Burnin’

This Is Not A Blog, a webzine produced by the Digital Journalism class at New York University in Spring 2005, contains several interviews with prominent persons in the online journalism sphere. Two that caught my eye provide deeper looks at Jim Romenesko and Kurt Andersen.

Andersen is a fan of blogs, but he says they need to be reinvented if they want to achieve clout in journalism. “The speed of blogs is great, but there are complex arguments and thoughts that can’t be compressed into 150 words. I am eager for the next moment in the evolution of blogs to happen, where there are people actually doing reportorial journalism in the blog form.”

He envisions a hybrid blog, whereby a journalist is paid to search out stories and blog about them, incorporating both traditional reporting and opinion. “So then it’s not just all like ‘Look at what this blogger said about this other blogger.’ It all becomes a bit of an echo chamber. The coffee gets pretty thin if you pour it through the grounds 10 times.”

Anderson maintained a blog for a short time on his own site, kurtandersen.com, but abandoned it last autumn while working on his new novel. He says he doesn’t have any spare intellectual energy to share with the world. “I did a few postings. And I’ve always known it could be a very addictive thing. It’s fun. Maybe it’s really old school of me, but I’m paid to write. So why am I going to write for free? Maybe over time I’ll develop a lot of second-rate thoughts to put on the blog.”

Romenesko, on the other hand, has no such quibbles with blogging.

Romenesko is dedicated blogger. He rises every day at 5 a.m. and immediately checks his e-mail and bookmarked Web sites for stories of interest. He later steps out to a nearby Starbucks (go figure), and hooks his computer up to a Wi-Fi connection to work from there, reading dozens of newspaper sites and blogs.

He usually heads home from Starbucks in the late afternoon—still posting until dinnertime—and goes to bed by 10 p.m., only to start the entire process all over again seven hours later.

Romenesko insists that he maintains a “real life” outside the blogosphere. “Of course, between postings I do ‘normal’ things—watch TV, read books, newspapers, magazines, go to movies, meet up with friends, dine out.”

Even so, maintaining three daily blogs takes a great deal of time and effort. So much so that he hasn’t taken more than two vacations in the last five years.

As a host of three blogs myself, I can relate to Romenesko best. Yet, as a writer of things other than blogs, I can see where Andersen’s counter point is equally appealing. For I can envision a day where I have more important and better paying things to write than blog posts. Like books, or screenplays or long-form journalism.

Flickr users, eatsdirt and nycarthur, have generously posted interesting photo sets from last weekend’s Coney Island Mermaid Parade.

According to ConeyIsland.com, “The Mermaid Parade is the nation’s largest art parade and one of New York City’s greatest summer events. The Mermaid Parade celebrates the sand, the sea, the salt air and the beginning of summer, as well as the history and mythology of Coney Island, Coney Island pride, and artistic self-expression. The Parade is characterized by participants dressed in hand-made costumes as Mermaids, Neptunes, various sea creatures, the occasional wandering lighthouse, Coney Island post card or amusement ride, as well as antique cars, marching bands, drill teams, and the odd yacht pulled on flatbed.”

The Unitarian Fellowship of Hilton Head Island hosted a service by Johnnie Mitchell this morning. Mitchell is a native islander who is passionate about the preservation and promotion of the Gullah culture. As part of her efforts, she has written extensively on Native-Gullah history and culture, and she co-owns De Gullah Creations at The Mall at Shelter Cove.

The church service was part of a larger celebration this weekend honoring Mitchelville—the first Freedmen’s village in the United States, formed in 1862 and called for by Union General Ormsby Mitchell. Descendents of the Mitchell family were in attendance this morning.

According to Organization of American Historians, former Secretary of Interior, Bruce Babbitt, on a visit to Beaufort in 2000 challenged community leaders to work together to provide opportunities for the public to learn more about Reconstruction era sites in the county. Including:

- the Penn School for former slaves founded in 1862 and located on St. Helena Island

- the Old Fort Plantation on the Beaufort River where the first African Americans assembled on 1 January 1863 to hear the reading of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation

- the Freedmen’s Bureau housed in the recently restored Beaufort College

- the Beaufort Arsenal where free slaves in Beaufort voted for the first time

- the first Freedmen’s Village of Mitchelville on Hilton Head Island

- many other noteworthy historic buildings and archeological sites associated with the Civil War hero and Reconstruction leader Robert Smalls

Robert Patterson of Prince Edward Island, Canada has been busy readying a collabortive work space set to open Monday in Charlottetown.

The Queen Street Commons is an organized group to create and serve the common good of its members.

We come together to create the organizational power to obtain services in common that we could never afford on our own. We offer fellowship and community for those that work alone. We offer the opportunity to discover the value of interacting with others. We offer the opportunity to contribute to the common good. We offer a “Work Home”.

There’s something decidedly 1960s about these sort of collectivist operations. Which is what I love about them. If I were a poet/blogger/copywriter/journalist dude living in PEI, I’d want in bad. Hey, can I get a Canadian work visa as a freelance writer?

Guardian Unlimited: Faced with that literary troublemaker TS Eliot, a York University academic called in the FBI and now claims to have cracked the case of how The Waste Land was written.

Lawrence Rainey, of the university’s English department, spent two years travelling across Europe and the US to sort out the sequence in which Eliot wrote the poem.

A sheaf of rough drafts for the poem surfaced in 1971 and Prof Rainey compared them with the letters and other writing that Eliot was producing in the years before its publication in 1922 - a task calling for forensic as much as literary investigation. He examined more than 1,200 leaves of paper, including 638 pages of letters, Eliot had written between 1912 and 1922, visiting 22 international libraries and several private collections in his two-year journey.

“When The Waste Land was published, its defenders insisted that the poem was planned from the beginning and that it was a poem of extraordinary unity. Now that we can trace the processes and the choices that Eliot is making, the poem turns out to be something quite different,” Prof Rainey said.

“The Waste Land was not a seamless whole, but something more radical. It is, at once, wild and unruly, violent and shocking and yet deeply compassionate,” he added.

Boston Phoenix reports that Domino’s Pizza founder, Tom Monaghan, has big plans for the community he’s building near Naples, Florida.

Ave Maria won’t be just a university. It will also be a new town, built from scratch, in which the wickedness of the world will be kept at bay. “We’ve already had about 3500 people inquire on our Web site about buying a home there — you know, they’re all Catholic,” Monaghan says excitedly. “We’re going to control all the commercial real estate, so there’s not going to be any pornography sold in this town. We’re controlling the cable system. The pharmacies are not going to be able to sell condoms or dispense contraceptives.” A private chapel will be located within walking distance of each home. At the stunning church in the center of town, Mass will be said hourly, seven days a week, from 6 a.m. on.

You know, it might be fun to be so insanely rich, that whatever crazy scheme you had up your sleeve, people would respond to it. I’m sure the contractors in S.W. Florida could give a crap why they’re building what they’re building. If this guy was serious, he’d take a page from the Mormons, and have only church members in good standing work on his projects.

According to a transcript of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show from Tuesday, the conservative commentator is, by his own admission, no journalist.

“I’m not a journalist. I’ve never pretended to be a journalist. For one thing I laugh. For one thing I enjoy life. You know, I’m not dour, I’m not filled with doom and gloom, I’m not a pessimist, I don’t dislike the country, and I don’t suspect my country’s guilty every time there’s some sort of international conflict. I’m not a journalist. But I am America’s anchorman. I am America’s anchorman and for nearly 17 years I’ve been doing play-by-play of the news here.”

“I never wanted to be a journalist. I’m an advocate. I’m a commentator. I mean, I do so much more than just journalism. I do tell people things they don’t know. I mean, that is the strict definition of a journalist. I even looked it up in the dictionary, just to be sure — you never know what the dictionary definition of a term is going to be these days — and it said: somebody who writes news for broadcast on radio or TV. So the broadcasters themselves are not journalists. The people who write it are, so the people who put the TelePromTer together for the evening news anchors are the journalists. Well, that’s according to the dictionary definition.”

Thanks to Fishbowl DC for the post.

Meg Hourihan, co-creator of the personal publishing application Blogger, was recently profiled by the alumni magazine at Tufts, her alma mater.

Having founded two pioneering high-tech companies in the past five years, Hourihan’s English degree may seem a bit incongruous. But she doesn’t think so.

“My career path in technology is not at all an aberration,” she explains. “Many women in technology come to technology later and don’t come through traditional academic, undergraduate degrees.”

She is a strong advocate of creating an educational environment where women are encouraged to enter the math, science and technology fields.

“For me, when I was growing up, I felt there was a stigma of computers and being a nerd,” she recalls. “I went to computer camp in sixth grade. I told people when I got back to school that I went to computer camp and I was just mocked. That definitely had an impact on me.”

Bluffton Today is runing a spread in today’s paper about an historic building in Beaufort that faces demolition, in order to make way for an expanding Inn. The Tom’s Shoe Repair building on the corners of Port Republic and West streets once housed the offices of Edmund Rhett, a lawyer and three-time Beaufort mayor, who along his brother Robert, was a leader of the “fire-eating” secessionists. The Articles of Sesession were drafted in this office, and later signed at Edmund Rhett’s house at 1113 Craven Street, a home which enjoys some preservationist protections.

According to the article, the structure could move to another location in downtown Beaufort or to a city-owned lot in historic Bluffton, provided a generous donor arranges for the transfer.

Bluffton’s ties to the building date back to July 31, 1844, the day the “Bluffton Movement” was born under the Secession Oak. On that day, as many as 500 people gathered to hear Congressman Robert Barnwell Rhett espouse his belief that the South could gain economic freedom only by breaking away from the union.

When you’re from the West, or Midwest, as I am, it can be difficult to properly conceive of the multi-layered histories that wind through American families on the eastern seaboard. Here in Beaufort County, there are many peolpe–black and white–named Pinckney. So, I did some research and it turns out the Pinckney’s have been prominent in this area for over three hundred years.

Planter, soldier and statesman, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, may be the most well-known member of this family, but his mother, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, has quite the storied past, as well. She took over her father’s plantations at 16, after he was called to serve as governor of Antigua. Eliza introduced indigo to the Carolina economy, which sustained the colony for 30 years. She also worked with silk, hemp and flax.

According to the U.S. Army web site, “Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who represented South Carolina at the Constitutional Convention, was an American aristocrat. Like other first families of South Carolina, whose wealth and social prominence could be traced to the seventeenth century, the Pinckneys maintained close ties with the mother country and actively participated in the Royal colonial government. Nevertheless, when armed conflict threatened, Pinckney rejected Loyalist appeals and embraced the Patriot cause. Pragmatically, his decision represented an act of allegiance to the mercantile-planter class of South Carolina’s seaboard, which deeply resented Parliament’s attempt to institute political and economic control over the colonies. Yet Pinckney’s choice also had a philosophical dimension. It placed him among a small group of wealthy and powerful southerners whose profound sense of public duty obliged them to risk everything in defense of their state and the rights of its citizens.”