yelvington.com

Bob Cox has written a clear dissection of the AP vs. Cadenhead uproar that everyone should read carefully. It's not the case of Evil Giant versus the Blogosphere that some of the more hysterical responses have assumed. More like bumbling giant versus bumbling aggregator.

In an op-ed for the big paper on the left coast, journalism professor Michael Skube complains that "the blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined."

"One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more," he writes.

One does? Perhaps one gets such an uneasy sense from not reading the blogs about which one is opining. Or from not writing what actually gets published.

I have to wonder whether the Los Angeles Times is playing the troll or the fool in this little operetta. I'm not sure which is worse. We all would be best served by journalism that aims to provide light and not merely heat, and that applies to the op-ed page.

See also:

Jay Rosen
Dan Gillmor
Ed Cone, from 2005
Paul "the Real Paul" Jones

Update: A couple of midafternoon additions move this forward a bit. CBS Public Eye's Matthew Felling points out Skube's "selective quoting'; The Telegraph's Shane Richmond defends Jay Rosen's stiletto jab at Skube, and Jay Rosen launches a crowdsourced effort to create a response aimed at educating the readers of LATimes.com, and maybe even a journalism professor here and there.

Fascinating and fast-moving.

A couple of recent launches highlight just how much participation has become part of the mainstream.

Boston got a fourth daily newspaper this week, its second free daily, with the launch of BostonNow. Most free metro (lower case M) dailies have been slow to come to grips with the participative nature of the net, but this one comes right out of the gate with a focus on the Web: Blogs for everyone (at least, as soon as they get Wordpress working) and, for people with way too much time on their hands, a live webcast of the daily 1pm news meeting. Editor John Wilpers, who is writing about all of this on Blogspot, promises to pick up the lead paragraphs of the best blogs for printing in the paper, with pointers back to the Web.

Chicago's Sun-Times group, which now includes an impressive stack of suburban weeklies and dailies, has begun rolling out a series of hyperlocal participative websites under the NeighborhoodCircle.com brand. It, too, is a work in progress -- as I write this, only Montgomery, Oswego and Yorkville (all fairly distant from the city core) are launched, and earlier this week some of the Yorkville pages linked to Oswego, but they're working on it. They have the usual set of features including blogs, community calendar and photo galleries for all.

Neither site has any social networking functionality -- the buddy lists and personal profile/self-expression pages that are at the heart of sites like MySpace.com. We and our friends in Bakersfield have both found social networking tools to be a very worthwhile addition.

Of the two, NeighborhoodCircle may have the more difficult challenge. BostonNow.com is launching at the same time as the newspaper, and will naturally benefit from joint promotional efforts and the "shiny new toy" syndrome. The Chicago effort has a brand that is distinct from the motley collection of newspaper names that are behind it. It will need a tremendous promotional and community development effort -- not just a few in-paper ads -- to establish the buzz necessary to get an interactive community site up and running.