MetaFilter - now As Seen On TV

February 27, 2007 11:48 PM

In Part III What's Happening To The News of Frontline's four part series News War, there came, during one of several discussions of the impact of the internet upon the news, a montage of screenshots of various websites, weblogs and community weblogs. MetaFilter was one of them. I seen it! Now should that be a little Woot! worthy or what?
posted by y2karl to MetaFilter-related at 11:48 PM (52 comments total)

MetaFilter was one of them.

*cough*

But then, so was The Site that Shall Not Be Named...
*sigh*
posted by y2karl at 11:51 PM on February 27, 2007

And, among the talking heads--and there were many--there was Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Craig Newmark of craigslist. I felt like my whole pitifully short internet life was passing before my eyes. I'd never seen any of them on TV or video before this. Only Craig Newmark looked like I expected he would. And Kos is just a baby. Totally unwrinkled. It was shocking. Man, that made me feel old and useless.

Well, I am going to go lie down and die now. After I get something to eat, that is...
posted by y2karl at 12:12 AM on February 28, 2007

This thread is worthless without video.
posted by wendell at 12:31 AM on February 28, 2007

Probably a stretch, but ...

Metafilter: Your whole pitifully short internet life passing before your eyes.
posted by moonbiter at 12:36 AM on February 28, 2007

Well, there's nothing of video for Part III on the Frontline site as yet, but here's the YouTube FRONTLINE "News War" (Part III) .

I have no idea of how long a clip that is, however.....
posted by y2karl at 12:43 AM on February 28, 2007

D'oh! That's just a preview. 29 whole seconds.....
posted by y2karl at 12:43 AM on February 28, 2007

You can watch the whole 270 minutes online at Frontline, though. Which means, I 'm thinking, you got to plod through a couple of hours to get to tonight's episode.
posted by y2karl at 12:45 AM on February 28, 2007

from the show's site: (my additions in parentheses)

Snapshot of a Typical Day

13 million people listen to "Morning Edition" on NPR (Public Radio says: "neener neener neener" Howard Stern has somewhere between 2 and 4 million on Private radio.)

9 million people watch ABC World News Tonight (it was #2 to NBC Nightly News at the time - more recently they're tied at about 10 million)

2.4 million people watch The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News (and 2 million of them are Over 55, outside the "Prime Demographic")

1.6 million people watch The Daily Show (and Fox's 1/2 Hour News Hour premiere got 1.5 million)

1.4 million people visit NYTimes.com
1 million people buy The New York Times print edition (what a burn! not meant in the Fahrenheit 451 way...)

715,000 people buy The Washington Post print edition (and half of them no longer care what Bob Woodward says)

500,000 people visit Daily Kos (Apparently none of whom were in Connecticut voting for Lamont)

350,000 people watch CNN's American Morning (because Soledad O'Brien is teh hawt)

55,000 people visit Power Line (suck it, Right Blogosphere)

(and 49,496 MetaFilter Members think "This will not wendell".)
posted by wendell at 1:01 AM on February 28, 2007 [1 favorite]

Here's the segment in Part 3 on "The New Universe of Online Media" (choose quicktime or windows media). MeFi appears on screen for a nanosecond during a quick scan of online sources. I'm going to get a screenshot...
posted by wendell at 1:12 AM on February 28, 2007

For the record, the segment spent a few minutes with Amanda and her ex-partner at Rocketboom, a minute with Kos, and over his last quote, showed blink-and-you-miss-em screenshots of...
Instapundit
Gawker
Wonkette
newassignment.net (that's the title, it's address was newassignment.wordpress.com - is this something I should know about?),
MetaFilter (all screenshots are from Feb. 23rd; MeFi's shows the posts for Kirupa.com, Tea Birds and Chomsky on the World)
PopCandy (at usatoday.com?!?)
Engadget
Kotaku
Michelle Malkin
THIS (they screwed up the url on THAT SITE and got a linkfarm instead... OMGLOLWTF are the wingnuts gonna be pissed!)
Drudge Report
Then Jeff Jarvis started talking and I tuned out...
posted by wendell at 1:42 AM on February 28, 2007

THIS (they screwed up the url on THAT SITE and got a linkfarm instead... OMGLOLWTF are the wingnuts gonna be pissed!)

Ha Ha!
posted by y2karl at 1:52 AM on February 28, 2007

Totally unwrinkled

Botox?
posted by matteo at 3:09 AM on February 28, 2007

But then, so was The Site that Shall Not Be Named...

filepile was featured in a news documentary?

Oh, the other site that shall not be named.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 3:44 AM on February 28, 2007

Know what? I'm the person who makes the video files that go up on the FRONTLINE site and I never even noticed that. Now I need to find out which of the editors reads Metafilter.
posted by Mayor Curley at 4:27 AM on February 28, 2007

And doesn't the video look especially good this week? I grabbed it off a digital Beta tape instead of the normal analog and I think it's the best-looking streamed Frontline ever.
posted by Mayor Curley at 4:35 AM on February 28, 2007

Huh, cool.
posted by mathowie at 5:45 AM on February 28, 2007

Oh, the other site that shall not be named.

What we need is code-names for all these unnamable sites.

We'll call LGF "Flamey Politics"; and Filepile we can euphemize as "Looks, Great Files"! Between that and common-sense abbreviation we should be able to simplify things greatly.
posted by cortex at 5:58 AM on February 28, 2007 [2 favorites]

Good show. Really demonized Tribune Corp. Wasn't that complementary to blogs either, saying they are totally dependent on newspapers.
posted by smackfu at 6:50 AM on February 28, 2007

s/filepile/4chan
posted by ardgedee at 6:52 AM on February 28, 2007

all screenshots are from Feb. 23rd;

huh, they were still working on the final product five days ago?
posted by Saucy Intruder at 7:23 AM on February 28, 2007

They had news clips about Anna Nicole Smith's death too.
posted by smackfu at 7:28 AM on February 28, 2007

What pissed me off was that they gave so much screen time to Nick Lehmann, who wrote that annoying "blogs R stupid" piece in the New Yorker recently. He's a good reporter, but man, talk about sour grapes and "these damn horseless carriages will never catch on" syndrome.
posted by languagehat at 7:29 AM on February 28, 2007

1.4 million people visit NYTimes.com

I wonder how many of them are using passwords they snagged from BugMeNot.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:44 AM on February 28, 2007

i've wasted used many hours in the last few weeks watching frontline documentaries of all kinds. the lost year is particularly good at documenting the systematic idiocy which has characterized our occupation of iraq.
posted by localhuman at 7:56 AM on February 28, 2007 [1 favorite]

Mayor Curley - yes, the video does look clean. Well done.

I saw the episode last night, and what occurred to me is how different mefi is from the other sites - this was the only community site shown.

Oh, the other site that shall not be named.

I didn't see Boing Boing.
posted by Pastabagel at 8:16 AM on February 28, 2007

Frontline is a fantastic program. Back in maybe 99 or 2000, I saw an episode of Frontline do a special about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. They showed that ABC interview with bin laden, and interviewed one of the Al qaeda higher ups in Afghanistan, who very chillingly said that it was easy to attack America, because "you are very open". He was smiling as he said this.

After 9-11, CNN and NBC were reporting about "Al Qaeda" like it was some super secret newly discovered group.

Frontline's coverage of the media and entertainment industry itself is also brilliant.
posted by Pastabagel at 8:21 AM on February 28, 2007 [1 favorite]

Indeed, M_C, it's probably the best-looking streaming Frontline I've ever watched.
posted by box at 10:40 AM on February 28, 2007

Nice, my user name was on Frontline.
posted by chunking express at 12:38 PM on February 28, 2007

Sadly, fishfucker's wasn't.
posted by yhbc at 12:43 PM on February 28, 2007

Too bad they weren't logged in.
posted by smackfu at 1:08 PM on February 28, 2007

Great. Now the rest of the world knows this is the site to visit for pictures of girls drinking tea.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 2:08 PM on February 28, 2007

And Chomsky On The World, too! That's MetaFilter--all Chomsky, all the time.
posted by y2karl at 3:04 PM on February 28, 2007

Way cool - though I am sure at the speed that the screenshots would have been put up - MeFi would have been nothing more than a green flash :(
posted by your mildly obsessive average geek at 7:15 PM on February 28, 2007

Fucekty fcuk! I watched part one and got distracted by the near apologia for the Frontline Goes Down on Judy Miller in Service to the Search for WMDs episode, leading me to fergit the series. Dammit!
posted by mwhybark at 7:52 PM on February 28, 2007

Mayor Curley! Despite the snarque, I KISS YOU!
posted by mwhybark at 7:55 PM on February 28, 2007

Frontline is a fantastic program.

Agreed.

btw, FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman...where have we seen his name before?
posted by jaronson at 9:17 PM on February 28, 2007

Fifteen milliseconds of fame!

(um, divided by 49,541 members = approx 3 x 10^-8 seconds of fame per mefite.

We only need roughly another 1,783,476,000,000 appearances like this, and we will all have achieved our Warholian objectives)
posted by UbuRoivas at 10:09 PM on February 28, 2007 [1 favorite]

Frontline, Metafilter, nice.
posted by toma at 3:59 AM on March 1, 2007

I am actually interested if there was a spike of visits after it aired. :)

*heh* I am quite enjoying these "sites that shall not be named" games, since I am completely out of the loop about which ones they are.
posted by smallerdemon at 12:43 PM on March 1, 2007

Well, the first rule about the sites that shall not be named is that we don't talk about the sites that shall not be named.

You know the form.

We also don't talk about the cabal, sub 15000ers, inline images, thread deletion, the other white milk or filesharing. Or the paucity of geographical knowledge exhibited by the general population of the United States of America.
posted by asok at 2:47 PM on March 1, 2007

This is true. Mefi was on Frontline a few nights ago. For less than one second, but it was there.
posted by j-urb at 4:38 PM on March 1, 2007

MeFi would have been nothing more than a green flash :(

Hmm. Tell me what numbers you see, sweetie.
posted by SassHat at 5:05 PM on March 1, 2007

Sasshat - LOL my bad. I lurk all the time on AskMe (my Mefi bookmark goes there!) so it just popped into my head that way I guess :)
posted by your mildly obsessive average geek at 7:00 PM on March 1, 2007

I jumped up and yelled: "HOLY CRAP I'M REGISTERED THERE!" when I saw the ol blue pop up.
posted by Cyclopsis Raptor at 9:37 PM on March 1, 2007

Is there another part next week?
posted by smackfu at 6:42 AM on March 2, 2007

Site that shall not be named = Fark, right?
posted by arcticwoman at 7:04 AM on March 2, 2007

Is there another part next week?

Frontline/WORLD at the end of March.
posted by Mayor Curley at 10:40 AM on March 2, 2007

Site that shall not be named = Fark, right?

Here's a clue:

(they screwed up the url on THAT SITE and got a linkfarm instead... OMGLOLWTF are the wingnuts gonna be pissed!)

posted by y2karl at 11:14 AM on March 2, 2007

Captial! I shall cock my hat it a far more jaunty manner: “An electromagnetic network publick logue with which I am affiliated was featured on a mass media programme. Take that sirrah!”
posted by Smedleyman at 12:29 PM on March 2, 2007 [2 favorites]

We also don't talk about the cabal, sub 15000ers, inline images, thread deletion, the other white milk or filesharing. Or the paucity of geographical knowledge exhibited by the general population of the United States of America.

Doesn't that just bloody well explain why no one talks to me?
posted by Samizdata at 8:56 PM on March 4, 2007

From the Newspaper section:
Another analysis, conducted by the consulting firm Bain & Company, found each unique online user generates between $5 and $10 a year in advertising revenue compared to $1,000 a year generated by a reader of a major newspaper.

At that price I can see them making major newspapers free sometime in the future to increase circulation. Alternatively, they could just kill the print edition and lose the overhead of paper, warehouses, and delivery.
posted by stevis at 2:53 PM on March 6, 2007

apparently they cut the interview that was the best part
posted by specialk420 at 8:00 PM on March 7, 2007