TurkeyMonkey

It’s no great secret that there’s a blog backlash going on right now. Case in point: Buzz Bissinger ranting and raving about sports blogs. If you haven’t seen the clip of him lashing out at Deadspin’s Will Leitch, check it out — if only to glean just how rabid the anti-blog sentiment has become.

Now, I’m a huge Bissinger fan. From “A Prayer for the City” to “Friday Night Lights,” he’s one of the nonfiction authors I most look up to. But his take on blogs — “blogs are dedicated to cruelty, blogs are dedicated to journalistic dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed” — was one of the most poorly informed thought that has come out of his otherwise brilliant noggin.

It’s not really worth delving into all the distortions Bissinger made on “Costas Now” — besides, he apologized and all but retracted his comments in a subsequent interview with Philly Mag (“Blog Battler Buzz Bissinger”) — but the incident only served to remind me of another blog crank, Mark Cuban, who sounded off about sports blogs back in March.

The difference between the two, though, is that Cuban took on not just NBA bloggers, but also attacked larger phenomenon of newspaper blogs. Unlike the profanity-lace Bissinger belch, he had a well thought out argument, which he set forth, ironically enough, in his own blog, Blog Maverick.

First, I should explain: I came upon Cuban’s rant while attending the “2008 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism.” Like just about every other writer there, I wanted to mill about and network. In reality, though, this meant reading through brochures and reading blog feeds on my iPhone. Right before a seminar with the NYTimes.com gurus about their innovations in “new media,” I stumbled upon Cuban’s post. The title: “Blogging and Newspapers, a Lesson in How Not to Brand and Market.” It was effectively a rant against blogs in general — and the NY Times ones in particular.

Same as with Bissinger, I have a huge degree of admiration for Cuban, who, cliched as it sounds, is a kind of Internet era renaissance man. MicroSolutions, HDNet, Broadcast.com, Dallas Mavs — all that. I had the good fortune to hear him give the keynote address at BlogWorld Expo last November — as well as the less gratifying experience of watching him on “Dancing with the Stars” — and I think his blog is one of the best executive-authored ones out there. Plus, his own attempt to bankroll investigative business blogging, in the form of ShareSleuth, is truly innovative. (Read the Wired story about the venture if you haven’t already.) Obviously, the profit model for that site — i.e. Cuban trading on whatever dirt reporter Chris Carey digs up, before his investigations are officially made public — poses ethical dilemmas about as sketchy as the 1919 World Series, but it’s still an interesting experiment.

OK, so all that said, Cuban’s assault on newspaper blogging was one of the most wrongheaded things I’ve read in the entire anti-blog backlash. Yes, it’s so idiotic that I’m still miffed about it months later. Needless to say, given that I’m posting about it to TurkeyMonkey — on a Sunday, no less — I can’t quite let the topic go.

Now, you may wonder, hey, Ted, don’t you write a newspaper blog yourself? Yes. And aren’t you partly responsible for a network of 60+ blogs at The Journal News? Yes, on that count, too. And while being a kind of blog czar for a mid-sized newspaper in suburban New York obviously gives me a completely biased position, it’s also given me more than enough time to ruminate on the subject.

My problem with Cuban — who briefly tried to ban all sports bloggers from the Dallas Mavs locker rooms, until the NBA overruled him — is that he misunderstands a few fundamental functions of newspaper blogs. Namely:

1. Blogs are a secondary content management system, which is, almost inevitably, superior to the newspaper’s main CMS.

2. Blogs come in all shapes and sizes — including reporter notebooks, analysis, commentary, link fests, and, yes, snarky cespools

3. Thanks to truly robust mechanisms for comments, categories, tags, podcasts and RSS feeds, blogs represent one of the last, best ways for newspapers to elevate the overall funtionality of their sites.

Which brings me to my other beef: It’s not just Mark Cuban (or Buzz Bissinger) who doesn’t get these things; indeed, most newspapers (present company included) fail to see them, too. Remarkably, the NY Times may be one of the only papers that appreciates (a) that blogs can be seen as a CMS, (b) that they can house all kinds of different content, and (c) that they should be integrating them into their website more, not less.

After the break, I’ll explain more about how Cuban’s assertion that “a blog is a blog is a blog is a blog” is dead wrong, and that, likewise, publishers (newspaper, magazine or otherwise) who see them this way risk ignoring what may be the single greatest publishing innovation of the past 20 years.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m always a big fan of Royal We sketches …

But for the love of sketch comedy, can we please refrain from expressions like “Ted here is a premature ejaculator” from here on forward?Please, Matt. It was funny the first time. Awkward the second. These days, it’s just plain cruel.

Still funny. But cruel, too.

Prepare for the truly surreal: a half-hour Oscar television special starring yours truly. Well, not really. I just appear at the beginning and end, rambling nonsensically about God knows what (something about Michael Moore, Castro, and “Juno,” I think).

But on the positive side, I had my very first experience getting airbrushed, and I got to successfully present my first Oscar — even if it was a $20 Internet knock-off that really looked more like a little league soccer trophy than an 8-pound hunk of gold.

Flash video:

The show aired tonight — Friday, February 22, at 7:30 p.m. — on RNN (channel six), the Regional News Network. I’ve been appearing on their evening news program, Newscenter Now (a joint venture with the paper I work for), over the course of the past year, to talk about the same kind of celebrity gossip I write about for my work blog, Suburbarazzi. But this was the first time where the blog was used to help anchor a whole half-hour show. Pretty cool, right? Or incredibly dorky, I suppose. Either way, it was a blast.

For more on the show, check out my Suburbarazzi post about it.

Alright, now you can commence teasing.

I finally broke down and pulled the trigger on the iPhone a couple weeks ago. Totally 100 percent worth it. It’s become the perfect way for me to kill time in lines, shopping with Ana, or waiting for whatnot. The only thing I wish it had more of — or maybe I should say, I wish I wasn’t so cheap about — is video. Put simply, I love watching music videos and TV shows on the gizmo, but I’m hardly the type to shell out for a $20 iTunes movie.

That’s why i was so thrilled today to find that iTunes is offering a free download of the Renaldo Lapuz tryout for American Idol — quite possibly the best two minutes of television I’ve seen in a decade. I think I already know the entire song by heart: “I am your brother / your best friend forever / singing the songs / the music that you love. … I AM YOUR BROTHER …”

For all you iPhoners out there looking for a little free video to cheer you up, check it out.

I’ve always been a skeptic when it comes to the “all inclusive” racket — the Sandals, Beaches, and Club Med resorts that promise you everything from lodging to food to activities for one package deal. But all that changed this week. I’ve seen the light.

All of the credit goes to Ana, who planned our trip to the Yucatan Peninsula all on her own. She scored a deal at a Club Med just south of Cancun for five nights, including airfare, at $1,000 per person. And that’s literally all we paid. (Well, excluding the taxi to and from the airport and the above $10 photo, which was snapped by some guy on the beach. While I can never condone the leashing of spider monkeys, that pic was just too good for me to pass up.)

To say we had a good time would be a gross understatement. Next to our honeymoon, it was probably the second best vacation we’ve ever taken. Factor in that neither of us got horribly sunburned and, well, maybe it even tops our post-nuptial trip to Belize.

The water was gorgeous, the food excellent and plentiful, the rooms recently renovated, and — most surprising to me — there was so much to do I didn’t get antsy for a minute. Don’t get me wrong, I was still in what Ana likes to call “activity boy mode,” but with windsurfing, sailing, water skiing, and umpteen exercise classes to keep me busy, I wasn’t lobbying to leave the Club Med compound to explore Mayan ruins (like I thought I’d be).

Sure, it would be fun to sightsee on a repeat visit, but for the five nights we were there, we were totally happy to stick to the resort routine: fill up a half dozen plates at every meal with every available dish, sip our shots of capuccino and mango daquari on the beach, listen to my ipod, catch up on old magazines and books, and watch the American Network (best TV show promos ever!) and Season 1 of “The Wire” at nights.

OK, enough gushing. Here are some pics from the trip:

Ana, Gabe, and I swung by Roseland in NYC last Wednesday, the night before turkey day, to see the Scottish sweetheart in concert. Though I own both of her CDs and know most of the songs by heart, I’d only seen her perform once before, on the Today show. On that occasion, she’d done everything herself, laying down a dizzying number of guitar, beatbox, and woo-hoo samples to construct the background for “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.” It was a virtuoso performance (I think you can still see it iTunes), but I was wondering if now, after all her success (i.e. “Suddenly I See” going from cool to ubiquitous to annoyingly overplayed — all in the span of about two months) she’d decided to finally hire a backup band. Amazingly, she hasn’t! Or at least, if she has, only the bongo drum player managed to make the trip across the Atlantic.

There were also a couple background vocalists, but they really weren’t all that necessary. For half the songs, KT lay down her own voice for background vocals herself anyway. Watching her work her sampler magic was every bit as enthralling as the today show bit — only she sustained it for a good 90 minutes, all the while cracking jokes and cussing it up.

If you every have a chance to see KT live, do it! Thank me later.

In case I did a bad job of summarizing her one-man-band style, here’s a video of it in action:

Over the 4th of July week, inbetween weddings in Philly (Parisa & Mike) and Jersey (Kim & Dennis), we took a trip up to Maine. The first few days Ana and I spent on our own, exploring Portland, Kennebunkport, and, of course, Freeport — aka Outlet Town USA. After that, we met up with the Mann clan in York Harbor, where we stayed for about four days, chowing on lobster, visiting the beach, and suffering near hypothermia from merely dipping our toes in the frigid Maine water. Here are just a few pics from our Summer ‘07 vaca:

The Gordon’s fisherman.

Didi and Philly Ball Game on the 4th.

Winifred waves her princess wand.

Owen dons stylish new shades at the Red Hook factory in Portsmouth.

A foggy morning on the way to the beach.

Philip helps Francesca build a sand castle.

If only so we can have an exchange like this:

Although I’m sure that at least initially it would go something like this:

Poor TurkeyMonkey. I’ve been a very bad caretaker of this beloved crossbreed mascot name. But fear not: I’m not about to let the domain registration slip. And I plan to get back to my regularly scheduled blogging any day now.

Why, you might ask, have I been MIA for so long? Have I gone rogue?

The short answer is, yes. I have gone rogue. But I’ve also been working diligently on two other websites lately, Suburbarazzi and Fix Hartsdale Parking. And as any blogger or webmaster knows, one only has enough attention span to run two websites at any given time. Alas, TurkeyMonkey and Plugs have suffered. I don’t know if it’s too late to salvage the latter, but I’m not about to leave TM all abandoned. After all, those are my initials and all, so that would be like abandoning myself, or my cyberself, which is an existential crisis I’m not yet prepared for.

Getting back to what I’ve been doing. … It’s been a busy few months. I’ll do my best to recap the top 10 busy-making things I’ve been up to below:

1. Meeting Bill Murray. Actually, this just happened last night, at the opening of a new Yonkers restaurant called X20. I’m still completely giddy over the whole thing. It all eminated from a story I wrote about how the restaurant’s chef, Peter Kelly, faced off against Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America. Not only did Kelly win, but he beat Flay in a battle of the grill (Flay’s specialty). Anyway, last night was the show’s debut and Murray sat down right next to me and we got to hang for most of the night. I’ll post more details later, with pictures. But I just couldn’t resist sharing that right off the bat.

2. Suburbarazzi: Speaking of celebrities, last fall I started up a blog devoted to the famous residents of the Lower Hudson Valley with my colleagues at InTown and The Journal News. Since then, Suburbarazzi has snowballed into something bigger than I ever imagined. The blog gets, on average, about 40,000 hits a month, and has been linked to from Gawker, Slate, and dozens of other sites. There’s also a celebrity stalker map on the site (an idea we blatantly ripped off from Gawker), photo galleries of recent celebrity sighting, and even a MySpace page. We’ve broken exclusives about DMX’s multiple arrests, the Rosie O’Donnell feuds, and the “sextortionist” who attempted to extort $125,000 from a Pepsi exec.

A daily (or weekly) newspaper column may be coming soon. And we also now film a weekly TV segment for a local newscast on RNN based on the blog. Here’s the latest one, from last week:

RNN clip

3. St. Maarten: In mid-March, my whole family went down to St. Maarten for a week-long vacation and celebration of my dad’s bday. We spent most of the trip mixing guavaberry daiquiris, visiting a beach on the French side of the island (we stayed on the Dutch side), and chasing after either baby Phillip or baby Austin or Owen or Francesca or Winifred. It was great fun, though. Here are some of my favorite pics:

4. LoHud Blogs: Besides Suburbarazzi, I’ve also asserted myself as a leader in our company’s effort to build up its blogging presence. At The Journal News, I helped form a group of “Power Users” to (a) make the blogs better and (b) make them profitable. As for (a), we’re still working on it, but he have managed to get video and audio up, improve the look of the blogs, and make them viewable on mobile phones. As for (b), I got us plugged into Google AdSense program, which hasn’t exactly yielded big bucks yet, but it’s more than the zero dollars we were getting before.

5. Flight School: For the May issue of Rockland Magazine, I went to flight school. It was a bit unnerving since I had no idea that I would actually be manning the yoke during takeoff, but thankfully we all survived. I’d love to enroll in the school for more than just a few classes, maybe even take the time to earn my license, but I’ll need a lot more spare time and money than I’ve got right now. Anyway, here’s the story: “Winging It.”

6. Iron Chef America: As I mentioned before, I wrote an article about Peter Kelly taking down Bobby Flay on Iron Chef. What I really liked about this story, “Diary of an Iron Chef,” was that it was completely written from the POV of the profile subject. I wanted the byline to say, “By Peter Kelly, as told to Ted Mann” to reinforce the idea that it was an actual memoirish retelling of Kelly’s preparations for the battle. In reality, the story came about through a series of lengthy interviews I did with Kelly, but I really hope and think it comes across as his voice.

7. Vegas Baby: For Mike Garrett’s bachelor party, I headed to Vegas with Craig, Gabe, and Mike’s best man, Jeff. We stayed at the Luxor, made a killing at the craps table, lost a killing at the craps table, and learned the do’s and don’ts of night-club line-hopping. Above all, I learned that Gabe (or perhaps an actor named Ryan that looks an awful lot like Gabe — Ryan Phillipe? Ryan Gossling? Ryan O’Neil?) is a babe magnet in the great state of Nevada. Outstanding.

8. Neha got married … and I may or may not have lost a certain bet: We ventured down to NJ for Neha and Justin’s Indian wedding ceremony, which was a blast. The sight of Justin riding in on a drugged, pimped out mule through a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot instantly became one of my top 5 favorite wedding moments. As for the question of whether or not Neha actually got formally married before her 30th birthday — let’s just say, I’m not pressing for any sort of confirmation one way or the other.

9. Newpaper nonsense: In addition to blogging and TV, my job also took me into another (almost) entirely new medium: newpaper writing. I wasn’t exactly handling a beat or anything, but I did begin writing some stories for the paper this year, including one about FBI mole Robert Hanssen (timed to come out with the movie “Breach”) and another about Rosie O’Donnell leaving “The View.”

10. Fix Hartsdale Parking: Last but not least: my crusade to reform Hartsdale’s antiquated parking system. It all started last December, when the hamlet’s ban on overnight winter parking kicked in. During the period from Dec. 1 to Mar. 15, we have absolutely nowhere to park our cars. The Hobson’s choice we’re forced to make is parking in the municipal lot behind an IHOP, where we have to feed meters 24 hours a day. It’s insane. This is the friggin suburbs!

Apologies to anyone who has already heard this rant from me before, but I just couldn’t understand why a town as densly populated as this one wouldn’t have adequate parking for its residents. A simple solution, I figured, would be to simply abolish the ban on overnight parking (which is supposed to allow for plowing, even though the plows never operate during the midnight-6am ban), and instead institute some sort of snow emergency evacuation policy (like most cities have).

To help advance this agenda, I created a website — initially called Fix East Hartsdale Avenue Parking, and later shortened to just Fix Hartsdale Parking — using an open-source publishing software called Joomla. It was really easy to set up, yet nowhere near as easy as Wordpress to customize. The good news is that hundreds of local residents found their way to the site and signed my petition. We even got articles in the local paper, editorials endorsing the plan, and we formed a committee to help lobby for parking reform in the town. The bad news is that this committe has thus far accomplished jack squat.

The police chief came out against me, even going so far as to attack me at town hall meetings. Even though we had legislation written and backed by hundreds of people, I learned a sad fact of suburban life: The police chiefs control the local government here, not the elected officials. Not one of the town council people have yet challenged the police chief to date. I’ve still got my fingers crossed that we’ll accomplish something, but

I’m not holding my breath anymore. The real solution, it seems, is to simply move out of Hartsdale. A lack of parking may seem like a trivial thing if you’ve never experienced it firsthand, but trust me, I’d take the crime in Philadelphia or the high rents in New York any day over the God awful parking situation here. Anyway, I’m cutting back on the parking crusade and getting back to important things: like blogging here.

The parking reform movement’s loss is TurkeyMonkey’s gain.