“News is what the consensus of journalists determines it to be.”-BBC journalist, Andrew Marr
*****
I think it is time for a military blogger (milblogger) to get one of those snazzy George Polk Awards. That is the fair thing to do in my book, and it would be a recognition of the power of new media and it’s importance to the war effort.
Or do the folks at Long Island University only recognize writers/journalists that produce inaccurate and highly slanderous books about Blackwater? Or does Long Island University only recognize bloggers that are actually more main stream media, than blogger? For example, I don’t have 7 journalists working for me at Feral Jundi or pay salaries out to anyone. Hell, I don’t even have a editor or marketing director.
What I am saying is that it would be really cool to see a guy like Michael Yon get a George Polk Award either for journalism or for photography, or even both! (hint, hint)
And what defines important journalism in the eyes of the panel? The stuff that Michael has produced is absolutely incredible. Hell, the work done by today’s milbloggers is amazing, because they are the ones that are driving the discussion and invigorating the debate about the correct direction in this war. How about the guys at Small Wars Journal or even the Long War Journal for example? And what really puts these bloggers front and center is that they are usually soldiers, reporting from the front lines, and pouring their hearts out about what they think is the right direction. They research, they write, they speak the truth, and care about getting the war effort on the right footing.
I guess my point is, is that if this award actually means something in the world of journalism, then why are there not more awards being presented to bloggers, and especially milbloggers? We are the new media, and we are contributing greatly to the national and international discussion. We do speak truth to power and we are a part of the consensus, and it is time for the George Polk Award to recognize that milbloggers have contributed greatly to that consensus.
So this is what you guys can do. Submit, submit and submit. Get your best stuff out to these guys, and force them to acknowledge our existence. Let’s get one of our own up on that list of George Polk Awardees, and bring some recognition and respect upon those that actually deserve it.-Matt
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A Web-only news operation gets its due
By Noam Cohen
Published: Sunday, February 24, 2008
NEW YORK — Of the many landmarks along a journalist’s career, two stand out: winning an award and making a government back down. Last week, Joshua Micah Marshall achieved both.
On Tuesday, it was announced that he had won a Polk Award for Legal Reporting for coverage of the firing of U.S. attorneys by administration of President George W. Bush. The “tenacious investigative reporting sparked interest by the traditional news media and led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales,” the Polk award citation read.
Also last week, the Department of Justice put Marshall back on its mailing list for credentialed reporters after removing him last year.
What makes last week special for many of Marshall’s readers is that he does not belong to any traditional news organization. Instead, he is creating his own. His Web site, Talking Points Memo, is the first Internet-only news operation to receive the Polk (though in 2003, the committee gave an award for Internet reporting to the Center for Public Integrity), and certainly one of the most influential political blogs in the United States.
To scores of bloggers, it was a case of local boy makes good. Many took it as vindication of their enterprise – that anyone can assume the mantle of reporting on the pressing issues affecting the country, whether with the imprimatur of a mainstream media outlet or not. And, most reassuringly, it showed that somehow, some way, somebody out there was paying attention.
Marshall was recognized for a style of online reporting that greatly expands the definition of blogging. The differences from the clichéd pajama-wearing, coffee-sipping commentator on the news – the crude image of a blogger among those who rarely read one – are obvious. He has a newsroom and seven journalists who report for his sites, including two in Washington.
Yet Marshall does not shy away from the word. “I think of us as journalists, the medium we work in is blogging,” he said, which could mean everything from the tone of the writing to the fact that articles are displayed in reverse chronological order. “We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead there are an ongoing series of dispatches.”
About seven years ago, Marshall was a doctoral candidate in early American history at Brown University, and also the Washington editor of the liberal magazine The American Prospect and a new blogger. He started his blog as an outlet for his ideas and to track the recount fight in Florida – the name came from a term bandied about during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
“If I had quickly happened into a staff position at The New Yorker, I probably wouldn’t have done this,” Marshall, 39, said of his seven-year migration to full-time online journalism.
In that time, he seems to have followed the opposite of a dot-com business model: Begin as a tiny operation. Manage to gain a following. As the audience grows, ask readers for donations and accept advertising. As the advertising and donations grow, add reporters and features. Repeat as often as needed.
Ads came in the autumn of 2003, when the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was captivating a politically active portion of the Internet, and “I remember there being peak days of 60,000 page views, which was really incredible,” he said. “Ads started bringing in, in relative terms, a decent income for me relatively quickly.”
Soon thereafter was the first fund-raiser, to cover the cost of reporting on the New Hampshire primary. It brought in $6,000 in about 24 hours. Since then there have been fund-raisers in 2005 to create new projects: TPM Café, where readers and experts can debate political issues, and TPM Muckraker, the site that was kept off the Department of Justice mailing list.
“The basic model is we are an ad-supported company,” he said. “Often, when we want to do some major expansion, we go to readers.”
Traffic has continually grown. Marshall said that the sites had, on average over the last 18 months, 400,000 page views a day. He said the number of unique visitors over the course of a month was 750,000 (about 60 percent of the traffic of the established left-wing magazine The Nation).
Marshall, who is married with a young son he occasionally writes about on the site, would not disclose the financial performance of the business. As for his own salary, he said “I make a better income than when I was freelancing,” but when pressed said, “I probably make in the neighborhood of what successful political journalists make.”
Yet his work is hardly the lonely reporting of big-time political reporters. It often involves synthesizing the work of other news outlets with original reporting and tips from a highly connected readership.
In the case of the U.S. attorney coverage, TPM linked to many local articles about U.S. prosecutors being forced from office and then drew the national picture for readers. TPM “connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush administration’s bidding,” the Polk award announcement said.
In addition to pursuing the tips from its readers, TPM has been known to give them assignments like wading through virtual piles of documents released by the Bush administration. “There are thousands who have contributed some information over the last year,” Marshall said in reference to the site’s U.S. attorney coverage.
Dan Kennedy, who teaches at Northeastern University and is a media critic who has followed TPM from its inception, said that what TPM did “is a different kind of journalism, based on the idea that my readers know more than I do.”
Writing on a blog for his journalism students, Kennedy proclaimed the Polk award “a landmark day for a certain kind of journalism.” TPM, he explained, “relentlessly kept a spotlight on what other news organizations were uncovering and watched patterns emerge that weren’t necessarily visible to those covering just a small piece of the story. This is ‘crowdsourcing’ – reporting based on the work of many people, including your readers.”
Marshall has many fans among critics of the administration, online and off.
Nan Aron, the president of the Alliance of Justice, a liberal legal affairs group in Washington, said, “There are certain stories like the U.S. attorneys that might never have seen the light of day had TPM not pursued it in the way that they had.” She added: “We now count on TPM and other blogs to do the investigative work that reporters used to do but don’t do at the moment.”
It was John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, who sent a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking about the Department of Justice’s treatment of TPM.
The site “revealed that it has recently been removed from DOJ’s press release e-mail distribution list,” the letter said. “Who made this decision and why, and was there a change in policy in press release distribution after you became attorney general?” (The next section of the letter to Mukasey, as it happens, went on to address the topic of “Waterboarding and Torture.”)
In a hearing room on Feb. 7, Mukasey said he “was not aware of” the removal of TPM from the list, and last week, it was restored. (In an e-mail message Friday, the Department of Justice explained that the issue was simply about whether TPM was “credentialed.”)
Despite his battle with the current administration, Marshall said he tried to keep a partisan tone out of the reporting, though his personal blogging on the site reflected a liberal viewpoint. “As a company there are strong ideological viewpoints that inform what we do,” he said. “When we are reporting the news, we make every effort to report it in as factual way as possible.”
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the founder of the influential Daily Kos blog and a big fan of Marshall’s, said that he agreed.
“Josh isn’t necessarily partisan,” he said, “I see him as a progressive who is passionate about the news and approaches the news from that perspective.”
Moulitsas predicted, “It may take a decade, but Josh would win a Pulitzer some day.”
It will not be this year. As explained by Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitizer Prizes, in an e-mail message, online articles are eligible for the award, but they must have been published on the Web site of a weekly or daily newspaper.
“A freestanding Web site does not qualify,” he wrote.
Story here.
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Awards and media references for Michael Yon (wikipedia)
Yon won the 2008 Weblog Award Poll for ‘Best Military Blog’ on December 31, 2008,[6] and he won the 2007 Weblog Award for ‘Best Military Blog’ in November 1, 2007.[25] He won the 2005 Weblog Award for ‘Best Media/Journalism Blog’ as well.[5] In January 2006, his blog was one of the 100 most linked on the internet according to Technorati.[2] Yon’s dispatches have been excerpted by several American newspapers and magazines, including Northwest Guardian, the Boston Herald, The Seattle Times, the Star Tribune, and The Weekly Standard.[26] Websites for the CNN, ABC, and CBS networks have referred to his work. He has appeared on the CBS Early Show and Good Morning America shows.[5]
Yon himself has been quoted by Fox News[27] and by Times Online.[28] His reporting has gained the praise of some well known and respected journalists, including Christopher Booker of The Daily Telegraph,[13] Brian Williams of NBC,[4] foreign correspondent Joe Galloway,[26] Alex Perry of Time, and US News and World Report writer Michael Barone.[5] Barone has referred to Yon’s work in his column.[29] Oliver North has supported Yon’s reporting,[2] and John Gibson cited Yon in an editorial.[5] New York University professor Jay Rosen has named Yon’s writing as a prominent example of successful citizen journalism.[8] Bruce Willis has stated his intention to produce a movie about Deuce Four’s deployment in Iraq, to be largely based on Yon’s experiences with the unit. Willis said, “What he is doing is something the American media and maybe the world media isn’t doing… telling the truth about what’s happening in the war in Iraq.”
Wiki for Michael Yon here.
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Long Island University Seeks Nominations for The George Polk Awards
Nominees for the George Polk Awards in journalism are proposed and selected by a national panel of advisers. The panel also considers entries that originate from publication offices, newsrooms or individual journalists. Should you wish to submit an entry for the 2009 George Polk Awards, please note the following guidelines:
DEADLINEAll entries must be postmarked no later than January 8, 2010.
CATEGORIESCategories vary somewhat from year to year, but it has been customary to give awards in foreign, national and local reporting (in print and broadcasting), news photography, and criticism. Electronic journalism, documentary films and books based on investigative reporting or dealing specifically with the field of journalism also may be considered for awards. From time to time, awards are made for a body of work.
CRITERIAThe criteria for awards include discernment of a significant news story, resourcefulness and courage in reporting, skill in relating the story and the impact of the coverage.
ENTRIESIt is recommended that each entry include a cover letter.Print – submit two original clips (or clear photocopies) of news or feature stories.Photojournalism – submit two original clips.Radio – submit two audio recordings of segment/s along with script/s.Television – submit two video or digital recordings along with script/s.Web – submit two copies of printed text as well as URLs (DVDs may be included).Journalists do not have to be United States citizens and the media outlet does not have to be American, but all entries must be in English (no translations) and have appeared in the U.S. There are no entry fees or application forms. Entries will not be acknowledged or returned. Winners will be notified some time in February. Send entries to:
The George Polk Awards
Long Island University
The Brooklyn Campus
1 University Plaza
Brooklyn, NY 11201-5372
(718) 488-1153
Find out more here.