A Neck-Snapping 180: E&P Is All About the Blogs

Just when your sides stopped hurting from laughing and you thought it was safe to take another sip of milk, Editor & Publisher treats you to more of its comedy stylings, this time via a self-congratulatory retrospective on their innovative Katrina coverage.

Exactly one year ago, E&P chose a blog-like approach to monitor the disaster unfolding in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast -- one of the few news outlets early on to draw on reader forums and blogs at local newspaper sites. Here are selections from the first 24 hours after the storm struck, mainly contributed by E&P Editor Greg Mitchell.

Notwithstanding what I presume to be an accurate retrospective of their year-ago coverage (perhaps naively, given their recent history of quietly monkeying with old, inaccurate articles about reporters writing old, inaccurate articles) readers of this or, well, most any other non-lefty blog will doubtless be surprised that Mitchell and E&P are so forward-looking and receptive to the "blog-like approach".

Last week, not only did E&P boldly trumpet a study pooh-poohing blogs for their lack of accuracy and reliability (sadly, without benefit of spell check), but Mitchell penned a two-part story (1, 2) in which he decried the ignorance of bloggers who "smear" fraudulent war fauxtographers in an attempt to wage a "propaganda war" on the mainstream media.  Soon thereafter, Confederate Yankee noted that three years ago, Mitchell had confessed in an opinion piece that he had written a fake story as a journalism intern in the late 1960s, a story which turned out to contain multiple factual errors, which were in turn, slyly, incompletely, and disingenuously corrected on the archived webpage.

Surely, it's just this kind of meddling that raises the ire of many in the traditional media and which was the likely impetus behind Mitchell's two-part backlash.  But I don't want to rush to judge the motives behind this surprising, front page blogosphere bear hug.  Maybe it simply took this whirlwind dust-up to bring Mitchell and E&P around.

If so, let me be the first to welcome them.  Now the healing can begin.  Sorry I laughed at you at the top of the post.

Previously:
More On the Adventures of the Recovering Fabulist
Recovering Fabulist Off the Wagon?
E&P Windbag a Recovering Fabulist
Windbag Reloaded
Hot Air Takes On MSM Windbag
Would I Lie To You?