this south american video crew interviewed me a looooong time ago
and their video just became available.
not sure any of you except for bicyclemark would like this interview because part of it touches on Citizen Media.
but seriously girls make out with this Sam Cassell lookalike. fascinating.
i look like i have gas.
it’s the LA Times’ political blog helmed by the tireless Andrew Malcolm.
Andy was one of the first people who warmly welcomed me to the Times about six months after they launched the blog, and he is still one of the best bloggers we have because:
he is always open to try new things,
he is alwas blogging (day and night),
and he has completely entrenched himself in the blogosphere.
he makes friends with other bloggers,
he learns from the kids in their pajamas in regards to what works online that doesnt work in print
he is never resting on his laurels: of which he has many.
because of that, Top of the Ticket is consistently in our top 2-3 blogs and has accounted for almost 100,000 comments, more than 16,000 Twitter followers (and growing 100+ per day) and produced in excess of 33 million page views for the Los Angeles Times.
it is a great joy to work with Andy, Johanna, Steve, Kate and all of the fine journalists who contribute to this great success story.
it’s exactly the reason i wanted to come to the Times. i wanted to work with committed professionals passionate about doing great work in a new medium.
here we have andy pictured with a box full of cupcakes that sarah got from Aunti Ems. theyre little tiny cute cupcakes that are delicious and tiny so instead of downing a ton of empty calories you actually lose pounds eating them because they’re so minuscule in size.
later we went out for a sushi lunch to celebrate and there was much rejoicing because the future only looks bright for the National Desk and the fabulous blog.
happy 2nd birthday Ticket!
thats just what the terrorists want.
i realize some of you have boyfriends or xboyfriends who have gotten into yr heads and thats the real reason why yr not blogging any more.
all i have to say to that is, thank god Emily Dickinson didnt care what her boyfriend or xboyfriend thought.
thank god Sylvia Plath and Courtney Love and Dooce never cared what people thought. they just wrote.
can you imagine if Raymi the Minx was all “omg i have xbfs, i have to now stop writing about my life, i have to stop being creative, i have to close this window to my world – because of someone i love/hate.”
men cause enough problems on this planet, please, ladies, dont let them effect the narrative of your development.
know that any devil voice in your head that is telling you to stop, is the same devil voice that whispers in the ears of anyone with an interesting tale to tell.
make it anonymous, make a new url, make something new. do something that will protect your identity, and for god sake if you are cutting off the rest of the world because of some d-bag – give me that dudes name and information and i will solve the problem posthaste.
i swear to Eddie that this is true.
and complained that it wasnt updated enough
one of the comments on digg and in an email was basically hey it just started give em a break, especially since apparently the technology at 1600 penn isnt all that.
and this is what ive gotta say. gone are the days of excuses in the white house yo.
get it done, fist bump, go to the next impossible panic.
its 2009, weve got a remote control car on mars, the last thing that should be half assed in a black white house is the blawwwwwg.
that is the one place where you can strut your stuff in a badass way for free to gazillions.
let people flip phone interview people inside the white house and explain why this happened or what that change is all about. show us the computers with windows 95. lay out the myriads of challenges going on and what the plans are. youre the ones bragging about how transparent youre gonna be – then bust with the multi-daily quick cam youtube blog posts and tell us whats up.
also show some of that little girls pictures of beyonce at the we are one concert.
since my post yesterday the blog has been updated three times. i looked at my reader and once again it showed that several posts had all been published at the same time. i wondered, what was the delay? dont make people think that. and dont have the google reader say things were published at a certain time but your blog says they were spread out.
i dont know whats going on there but its gotta get fixed.
jim gilliam of whitehouse2.org explained that the problem might be due to a variety of reasons
My guess is that they have a fancy new site in the works, but it’s not ready yet, so they are stuck using the old infrastructure from the Bush administration and just don’t know how to make it all work. The current site is based on ASP.NET, meanwhile the campaign was built on more open tools with Blue State Digital. It’s my understanding that BSD turned down the job to run whitehouse.gov because of all the legal restrictions placed on it. And Obama still has not announced his Chief Technology Officer, so they may be lacking solid leadership in this area.
in other online publishing news. friend of the busblog howard owens is part of a sorta historic online lawsuit. he works for a publishing group called GateHouse who is calling foul at the way the Boston Globe is agrigating their content. while most people, including howard, and myself, believe that taking a headline a few paragraphs from a website or blog and putting it on your site is fine if you link back. but GateHouse thinks that because the Globe takes all of their headlines they are making their section front (and possibly some of their content) less valuable. dan kennedy has a great post on it:
Seen from GateHouse’s point of view, a [Boston.com] Your Town site – for instance this one covering the town of Needham – links not just to a few stories, but scoops up every item of interest from GateHouse’s Needham Times, making it unnecessary for anyone to visit the Wicked Local Needham homepage. By republishing the headlines and ledes from GateHouse stories, Your Town, in many cases, is making it unnecessary even to click through. The Times may have grabbed only a small part of each story, but, so this line of thinking goes, it’s grabbed the best part.
this is one of those weird times when i originally thought omg how can they even be suing? and now i think they have a totally interesting case. i really hope theres a lot of discussion about this because aggregation is really important to web 2.0
ps, happy 24th birthday lindsay, thanks for buying the cubs.
at a swanky club near the times
the edison is so popular on weekend nights that they wont let you in if you dont have a collar on your shirt or if you have jeans (if youre a dude), or if your not super hot (if youre a babe). ok that last part might not be 100% true but it sure seems like it.
on tuesdays they do this little back room action. its a throw back to the prohibition times, which is sorta the theme of the edison anyways as the hostesses wear sassy flapper outfits and the gents dress as gangsters. 20s gangsters. on tuesdays they dress like that too, they just shut down most of the spacious club and present entertainers and serve a limited choice of hand made $14 fancy drinks.
cant say i was impressed with the fancy drinks but i appreciated that the host stoked us with some food since there were so many of us and we were, after all, bloggers. thus royalty, duh.
being from uc isla vista i can pretty much drink anything, and i gotta say the mini hamburgers were probably the best mini hamburgers ive ever eaten, so thanks bro. meanwhile the belly dancer, the blue angel-ish chantruse dominatrix singerwas really funny, and the magician sorta freaked me out with how great he was with his close up illusions.
i got to hang with joz joz joz, jeff from thrillist, rachel from kcrw, moye from the wb, and many others including caroline on crack who put it all together who i should thank cuz it was super fun.
but i wont.
instead i will steal her picture without giving her credit.
but i will link to her gallery from that magical night.
photo of some bald dude, a magician ruth, and rachel of kcrw at the edison by caroline on crack
my space bar is broke on my laptop so ifyousee wordsmushedtogether then you know im not drunk. it seems like the right side of the button is bad not the left so im using my left thumb. and it seems to be doing the job.
anyways since todays sunday lets say a little prayer to our friends in the gulf coast.
theres a blowhard on cnn rambling on about how hes getting info on “twitter and myspace”. hes telling his director about this or that. a real roll up your sleeves and lets “go forward” on this breaking story. sorta disgusting sorta alpha male fascinating. as if he wants to literally strangle the hurricane himself and provide play by play on how he’s doing it.
comedy on what will surely be a tragic story in no time.
i also dont trust that thats all his own hair.
there was a time when i wasnt so cynical. hard to remember that far back but im sure it wasnt the day i was spanked into life. which is why i admire my dutch friends in the photo. intelligent, alert, but optimistic. neither of them think about america as a goal in their lives.
maybe vancouver for justagirl. maybe paris for bicyclemark.
dont they know this is the greatest country in the world? dont they know that here you can be the mayor of a town with as many people as can sit in the bleachers of wrigley field and then become governor and before your first term is over you can be a heartbeat away from president? (and what a heartbeat, indeed.)
that doesnt happen in paris. or canaduh. sorry yo.
once upon a time, back when i was idealistic, i was told that anyone could be presidnet of the united states.
im finally starting to believe that again.
thank you america.
out of 125 million blogs, our very own Top of the Ticket has broken into the highly competitive Technorati Top 100! Not that long ago there weren’t any LA Times blogs even in the Top 2000, but because of the hard work of the bloggers, their editors and copy editors, they were able to take that blog straight up to the top.
congratulations Andy, Don, Scott, Diana, Meredith and everyone else who was involved in this huge accomplishment!
theres this weird belief that internet traffic is slow in the summer. people think that since the kids are out of school or because the weathers nice people dont use the web. such a lie. omg so wrong.
last month latimes.com broke a record, like no problem. it got 127 million pageviews. almost 10 per cent of that came from the blogs – 12.2 million – which doesnt seem like very much until you realize that last july la times blogs only had 2.2 million. in august you shouldnt be surprised if we can get 2.2 million from 2-3 of our blogs.
every month my boss meredith sends out a little email to the entire organization giving out the numbers. i hope she continues to have them posted on our Readers Rep blog because that way i can send a link to my mom. but since i know my mom reads the busblog, here you go ma, we did good last month! also my cohort Lindsay did real well on Your Scene, our user generated content, and its blog.
Top 20 blogs for July follow. Blog traffic broke an all-time record this month of more than 12 million page views. Tony Pierce notes that July 2007 blog page views were 2.2 million page views. Incredible growth.
1. Top of the Ticket — 1,800,770 PVs
2. The Dish Rag — 1,666,702
3. L.A. Land — 1,205,609
4. Gold Derby — 655,369
5. Show Tracker — 516,324
6. Lakers
7. Countdown to Crawford (more than 500K in its first full month)
8. Hero Complex (launched July 16)
9. Technology
10. Web Scout
11. The Big Picture
12. Booster Shots
13. The Daily Travel & Deal Blog
14. Opinion L.A.
15. The Homicide Report
16. L.A. Now
17. Ticket to Beijing (Olympics)
18. Money & Co
19. Entertainment News & Buzz
20. L.A. UnleashedYour Scene, our user-generated photo service, generated 6.6 million page views in July. Bravo to Lindsay Barnett, Your Scene producer extraordinaire.
this month expect even bigger numbers from the dish rag who has already gotten off to a huge start. top of the ticket will end the month by covering the GOP convention, our olympics blog will dominate the world, and hero complex was in the top ten last month after only being around 2 weeks therefore it will be interesting to see if it can crack a million since it will have an entire month to rock. could we have five blogs break a million in august? all signs point to hell to the yes.
and wrestles Wonkette away to be all his.
denton also seemed like it was time to sell off the curiously average Gridskipper to Curbed and music blog Idolator to Buzznet,
“There’s a cold wind coming,” Denton told Silicon Insider via IM. “We need to focus on our core titles.”
what world does he live in where Wonkette isn’t core? maybe i can get an interview with Layne later today. in the meantime heres the email Denton sent his troops this morning:
From: nick@gawker.com
Subject: Gawker spinning off three sites — Idolator, Gridskipper and Wonkette —
Date: April 14, 2008 10:26:06 AM EDT
To: all@gawker.com, edit@gawker.com
I’m amazed we’ve managed to keep a lid on this news; that, given your naturally gossipy natures, must be a first! We’re spinning off three sites: Idolator, Gridskipper and—this one may be a surprise—Wonkette. There were indeed some rumors about Maura Johnston’s music blog late last year; they were true of course. For reasons that I’ll explain below, both it and our travel and politics sites have better commercial futures outside Gawker than within. (Excuse the corporate lingo: some of it is unavoidable.) But, first, the facts, which will be hitting the wires later this morning, or as soon as you leak this email. Go ahead!
* IDOLATOR is going to Buzznet, a music-focused web and social network. Buzznet recently acquired Idolator’s chief rival, Stereogum, and received a big investment from Universal Music Group.
* GRIDSKIPPER isn’t going far: it’s being taken over by Curbed, the network founded by Lockhart Steele, in which Gawker Media is a shareholder.
* WONKETTE is being spun off to the managing editor, Ken Layne, former founder of one of the web’s very first news sites, Tabloid.net. The title will become part of the Blogads network of political sites, which includes Daily Kos, among others.
Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did.
Music audiences are fragmented across genres; Maura’s Idolator gave Stereogum a good run, but a group with a whole array of music sites will command more attention from record labels than we could. In the case of Gridskipper, our urban travel guide, we could never match Curbed in attention to city-specific content and advertising. As for Wonkette: political advertisers are a strange breed; they don’t come through the same agencies our sales people deal with.
I’m relieved we’ve found pretty decent homes for the three sites, and most of their writers, but we’re gutted to lose them. Idolator’s Pop Critic’s Poll was a tremendous coup—and Patric’s bleeding-heart logo for the site was one of my favorites. Gridskipper is so far the most sophisticated travel blog: it entirely deserved its inclusion in Time’s list of the 50 coolest websites.
And Wonkette is one of the brands with which the company is most associated; people will be shocked that we would ever part with it. The political site has won an array of Bloggies and other awards; it introduced the word ass-fucking into the dictionary of political abuse; the founding editor’s slippers are even on display in the new media museum in Washington, DC. And Ken and his team have brought a new liveliness to the site this election season—validated by the record traffic of the last three months.
So why not wait, at least till the election? Well, since the end of last year, we’ve been expecting a downturn. Scratch that: since the middle of 2006, when we sold off Screenhead, shuttered Sploid and declared we were “hunkering down”, we’ve been waiting for the internet bubble to burst. No, really, this time. And, even if not, better safe than sorry; and better too early than too late.
Everybody says that the internet is special; that advertising is still moving away from print and TV; and Gawker sites are still growing in traffic by about 90% a year, way faster than the web as a whole. But it would be naive to think that we can merely power through an advertising recession. We need to concentrate our energies, and the time of Chris Batty’s sales group, on the sites with the greatest potential for audience and advertising.
The dozen sites that remain represent some 97% or our 228m pageviews per month, and an even higher proportion of our growth and advertising revenue. (Key facts are below, in case anyone asks.) We’ll be able to devote more attention to breakouts such as Jezebel and io9, as well as established titles such as Gizmodo and Kotaku, which are becoming utterly dominant in their domains. And, then, once this recession is done with, and we come up from the bunker to survey the internet wasteland around us, we can decide on what new territories we want to colonize.
Both Noah and I are around to answer any questions. On email, IM, or phone. I’m xxx-xxx-xxx and Noah is on xxx-xxx-xxxx.
Regards
Nick
congrats to ken, sara, and the readers of Wonkette. it will be fascinating to see what that site can do with Ken Layne running the whole thing.
and special thanks to basart for the early morning email tipping me off.
has been up for less than a week. there are already over 50 mentions in the blogosphere. these are some of my faves:
Metafilter: Inventing the Bloghook
LAist: Meet LA’s Biggest Blogger (an interview)
Chicago Tribune: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s core fitness tips
Fark: Abdul-Jabbar takes up blogging. No, not the former Miami Dolphins running back, the other one
Deadspin: It’s obvious from the get-go that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s blog is going to be a daily read.
The New Republic’s The Plank: Another Blogger for Obama… Only this one’s named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Actually, Kareem’s whole blog is worth a read: There aren’t that many 7-foot-2 Hall-of-Famers out there who can still shoot a sky-hook and write intelligently about Herbie Hancock and the straitjacket of music genres.
Top of the Ticket: You couldn’t stop him on the court, you can’t stop him here from writing about his life and thoughts exclusively on LATimes.com.
LA Taco: Besides being one of the greatest basketball players of all time, Kareem is a noted historian, author, LA legend, and all-around amazing person. So far his blog is focusing on sports, black history, music, and politics. It rules, and so does Kareem.
Blogger & Podcasting: Help us interview Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Fishbowl LA: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Makes Us Feel Fat And Lazy
Will Campbell: The Night In Studio City That I Played One Game Of Tennis With Wilt Chamberlain
fly by night: Look who’s blogging
Yes but No but Yes: Abdul-Jabbar, the Blogger
Forum Blue and Gold: I’m late to this party, but I love Kareem’s new blog. Very smart, well rounded man.
Nikkola Media: LA Timesilla riittää pelisilmää bloggaajien valinnoissa. Kareem Abdul-Jabbarin korisblogi tästä hyvänä esimerkkinä.
Rawk Blog: Jazz historian and arguable greatest basketball player of all time Kareem Abdul-Jabbar weighs in on the merits of Herbie Hancock’s Grammy-winning album of the year, River: The Joni Letters.
Craig Smith’s Blog: Maybe they should Call it The Skyhook Blog
Immodest Proposals: Wit and Wisdom from a Perspective About a Foot Higher Than Most Anyone Else
What is Unseen: The skyhook, from the master. Yes, basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is blogging. Which is so cool.