Fact-esque

New Kid on the Block

There's a new kid on the block - but it's a rich kid, who moved into the biggest house, goes to a better school and has a lot of cool new toys. Predictably, I hate her, but wish she were my best friend.

Actual journalists at the Columbia Journalism Review have started The Campaign Desk . You can read about it here in the NY Times.

Via the NY Times article, the Campaign Desk's managing editor takes a swipe at bloggers. I especially love the careful use of statistics and not opinion in the first sentence:
"Most blogs are 99.9 percent opinion," said Steve Lovelady, the site's managing editor and a former managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. "This is a Web site run by and staffed by responsible journalists whose job is to monitor, critique and praise the campaign press, on a daily basis."

Don't these people read PressThink ? That site likes watchers. And didn't we agree during a discussion there that we didn't come to bury the press but to praise it? We're sweeties.

The staff at Campaign Desk comes, at least in part, from the dangerously opinion-filled world of blogging. Again from the NY Times article:

They are: Bryan Keefer, 25, a co-founder of a similar site, Spinsanity .com; Zachary Roth, 28, a former intern at The Washington Monthly; and Thomas Lang, 22, a former intern at The American Prospect.

So the snoot factor is high, but it looks like they're trying to keep it real. From the first bunch of articles, it looks like they are casting their net wide so there is still plenty of room for us to do our job - encourage readership of and feedback, positive and negative, about individual reporters. And I think it's valuable to have input from people who aren't in the journalism bubble. There's a chance that Campaign Desk does as well since there's a button called Blog Report in the sidebar. Let's send them our URLs.

Critical Drift

Jay Rosen over at Press Think makes an excellent point about press watching sites. Here's the article. First the positives: Jay is right on when he says that watching a specific reporter requires the watcher to think deeply about not only the journalistic aspects of the articles but also the issues they cover. That has happened with me already and I've only been at this a few days. As for the negative side: He's right again when he worries that watching might " drift toward rhetorical violence ". I worried about that too. The good news is that I am mindful of the possiblity and am working to avoid drifting anywhere that is unproductive - like name calling, or criticizing rashly. Luckily, I have a fear of the permanence of putting ideas in print so I tend to err on the side of caution.

I have another concern though and that is that as a watcher, I'll start to feel embedded in Mr. Woodward's work and lose objectivity on that front, which wouldn't be good either. I already think of Mr. Woodward as "my guy" and am excited when I find a piece he's written. Frankly, and I think many watchers feel this way too, I'm happier when I can say that the work he's done is good. It's better for my soul and better for the country. That's why I'm glad that Swopa at Needlenose is also watching Mr. Woodward. More than one perspective can't hurt. And let's face it, I appreciate the back-up. What I don't know about some of the issues that are bound to come up could fill a warehouse.

Lastly, I gotta say that I love the term "watcher" because of the total Buffy connection. I'm much more of a Giles than a Buffy anyway.