What’s a blogger to do?

In case you haven’t noticed, more and more news sites are limiting the access to their online articles unless you’re an online subscriber in some way. The most notable here in SE Wisconsin is JSOnline, the online presence of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel which limits access to 20 articles per month (This can be “hacked” but I’m not going to tell you how and it is somewhat inconvenient).

They are certainly not the first. The Waukesha Freeman has been doing something similar by limiting which articles you could access and how soon it could be done.

Other web sites that I visit are beginning to do the same thing. The Orlando Sentinel, the Mansfield News Journal, and the LA Times,  out of state sites that I go to have recently begun a policy similar to the Journal Sentinel. Others are Gannett newspapers like the Green Bay Press-Gazette, the Appleton Post-Crescent, Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter and Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune.

I don’t blame these sites. It’s their prerogative to  do what they wish about their web presence.

My intent is to look at how this affects blogs and bloggers like me who link to news sources.

I could certainly subscribe to these websites and should. But if I link to these sites too much, my readers, less likely to have subscribed to these sites, would go over their limit for free articles.

Of course at the rate I’ve been posting lately, this is unlikely to happen and I can still, if available, link to a similar article on a different site. Even if I posted like I did a few years back, it might not happen.

But it’s still a trend that will continue to impact bloggers like me.

Recall elections begin.

Well, the next six weeks will be exciting. Or maybe not.

The first round of recall election process begin Tuesday. Here’s the schedule from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Tuesday [July 12] is election day for Democratic primaries in six Republican-held Senate districts.

July 19 is the general election in the district of Sen. Dave Hansen D-Green Bay, and Republican primary day in two other Democrat-held districts.

Aug. 9 is the general election in the Republican districts.

Aug. 16 is the general election in the two Democratic districts.

In this round, the fake Democrats (Everyone knows they’re fake now right? We don’t have to hide any longer? And we do know the Democrats have done something very similar in the past, don’t we?) will be in a primary with the real Democrats (just to keep it simple for everyone, especially me).

Oh, speak of keeping it simple here’s a nice little graphic (PDF file):

Now if it was my preference, the fake Democrats (far right column in above graphic) would win the primary and then the general election. But my preferences rarely come to pass.

Now one more thing, which everyone knows, is that there is going to be a boatload of money spent by both sides, a lot of coming from outside the state.

I actually think this is good because I believe people should be able to spend their money the way they want to. Democrats will spend just as much as Republicans even though they pretend to not want to do it. They just have to protect us from evil Republicans.

I used to agree with what the Editorial Board said about recall elections:

But that doesn’t mean these elections are a good idea. In fact, they are a very bad idea – an extreme overreaction born from a long season of overreaction.

[snip]

Recalls should be used to punish gross malfeasance or corruption – something that cannot wait for the normal election cycle – not to overturn the results of an election or to dispute policy differences.

But this money helps the economy maybe even creating some jobs, which is good for the state. Maybe other states will put recall elections in place in other states to boost their employment rates. #sarcasm

Because Wisconsin’s job market, though not as robust as we would like, and slipping a bit last month (PDF file), is still the envy of many states and certainly the federal government.

Claiming persistent bias, Democratic Party to stop taking PolitiFact’s calls.

Accusing the Journal Sentinel’s continuing feature PolitiFact of persistent bias, leaders of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin say they will no longer respond to inquiries from the fact-checking operation’s reporters.

The party leadership acted after a series of PolitiFact stories they considered unfair, as well as an overall assessment that in its judgments about what to cover as well as its assessments of truth and falsity, “it just seems consistently weighted to one side,” [DPW communications director Graeme] Zielinski says.

via Inside Milwaukee – Dine, Shop, Entertainment and more.

I’m well-acquainted with the Right’s suspicion of PolitiFact, having originated with the St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald, both well-known left-leaning newspapers in Florida. The Right is also suspicious of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel of it’s left-leaning tendencies.

I’m also aware of the left side of the Cheddarsphere’s frustration with the Journal Sentinel which they lump together in one big lump with WTMJ 620 and WTMJ 4 under the Journal Communications, Inc. parent company. They believe the organization is right-leaning based on the WTMJ 620 talkers, Patrick McIlheran and others. I believe they also uncovered one of the Board of Directors contributing to a Republican candidate, bu I can’t put my hand on the link right now.

PolitiFact responded.

In a statement today, the Journal Sentinel editor in charge of PolitiFact, Greg Borowski, stood by the impartiality of the feature.

“At PolitiFact Wisconsin, our mission is to serve our readers by examining political statements to determine their accuracy — but also to identify where those statements are inflated, misleading or simply wrong. We do this by turning to outside sources to provide context to the issue, as well as by clearly stating how we came to the conclusion we did and what sources and reasoning we used to get there,” Borowski said.

Both left and right have had their problems with PolitiFact. One source of contention is the “Truth-o-meter” which does often seem pretty subjective. Other popular fact-checkers don’t have anything comparable, to my knowledge. As the author of the article writes,

Even so, PolitiFact’s critics have a point, but it’s a bit more complicated than partisan bias. The larger problem remains in its simplistic rating system and especially the incendiary “Pants on Fire” category, which doesn’t appear to be consistently applied.

He also notes,

Here [in wisconsin] the criticism has been most vocal among political activists on the left.

I not sure why that is. I sure my friends on the right think they’re biased, too; they just don’t seem to write about it.If they are some links to right-leaning posts, I would be glad to share them here.

By contrast, the national PolitiFact operation appears to get more criticism from conservatives.

Zielinski, who once worked for the Journal Sentinel, went on to say,

“We will deal with the Journal Sentinel. We have to,” he says. “It’s the largest newspaper in the state. We have good relationships with many of their reporters.”

But PolitiFact, he says, “is an instrument that we don’t think profits us anything, because we believe we’ve worked in good faith with them and not seen fair results.”

The writer of the article then states,

On the one hand, a casual examination of how party affiliation lines up with ratings from True to Pants-on-Fire makes doesn’t make an obvious case of bias for or against either side of the political spectrum. (You can see for yourself; if you disagree, feel free to comment below.)  Did you know, for instance, that 17 of Gov. Scott Walker’s 27 statements to be rated so far have been labeled as “Barely True,” “False,” or (in one instance) “Pants on Fire”? That seems difficult to square with a claim of consistent bias against Democrats.

No doubt the comment section will fill fast.

He sums up,

Perhaps the single biggest improvement in PolitiFact would be if there was just a little less of it, with topics more carefully chosen.

That might be something to shoot for. We don’t need a daily truth detector; and we don’t expect it to be perfect.

And, please, get rid of the “truth-o-meter.”

 

I won’t be writing

I sent an email to my editor last night, telling her that I would be withdrawing from the Community Columnists.

I love doing it, but I just don’t have the time to do the job the way I want to.

Now that it’s public…

Does this mean I’m now part of the Main Stream Media?

Dean Mundy, 57, served as a missionary for 21 years in Papua New Guinea and now lives in Waukesha. His favorite topics are those that people always argue about: politics, religion and sports. He considers himself a conservative and is an evangelical Christian who differs from the religious right on many issues. He was one of the original community columnists.

via Our new community columnists – JSOnline.

Waukesha Carnival, the 24 season premier edition

Welcome to the January 11, 2009 edition, the forty-eighth. This is where I survey the Waukesha corner of the Cheddarsphere and bring what are, in my opinion, the best posts of the last week. Feel free to add yours in the comments.

Let’s get started.

Taking a look at some local items, over at Fairly Conservative, Cindy Kilkenny looks at the Elmbrook school slates. Be sure to check out the comments.

Alexander wonders at A little off Main if he’s in Madison and Vrakas is a RINO. I don’t go much for the RINO tag, but the post is worth a read.

Has Jeff made his last post at Five Points? If so, be sure to catch his update on downtown Waukesha.

Huckleberry Dumbell has some “lay observations” about the Waukesha housing market in this post at Spring City Chronicle.

You can read James Wigderson’s post about bias is all in the eye of Ricky on State at Wigderson Library & Pub.

Tom Gehl discusses The Denigration of Race in Milwaukee at Brookfield Basics.

In local sports, Tim Rock takes a look at the Trevor Hoffman deal with the Brewers at The Other Side of My Mouth.

Bryon Houlgrave is shooting Northstars. Wrestling pictures. You can find more of Bryon’s sports photos at SportsShooter.com.

Looking about posts dealing with more general issues, Kyle Prast has a post at Practically Speaking showing us that not only is the Homeschooling movement is growing, but so is “unschooling”.

Linda Richter has a post decrying guilt by association by both sides at Inside New Berlin.

Chris from Racine, blogging at silent E speaks has a couple of posts on a recent experience with customer service.

Then concerning taxes and spending, Sen. Mary Lazich (chief aide Kevin Fischer?) makes a correlation at Conservatively Speaking between the fastest-growing states and those with the lowest tax rates.

The Asian Badger thinks Obama may have a one good idea with nominating a “Chief Performance Officer” to monitor spending.

Dad29 has a couple of charts illustrating that our infrastructure spending is already huge.

That concludes this edition. You can submit posts you liked in the comments. If you read something in the coming week, you can either put them in the comments, e-mail them to me or use this handy form. Archives can be found here.

See you next week.