Media Curmudgeon

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September 17, 2007

Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine

Jeff Jarvis, the former “creator and founding editor” of Entertainment Weekly and former Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News, writes a fairly well-read blog, Buzz Machine, which has a lot of influence on media types, especially other bloggers. I read Buzz Machine and find that Jarvis has intelligent insights and does some good reporting and commentary on topics such as the importance of a free press, on citizen journalism, on the Internet and on blogs and blogging. I agree with his positions on some things and disagree strongly with others. He’s highly opinionated, and, to me that’s good, because you always know where he stands and he makes you think.

He’s been accused of being a pushy self-promoter, which I agree with, and his flogging his appearances in the media is annoying. But what I find most annoying is his pompous self-righteousness about blogging and the Intent. He writes and talks (oh, how he talks on radio and television) like he invented both. He used to be a Journalist with a big J. Now he’s a Blogger with a big B, and claims that Blogging is the new Journalism and has replaced it and become the main-stream media. Woe be to anyone who criticizes or denigrates bloggers (especially him). He seems to be promoting himself to be the conscience of all bloggers.

He’s pals with and a promoter of Jay Rosen’s PressThink blog. Rosen was one of the first bloggers on the press and journalism and still is the most thoughtful (if often highly theoretical). If you go to PressThink, you’ll see a pretty straightforward blog with no advertising. No buttons or banners, no Google AdSense links. Nothing that generates revenue. This gives me the message that he’s not out to make any money from blogging, not trying to be popular or controversial to generate traffic, that he’s an intelligent journalism professor who’s passionate about the press, the news, a free press, and journalism. I read his blog almost every time he posts and I’ve never read about Jay Rosen—he doesn’t promote himself, he promotes ideas—good ideas.

When I went to Jeff Jarvis’s BuzzMachine site today (9/17) I was slapped with a large skyscraper banner ad for Washlet—the TOTO Washlet—which is a modern-day bidet in the shape of a toilet, and the bottom half of the ad was a large female nude butt with a smiley face painted on it. When I showed the ad to my wife, she said, “gross!” You know that if she’s married to me, she has high tolerance for gross, but that ad pushed her gross button. Mine, too. Inappropriate, in bad taste.

In my last blog, I wrote that I thought the New York Times should not have run the MoveOn.org ad that, in essence, accused General Petraeus of being a traitor with the line “Betray Us” because it was in bad taste. Or at least the Times should have tried to get MoveOn.org to take a different approach. Why does Jarvis, who professes to be a serious journalist allow his ad network to serve ads on his site showing big butt cracks? Is he that hard up for the few dollars he makes? Or maybe he really doesn’t have a conscience, or, certainly, a sense of good taste.

Posted by Charles Warner at September 17, 2007 11:00 PM

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