Note: an experiment with Storify export
memeorandum with color annotation
One of my favorite sites for seeing what’s hot in the political blogosphere is memeorandum. Fortunately, it’s a favorite haunt of Andy Baio, too. Baio is a writer and tech entrepreneur in Portland, OR. He’s fashioned a cool toolthat illustrates the political leanings of the blogs featured in discussion on memeorandum.
Research (Glance and Adamic) in the early days of blogging suggested very little cross-linking. In other words, liberal blogs rarely linked to conservative ones (and vice versa). This current visualization reflects linking behavior in the context of featured stories on memeorandum. In other words, what stories are the bloggers talking about?
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So asks The Atlantic in a provocative essay by Stephen Marche. My initial reaction was not unlike a response to fingernails on a chalkboard:
I hate articles like this one from @TheAtlantic: is.gd/qvLQ1f LinkBait headlines (Is Facebook making us lonely) 1/2—
Kathy E Gill (@kegill) April 19, 2012
My (belated) entry in the March Carnival of journalism. The theme: how do we measure impact?
Just as we need to be careful what we wish for, we must choose carefully before establishing metrics. From The Guardian‘s Simon Caulkin (emphasis added):
What gets measured gets managed – even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so…
Quality guru W Edwards Deming went further, putting ‘management by use only of visible figures, with little consideration of figures that are unknown or unknowable’ at No 5 in his list of seven deadly management diseases. Henry Mintzberg, the sanest of management educators, proposed that starting ‘from the premise that we can’t measure what matters‘ gives managers the best chance of realistically facing up to their challenge.
What matters? What is the role of journalism, our purpose, our challenge?
I don’t think that America’s news media have been given the gift of the First Amendment so that moguls can negotiate monopoly rents into millionaire status. I don’t think that America’s news media have been given the gift of the First Amendment in order to glorify celebrity culture (think Kim Kardashian, for example).
I do think America’s news media have been given the gift of the First Amendment to speak truth to power, to give voice to the powerless, to act as a watchdog on public institutions — all things that matter but that are hard to measure and even harder to monetize.
Midnight and the close of the 2012 legislative session were around the corner (10:02 pm) when the Georgia Senate passed HB 875 on a 48-2 vote. The bill that the Senate voted on was substantially different from the version it passed less than 12 hours earlier; however, the Senator didn’t share that bit of information with his peers. By the time the House rejected the bill, only an hour later, word of the deceit had bypassed circumvented the mute Republican leadership via the magic of zeros-and-ones.
Has old school political machination met its match with digital networking?
