On Mediaverse

Let the meta blow your mind.

Friday morning I woke up and saw this post at Mediaverse in my Google reader and instantly had a mini-heart attack. What I had been working on late at night here at T&G had somehow shown up on the local media watchdog’s blog, where said watchdog had shared the following:

And yesterday, CA designer Lindsey Turner posted a likely template design for what appears to be a new CA blog featuring Trevor Aaronson. (A Mediaverse reader sent in this screencap.) Theogeo is on WordPress, the same as the CA’s blogs. Hence, one more reason to use her blog as a lab.

Here’s what struck me as weird, in more or less chronological order:

1. Holy crap, I was just tinkering last night with very rough, very potential ideas. IDEAS.

2. Who is visiting my blog that late at night, and who would be so presumptuous as to take a screenshot and send to Mediaverse, all atwitter at the thought of some kind of gotcha scoop? (My sitemeter was helpful in providing me with the IP address, for my own personal knowledge.)

3. Oh lord, I might actually be in trouble for this one.

4. @#&*$^%!!!* Why didn’t I take the time to figure out how to create a sub-domain on which to do the aforementioned tinkering, instead of activating it on my blog index page?!?! I am stupid, kill me now, etc.

5. Wait wait wait, who the !$*&%#& reads my blog on a Thursday night, deep into the wee hours of Friday morning, when I was doing the bulk of the tinkering? No one, that’s who.

6. My cats are going to gnaw my ankles off if I don’t get them some food soon.

7. My blog as a lab? Really? Um, no. My blog is my blog and, thankfully, no one at work asks me to use it for anything other than my own record of my slow but steady descent into madness.

8. *something unspecific about waffles, probably*

9. Crap crap crap, people might actually think that screenshot represents a finished design.

I could continue, but it was at that point that I hauled ass to work early to make sure I hadn’t caused any undue stress in the newsroom regarding this fledgling idea for a blog. (My editors and bosses were refreshingly cool about it, and some were amused, which is good because I was kind of having a private little humiliation party, complete with a stroke on the left side of my body.) See, when I say I was tinkering, I mean I was tinkering. I know practically nothing of substance about web design and WordPress and php and any chance I get to teach myself some of this stuff, I’m gonna take it. Which means, sometimes, taking ideas from work and running with them at home. Brainstorming. Seeing what sticks. Et cetera. I do this not only because my relevance to my industry depends on it, but also because I want to know. I need to know. I love the internet and I want to be able to use it and shape it the way I feel it deserves to be shaped. I never took web design classes so it’s up to me to teach my damn self how to prettify my ideas.

So here’s the thing about the Mediaverse post that really kind of struck me as odd:

The assumptions.

The assumption that I was doing something for work that was likely to stick.

The assumption that it makes sense to use T&G as a lab for CA blog projects just because we’re both on WordPress.

The assumption that the CA would ask me to do so so or that I would volunteer to do so.

So forth and so on.

It just seemed unsettling to me to wake up to a post alleging all these things that might or might not have been true, all framed as gospel, as inside scoop, without ever having been consulted about them. It was almost as if the “gotcha” moment of catching a web designer prototyping ideas trumped any consideration for journalistic ethics — ethics that might have dictated an e-mail asking exactly what it was that this intrepid, screen-capping reader had spotted on my blog.

But, to use Richard Thompson’s verbiage, I digress.

I like Mediaverse. We don’t agree on everything (I don’t agree with anyone on everything), but I think there needs to be someone watching the watchdog. Obviously. So I’m glad Mediaverse is there and I think it has incredible community-service value. Knowing that people with industry experience are paying attention — especially people who do it for the love of journalism — helps keep newspaper folks on their toes. But it cheapens the effect of media criticism when those critics use sloppy methods to do their own journalism.

To see my random, graphical brain farts posted on a website and called “likely designs” and my own blog termed a lab for my workplace was quite shocking in its lack of accuracy.

A quick e-mail to me might have cleared that up. Hell, even a few “possibles” and “maybes” thrown into the post might have gone a long way. But instead, a completely false impression was given, and who benefits from that?