The Addendum "I tried to write shorter ~Mark Twain
route99west.com/addendum
is an occasional journal of Oregon, from arts and books to public policy & transportation.
All content © 2006- by Alexander B. Craghead, except where otherwise noted.
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Review: Approaching Nowhere
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Week in Review... in review.
Week in Review, Vol. XI
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Other Notable Blogs
Cafe Unknown
Travel, History and Portland Oregon by Dan Haneckow
Jack Bog's Blog
By Jack Bogdanski of Portland, Oregon. (Like he needs any other introduction by now? -- A.B.C.)
For Portlanders Only
"Why buy a mattress anywhere else?"
Good Stuff NW
Featuring stuff that is good in the NW
LOST Magazine
LOST Magazine is an online monthly magazine that combines elements of many other literary, online, and national magazines with a singular mission--to reclaim in writing lost people, places, and things.
Mapes on Politics
Way West of the Beltway
Outside Is America
A journal about photography, roadtrips, trains and life, with occasional detours into movies, baseball, music, family and more.
The Photographers' Railroad Page
Good photos usually have good stories to go with them.... The goal of The Photographers' Railroad Page is to provide an outlet for top quality photographs and their story.
Portland Food & Drink
Throwing Ourselves on the Grenade of Bad Food to Save You
Portland Transport Blog
A Conversation About Access & Mobility in the Portland/Vancouver Region
PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media -- and booksellers
RailPixCritic
One person's musings on railroad photography, focusing on discussions of specific images or groups of same
Rambling West
The musings of a farmer with a typewriter and camera
Stumptown Confidential
Documenting Portland, Oregon architecture, history, and culture through photos, postcards, and words.
The Unauthorized Observer
Observations on faith, photography, trains, baseball, the city where I live (Fullerton, Calif.), anything that I find funny (a lot of things) or irritating (some things) and various incidents involving friends and family.
Under the Weather
...the open road, fatherhood, family life, music, railroads, photography, popular and unpopular culture, sex, violence, religion, the oppression of consumerism and capitalism and the general bullshit that makes up modern life.
Urban Planning Overlord
A blog to counter the myths, lies, and demagoguery others use against sound city planning to further their own ends, fair and foul - but also to urge the profession itself to pull back from the occasional wretched PC exces.
VanPortlander
Living in Vancouver; working in Portland. I have some thoughts.
Whiskey, Texas
...life and experiences in Texas and the Southwest. Recurring themes: Photography, railroads, fading ads / ghost signs, fallen-flag railroad logos, boxcars, bicycling, Texas music, pop culture, sports, road trips, literature, kids and family.
World Scott
The Travel Writing and Photography of Scott Lothes
Blegs & Bargains
Amazon Book Wishlist
B&H Wishlist
My eBay Listings
Powell's Books Wishlist
Friday, December 7, 2007
Feed Addition
Aaron over at VanPortlander wrote in this morning to ask if there are any RSS feeds. Labels: Blogging, Internet, Journalism, Media, Site News
I confess that The Addendum is a bit of a passive-aggressive blog. I have blogged before, sometimes quite intensely. Overall, though, I got tired of it. Aaron put up a post yesterday that outlined one of many reasons the blogging thing gets old. At some point it feels like a rat-race to be the first to post your opinion about whatever is going on, out there, out in the non-cyber world.
The entire route99west site, however, began its rebirth as an outlet for various artistic pursuits. I viewed (and continue to view) this site as an extended, web-based portfolio of my work. The Addendum grew into the project when I needed a place to put an occasional article or item that just didn't seem to merit the energy investment that a photo essay might. It's also a convenient place to plop some links to interesting stuff that is going on with others on the web.
My reaction against blogging continues. I know from previous experience I won't always have time for updating this page, so I'm trying not to get into the habit of posting to it on a crack-hyper squirrel pace. You'll probably see more Week in Review type posts.
So now, dear readers, you know my excuse for not having made site feeds available in the past. You can thank Aaron for prompting me to change that, however. You can find an atom-based feed here, and an RSS 2.0 feed here. I've also plunked links to both over at the left side of the page, under the heading "Feeds & Etc..."
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Thursday, December 6, 2007
Week in Review, Vol. I
It seems one of the stock investigative journalism stories in the post-9/11 world is the "TSA Security Breach." You know the drill. Reporters get together some kind of security violating package, like dummy weapons or fake explosives, then smuggle it past security at a major airport. Thanks to a few hidden cameras, the whole shebang gets broadcast on television about a week later, with alarmists "are we safe?" comments slung back and forth throughout the accompanying monologue. It's over-the-top, and it's also borderline instruction video for wannabe terrorists, but it's not surprising that the average journalist doesn't even comprehend such a thing. It's all about shock, sensationalism, and a degraded notion of what a "scoop" means. Labels: Journalism, Media, Portland, Portland History, Public Policy, Railroads, Transportation, Week in Review
For those of us a bit sick of such fabricated news, check out this video from The Onion. As usual for this parody news outlet, they've done a great job capturing everything that is absurd about such reports. It's no small wonder that Reason Magazine's Greg Beato called The Onion "our most intelligent newspaper".
And now, add to that, our most intelligent television news.
We're still taking stock of the damage up here after the high winds and flooding that began late last week and lasted through Monday. The predictions made by TV weather reporters for the Willamette Valley became largely untrue. Although some creek drainages did overflow their banks, nothing on the scale of the 1996 floods occurred.
The coast, however, is another matter. Everywhere from Lincoln County north to the central Washington Coast got hammered, and every major highway to the coast north of Newport shut down. Lewis County -- an inland county up in Washington -- got hit bad, with jet-boats and helicopters handling evacuations of folks stranded by the rising Chehalis River. Interstate 5 shut down due to high water, with travelers in the Portland-Seattle corridor being routed over the Cascade Range twice via Yakima.
Further south, Astoria got hit with wind-speeds in excess of 85 mph. Thousands lost power, and the Coast Guard even closed the Columbia Bar to all passage.
It wasn't a hurricane, and there were relatively few casualties on the human side. Still, it'll take a while to pick up the pieces from this one.
While the rain fell and the Coast receded into the pre-industrial age, the news media finally found something else to put in its headlines beside alarmism over MAX light rail security. Lost, too, is the absurdity of the pile-on; for a while it seemed as if TriMet was going to get blamed for inventing everything from petty larceny to manslaughter.
TriMet critics, naturally, used the opportunity to pull out every tired grievance they have with the transit agency and shout it at the top of their cyber-lungs. Comments in articles at the Portland Tribune as well as at many local blogs became borderline hysterical. The objections themselves are nothing new. TriMet is subsidized, and therefore an evil. TriMet brings in transit-oriented-development, and is therefore evil. Sam Adams sleeps with a stuffed TriMet plushie at night, and is therefore evil.
As the agency itself began to openly discuss how best to provide security on its light rail system, the issue seemed to get muddier, rather than clearer. Crime near MAX was somehow linked to eliminating fare evasion, which in turn was then linked to eliminating Fairless Square.
Has all use of logic been lost in this city? First, how many of the offenders who commit violent crimes live in downtown Portland? I'll bet on average the the criminals who commit crimes in Gresham are from -- surprise! -- Gresham. And I highly doubt they somehow go all the way downtown in order to get on at Fairless Square and then ride all the way back to Gresham to go mug some unsuspecting soul. And for those who want to install turnstiles, another question. How many of these crimes occurred on board MAX? Most of them occurred on the platform. Does anyone think that just because a criminal can't access the platform he'll go away? No, he'll just move twenty feet away, outside the turnstile. Or he'll jump it. Even Jack Bogdanski -- normally a critic of TriMet -- has noted the absurdity of the shotgun-blast of claims out there now.
Many people are angry, and they should be. Let's stop and breathe a moment though and decide who that anger ought to be directed at. While all the pundits decide to point the finger at MAX, let me ask this: What is the responsibility of the local community to police the system? Do police now stop patrolling at the doors of public transit? Does this mean that if MAX comes to my community, that my own police force will say, "sorry, Charlie, we don't vouch for security on that platform. Everywhere outside of it, sure, but that platform? It's like Switzerland, we can't go there, you're on your own."
That idea is absurd. If the force here were refusing to do their duty just because the area a crime is being committed belongs to TriMet, I'd be very angry. There is no question that TriMet should have seen these problems and tried to do something about them earlier. And TriMet needs to do something serious about it before it gives one of the best transit systems in the nation a permanent black-eye. But if Gresham (and Hillsboro) residents want to get angry at anyone for negligence, they should look at their own police forces and their own local political leadership, both of whom apparently decided to play a territorial pissing-contest rather than keep you and I safe.
Meanwhile, Aaron over at VanPortlander notes an interesting side effect of the flooding:"With I-5 shut down in the Chehalis area, truckers heading to and from Seattle aren’t clogging up I-5 or I-205, leaving the two routes into Vancouver clear for passenger vehicles. Even though I left work about half an hour later than normal, I got home only 5 minutes later than when I’ve driven on a typical day. The removal of long-haul trucks from the interstates cut my commute nearly in half."
Welcome to the future? Well, probably not. Not any time soon, anyway.
It does, however, reinforce the argument that there will come a day when we may wish to divert truck traffic between Seattle and Portland to other means, such as rail. Why we continue to move multiple semi-trailers of mail between the two metro areas every night on I-5 when we have regularly scheduled and reliable Amtrak service between both points boggles the mind. In the mid '60s we separated mail, less-than-carload, and other parcel services from our passenger rail network. Maybe it's time to rethink the wisdom of that.
Returning to transit security, the American Public Transportation Association is a bit ticked about the issue right now. It seems the Presidential Administration has proposed cutting back Federal funding for transit security. As APTA President William Millar puts it: “If this is true, this is an outrage. Transit security is a national security issue and national security is the responsibility of the federal government. Why should public transportation riders, who take public transportation 34 million times each weekday, be treated as second class citizens?"
Millar sent a letter this week to Office of Management and Budget Director James Nussle, requesting an immediate meeting, and stressing much the same points.
It seems anytime that media prints an online story about light rail construction, it brings every NIMBY, nay-sayer, and Libertarian critic of government spending out of the woodwork in the comments section. Then I happened onto this article about an impending light rail project in Norfolk, Virginia. The comments section, for once, had some really intelligent backtalk from locals who liked the proposal.
Best of all, though, is the post by one "Bryant E." in Virginia Beach:"People are complaining that it will take 35 years to pay off not counting maintenance. That's funny, do you own a home? How long is your mortgage? 30yrs plus with each refinance & that doesn't count the maintenance but you are willing to pay for that. What benefit are you getting from that mortgage? Is it making you money? No it is serving a need, which is a roof over your head."
Brilliant. One of the best arguments for public infrastructure funding ever. I'm going to steal it. Hope you don't mind, Bryant?
Meanwhile, Portland will be playing host over the next two weekends to the 3rd annual "Holiday Express" train excursions. For an extremely affordable price, anyone can ride behind one of the largest operating steam locomotives in North America, Portland's own SP 4449. The engine has called Portland home since 1957, and in the 1970s was restored to pull the American Freedom Train around the country during the U.S. Bicentennial.
Sadly, the engine -- along with two stablemates -- has no permanent home. Currently it is housed in the former Southern Pacific roundhouse in Brooklyn Yard, near S.E. Holgate Street. The property owner, Union Pacific, has been very patient over the years, but does plan to develop the land into something that makes more money than storing old relics.
Although the engines are all owned by the City of Portland, the city provides no funding for them, and the volunteer groups who maintain and operate them are responsible for raising all needed funds. The Holiday Express runs are one of a number of strategies aimed at fundraising.
So if your kids liked the Polar Express movie, or if you want to support a valiant historical preservation effort, or if you're just a big kid yourself, please go down and ride this weekend or next. Trains board near the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and parking is free.
Well that's all for now, folks.
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Tuesday, November 13, 2007
The Ultimate Camera Test-Drive
War correspondent Micheal Yon goes over the ins and outs of cameras for some real high-pressure shooting environments -- Labels: Journalism, Media, Photography, Technology
war photography."When the Nikon D70 got combat stress, I jumped out of the pool and into the Bering Straits of digital cameras. Drum roll . . . I opened the box . . . the Canon Mark II 1DS. Welcome to photography hell! No dummy buttons. The engineers apparently assumed the owner actually knows something about photography to spend $8,000 on a camera body. You make a wrong move with the Canon Mark II 1Ds, and your photos are trash."
Yes, sadly, he jumped ship to Canon, the Toyota of camera makers. Still, his comments about idiot buttons are right on the mark.
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Sunday, November 4, 2007
Amtrak on Parade
Parade Magazine this weekend highlighted passenger rail's future and the debate over Amtrak funding. Many Amtrak press articles end up being way off base, either making Amtrak out to be a saint persecuted by the Eeeeevil Bush Administration, or to be a big pork-barrel project that exists solely to put public money into union employee pockets. Amazingly, the Parade article is neither, and gives a very balanced if brief view of the situation. Labels: Journalism, Media, Public Policy, Transportation
(The comments section I can't say as much about. To be honest I didn't even read it. Internet comments may be one of the least useful inventions in journalism.)
A snippet:"'I'm amazed at the rancor about our numbers -- they are so small,' says Alex Kummant, Amtrak's CEO. 'It costs about $1.50 for every man, woman and child to sustain this network -- one cup of coffee per person. Look at highway congestion, environmental issues, the capacity of airline travel. For city-to-city transportation, we need passenger rail.'
A worthy read, and top-notch work by Parade
As our airways and highways have slowed down, demand for train travel has been increasing. In fact, Amtrak ridership was up for the fifth year in a row, reaching record levels -- despite the fact that a third of trains arrived late last year. In the Northeast, since Amtrak introduced higher-speed Acela trains in 2000, the railroad's share of 10,000 daily commuters between Washington, D.C., and New York City increased from 45% to 54%."
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Saturday, October 27, 2007
Happy 1027 Day!
Okay, one last post before bed. To all my friends and former colleagues over at THE Magazine of Railroading, Happy 1027 Day! Labels: Journalism, Media, Publishing, Railroads, Transportation
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Monday, July 2, 2007
Cult of the Amateur
The New York Times this weekend published a review of Andrew Keen's new book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture. (If the times asks you for a registration to read it, just go to http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.nytimes.com and get a login set.) Labels: Internet, Journalism, Media
Although the title alone suggests this will be an anti-digital rant bordering on the luddite, Keen's theory merits a second glance. Although he takes a few swipes at one of my favorite projects, Wikipedia, he makes a strong case for the gradual replacement of quality content with simple quantity. As Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani summarizes, Keen fears a destruction of truth:"Postings about political candidates, for instance, can be made by opponents disguising their motives; and propaganda can be passed off as news or information. For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to deliver the best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their own subjectivity, and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, in Mr. Keen’s words, to confirm their “own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies.” What’s more, as mutually agreed upon facts become more elusive, informed debate about important social and political issues of the day becomes more difficult as well."
This subject is near and dear to my heart, and has become a centerpiece of some of my academic writing. In a paper entitled "Kuze's Theorem: New Media & The Emerging Solipsism", I pointed to a very similar effect:"The "democratization" of media through the establishment of websites, blogs, and so forth has enabled cults, extremists, and partisans at the expense of the more moderate, homogenized "traditional" media. This has created a networked society where whatever "news" an individual finds and likes can become for them a truth just as valid as any other -- even if it's no more than propaganda. We are in danger of losing ourselves in a sea of media "choice", of enveloping our society into fragmentary fits of what is known as solipsism."
To hear these thoughts voiced and given attention in the Gray Lady certainly makes me feel a bit more secure. But to what avail? How many of the Myspace-friendster-Second Life-Facebook-Yahoo!-orkut-etc.... addicts will read it, and how many that do will care? What Keen is pointing out he is framing as some kind of social ill, implying that there is some action that can be taken to counter it. I view it more as a force of nature, as a kind of human tide. Keen seems to position himself as a modern King Canute, setting his thrown at the shore and ordering the tide back. Me I'm scrambling for some wood to build a raft with.
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Sunday, May 20, 2007
Another one bites the dust?
I've mentioned before the transition that magazines in the railroad enthusiast or "railfan" field have been undergoing. Now, general historians will be mourning the loss of a publishing giant in their niche, American Heritage. Labels: Internet, Journalism, Media, Publishing
Founded in mid 1950s, American Heritage was a highly successful general history rag distributed on newsstands nationwide. According to the New York Times, who reported late last week about the magazine's closure:The circulation is currently 350,000, or as high as it has ever been, and hundreds of those readers can still be reliably counted on to write in arguing about the true causes of the Civil War or, as happened recently, to point out that the author of a World War II article doesn’t know the difference between the M-1 rifle and the M-16, which didn’t come in until Vietnam.
Sound familiar at all? Might the term rivet counters come to mind?
Yet publisher Forbes put the magazine up for sale in January and has had no offers. In the light of this, the company is shutting down production with the June/July issue. For the moment, the staff will continue to maintain the magazine's web site, but there seems to be no clear vision of an all-digital American Heritage either. Indeed, the internet seems to be part of the problem. Editor Richard F. Snow, quoted by the Times story, stated the case like this: "We're really a general interest magazine.... We don’t play to a history buff in any narrow sense -- like the Civil War re-enactors, for example. They can go on the Web and get thousands and thousands of hits."
Again, any bells ringing? Skim the NYT story. Aging readership. Attempts to refocus the editorial direction to a younger audience. Internet incursion. Falling off advertising sales. Patient determined publishers carrying the water.
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Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Thoughts on Railfan Publishing
Over at TheDomeCar@yahoogroups, Mark Perry recently brought up the subject of the future of railfan oriented publications such as TRAINS Magazine or Railfan and Railroad. Many of my comments here are based on a compilation of the posts I have made at The Dome Car; for a fuller exploration of the topic, I encourage you to join the list and plunge into the discussion. Labels: Journalism, Photography, Railroads
Mark's post was inspired by a conversation with a twentysomething railfan he met while trackside. Amongst the younger photographer's remarks:What he did say that captured his attention was of course, the Internet, he said everything you want to know about or see, is on there for only the cost of your monthly internet charge. He mentioned that he had seen or had been on the "other car" discussion group but was turned off by the bragging and bitching going on there???? He had not seen or heard of The Dome Car. He surfs RailPictures quite a bit but does not submit.
Of the magazines he did say he liked, bought and looked forward to seeing, were those special edition issues being put out by TRAINS. The two magazines that I remember him mentioning were, DIESEL VICTORY and LOCOMOTIVE
The comments regarding the net are somewhat amusing to me, and pose a double-edged sword. Although the net is a powerful tool, there is much it lacks. Show me where you can get serious, scholarly historical themed articles online? Show me where you can find in-depth reporting with interviews with principles of major railroads and transportation agencies? Show me where you can find more than a handful of rich, well designed, well edited, well written photo essays? You can find a lot of photos, and you can find a lot of small news snippets, and you can find a lot of rumor, and even more speculation and bitchy arguing.
Sandy Mitchell, who owns The Dome Car, added the following as part of his response to the question:Nowadays, based on my somewhat limited trackside experiences of late, I'm inclined to believe that the divide begins not with Trains-versus-Railfan-versus-RI/PTJ, but between those willing to read paper versus those entirely online....
It may be easy for us to wave our hands dismissively and say "aw, those young punks'll come around", but to be honest, I'm not so sure. We are indeed entering a different era, where railroads seemingly try to hide from the public instead of doing public relations, and where railroad accessibility is seemingly nonexistent in many regions. (I vividly contrast the reception I receive from railroaders in the middle of the Arizona desert with what I get in the urban Northeast.) I repeatedly tell everyone who will listen that the Internet is doing to America in the early 2000s what the railroads did in the mid-nineteenth century -- utterly changing the ways Americans (and, of course, Europeans, Asians, Africans, etc.) live, work, do business, eat, socialize, etc. And it's changing the way we railfan and relate to railroads as well--imagine what a hopeless fantasy train-simulator software and hardware in your own home would have been in the 1970s.
I think Sandy hits it right on the head.
I kind-of straddle the two camps. One one hand, I was in many ways the last of the pre-net generation. I learned my photography on an old brass (heavy as a tank!) GAF 35mm SLR, and my first real camera was a Pentax K1000. I came of age with computers but without the net. I began subscribing to TRAINS at about 16 and kept it up for years and years, skimming each issue in hopes of learning the latest doings in my neck of the woods. Yet as soon as I gained the net, I really plunged in. I invested in Wifi from day one of being plugged on the net at home. I joined eleventeen-thousand Yahoo lists. I started a railfan webzine which had a healthy but excessively exhausting two year run. Looking at my contemporaries in my generation and those of the younger one who I socialize with, the ideas of the twentysomething railfan that Mark talked to are extremely familiar, and I am sympathetic with them.
I had the pleasure of working for TRAINS routinely for about two years, and those years taught me that there's still a lot that the traditional publishing model can bring to the table that has value. But even so, consumers don't always make rational decisions; short attention spans combined with the net's "cost-plus-free" instant gratification are potent factors.
I suspect there are some business models for paper printing that will survive. Certainly amongst those of us snobby enough to think higher of our photos than snapshots, the ego stroking of being published appeals. Plus there's the less egotistical finickiness of wanting a printed, high quality image rather than pixels on a screen.
The fact remains, however, that most young people have the net at their finger tips, every day, 24 hours a day, and generally on their parent's or school's dime. They tend to shoot digital, making electronic transfer one click and no dollars away. Unlike the 1960s, 70s, 80s, or early 90s, they don't perceive a need for print as a source of news, and likely don't care about in-depth analysis that publishing-quality writers increasingly must provide. Bottom line: they don't need print, like many of us did.
The net also provides something that I occasionally -- no, frequently -- lament, that print doesn't in a significant way: the ability to participate in the medium. On paper, this was limited to either writing the editor a letter and hoping it got published, or writing a story or sending in a photo for publication and crossing ones fingers. On the net though, anyone who can type or can upload a photo -- and thats a really low bar -- can participate directly in "publication". Instead of reading the Professional Iconoclast or Don Phillips, they can strut onto a bulletin board and pretend they are just as knowledgeable. This post for one, and The Dome Car list where the discussion originated for another, are great examples of that. We could never have had this debate on print, short of sending a lot of letters, spending a lot on stamps, and standing at a Xerox for a long, long time. Sure, there's a ton of white noise, but the younger generation has always known it, it doesn't bother them as much because its part of the world they grew up with.
The publishing industry, in general, is on a slow but steady decline, and isn't near bottoming out yet. There is absolutely no good reason to expect these wired, net-raised kids to suddenly wake up one day and go, "hey, I really need to subscribe to Railfan and Railroad!" They might, for the heck of it, because they have extra cash and need something to burn it on. To do that, though, publishers have to be more careful about providing relevant content. Kalmbach, the publisher of TRAINS, seems to be trying the special issue route as an answer and it seems to work for them; there might be other angles. I don't think anyone should get out funeral pyres for publishing. The publishing industry in general, and the railfan publishing industry in specific, will survive. But to do so they will have to adapt, and in a way that goes far beyond just adding a website and putting some "look at our site" pointers in the magazine.
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Wednesday, April 4, 2007
New article published
Meanwhile, I'd also like to announce a new article publication. The May 2007 issue of TRAINS Magazines has an article by myself and Dan Haneckow titled MAX at Night. It's a 6-page photo essay focusing on what happened behind the scenes at TriMet's MAX Light Rail Service. Labels: Journalism, Photography
Many thanks go out to Mary Fetsch at TriMet for working with Dan and I over the last two years of this project. It's been a long process but I think it turned out quite nice. Thanks also go to Jim Wrinn, Editor at TRAINS for taking the risk to run a photo essay on transit; to Kathi Kube, TRAINS' Managing Editor and the project editor for this story; and to the Art Department at the magazine, who made our story and photos look so good.
Last of all, but not least, thanks to Dan who came up with the brilliant idea and who soldiered through the all-nighter (and the long writing process!) with me.
Look for the magazine on newsstands near you starting this week. You can also order it direct from Kalmbach Publishing at 800.533.6644, Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Central Time.
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Thanks Jim!
I've added The Rookie Year to the site at last. Many thanks go to Jim Wrinn, Editor of TRAINS Magazine for giving the permission to make this possible. The story also has a small image of Harold Highballs, a painting I created specifically for this story. I am thinking of writing a piece on creating this painting sometime in the near future. Stay tuned. Labels: Journalism, Watercolor
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Thursday, February 9, 2006
New PJ Blog
Chris Crook, a photojournalist in rural Ohio, has started a blog on the experience. It's an interesting and fairly unique read for those interested in the "supply side" of media. Labels: Journalism
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Deconstructing Wikipedia
Wikipedia, the world's largest participatory encyclopedia project, is coming under closer scrutiny by established media sources. In an Online Journalism Review article, blogger Ray Grieselhuber takes a critical aim at Wikipedia, and suggests six "solutions". Labels: Journalism
While Ray has some interesting points, I couldn't help but feel that some of the suggestions were highly impractical for implementation on what is, to a great extent, an open source project. Here's part of my response:"There's a couple of things going on here to pay attention to. In a broader sense, it's a darwinistic approach to an encyclopedia, relying on the numbers to correct the mistakes and inaccuracies. As a very, very minor-league Wikipedian, I can say that the "sofixit" response is indeed the best, only, and most successful one. It relies on no centralized control, but instead on *us*. That's one of the basic premises of Wikipedia -- harnessing the network of users across the globe, instead of a central hierarchal editor pyramid. If you don't like open source, then don't use Wikipedia, because that is the very heart of its concept. Go use Britanica.
"Sofixit" is, in fact, the only reason I started posting to Wikipedia -- I spotted some articles in fields I am knowledgeable in that were egregiously wrong, and corrected them. It was either that, or complain about inaccuracies -- I put my money where my mouth was. Why is this too much to ask of, well, in this case, the entire World?"
For the rest, see the comments section of Ray's piece on OJR. As of today, it was the last post.
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