The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

About the time for Sunday breakfast, the digital mercury crested 60 degrees — and the bluebirds showed up at the birdbath. Watching the blue male angle for the best perch to get at the water, I had an epiphany of sorts.

Sometimes, to get a better perspective, it is wise to change your perch.

So I setup the MacBook Pro on the screened-in porch, where I could continue watching the birds, while putting my latest thoughts down for a Sunday column.

It is almost time for bluebird nesting season here, and judging by the sound of their cooing as I type this, it is obvious they are loving this weather and doing what all species tend to do in the early spring: Making love.

Glynn Wilson

See a bluebird photo essay from Earth Day 2009 here

Hey, it beats making war any day, right?

The people of Egypt made a revolution for themselves over the past couple of weeks, and somehow got the military on their side, thereby avoiding war. Maybe it’s just my perspective, but I don’t see how it is much of a revolution if you end up with the military in charge. Maybe it will all work out for them and the generals will hand over power to a civilian-led democracy at some point. I hope so for their sake.

As a close follower of public opinion, I found it interesting that 82 percent of the American people showed sympathy for the people of Egypt in their revolution, although it is pretty clear that nothing like that would ever happen in the United States.

It is hard enough to get people to support the need for union labor and a living wage in this country, much less to march in the streets against a corrupt president.

With all the national attention on Egypt this past week, many people probably missed a couple of big media and technology stories, while the Democrats in Alabama were still focused on their parochial concerns and feeding their adrenaline addictions by arguing about local politics.

But you know me. Since there is an academic lesson involved here, I need to open up my Sunday School class for the next few minutes.

You may have heard in passing that the so-called progressive “Internet newspaper” and haven for free blogging, The Huffington Post, was gobbled up by the old Internet access company America Online this past week. If you have been online for more than 10 years you will remember AOL as the company that made a fortune selling access to the Internet with a modem for $20 a month back in the ’90s, the very same company that managed to fool enough of the people of their value that they took over the largest media company in the world in 2000, Time Inc.

That merger never quite worked out, and eventually Time distanced itself from AOL, after the damage to the media brand and stock value was a foregone conclusion.

I was quoted on the merger this past week in an Op-Ed News interview, but now I’ve had a little more time to think about it.

The Huffington Post story was initially played as a potential betrayal for all the liberal and progressive Democrat bloggers who happily donated so much free content to Ariana Huffington’s Internet startup. But if you dig a little deeper into the inside baseball media news coverage of it, there are a bunch of journalists wondering if Ariana might use some of that $315 million to compensate some of those bloggers. A new Facebook group started up, asking the question: “Hey Ariana, Can You Spare a Dime?.”

The name is obviously inspired by the Depression Era song, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” which seems appropriate enough, considering the state of the economy for the media, writers and creative types of all kinds these days. Photographers are having a hard time making a living. Art galleries are closing down. It is a major Depression out here folks, and all this free blogging is NOT helping — especially not the anonymous kind.

But then, since the invention of the printing press, there have been publishers willing to extract free labor from people who will do anything to get published.

Out of ignorance and bias, I’m sure, I was recently accused of being a “pay for play blogger.” Sorry, but where I come from, that’s called a “professional journalist.” Is there anything professional about blogging for free, especially hiding behind anonymity?

Not in my book, or any academic text that exists.

My comment on the Media Bistro site in New York was a version of this: The era of free blogging needs to end. It had its day, but now it is time to build the economy for the Web Press.

Of course, I’ve been saying that for years, and setting out to do just that. For that I got written up in the Columbia Journalism Review recently, but also slammed, by you guessed it, an anonymous commenter.

The problem with these anonymous comments is that you can jump to all kinds of wrong conclusions when making faulty assumptions about who might be behind the anonymous name. That is just one of the many reasons that anonymous comments should never be taken seriously. Maybe they are harmless in some settings, when the back and forth jive is meaningless chatter on some blog site like al.com, where anybody can say anything under any name they make up.

Somebody ought to tell them you can’t get famous writing under a fake name.

One thing I remember from the study of journalism ethics is, the first rule is that a real journalist writes under a real name. You have to be willing to face the people you write about. So let’s get this straight. There is nothing professional about anonymous comments, either. Any anonymous comment to the contrary can henceforth be summarily dismissed.

This is just one of the things that makes all this online activity, including social networking, a potential nightmare for amateurs.

For a professional journalist, however, especially one with investigative skills, sometimes it is not hard to find out who the anonymous cowards are — and what lies are at the root of their agenda.

Thanks to a little help from an inside source on the New York publishing Intranet, not a public Internet, I have a good idea who is behind the attacks in this case. I am not going to name them or explain the entire battleground yet, because like The Dude said in The Big Lebowski, “It’s a complicated case, Maude. Lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what have yous…”

But for those of you who know me, and understand that I am the guy you want on your side in an Internet fight, let me assure you not to worry. The situation is under control, and in the end, the real journalist in the room will emerge victorious.

What they don’t seem to understand is this: I am not just some little former newspaper reporter. I am THE PUBLISHER. Victor Hanson III cannot say that anymore. You’re welcome.

The CIA can never get me fired again, in other words, like they did in Baldwin County in 1992. Both the editor and publisher involved in that incident are no longer associated with the news publishing business in any way, anymore.

Me? I went on to teach journalism, and later to write for the likes of the New York Times, and The Nation magazine.

Now, I own a Web Press, with paid advertising and reader donations behind it. Is there another blogger anywhere around here who can say that?

Chances are, when my family situation — the reason I’m here — comes to its logical conclusion, I will hit the New York publishing world again one day in the not too distant future. They like me up there. Really, they do.

But one of the most gratifying things about this experiment over the past five years has been the positive feedback I’ve received from hundreds of people with similar experiences in the South, who keep up with and appreciate what I’m tying to do here.

That’s what makes it all worth while, folks.

What the dingbats and nutjobs say is meaningless flotsam and jetsam floating harmlessly in the sea of life.

In this case, it is corporate oil-tainted flotsam and jetsam, just like the molecules in the Gulf of Mexico still evaporating and precipitating all over the South.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Tags: Bluebirds, Brother Can You Spare A Dime

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 13th, 2011 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Media News, Technology News, The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.