Comments on: SF Chronicle Metafilter mention

SF Chronicle Metafilter mention

jasper411 — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:41:51 -0800

Metafilter mention in Feb 27 SF Chronicle column. Chronicle columnist Mark Morford tosses (6th paragraph) off that his entire column today was sparked by the Dyatlov Pass metafilter thread.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:06:31 -0800

My God! A journalist who admits which bit of the Internet they plagiarised their column from! :p
Top job, Hank.

By: jasper411

jasper411 — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:10:51 -0800

Hank? Who's Hank?

By: dersins

dersins — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:12:55 -0800

Hank? Who's Hank?

The guy who posted the Dyatlov Pass thread.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:14:15 -0800

Sorry, that's his MoFi username. My bad.

By: rtha

rtha — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:15:10 -0800

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:29:27 -0800

A journalist who admits which bit of the Internet they plagiarised their column from!

No link love though. I missed that the first time around creeeeepy.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:31:03 -0800

Weird, I can't get the sfgate site to load for me...

By: rtha

rtha — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:39:23 -0800

No link love though.

That's okay by me - we're going to have to start renting Kezar stadium for meet-ups if more SFBayArea mefites appear. (The last one was delightfully intimate - it was on a school night, though.)

By: googly

googly — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:41:58 -0800

Funny you should mention that.

Also funny that Morford dispenses with the extremely plausible avalanche theory in a single sentence. In all, a remarkably lame piece - sort of like parachute journalism, only this time he hovered over a thread, selected the juiciest bits, ignored the less OMG ones, and spun out a breathless gee-whiz column.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:44:27 -0800

Ok, it loaded. Huh, he took every link from the post but didn't link to the thread. That's really odd and seems like an oversight.

By: Plutor

Plutor — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:45:50 -0800

Abiezer: "My God! A journalist who admits which bit of the Internet they plagiarised their column from!"

The bar for plagiarism sure is getting lower these days. It used to mean physically pulling phrases from a source, but now it just means getting an idea for subject matter from some website.

Shit, I just plagiarized all those snarks I read this morning.

By: Plutor

Plutor — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:51:55 -0800

Okay, maybe (maybe) linking to all of the same links qualifies.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:54:16 -0800

I was being tongue-in-cheek, Plutor (I even used the appropriate smiley!), having hacked out a few columns on zero inspiration myself. I was thinking crediting any source at all was a remarkable show of standards in this day and age.

By: desuetude

desuetude — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:54:55 -0800

Is Morford (the columnist) a Mefite? If he is, he never posts - I'm certain I'd recognize his writing style, which I find so irritatingly breathless and headlong that I rarely read his columns all the way through, even if I like the subject he's writing about.

I agree, except that I secretly admit that I like his writing style. Holdover from being a fan of his now-defunct e-mail column, The Morning Fix. It's a guilty pleasure.

Matt, if you sent him a friendly note, I bet he'd link to the thread.

By: aramaic

aramaic — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:29:56 -0800

Morford is part of the conspiracy of silence. You cannot trust a man who has seen those Things with his own eyes and remained sane.

I must be brief, for fear they will track me down, but I warn you: be afraid of the Pacific. Be very afraid.

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:32:00 -0800

Is Morford (the columnist) a Mefite?

If he is, he's not being overly obvious about it. And agreed; a link to mefi seems kind of called for, though I'm inclined to read it as misstep/oversight as well, as much as anything.

By: KokuRyu

KokuRyu — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:33:21 -0800

What's so creepy about an encountering an avalanche while on a hiking trip?

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:49:00 -0800

They may have in fact been assaulted by literal Vikings.

By: jasper411

jasper411 — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:54:13 -0800

I just emailed Morford to ask him why he didn't link to the thread. I'll post updates if I get any.

By: jasper411

jasper411 — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:06:20 -0800

Here's Morford's reply:

hmm. good point. I suppose I could have, probably just rationalized that since the Mefi item merely linked out to the same stories/sources I do, there was no point in merely linking to a discussion thread about it. That is, I'd rather point my readers to actual content, not merely a chat thread.

No matter. I'm fine either way. I'll link to it now.

thanks for the note

mm

Hmmm, a Metafilter link is "merely a chat thread"?? FWIW, the article now has the link.

By: ooga_booga

ooga_booga — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:08:42 -0800

One of my friends is completely crushed out on Mark Morford. Given Morford's tie-in with the Dyatlov incident, I'm expecting her hair to turn grey and her skin orange anytime now.

By: ooga_booga

ooga_booga — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:08:59 -0800

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, she still has her tongue.

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:12:14 -0800

merely a chat thread

Don't get too indignant. String of comments attached to item of interest on website you don't have a personal emotional investment in = merely a chat thread. Morford may be more of a Guy Who Looks at Metafilter (or Guy Who Followed Link to Metafilter) than an honest-to-goodness lurker.

By: jasper411

jasper411 — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:31:47 -0800

How dare you question my indignation? Indignation is like air, water, and food to me, sir! Without indignation, I'd be nothing but a puddle of grease on the floor! Grrrr...

By: Staggering Jack

Staggering Jack — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:03:22 -0800

that is, I'd rather point my readers to actual content, not merely a chat thread.

Some people say that many newspapers and journalism schools subscribe (so to speak) to the Peak Link theory that states (amongst other things):

Links on the Internet are finite and that if global consumption of Internet Links is not mitigated an Internet crisis may develop.

That is why serious journalists never link to their sources if they are just "chat threads" or "blogs". Really, it's just about being a good Internet citizen and saving the links for when we really need them.

By: scarabic

scarabic — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:12:45 -0800

I love Mark Morford. I can't say how many times I've run into something of his and read it to the end and enjoyed it, only checking afterward to see who wrote it. I hope to bump into him at a meetup someday.

By: absalom

absalom — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:19:30 -0800

How dare you question my indignation? Indignation is like air, water, and food to me, sir! Without indignation, I'd be nothing but a puddle of grease on the floor!

No shit, you're a MetaFilter user.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:43:56 -0800

That's cool that Morford did that, though he could have just linked to the main site instead of the "chat thread". The number one search result for people coming to MeFi has always been a search for "metafilter", probably because people mention it a lot without linking to it.

By: batgrlHG

batgrlHG — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:58:02 -0800

I am soooo deeply grateful to jasper411 for posting this as I had completely missed the original Dyatlov Pass thread and am now totally intrigued. Also have subscribed to Morford's RSS feed. Much linkage joy all round.

Speaking of which, there's now a link to the MeFi thread in Morford's article.

By: batgrlHG

batgrlHG — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:59:15 -0800

Er, as had already been mentioned, sorry.

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:32:36 -0800

mathowie The number one search result for people coming to MeFi has always been a search for "metafilter", probably because people mention it a lot without linking to it.

It's not people typing into their google searchbars when they think they're typing into the address field? Because I do that all the freaking time.