Happy Labor Day, Suckers!

CNBC:

Top executives at major U.S. businesses last year made as much money in one day of work on the job as the average worker made over the entire year, according to a report released on Wednesday...

The top 386 CEOs in the study took in perks, such as housing allowances and travel benefits, worth on average $438,342 in 2006. It would take a minimum wage worker 36 years to earn the equivalent of what CEOs averaged in just perks alone.

The 20 highest-paid individuals at publicly traded corporations last year took home, on average, $36.4 million. That's 38 times more than the 20 highest-paid leaders in the non-profit sector and 204 times more than the 20 highest-paid generals in the U.S. military.

Thanks, Jim.

Black is Back: News Veteran Launches Solo Blog

When Eric Black, a journalist who for three decades served as a "humble and obedient ink-stained wretch" in the Star Tribune newsroom, announced in June that he'd be taking a voluntary buyout and going it alone in the blogosphere, he told Minnesota Monitor his quest was to find the "sweet spot" between traditional journalism and blogging -- that "best combination of the reporting and verification discipline of the old with the energy, immediacy, honesty and candor of the new."

Since then he's been searching for that gratifying overlap as a National Fellow for the Center for Independent Media, writing for Minnesota Monitor and the CIM's other sites, and at a beta blog of his own that he's been testing for several weeks. Up to speed and with glitches ironed out, he officially launched Eric Black Ink earlier this week.

Black says he hopes the site will be noticeably guided by ideals of fairness and intellectual honesty, but he's doing away with some of the rigid tenets acquired over 30 years as a newspaperman. In the "creed" he's writing for the new site, Black states, "the objectivity paradigm, as evolved and practiced by mainstream journalism, is a spent force" and needs to be jettisoned. "One of the things I think simply doesn't work anymore in mainstream journalism is the idea that you can have this huge wall between facts and opinion," he said Wednesday, "or the idea that it's somehow helpful to the reader and helpful to the reporter's
credibility to not answer basic questions the readers have in their mind about where the reporter is coming from, ideologically, let's say. That's very liberating under the new medium."


At his new home, that freedom has given birth to an array of diverse discussions,
from a piece marking last week's anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas debate (with a comparison, complete with Neil Postman reference, to today's abbreviated brand of public dialogue) to a query into whether Bush's is the "most politicized administration in history" to an essay entitled, "Question: Are most journalists liberals? Answer: Yes."

The founder of the Star Tribune's blog The Big Question, Black is accustomed to prolific and dedicated commenters and the major-league traffic a top-30 newspaper website can garner (his Big Question post on Rep. Michele Bachmann's assertion that she knew of a plan to divide up Iraq into distinct states attracted more than 200,000 unique visitors in a day).

He realizes his one-man enterprise might not initially have that kind of draw.

"This is a pretty scary for someone like me, who for more than 30 years had a claim on an audience I hadn't earned myself," he said. "Just having a story in the newspaper got me quite a large number of readers, many who didn't have a particular interest in the topics I was addressing but were just people who read through the newspaper. With a one-person blog, you won't get very many accidental readers."

But he revels in the complete independence of it. "It would be easy to overstate how much I was told what I could and couldn't do at the paper, but there were a lot of rules that apply to the whole enterprise of writing for a newspaper. They're almost all gone now. I suppose the exciting -- and scary -- thing is that I have to take complete responsibility for what I write, because I can't claim somebody made me do it," he said. "On the other hand, if I have something to say that I think is worth saying, nobody can stop me from saying it."

Interview: MinnPost.com Creator Joel Kramer

"Your loss, our gain" might be an apt tagline for the daily online news site former Star Tribune publisher Joel Kramer is planning. As a press release Monday reported, the site has agreements from 25 journalists and editors, many who left jobs during tumult at City Pages, the Pioneer Press, and the Star Tribune. While Kramer insists he's not sending a message to the paper he once ran, he's clearly glad to pick up its discarded talent. In his first interview following the announcement on Minnesota Public Radio, he tells Minnesota Monitor about the MinnPost.com, the ideas that guide it, and the learning curve in going from dead-tree media to an internet-based newsroom.

Paul Schmelzer: You're launching the site in an interesting media climate. Do you expect there'll be a lot of good will for what you’re doing because of all the bad feelings over what’s happened at the local papers -- all the buyouts, layoffs and firings?

Joel Kramer: I think so. A lot of the dailies are struggling. Their business model is very difficult right now with declining advertising. They still have a lot of readers, but they have a situation where the high costs are not in line with shrinking revenues. In addition, I do run across a lot of people who lament or complain that coverage is not as serious or ambitious as it used to be. I think the opportunity there is good. Of course, the other part of that opportunity is that more than 100 journalists left those papers, and a lot of good people left City Pages... I think there’s goodwill for what we’re doing, but of course, we’ll have to deliver.

PS: You have 25 journalists listed, from former Strib D.C. intern Brady Averill to former Strib political reporter Bob Whereatt. Are they all staffers or freelancers?

JK: Contract contributors. Many of these people will be on regular contracts. Some want to just write front-page stories for us, but many of the people on the list will be posters – reporter/bloggers – and those people will also be on regular contracts. They can also write front-page stories and get paid additional.

PS: How long will front-page stories be?

JK: There’s no specific length, but the front-page stories are meant to be in-depth, serious stories. Many of them might be 1000 words or more. The real difference is how thoroughly they’re reported out. Reporter/blogger types – what we’re calling "posts" -- will write something based on one good source and some thoughts about it, and maybe another phone call, but it’s not at the length and depth and time invested as an enterprise news story.

PS: How will these posts be different from what I see occasionally at Buzz.mn or The Big Question, which feel like entries in a reporter’s notebook?

JK: We’ll spend the next couple of months experimenting with what the form will actually be like, and a lot of it will depend on how the writers react to it and how they innovate out of the form. It may resemble some of what’s being done in some places already. The guidance is that it’s reporters having more of an informal discussion with the readers. But one difference is these are not going to be discussions by reporters who are also writing in the newspaper. We expect their reporting to come through in these discussions. They’re not going to be talking about stories they’ve already written, for example, because in most cases this will be their way of talking to the readers. The guidance is that it’s more informal and more immediate than the longer stories. For example they could be posted at any time of the day. They could ask readers for feedback. There are examples out there that may resemble it.

PS: A line in the press release struck me as odd:

MinnPost.com will offer exclusive front-page news stories as well as “posts,” a new format in which professional journalists engage in an informal conversation with readers about what they're learning and what to make of it. Posts will be a bit like blogs, but unlike many blogs, they will be built around original reporting – not just opinions or links to other people’s work.

It suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of blogs, because a blog is merely an application where you can publish scrolling, time-stamped, authored stories that allow comments. It seems you’re confusing posts, an item within a blog, with an entire blog. Also, a blog is simply an application, so it can be used for reporting or opinion alike.

JK: OK. Not all blogs are like that but many blogs are. We’ve actually done focus groups with the news-intense readers we’re interested in, and many of them have a negative view of blogs because they think of them as primarily just commentary. Not all blogs are, but many are. We’re saying the posts – I’m not saying they’re unique, but they’ll be limited to the kind of blogging that’s based on real reporting.

PS: Are there models you’ve looked to? On the left there’s Talking Points Memo…

JK: What you and Brian [Lambert] do are good examples of what we’re talking about. You do real reporting. I’ve looked around to find those kinds of blogs in town and there really aren't that many who really start their day by trying to report. That’s our model – people who start their day saying, "What can I find out that’s new, and then how can I engage with the readers about it?"

PS: Why a nonprofit?

JK:We started out looking at a for-profit model, because a big goal of mine was to create something sustainable that would not be dependent on foundation soft money for the long term, and therefore we thought a for-profit model would be great. There are two reasons why it didn’t work out. One of them was we found that the model -- to be successful -- really needs money from advertisers or sponsors. And the subscription model, of getting money from readers to buy exclusive content is not working on the web for general news. So the conclusion from that is if we want a significant component of the revenue to come from readers, it needs to be a voluntary membership model that’s basically a nonprofit model. The other thing is as we talked to investors most of them told us that the mission we were describing was a public-service mission and they felt very comfortable donating the money, not investing it.

PS: Considering the sale of the Strib last winter and how it demonstrated that the needs of corporate stakeholders and the needs of a community are sometimes at cross-purposes, could you talk about the philosophy behind this? You're contracting with arts writers, an architecture critic, political reporters -- all areas that are seeing lower levels of coverage in the dailies. Is MinnPost a critique of the way your old paper is running things?

JK: It's not a critique of anybody, but it is an opportunity created by the challenges the other media face. Clearly the newspaper model is deteriorating. It used to be that newspapers had strong pricing power for their advertising, and that enabled them to do, frankly, what other media didn’t do, which was invest a lot of money in news. Historically, it’s always been the newspapers that put the most money into news. They’re losing their ability to do that and as a result a lot of good people are leaving. Our goal in attracting a wide range of people is: this is not just for political junkies or policy junkies, by any means. It’s about, for example, what you might expect to see on the cover of the New York Times. The Times does a lot of government coverage and a lot of political coverage, but it also covers science, health, the arts, culture, popular culture, on occasion, when it has an interesting way of looking at it. That’s our goal: to cover the whole range of human experience with writers who have had a long time developing their contacts, their understanding, and who know what’s going on.

PS: What’s the learning curve been like for you? You’ve got a lot of experience editing and publishing, but… can you teach an old dog new tricks (no offense).

JK: The learning curve has been intense. I’ve only been at this about six months. I’ve spent a lot of time reading on the web, Googling, and experts and so forth, and also talking to lots of people and attracting people who know more than I do to help us. Yes, it’s a different world, both in the business model and in how you present information and how readers get information. But one interesting thing about the learning is that once you start you learn fast and you get feedback from readers and learn a lot that way. That part is exciting, because it defines how nimble you are in responding to that. But one thing I want to emphasis -- and I think it’s part of the intellectual challenge of it -- is that while the web is a different world and many things can be done there that cannot be done in news and need to be done differently, we expect a large part of our audience to be people who are not focused on the fact that this is a web thing. These are people who just want high-quality news, and they’d be perfectly happy if it was in print. They just feel there isn’t as much as there used to be and there isn’t as much as the community needs, and they want it, and they understand we need to provide it in this medium because that’s where the economics are. Therefore we have to keep them in mind, too, and not just be focused on the latest dazzling thing that can be done just because this is on the web. That’s going to be tricky.

Former Strib publisher announces new site

An all-star cast and some serious funding: That's what's behind the nonprofit daily news site planned by former Star Tribune editor and publisher Joel Kramer, according to a press release sent out Monday morning to announce the late fall launch of MinnPost.com. The internet-only daily has banked around $1.1 million and has signed on some of the biggest names in Twin Cities journalism to be regular contributors -- including former Star Tribune writers Doug Grow and University of Minnesota J-school professor and Pulitzer winner Chris Ison, former City Pages staffers Mike Mosedale and Beth Hawkins, former Strib editorial writer Steve Berg, and John Camp, who won a 1986 Pulitzer while writing at the Pioneer Press.

The site will publish original news and culture features daily, plus an abbreviated version, MinnPost in Print, that readers can print out at home. "MinnPost.com is all about substantive news for Minnesotans who are intensely interested in the world around them and want more insight and analysis than they're getting from their media choices today," said Kramer. "It will combine the best of traditional journalism with new forms of newsgathering and storytelling made possible by the Internet."

While the site will publish "front-page news stories," it takes its name from what the press release calls "a new format in which professional journalists engage in an informal conversation with readers about what they're learning and what to make of it." These "posts" will "be a bit like blogs, but unlike many blogs, they will be built around original reporting - not just opinions or links to other people's work."

Site funding will come mostly from five parties, four local couples and a foundation. It has received $850,000 in startup funds from Sage and John Cowles, Vicki and David Cox, Laurie and Joel Kramer, and Terry Saario and Lee Lynch, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has announced it'll kick in $250,000. Kramer says he'll look for additional foundation support in the future.

The site also invites donations from readers, similar to the membership model at Minnesota Public Radio. With a nod to its traditional media roots, the giving categories -- which run from $50 to $5000 or more -- refer to old-school news roles, from Cub Reporter to Media Mogul.

Look for my interview with Joel Kramer later this morning.

The hero with the hand sanitizer

You might remember Bonnie Bleskachek as the former Minneapolis fire chief who was demoted after she was accused of beating her lover and harassing subordinates. The city spent more than $410,000 on legal fees, settlements and salary related to the allegations. But to Jay Berkman, who works for the PR firm Mata Global Solutions, she's an unsung hero of the 35W collapse. Downtown Journal's Michael Metzger writes about an odd press release [pdf] it received that referred to Bleskachek as an "embattled hero... [who] hasn't allowed recent personal controversy to stand in the way of helping Minnesota citizens in times of crisis."

Her deed? Working at the city's emergency center after the collapse, the release stated, "she was the first to respond to an unsolicited call from a Connecticut company offering to contribute a shipment of [...] a new, alcohol-free hand sanitizer, for emergency workers at the disaster scene." Metzger writes that Bleskachek approved the opportunistic press release and that Berkman said he'd Googled Bleskachek to learn of the controversy. "I'm very familiar with what you see and what you read and what you hear [in the media] is always not what is necessarily the truth, in all due respect. It gets taken out of context," he said. "If the things that she had done were as terrible as portrayed, one would think she would've been summarily fired... They didn't fire her."

Watertower Modernism

Utrecht-based Zecc Architecten BNA converted an old water town into a modernist apartment. I can't read the Dutch, but the photos speak for themselves.

Freedom Fries fizzled...

Mother Jones:

It was only four years ago that Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) and Walter Jones (R-NC) announced the official name change in Congressional cafeteries from French fries and French toast to Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast. "This action today is a small, but symbolic effort to show the strong displeasure of many on Capitol Hill with the actions of our so-called ally, France," said Ney at the time.

My, how les temps have changed!

Now ex-Rep Ney is serving 30 months jail time, Jones has become a fierce war critic, and lo and behold, the French may be coming to the rescue in Iraq.

Read the rest...

Pic of the Day: Farty Pants

via

Luggage Tags for the New World Order

Justin sends along this new take on luggage tags, aimed at making the TSA's job easier. He writes:

My mother gave me these luggage tags. She found them at Target on clearance for $1.98.

They're originally made by the folks at knockknock.biz, though I can't find them on their site anymore.

I'm pretty sure if you actually used these, it'd be a great way to guarantee that your luggage was searched and/or lost.

Make the Logo Bigger!

For advertising designers, nonprofit marketers, and anyone else who works in the-client-is-always right industries, this one's for you: The hard-rock classic, "Make The Logo Bigger." Via someone in the nonprofit art world, but originally from here and here.

B@by

A couple in China has tried to name their newborn after the "at" sign. The @ symbol, while used in Chinese email, was meaningful to the couple because "at" when pronounced with a long "T" sounds like "ai ta," or "love him," Reuters reports. "The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'," said the father. No word on whether Chinese officials, who have banned names using Arabic numerals, foreign languages and symbols not used by Chinese minority languages, will OK the choice.

Hot, Off the Presses: Former City Pages Editor to Launch Hybrid Web Daily

When he resigned from his job at City Pages in January, editor Steve Perry cited "philosophical and practical differences" with the paper's new owner, Village Voice Media. Since then, City Pages has taken one path, very different from the one he set for 13 years as editor, and Perry has taken another. For the past six months, he's been writing a business plan, picking the brains of consultants, writers and technology experts and laying the foundation for the hybrid news, culture and conversation site he'll launch late this fall. Granting me first word on his new project, he agreed to an email interview in which he discussed the site's tone and functionality (think: Gawker bred with MNspeak and The Stranger), his assessment of the competition, and the national culture writer -- and inlaw -- who'll be contributing.

Paul Schmelzer: What is it and how will it be different from City Pages and all the other local news sites running or in the works in the Twin Cities?

Steve Perry: It'll be great! There's maybe a dozen people directly or indirectly involved in this project so far, and most of them have already reported experiencing better sex and shinier hair.

It's a Web-only local publication. Daily. Blogs- and multimedia-based, so the writing will
usually be short and a lot of the content won't revolve around writing. We'll build to a pretty high posting volume, but there won't be any feature-length writing, at least initially. There will be original reporting and news analysis, and local arts-and-scenes coverage, and we'll do a lot of filtering of the most interesting events and conversations around town and in other media. I also want to experiment with using non-expository content like annotated maps and infographics as ways of telling complete stories, not just as illustration/accompaniment to longer pieces of newswriting.

So it's a professional journalism site, but it's just as importantly conceived to be a community-and-conversations site. I love the idea of building a forum that wantonly blurs the lines between "professional" and "amateur" voices wherever appropriate. After we started blogging extensively at City Pages, I was struck by how much I learned from the comments and correspondence it generated.

I didn't just get a better sense of who the readers were; many of them made tangible contributions that helped me do my job better. But this all happened in the background, more or less. Since that time, what I've really wanted to do was a site that integrated, and more regularly foregrounded, what readers and users had to contribute. This area in particular seems so ripe for it. The degree of public engagement with media here has always been pretty incredible. And there's a great web climate. Minneapolis/St. Paul never gets mentioned near the top in lists of "most wired cities" anymore, but it has the fifth-highest local Web penetration of any U.S. Top 15 market.

Lately I have learned many such fun facts.

PS: The local online media scene has its players, and they all seem to serve specific niches: MNspeak for a community message board, The Rake's online look at culture and dining, videoblogging from Chuck Olsen and The Uptake, community news and aggregation from the Daily Planet, original reporting from yours truly and my capable colleagues at Minnesota Monitor, and blogs by the mainstream magazines, radio stations, and newspapers. And Joel Kramer is starting up his enterprise later this year. Yours seems... different. A combination of some of the above and something new. What sites inspired different features you're considering?

SP: All the local sites you mentioned are ones I've learned things by watching. Creatively, they and a few others have been trailblazers in working out interesting ways to do local web content. Especially Chuck Olsen.

I think The Stranger in Seattle does an amazing job with its Web content, and they have great, robust, funny community interaction happening all over the site. They're definitely kindred spirits in my eyes. I like Gothamist and its affiliated sites in other cities. They capture part of the equation.

And the Gawker blogs are a very useful model for anybody setting out to do professional blogging, because nobody studies the factors that drive traffic -- packaging, item lengths and formats, posting times, posting frequency -- as doggedly as they do. I think Adrian Holovaty's work is always interesting, even though the Backfence project went toes up a couple of months ago. And there's an intriguing Web-only publication called Crosscut, which is also in Seattle, but it's much more an online newspaper than this project will be.

Content-wise, there aren't a lot of models for what we're hoping to do here. It's a mash-up of elements. The site tools and features, and the navigational architecture, will be very simple. The goal is a site whose content and tool-set will scratch Web-savvy users where they itch, but at the same time make it transparently easy for technology-shy people to jump in and participate.

PS: Given the hybrid nature of what you’re working on, it doesn’t sound like you really have direct competition. There is no Minneapolist or GawkerMN or anything comparable. But Joel Kramer’s site, which (unlike yours) I’ve heard will be non-profit and follow somewhat of a newspaper model, seems to be the closest thing. He’s got some good staff -- Roger Buoen of the Strib (and current Minnesota Monitor editorial mentor), former Pioneer Press editor Don Effenberger, City Pages’ Corey Anderson as Web editor, plus ties to lots of bought-out Stribbers -- and a lot of funding. Do you see him as competition? How will you be funded? And finally, you told me once that a big-name national culture writer will be on board. Can you share who that is?

SP: I know a little about Joel Kramer's site, and it sounds exciting. He and I have talked about it, and we talked in passing about the possibility of working together on certain aspects of what we're doing. We'll see. I'm confident the sites will be pretty distinct from each other, but of course there will be competition for local Web ad dollars. There already is. The new factor is that you've got Web-only publications entering the picture. My feeling, as I told Kramer when we talked, is that we have more in common as new-media sites looking to put across our stories in the local Web ad market than we have separating us as potential competitors.

I don't know when his site will formally launch -- the buzz now seems to be October or November -- but frankly I don't know when our site will move from beta to hard launch, either. I made the decision early on to put off meeting with potential investors until I had not only a fully developed business plan but a site prototype built as well. So I've spent my own money on the latter, and secured some initial investment for the start-up, but I'm really just beginning to have the money conversations. And obviously they have an impact on the timing of the rollout.

The writer you alluded to is Greil Marcus, but I don't want to give the impression he'll have a blog of his own there or anything. He's agreed to be an occasional contributor to our national media-culture blog. I'm thrilled to have him as a contributor, and although I wish I could say it was the sterling content plan that won his heart, the fact my wife is a) an important part of this project and b) his daughter may have tilted things a smidge.

There are some other national bylines that may find their way into that space as well, but it's misleading in a way to talk about nationally known bylines -- the site overall will be very much local.

PS: Got a name yet?

SP: Yes, but I'd rather hold off on disclosing it until the design work's done and I can show as well as tell. Actually, the whole site's under construction as we speak. I've got a great IT partner in the Clockwork web firm, and we're on schedule to have it up in a limited, by-invitation beta next month.

PS: Give us a hint about the name. Will it be more straightforward, like Minnesota Monitor, or along the cryptic-poetic lines of The Rake?

SP: I always thought a publication called The Hoe would make a nice companion to The Rake -- no disrespect intended to The Rake, but the name conjured visions of an entire empire of niche publications named for garden tools.

But that's not it. I couldn't have gotten the URL anyway. The name we chose is sort of eccentric, and we hope memorable. Playful but with resonances we liked. The word "Daily" is in the name. Let's call it the Daily X for now.

Perry is looking for 100 beta-testers for the new site. To be invited, email beta.list@gmail.com.

Crossposted at Minnesota Monitor.

Liberals read more than conservatives

These findings from a new AP/Ipsos poll:

• 34 percent of conservatives have not read a book within the past year, compared with 22 percent of liberals and moderates.

• Among those who had read at least one book, conservatives “typically read eight” books in the past year. Liberals read nine, moderates five.

• “By slightly wider margins, Democrats tended to read more books than Republicans and independents. There were no differences by political party in the percentage of those who said they had not read at least one book.”

The Typography of Love

Amazingly sweet (and typographically elaborate) marriage proposal.
Via Justin at Off-Center.

Quote: Frederick Douglass

Via Lords of Apathy.

Dems grant Bush more surveillance power than he asked for.

With Democrats controlling Congress, things are going to change, right? Don't hold your breath. The New York Times reports that "lawmakers, in a frenetic, end-of-session scramble, passed legislation they may not have fully understood and may have given the administration more surveillance powers than it sought." Now two weeks after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was signed into law, Democrats are wondering what they approved. The Times:

Several legal experts said that by redefining the meaning of “electronic surveillance,” the new law narrows the types of communications covered in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, by indirectly giving the government the power to use intelligence collection methods far beyond wiretapping that previously required court approval if conducted inside the United States.

These new powers include the collection of business records, physical searches and so-called “trap and trace” operations, analyzing specific calling patterns...

...In effect, [civil rights advocates] say, the legislation significantly relaxes the restrictions on how the government can conduct spying operations aimed at foreigners at the same time that it allows authorities to sweep up information about Americans.

DIY Struth

Incredibly simple (and clumsily named), Museumr lets you put your own photos into a museum setting, creating Thomas Struth-like watching-the-watchers imagery. (I tried it out with an image left on my desktop from a past story. Not sure what it means -- if anything -- but I like it.)

Signposting America

In one of Connecticut's oldest historic districts, artist Norm Magnusson has been erecting cast-aluminum historical markers that commemorate this odd moment in the American timeline. Designed to mimic that area's "on this site" signs, Magnusson calls attention to the "Walmartification" of American culture, politicized debates over global warming and "intelligent design," and the Iraq War to name a few. To me, his work asks: Is this really what we want to be remembered for? His installation On This Site Stood closed at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum's Cornish Family Sculpture Garden on August 12. More signs here.

Fox whacks Wiki facts

Wired reported yesterday that many entities are changing Wikipedia entries to stamp out criticism, including touchscreen voting machine manufacturer Diebold, the CIA, political campaigns and, according to tech bloggers, Fox News . Through a search tool called the Wikiscanner, users can trace anonymous editors to the IP addresses of the computers they use. The tech blog O'Reilly, for instance, used the scanner to discover that someone at a Fox News IP modified the entry for Al Franken to delete a quote from Franken that the 2003 lawsuit against the Minnesotan by the news outlet was "literally laughed out of court" and that the judge's ruling that the suit was "wholly without merit" was "a good characterization of Fox News itself." (Here's a more complete list of changes made by Fox.) No news yet on what the scanner revealed about, say, changes made by users at New York Times' IPs.

Update: Someone with a BBC IP changed George W. Bush's Wikipedia to call him George Wanker -- not Walker -- Bush... although the edit was made in 2005 and didn't last on the site long.

Anatomy of a meme: Cheney '94 "quagmire" video

Track this one:

1. Dick Cheney gives an interview in 1994 about why the US didn't go into Baghdad in the first Gulf War, saying that to do so, alone, would've landed us in a "quagmire" and wouldn't have been worth the potential loss of human lives.

2. C-Span revives the footage in 2007 on its website and in broadcasts. The world fails to pay attention.

3. Then YouTube user GrandTheftCountry posts it, it gets more than 430,000 hits, and...

4. Now CNN is covering it.

The local angle: Steve Perry, former editor of City Pages, picked up on Cheney's now-and-then contradiction in a 2003 blog post. He found an earlier speech -- at the Soref Symposium in 1991 -- in which Cheney said White House discussions about invading Baghdad were met with a "resounding 'no'." He said that it "would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq" and asked, "How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?" (Download the speech here.)

The GrandTheftCountry video:


CNN's coverage of it:

There's something to be said here about citizen media's power in shaping the media landscape.