I'm mostly happy with how this article came out. Some of the editorial at the beginning caught me out of left field. Columbus bloggers are affluent white kids? Huh?  :?

 

<img src="http://theotherpaper.com/top5-8/coverphoto.jpg">

 

<b>YOU'RE WELCOME</b>

BY LYNDSEY TETER / MAY 8, 2008

 

A civic divide is growing in Columbus.  For the past decade or so, ordinary people have become less inclined to call their political representatives or drive all the way down to City Hall to personally lobby government officials.  But a community of tech-savvy, affluent white kids say they’re picking up the slack.  Columbus’s bloggers believe they’re furthering democracy, improving the economy and advancing humanity—all without missing Grey’s Anatomy.  Ranked as the No. 8 most active blogging community in the nation, an estimated 10 percent of Columbus inhabitants regularly pounded the keyboard in 2007, offering up online commentary themselves or consuming somebody else’s, according to Nielson Media Research. 

 

Walker Evans, the longest-running and best-read Columbus blogger, described his vocation in similarly grandiose terms.  Six and half years earlier, long before online diaries were trendy, Evans began ColumbusUnderground.com as a mere side project. Nowadays, the community message board hauls in about 200,000 visitors a month.  His personal companion blog, an offshoot of CU called the Walker Evans Effect, draws in a couple hundred visitors a day. Web traffic is high enough that, unlike other local bloggers, Evans is able to run Columbus Underground as a for-profit business.

 

LINK: http://theotherpaper.com/top5-8/coverstory.htm

Way to go Walker, you affluent white kid.  :wink:

From here: http://walker.columbusunderground.com/?p=628

 

It’s 2008, and The Other Paper doesn’t understand the Internet

Posted on May 9th, 2008

 

First off, let me say that I was mostly happy with the way <a href="http://theotherpaper.com/top5-8/coverstory.htm">the article</a> turned out in this week's Other Paper. I believe that Columbus has a great online community, and any attention (no matter how slanted) given to bloggers is good news.

 

That being said, there were some standard Other Paper problems with the way this story was presented. Allow me to start from the beginning.

 

I got a facebook message from Lyndsey Teeter, a writer for the Other Paper, stating her interest in doing a story on the "local blogging scene". I was a bit wary to meet with her at first, as I've never been a huge fan of the way The Other Paper editorializes their stories. I've talked to many friends who have been interviewed by The Other Paper, and more often than not they wind up unhappy with how their quotes get used out of context, and how the editorial slant gives them a false appearance contrary to how they actually feel.

 

Honestly though, I really didn't have anything bad to say about the local blogging community, so I couldn't imagine there could be any way that I could be misrepresented. I got in touch with Lyndsey and we headed over to <a href="http://www.urban-spirit.com/">Urban Spirit</a> to chat.

 

Lyndsey started off by explaining to me that she was new to writing for The Other Paper and hadn't seen anything in their archives where they had done any sort of feature on the local blogging scene before. She sounded like she was fairly in tune with the goings-on of the local internet community, but the management at The Other Paper was not. She told me that there was a sort of preconceived notion at The Other Paper that bloggers are nothing more than self-important show-offs who have too much keyboarding time on their hands. I did my best to explain that blogs are really just a type of online syndication tool that can be used for a variety of purposes. Some blogs can be personal. Some are topical. Some are community driven. I rattled off plenty of diverse examples of local blogs, all of which are run by people who I've met and are far from being self-important or show-offs. When she asked for recommendations for contacts, I rattled off my laundry list of fellow bloggers who have been around the longest and could offer some good insight on the community as a whole.

 

We continued to converse for around an hour. I answered questions and brought up some ideas. When we talked about the traditional media, I told her that I rarely pick up print copies of The Dispatch, The Alive, The Other Paper, or anything else for that matter. I read all of their content online, and direct others to do the same on a daily basis through links on ColumbusUnderground. I mentioned how both The Alive and The Dispatch have writer's blogs that act as great interactive supplements for their articles and suggested that The Other Paper do something similar. I expressed my disappointment that The Other Paper only puts three articles online each week leaving a lot of their content going unread in the print edition.

 

I was specifically asked to name some things that ColumbusUnderground was "responsible for". I tried to explained that it was a bit difficult to claim credit for anything since the site is more of an idea incubator, and not always a way to take physical action on anything. We discussed how the Indie Art Capital movement was born out of a conversation on CU, as well as how communication across the site helped people to connect and keep Via Colori alive in 2007 when it was nearly canceled. There's been plenty of other ideas that have appeared on the site, and then come to life. Sometimes there's some genuine inspiration there, and other times it's just coincidence. It's a very hard thing to measure, and I didn't want to even attempt to take credit for anything just loosely or indirectly associated with CU.

 

Anyway, I left the conversation feeling mostly positive. Lyndsey was very nice, and we followed up a bit in email with some more supplemental information. Mostly just things I didn't have on the top of my head when we met.

 

And how did it all turn out? Well... if you read <a href="http://theotherpaper.com/top5-8/coverstory.htm">the article</a> you'll probably spot a lot of things slipped in there that cast my presentation in a strange light. Such as:

 

    * The headline: “You’re Welcome”. Sounds like the local blogging community loves to pat themselves on the back. Not sure where that came from.

 

    * “Tech-savvy affluent white kids”. This description really baffled me. I’m not sure why the the insulting or condescending description was necessary, as it’s very obvious that bloggers go beyond any sort of racial, technological, or age stereotypes. Does The Other Paper also think that bloggers live in their parents’ basements?

 

    * The stat revealing that 10% of Columbus being bloggers does not equate to 90% of Columbus viewing blogs as a waste of time. There are people who read blogs and those who write them. This sort of logic applied to the Other Paper would mean that only .001% percent of people in Columbus write for The Other Paper, while the other 99.999% think The Other Paper is a waste of time.

 

    * My supposed “grandiose terms”. I like to think I’m a fairly humble guy. Playing moderator on Columbus Underground keeps me moderate. That’s my job. Lyndsey and I joked about “local internet celebrities” while making the finger quotes in the air. There’s nothing grandiose about the way I present myself or my projects, and I certainly would never say anything close to “I’m saving the city”. The “delusions of grandeur” comments are completely fabricated.

 

    * My Dispatch quote was truncated and used completely out of context to make it sound like I was trying to take a stab at them. I really don’t think it’s all that ethical to use people as a tool for The Other Paper to poke at The Dispatch. Isn’t there enough slapfighting in other articles already?

 

    * The Social Media Cafe was made out to be something overly pompous and silly because of one person’s project, and was then juxtaposed with Mayoral Spokesman Mike Brown stating the important of “these people”. Sort of a classic Other Paper move to mash things together and let your content ridicule itself.

 

And finally, one of the closing comments in the article:

 

<em>"Whatever else you say about the bloggers, they’re doing their part to shed Columbus of its unhelpful humility."</em>

 

Thanks Other Paper, for sticking with your preconceived notions, and shoehorning something positive that people are trying to do for their community into something you'd prefer to ridicule.

 

Come to think of it, now that I've picked the whole article apart and ran it under a microscope, I'm not really very happy at all with the way it came out. It's insulting for a news publication to ask someone to take part in a story and then ridicule them with editorial.

 

I don't think I'll be speaking to anyone at The Other Paper anymore, and won't advise that anyone else do the same unless you don't mind your contribution taking a back seat to their condescending vision of your livelihood.

when i first shacked up with my spouse to be, we lived in grandview & the three additional apts in our building were writers for the other paper. we would all sit in the backyard and the conversations were very interesting to say the least, i heard all the local scandal and all that.

 

2/3 of them were from affluent white folks families. i remember one grew up on w25th st in the cleve, so i took that as not affluent.

 

I don't understand why the article has Walker quoted as saying he never picks up the dispatch anymore?  But when you go to Columbus Underground, half the articles posted seem to be from the dispatch.  I can see the semantics argument that he doesn't actually pick the newspaper up to read it, but he goes to dispatch.com, grabs their article, posts it up and lets people comment on it. In fact, I would venture to say if it wasn't for print media's emergence online, there would be no columbus underground and he wouldn't be able to make money off of the Dispatch's work.  And even further, blogs like crooksandliars.com and redstate.org etc would not be around either.  The simple fact of the matter is that most of what's found on the internet is just someone reprinting what someone else wrote in a different medium.

 

Ahh.. Well I just read Walker's response and he explains the Dispatch thing pretty clearly.  So disregard my last post please  :-D

Awesome job, Walker!

Ahh.. Well I just read Walker's response and he explains the Dispatch thing pretty clearly.  So disregard my last post please  :-D

 

Heh, yeah, I've got no beef with any of our local media outlets. For the most part, our local reporters do a great job and I'm always more than happy to point links towards articles worth reading on relevant topics for the visitors to our site, just as is done here on Urban Ohio.

 

Oh well. Next week no one will even remember this Other Paper article since it's not archived online. ;)

Actually there are some pretty neat urban blogs out there.  I recall some good ones from Buffalo NY (and Critical Spatial Practice), which inspired me to experiment on this for Dayton.

 

Here in Dayton believe it or not a newsy wanted to interview me about some industrial stats/geography stuff I posted at my blog for an article he was working on on de-industriailzation!

 

I was really suprised at that.

 

I e-mailed him that I am not a reliable source as I am "out of my field"  (that my blog posts were more opinion and amateur analyses) and suggested he contact some experts at UD or WSU for hist story.

 

There is a sort of conceit that bloggers and blogging are this alternative news source, and one sometimes runs across this new journalism/muckraking tone.  Which might be accurate if they have access to insider knowlege or are insiders themselves.  For me its just a form of "info-tainment"...that when I blog its just this joe blow playing around with census data.