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Jan

2

Update on David Yepsen “blogging Iowa newsman” and “king of new journalism”


So, I’m reading up on the Iowa caucus and see a header on CNN for David Yepsen’s blog re: Ted Strickland.

Hmm, I think. Not this again.

And I go there. Wow. Look at all those entries!

And I think, how did I miss all that? Did I miss all that?

And I go back to my posts and the WaPo article that called Yepsen the blogging Iowa newsman and I google him and the word “blog,” again, and again, I get what I saw when I wrote those posts: no blog entries since 11/11/07.

How can this be?

Well, for one thing, the Des Moines Register has two places where you’ll find blog entries:

Here (check out the abysmal URL) and here.

For another thing, the original WaPo article never gives a citation for Yepsen’s blog, so that WaPo readers can go check it out – him being called a blogging newsman and all – and so I relied on googling “david yepsen blog” – and I got the one with no entries since 11/11/07.

So – what’s with the other blog, the one with posts every couple of days?

I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I imagine that it’s the version that the WaPo reviewed – I hope – before writing its article. But then this speaks to how the MSM takes for granted that all readers will simply accept as true what they write and won’t go in search of checking it out – like I did, and discover that without a citation to the blog, readers, like myself and those who read what I write, will get confused and slam someone who may or may not need to have been slammed.

Put another way, if only the WaPo article had posted a link to Yepsen’s blog, so that all WaPo readers could see what the WaPo writer and editor (I presume) saw, I wouldn’t have bothered to say, “Hello? The guy has no posts since 11/11 and the WaPo article came out on 12/18.”

I take responsibility for not finding what appears to be the more up to date blog by David Yepsen. But I did look and apparently so did at least one other person.

We still don’t know why the WaPo article didn’t just link to the damn thing in the first place, being an article about new journalism and all. Not linking – bad form, IMO, and in an online version of the story, about new journalism? No good excuse.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 11:42 pm January 2nd, 2008 in Blogging, Media, Politics 

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