Category: 2004 US Election

CNN helped, even made money from, the fake Medicare news fiasco?

CJR Campaign Desk: Archives:

But some also expressed strong displeasure with CNN, which distributes pre-packaged stories to local stations around the country through its CNN Newsource service, acting as a sort of wire service for TV. Veazey said that when his station receives VNR footage from CNN, it’s clearly labeled in the slug at the top as VNR. But other news directors told us that’s not the case in their systems: You have to search through the footage to find the VNR I.D. Henderson, of WTVC-Chattanooga, told us his station “ran what appeared to be a reporter’s package, which aggravates the mistake.” And Lynn Brooks of WVUA-Tuscaloosa, confirmed in an email to a viewer, obtained by Campaign Desk, that when her station received the Medicare story, it “was designated as a ‘reporter package’, with nothing distinguishing it as a video news release.” CNN, she said, “dropped the ball.” Akins of KSEE-Fresno agreed: “I think CNN does a disservice to its affiliates” by including VNR packages in its stream of news footage. “They should create a separate VNR feed,” she said.

According to the news directors, CNN makes money on both ends of the process. Understandably, it charges the news stations a fee to subscribe to its satellite news feed service, just as the Associated Press charges the newspapers it serves. But Larry Moskowitz of Medialink (which Moskowitz told Campaign Desk is the world’s largest producer and distributor of VNRs) confirmed that CNN Newsource and other similar services also charge the VNR distributor, by leasing transmission time on the satellite news feed that then goes out to local stations.

Hmm, I worked with CNN Newsource quite a bit during my time at CNN.com: it’s unfortunate to read this. I hope it was just a mistake: I’m sure the feed data has changed since last I saw any of that stuff, assuming I could remember it. I think there’s a true video browsing system in place now, so my memories are obsolete, I’m sure.

Background: the project I worked on was a precursor of this, I think: an online feed parser/browser system that took feed data from the newsroom system, parsed it, and inserted it into mSQL. The resulting application allowed subscribing stations to see lists of what packages were available, with the dateline, reporter’s details, and some descriptive information (often the lead-in text).

Does anyone like TypeKey?

TeledyN: MT To Reinvent Drupal Authentication:

To mimick the proposed TypeKey selective-ban policies, any network member site would apply a JayAllen ban-pattern list to the full login name@server, but they might also now ban the specific authenticating server — if some server starts to pollute our network with bad IDs, like a lame nameserver, it gets itself excluded from the gene pool (but it could still be considered reliable and just in some other network); we may even improve on the JayAllen content-based filter by adding a facility to ban by point of entry into the network.

Gary reviews the various arguments for and against the new TypeKey authentication {proposal|meme}, and perhaps unintentionally makes a counter-proposal.

The whole thing is quite tiresome (don’t any of us have anything more important to talk/think about?), but one of the reasons webloggers even take up the filthy habit is a sense of “I know better” . . .

What seems to stick in everyone’s throat about this is the lack of transparency and openness about it: “just trust us, we know best” doesn’t get you far with this crowd.

I guess the only thing to do is wait for MT 3.0 to be released so the new APIs can be leveraged for something people will hate less.

and the beat goes on

Harpers.org: Weekly Review:

The Congressional Budget Office published calculations showing that the federal budget deficit is largely a result of President Bush’s tax cuts and spending increases; the agency estimated that only 6 percent of the deficit was the result of economic weakness. The Pentagon was withholding a $300 million payment for Halliburton until auditors make sure that the government was not overcharged. The Bush Administration’s Medicare cover-up continued to unravel . . . .

an easy one for the lazy web

For some reason (dimness, I suspect) I can’t map the copious documentation about mod_rewrite onto my trivial problem.

I fat-fingered my archive format when I switched from numbered to dated archives: the URIs all have a _ before the .html. Not content to leave well enough alone, or perhaps that was causing a problem when the archives were written, I changed the config to remove the offending underscore.

In the meantime, Google and sundry other indexers had taken note of the old format, so switching meant breaking some URIs.

It seemed to me that something like this:

RewriteRule ^(.*)_\.html$ $1.html [R]

should work. But no such luck.

Can anyone show me the error of my ways?

your tax dollars at work

help make sure the Department of Homeland Security has its best face on . . . .

USAJobs:

The Entertainment Liaison Office supports the Office of Public Affairs by influencing how the Department of Homeland Security is portrayed in mass entertainment media. It helps to ensure accurate portrayal of the department’s mission, policies, and activities, while proactively working to help the American public better identify DHS functions.

The salary range for this position is:

* GS-14: $89,239 – $116,013 per annum

* GS-15: $104,971- $136,466 per annum.

via Boing Boing.

Can’t say the administration isn’t creating jobs . . .

adding trackbacks to published posts?

I just discovered a posting of mine that I should have invoked the Lazyweb’s collective genius on, but I don’t see how I can do that, now that it’s published. So this is a two-fer request: one for how to add trackbacks to older posts and one for a smarter email client that can offer to filter mail for you, based on observed patterns.

The original post is here and the content is below:

Feature request: mail filter suggestions
This is for all email clients on all platforms.

I keep running into people who moan about how much email they get and how they so far behind blah blah blah . . . . .

Do these people not understand what mail filters are for or how they work? I have to wonder if they understand the basics of filing paper documents: the principles are the same. What I have done for years is take my most frequent correspondents and filtered their email in their own mailbox, so a. I don’t miss any of their mail, and b. to unclutter my inbox. The stuff that doesn’t fall under any rubric stays in the inbox and can be dealt with as I get to it. But stuff from the people who I correspond with frequently gets filtered out so I can be sure I get to it.

Is this so hard? The people who tell me they have 700 or 1000 unread emails probably need it all printed out for them: perhaps they would find it easier to deal with.

So my feature request would be for an email client to review the corpus of already received email against new email and offer to create a filter based on the receiver’s sender’s particulars.

Apparently some folks need the help with this . . . . .

sidetracked

Dear Concerned Listener:

“When I made the decision to cancel ‘The Loh Life,’ I was not in possession of all the facts regarding this unfortunate incident, specifically that it had been Sandra’s practice to leave instructions for her engineer to bleep out certain words, and that this practice had never before gone awry,” said [KCRW GM Ruth] Seymour. “I regret having jumped to conclusions about what happened and for erroneously accusing Sandra of an ‘intentional’ breach of our broadcast standards.”

If you read the whole statement, you learn that this was a taped piece, not a live broadcast. So I’m not sure why the engineer who failed to follow the instructions (as had been done on prior occasions) wasn’t canned, instead of the commentator.

And of course, we can thank the FCC for this, for cracking down on free thinkers like Sandra Tsing Loh, Howard Stern, and Bono, whether you agree with them or not, while the broadcasting companies who license the airwaves from us — has the FCC ever revoked a license for irresponsible behavior? — can continue to create thirty-third rate programs and pay for them with stupid, inappropriate advertising.

stewardship

If I belonged to a community of belief that considered all life to be sacred and believed that the world and everything in it were under my stewardship, what would be my response to the news that many species of previously common creatures — not those on endangered lists — were in possibly irrecoverable decline due to human activity?

Would I be able to consider myself a good steward of the planet? Would I be able to look my Creator in the face and tell Him I had done my best to preserve His gifts to me and my brothers and sisters?

So why isn’t conservation and wildlife protection a religious issue? Why aren’t people of faith on the front lines in the few wild places we have left? Why does it always seem to be the godless non-mainstream types who put the health of the planet at the top of their list, while those who claim to be in regular communication with the force they think created it don’t seem to care?
Continue reading “stewardship”