November 16, 2005

Liveblogging the Open Source Media (Pajamas Media) Launch Event

I'm sitting here in the Rainbow Room, for the start of the OSM launch event. I'll try liveblogging the event once it begins.

10:13 am. The event is starting. Andrew Breitbart is giving a kickoff introduction of Charles and Roger. "It's amazing that the two of these guys have realized that the future is online and the future is the internet."

10:15. am. Roger is starting his speech. "With hundreds of thousands of fact checkers online, we have the opportunity to be more credible than MSM." "We do not intend to overthrow the mainstream media, but to enhance it." "OSM is not going to be all politics. Far from it. There'll be issues from fashion to spelunking."

10:27 am. Charles Johnson has been introduced by Roger, and is now giving us a guided tour of the site (OSM.org). "I want to thank you all for coming. Look at you all  This is great. We have a veritable constellation of the blogosphere here." "We're going to have live newsfeeds from several MSM sources." "One of the really exciting features that we're going to be introducing is something called BlogJams -- an online equivalent of a Sunday-morning talk show."

10:36 am. Roger's introducing the OSM team. I just was introduced and had a chance to get up and wave. Although I didn't actually wave. 

10:38 am. Tom Julian is now introducing the first panel, "Are Blogs the New Black?" The panel also includes The Manolo, who is present invisibly by telepresence. Tom said the Manolo can't be called a man or a woman since he is anonymous. The voice of the Manolo was then heard, saying "Of the course The Manolo is a man." He sounds _exactly_ like you'd expect him to.

Elizabeth Hayt: "Blogging is for rich people with too much time on their hands. I never read blogs." Elizabeth said when she told this to OSM she was told, that's great, that's why we're inviting you. My thoughts: this is excellent. Everyone is enjoying her point of view, and it's contributing to the discussion.  

The panel is continuing with fashion bloggers Kim Weinstein, Kristen Kelly, Krista Webber and The Manolo.

The Manolo: "Hello to the people who used to be in their pajamas." 

11:12 am. Roger is now introducing the political panel -- Claudia Rosett, John Podhoretz, Richard Fernandez, Larry Kudlow, and David Corn. David Corn: "Blogging couldn't exist without MSM. A lot of blogging is debating and figuring out what the news is really about."

Fernandez: "What happens in blogs to a certain extent is this analytical function. You can never write from authority when you are writing a blog post. What you have to do is say from a given set of assumptions, here is the conclusion you would arrive at  yourself if you were presented with the same facts." "For the first time in history you have a network that flows both ways between the players -- where the audience can come up and be the players." "In a sense this is the revenge of a guy with a day job."

Podhoretz: "People deserve the authority that they earn based on a long-time experience that the reader has with the writer. It's the words themselves and the text itself that conveys the authority -- the authoritiy adheres to the work itself." "Two married missionaries -- bloggers -- were largely responsible for the world finding out about the orange revolution in the Ukraine."

Kudlow: "I love blogging. It's great stuff. It allows me to vent, and I hope somebody reads it at the end of the day." 

Corn: "There is a trend in MSM where news is becoming niche-ified. Remember, if you wanted to get sports news, you used to have to sit through the local news. Now you have 5 ESPN channels. So it gets harder to have a debate, because everyone gets self-ghettoized." "OSM brings people together so you can have the real contest of ideas."

Podhoretz: "You have a more cosmopolitan possiblity now than you did 25 years ago. The MSM [is still biased] -- the misdiagnoses of what happens in the world. All due to a blindness that is reinforced by others in MSM." 

Rosett: "Thre transaction costs have dropped. When I started there was no Google, there was no Internet. Today you can Google it up, and transaction costs have dropped dramatically."  

Corn: "I was pursuing a story recently, making many phone calls, trying to track down the facts. Then a blogger posted a story, presenting one view of the events as fact. I presume he talked to one of the same sources I did, and just put it up there. Is that the same as the Lincoln-Douglas debates [of 1858, in which MSM accounts contradicted each other]? I don't know, but it really ticked me off." [Note -- this dialog is as ver batim as I could get it, typing live. It's unlikely to be word-for-word accurate.] 

This is a hot panel. I believe OSM.org has a link for streaming audio if you want to hear it live. 

Podhoretz has just said that the MSM voice of omniscience is dead, and has been since Charles Johnson documented that the CBS faxes were forged. 

Kudlow: "We'll now all be accountable."

Corn: "Yes. There is this transparency that is being imposed upon all of us."

Podhoretz: "People in newsrooms, using AP feeds, from 1940 to 1980 were the only people who could read Supreme Court opiniions on the day in which it was released. The NY Times might decide to print the whole opinion, so that a day later a law professor like Glenn Reynolds could read it, and a few days later, after sufficient research, could write an article, demonstrating that the report in the NY Times was incorrect. Today that Supreme Court opinion is up on the Internet is up in 3 hours."

It's now open to questions fromt the audience. Great questions are coming in. Someone is saying "The notion of objectivity is a 20th-century phenomenon. The bloggers have made it partly because they are both assertive and modest." 

Glenn Reynolds: "I'd like to see MSM do more hard news reporting. MSM has cut back on this to save costs, and has substituted zip and opinion. They've thrown away their killer app, the what happened when and where, and I think it's been a mistake." 

Update, 4:14pm: The event is now concluded. Everything went well. After the political panel, we adjourned to the dining room for lunch. At lunch, Glenn Reynolds introduced keynote speaker, Judith Miller, who said: "I strongly urge you to support the Free Flow of Information Act -- a name I like a lot. It's not a reporter protection act -- it's a freedom of information act." 

After Miller, Senator John Cornyn of Texas appeared via video hookup to discuss the shield law. Cornyn believes no meaningful distinction can be made between MSM reporters and bloggers as journalists.

He also made some interesting comments on the McCain-Feingold legislation: "McCain-Feingold was well intended, but it's clear it hasn't worked very well if the intention was to keep vast sums of money out of the political process." "We really haven't solved our problems -- for example, the 527's -- and the solution is not to go further and regulate the blogosphere."

I'll post pictures from the event after I get back to LA. 

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