The cartoon crisis which has left embassies ablaze and sparked riots from Beirut to Bangkok and Jarkarta was a set-up job, planned and executed by a group of Muslim leaders from Denmark in concert with leading lights of the Islamic world. The conspirators used supremely inflammatory phony cartoons never published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten to gin up a campaign of violence and intimidation against Denmark, the EU, and the West. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Marks gives me more credit than I deserve in this Many to Many posting, where he notes the traditional journalistic model of going for an exclusive scoop. He says some journalists are thinking how to make stories more inclusive: “measuring success by how many people they bring into the conversation, and they recognise it doesn’t necessarily start with them.”

This was with most of the things I used to work on when I was writing a regular column. I was writing about people, issues and organizations after the news had already come out — trying to put it into perspective with my own take on the topic.

But I also hungered for the scoops. And when I got something all by myself, which happened periodically, I loved the feeling.

This is a valuable part of journalistic competition. It is surviving the shift we’re seeing from Big Media dominance to a more synergistic system including the rest of us. Scoops will continue to occur — though they’ll take different forms, and the scoop will last for about five minutes before it spreads widely — and that’s a good thing.

Meanwhile, the involvement of more people in the conversation is the big, and most important, shift of all. This definitely doesn’t start with us, or end with us. It continues, and grows.