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White House admits first blogger to briefing, CNN demonstrates that they don’t get it

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Link!

Upshot: A blogger has been credentialled to attend the daily briefings in the White House press room. Hurray for progress!

My Take: CNN’s article screwed up the link to the bloggers’ site. The link to http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc was correctly written in HTML, but their style pages assume that ANY link must be a link to something on CNN.com. The result was “http://www.cnn.com/http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/” In short, CNN is epitomizing mainstream media’s take on the blogosphere by screwing up their reporting of it.

See, the way it’s SUPPOSED to work is that you link to sources so that interested readers can go learn more than just what you’re reporting. Mainstream Media doesn’t like to do that, and when CNN tried to do it, their own page templates screwed it up INSTITUTIONALLY.

Hurray for progress indeed. 🙂

–Howard

6 thoughts on “White House admits first blogger to briefing, CNN demonstrates that they don’t get it”

  3. In all fairness, I see that happen even on smart, web-savvy, terminally hip websites like Gizmodo and Boingboing.

    But still.

  4. BUT! The BBC got it right a long time ago

    Howard is dead on that mainstream media is averse to anything that they can’t control, with a singular notable exception: The BBC

    The BBC got this right some time back and now the BBC News site regularly carries links to external sites that show accounts of the same stories and often to blogs as well.

    I’m just crowing a little ‘cos I was one of the original core team members that help put it together over 10 years ago. Albeit the core team had more people than Larry H Miller has car salesmen 😉

  6. Slashdot

    This is exactly why sites such Slashdot gained so much popularity early on. They weren’t doing the writeup, just a comment with links to the places that had the info. People wanted the aggregation, and the chance to discuss that with similar people.

    Of course, you have to continue developing, or fall stagnant.

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