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Of Criticism and Cowardice - LAist Rewrites Its Own History *
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4837 Reads
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 UPDATE BELOW
There's a sad development in the LAist-vs-blogging.la battle: LAist appears to have censored its critics by erasing more than a dozen negative comments from its site.
Yesterday morning in comments on this post, LAist publisher Jake Dobkin was defending his decision to brag about LAist having a bigger audience than blogging.la.
After a stiff argument with critics including blogging.la co-founder Jason deFillippo and Caryn Coleman (wife of blogging.la cofounder Sean Bonner), Dobkin apparently froze the comments, disallowing further debate ...
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And he owned up to it, telling deFillippo: yeah- i turned off the comments because i had a feeling they were going to start getting personal- but have no fear, you are trackbacked on to the post.
seriously, though- don't take it so personally. i think i'm better than you? i've never even met you. i have met your site, however, and i really do think it's weak. sorry about that.
Posted by: jake at October 11, 2004 03:07 PM Jason deFillippo blows his stack about it here.
As of this morning, the entire flame war is missing from Dobkin's original post, backtrack links and all. Every comment criticizing Dobkin's post, a comment or two accusing him of using inaccurate figures to make the traffic comparison, and a few comments that criticized blogging.la's content, have been erased - more than 20 in all.
I could pontificate here about the responsibility of journalists to accept criticism gracefully, to avoid changing facts to suit their needs, and to encourage debate of any kind - particularly in the blogosphere.
I could rail about censorship - there's a distinction between a publisher's right to eliminate posts that would offend his users (for profanity, threats, etc, which are covered in any standard site-use agreement) and eliminating posts that make him look bad.
But I think it's pretty clear what happened - Dobkin dished it out, but couldn't take it.
It's easy to dismiss this as the rash act of a young site - LAist has only been around since June. We can hope that eventually other LAist bloggers will see the error of Dobkin's ways and the site will get back to business.
But in the event of further Politburo-style revisionism, I'll quote here the complete content of his original post: <img src="images/blog/2004/laisttraffic_original.gif" width="396" height=310" border="0">
A couple of announcements regarding the site:
1. LAist has now completed the migration to MovableType 3x, so please let us know if you see any lingering problems, particularly with commenting. The site is also living on a new, dedicated server, so hopefully that will result in better performance and speed for the site. If you are noticing strange page loads, shoot us a note with the browser you are using, and we'll try to resolve it.
2. Not to toot our own horns, but LAist is now the most popular group blog in Los Angeles. By a longshot! We can't thank our readers enough- and we can't wait to show you all the new features and writers we'll be introducing over the next couple of months. Come on back, y'all! (The traffic data from our friends at Blogging.la is courtesy of their Sitemeter)
Talk to you soon!
Posted by Jake Dobkin in
UPDATE: Aaaand ... now the comments have been restored to LAist warts and all, without comment.
I note that someone (not me) has added a trackback link there to the piece you're reading now.
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - 10:31 AM
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