately argues FOR a bigger and better Vietnam Syndrome - “one in which the people, the press, the congress and even administrations become much more skeptical of the spin that is used to rush us into military action.”

By: David Johnson

David Johnson — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 21:39:16 +0000

two good nods to very forward thinking in al’s morning meeting on poynter today:

quote

Yesterday, I mentioned the use of “tag clouds” as an interesting way to analyze speeches. MSNBC.com used tag clouds to cover the State of the Union address. I like the “transcript” and “analysis” tabs on the page too.

Alex Johnson at MSNBC.com told me:

We supplemented [the tag cloud] with video, and the cloud is generated in real time as the President progresses [through the speech], which is pretty cool because you can track the shifts of emphasis as he goes along. Plus we supplemented it with topic-by-topic analysis and reader interactivity.

Also, listen to this piece from NPR’s “Morning Edition,” which features several NPR correspondents commenting on the president’s speech in quick 15-second bursts. NPR also produced beat-specific “fact check” columns. Brilliant! It was not only useful, but it was a wonderful display of the depth of NPR’s reporting power and expertise.

/quote

very impressive, props to both msnbc and npr for these new approaches.

By: discreet_chaos

discreet_chaos — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:55:54 +0000

I agree that those with an audience or who can get access to one, should start thinking along these terms. Of course a lot of MSM were probably focused on their own coverage and the Pipeline shot of all those people and cameras in Statuary Hall sort of backs that up.

While on the other hand, there were a LOT of us on Wonkette and the event resulted in four comment threads with a total of 626 user comments. As someone who would occasionally jump into the fray, I’d have to say that logistically it was kind of difficult because the Gawker publishing system kept having problems and because so many of us were watching the bottom of the comment threads, we weren’t really seeing the stuff up top that was being posted by the official livebloggers.

Also and it may be because of problem with their publishing system, but the hosts jumped to a new thread a couple of times and at least twice, I found myself adding toward the bottom of a thread, while the official bloggers had taken it to a new post.

Right now and off the top of my head, I’ll say that liveblogging an event as high-profile as the SOTU is just about at that point, where multimedia switches from porn to the mainstream. There have been problems in the past, but they were fewer this time around, so next time enough of the kinks may be worked out that a network and another site might have a great example from which to build.