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While the above is satire, the event was real:
http://eddriscoll.com/archives/008051.php
While the above is satire, the event was real:
http://eddriscoll.com/archives/008051.php
Live Blogging The OSM Launch
By Ed Driscoll · November 16, 2005 10:09 AM · The New, New Journalism
Unlike Jeff Goldstein, I'm actually here, so the following will be tempered by a generous interaction with reality. But here goes...
10:05: Folks are wandering in: Neo-Neocon is talking to my wife about hate email; Evan Coyne Maloney just introduced himself to Charles Johnson.
10:06: Announcement to take a seat.
10:07: Andrew Breitbart is at the podium, introducing OSM to the audience, which looks to be about 90 to 100 people, based on a very, very quick and rough table count.
10Breitbart: "Roger and Charles have gone on a shopping spree and linked together 50 of my favorite bookmarks."
10:12: Brietbart introduces Roger L. Simon.
Roger's speech explains the origins of the Pajamas Media meme. Here's the final draft, Roger may have made a few extemporaneous minor changes:
I would like to welcome you all to the launch and before we ignite our site say a few words about what was once Pajamas Media and is now OSM Open Source Media the new media paradigm for the 21st Century.
Pajamas Media, as many of you know, was a name conceived in ironic recognition of a moment in the history of the Internet, that moment when supposedly-amateurish bloggers in pajamas accused a major figure of the mainstream media, an anchorman, no less, of deceiving the American public with forged documents. Despite a sea of denials, that same anchorman has now resigned his position and, a year or so later, some of those same bloggers stand before you today to inaugurate a new and fully-funded online media company.
So times have changed.
But with changing times comes responsibility. We dont want just to criticize a short run thing. We want to be constructive a long run thing. Were here to stay. And so we needed a new name. But what does that name mean and whats this new company about?
Open Source Media is a new meeting ground for opinion and news online - a unique home for the growing movement of citizen journalism. It amalgamates over 70 thoughtful webloggers from around the globe with mainstream media journalists sympathetic to our goals. Even though we will emphasize bloggers, this is, to our knowledge, the first deliberate blend of these factions to create the next phase in online media, that new media paradigm. As our numbers increase, we will carefully evolve even further into what we hope will be the global news service of the future, replete with a clear and definitive firewall between news and opinion and detailed fact-checking protocols to go along with that. The Internet, via instant messaging and other technologies, is an ideal place to develop new methodologies to assure the accuracy of content and we welcome everyones input in this regard. With hundreds of thousands of potential fact checkers online, we have the potential to be more credible and reliable than mainstream media outlets from CBS to the New York Times. We would also point out that such events as the revolutions in the Ukraine and Lebanon, the Asian tsunami and hurricane Katrina have already shown us that blogs on the scene are fully capable of scooping the mainstream media.
Our criticism of traditional media has been its inability, whether through bias or negligence, to correct itself when the inevitable mistakes occur. (Weve already made plenty ourselves.) And when mainstream media finally makes corrections, they are usually buried in the back pages of a newspaper, sometimes weeks after the actual error was made. We, at OSM, in our allegiance to openness, take the opposite approach. We will publicize our errors on our front page on a continuing basis, inviting readers, bloggers and other interested parties to engage with us in the search for truth.
But we are only beginning this effort. That blog news service, limited or elaborate, is still in our future. We have other more immediate and developed approaches to news and blogging we will show you in a few minutes. But our guiding principle, now and in the future, will be this openness as practiced by citizen journalists in a free and respectful manner.
When we speak of citizen journalism, we mean journalism created not by elites, as in the top-down traditional media, but from the bottom-up by citizens using their observations and knowledge, informed by a desire to speak honestly.
Not all who have joined this effort are or will be bloggers. Some are professional journalists, prominent writers who work from this position of openness and responsiveness, like Claudia Rosett of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and David Corn of The Nation, both members of our editorial advisory board. David also blogs, of course. Others are bloggers of long standing and respect like our Australian editor Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club who has flown in from Sydney to be with us today
[Richard says hello]
and our Western European Editor Jose Guardia of Barcepundit, who greets us from Barcelona
[a greeting from Barcepundit on webcam here]
And the Fadhlil Brothers, Omar and Mohammed, who have gained world recognition for their blog Iraq the Model
[UNFORTUNATELY, A LINK TO OMAR AND MOHAMMED WAS IMPOSSIBLE--ED]
Others will be lesser-known emerging bloggers to whom we make a special commitment to promulgate and encourage their work. We are designing a system for spotlighting them and will feature it on our site in forthcoming months.
Taking our themes from the foundations of democracy itself, we expect all who join us to be willing to have their opinions challenged by the humblest competitor, and to acknowledge the truth quickly and wherever it falls. Citizen journalism at its best means the pursuit of this often-elusive truth above all things, including partisanship and the financial interests of the medium publishing it.
OSM seeks to expand the influence of weblogs by finding and promoting the best of these citizen journalists. We will provide a forum for them, and a platform from which they can increase their financial viability through advertising and syndication. In so doing, we do not intend to overthrow the mainstream media but to enhance it and maybe change it a little bit by making it more responsive.
We also - and this is especially important - have already affiliated bloggers and journalists across the political spectrum and are continuing to reach out to all sides. This is quite deliberate. Mainstream media frequently fosters partisanship. We intend to foster dialogue. The interactive nature of the Internet facilitates this and we would like to maximize it. We believe that Americans are not as easily categorized politically as the mainstream media would have us believe. Toward that end, OSM has already commissioned some studies in conjunction with Princeton Research. We will be issuing more extensive conclusions shortly, but preliminary results are dramatic. According to our poll, taken by Princeton, a full forty-three percent of Americans are uncomfortable being labeled liberal or conservative - or even moderate.
[shows page from poll]
Thats far more, obviously, than any of the other categories by themselves. Americans, apparently, just dont like to be labeled; at least not with the labels theyve been given.
Hybrids arent just for cars. We are a nation of political hybrids. The mainstream media, however, has preferred to regard politics as sports, placing all of us in rigid categories like sports fans, as if supporting a political party or point of view were as unified and unthinking as allegiance to the Lakers or the Celtics. OSM questions that.
But speaking of sports, OSM is not going to be all politics, all the time. Far from it. We already have many lifestyle blogs--you'll be hearing from The Manolo later on! in areas from fashion to spelunking, some of which are going to be featured here today.
On the business side, our demographics are already remarkably high. Our larger blogs frequently get over two hundred thousand visitors a day with many millions of page views a month. From our own internal studies, the average visitor on these blogs has a profile similar to the New Yorker in income and education six figures in income and graduate to post graduate in education. Also, they are the kind of early adopters that should be attractive to advertisers in terms not just of purchasing power, but also in word of mouth. They are the people who create trends and fashion. But you need not trust us about this. We are already embarked on official studies via Nielsen and iPro that will be made available to you.
But enough of this theoretical palaver, lets have a look at our site or what we call our common pages.
My partner in crime, co-founder of OSM, Charles Johnson of the enormously popular Little Green Footballs blog and I will now ignite our site .
