All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Attention reporters, producers and other media-types: if you thought your in-boxes were already clogged up with mass e-mail campaigns from organizations representing one point of view or another, wait until The Spotlight is turned your way. The Spotlight Project is a left-wing tool designed to enable users to communicate with individual members of the media. It’s being rolled out as a feature on Firedoglake (of Ned Lamont fame) and promises to allow everyone to send a blog posting they like to any number of reporters, producers or shows, along with their own comments.

On the face of it, this sounds like a great way to communicate with individuals in the media. But in practice, it threatens to become something ineffective, if not counter-productive. Here’s how it works: On participating blogs, each entry includes a “spotlight” tag and clicking that brings you to a site displaying the names of a large number of print, TV and radio types. If you want to send that particular entry to someone on that list (say the reporter whose article is being discussed), you click that name, add any others you’d like to send it to, make any comments of your own and send.

A savvy operator might take an interesting idea, thought or angle and send it to one or two reporters who might then somehow incorporate into their work – or at least think about it. But one would need a pretty hefty amount of knowledge about the press and the people in it to use that approach to target effectively. But will it more likely be used to flood journalists with yet more spam e-mail that simply ends up victim to the "delete" button?

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It was pretty clear what to expect from the Washingtonpost.com’s online forum on “the evolving nature of Internet commentary and ethics.” After all, the views of those invited to participate are hardly foreign to most of those who pay any attention to this debate (or blogs themselves). The group was made up of Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis, Pressthink’s Jay Rosen and Jane Hamsher from firedoglake. But, hopefully many of those who tune in to read the conversation haven’t been exposed to all of this before and there were some interesting points made, so let’s dive in. (This was set up in response to last week’s blowup on a post.blog where comments to the site were closed after a flood of criticism. If you’re not up to speed on this story, see here).



In today’s forum, there was a lot of chatter about the difficulties involved in opening a site up to outside comments and the gist was: Registration systems help and the discussion usually takes place on a higher plane of civility when identities are attached to comments in some way. The downside to that approach is that it limits participation. Interactivity is important, especially for major media organizations and the Web is a pretty unrestrained place but those who own and operate sites have the right to do what they feel is right with comments. A few of the more interesting highlights follow:

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