Publicly, Baker and Thompson presented themselves as dedicated to uncovering the truth. But Baker had secret meetings and conversations with Nixon and his top aides, while Thompson worked cooperatively with the White House and accepted coaching from Nixon’s lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt, the tapes and transcripts show.

Fred Thompson, Pro-Choice Lobbyist

There is much discussion of the evolution of Nashville Is Talking, which looks to be going the way of the Dodo. I have no stake in the site anymore, so frankly I couldn’t care less what happens to it, so long as the archives are still available. If they take all my hard work down off the web, I’m going to be pissed off. Anyway, this local “blog coach,” who is going to get ego elbow from patting himself on the back all the time, says WKRN’s foray into the world of blogging was a failure. Well, what he’s really saying is “WKRN failed to meet my goals with their project, therefore they failed.” But the creator of the NIT project schools Bill on precisely why that blog was begun:

[W]hen NiT was created I can tell you it was launched with altruistic motives and not to make a fast buck for WKRN. I bought into Terry Heaton’s vision of using the station’s resources to create a meeting place for local bloggers that could eventually lead to an ad network that both the station and the bloggers could profit from. This is why you saw no ads on NiT to start. It was supposed to be a stand alone blog, not a promotional tool for the station and that’s why a local blogger was hired to run it and not someone in news or promotion. Her orders were simple: No ‘F Bombs’ and no porn. Otherwise write it like a blog. Her placement in the newsroom was intentional so she could see how the newsroom functions, warts and all and the newsroom benefited from having her there.

At its height there were twenty three separate blogs originating out of that newsroom and Brittney was the catalyst. There were news stories generated from blogs Brittney highlighted on NiT and eventually led to her semi-regular Friday on-air wrap ups of what Nashville’s Talking about. NiT was never about ROI’s or driving ratings to WKRN even though the latter would have been welcomed. It was about moving into the Media 2.0 world and finding ways of engaging an audience that didn’t think about watching a local newscast. We sponsored blog meet-ups where new friendships were forged and conducted classes just for bloggers on shooting and editing video. This really was the station reaching out in a unique way to the local community.

To people like Bill Hobbs, and perhaps the City Paper since they hired him, altruism and community building are “failures.” Because NIT didn’t pay for itself, it was a waste. I couldn’t disagree more. This is a myopic view, and one I think is being taken on by upper-management at WKRN, unfortunately. Good, authentic sites like NIT take time to show a monetary return, especially when pure greed isn’t the ultimate driving force.

Hobbs likes to tout his clients’ hits as something “out-of-the-box.” Frankly, I’m not sure he knows what that term means. He has a history of misprepresenting his own traffic numbers, something he at least admitted to after being called out for it. Taking a look at the City Paper’s blog stats shows nothing substantial for a site getting linked by local bloggers all over due to their debut. Those hits are sure to slack off in a big way. In fact, in addition to the inaccuracy of my job history, Bills Hobbs has overestimated the hit count of the City Paper blogs on the 6th of this month by 50%. He says, “The City Paper’s Nashville City Blogs have, combined, achieved 30 percent of the page-views of NashvilleIsTalking.com today, although the Nashville City Blogs are just a week old, and NiT is more than a year old.” This, according to publicly available stats, is a lie. Here’s the math comparing hits on 7/6:

565/3368=16.7%

Might I remind everyone that in Hobbs’ inflated percentage report he is comparing ALL of the City Paper blog hits to ONE of WKRN’s blogs hits? So, not only is the comparison completely unfair, it is completely wrong. Hobbs has yet again inaccurately reported inflated hit numbers for web sites under his supervision. This will not come as a surprise to many who have been keeping up.

The City Paper hired a spinster and a fact-fudger to consult for them on their blogs. II’ll admit, Hobbs has expertise on social networking and blogging, but he can’t stop lying long enough to let the good skills shine through. He truly has an uncanny ability to obfuscate any and all discussions so that, through paragraph after paragraph of semantics, he leaves people throwing their hands up in disgust. It’s a skill few have. He’s a master at it.

For Hobbs to pooh-pooh the genuine efforts of good men and women in order to boost his professional profile is shameful. And, sadly, par for the course.

CLARIFICATION: When I refer to hits, I am talking about unique visits.

UPDATE: These stats show the influence of the CPBlogs this early in the game as being negligible compared to NIT, despite what others would have you believe, especially considering that NIT had two separate URLs.

Nashvilleistalking.com is ranked 6,876

News2wkrn.com/nit is ranked 9,746

Nashville Ballerz is ranked 624,806

The Style Arbiter is ranked 855,142

Giant Steps is ranked 855,142

Political Animals is ranked 425,060

As you can see, suggesting that the CP Blogs have anywhere close to the amount of visitors or influence is ludicrous. I’m not saying they won’t one day, but it hasn’t even been a week since their launch. You simply cannot compete with an established site like NIT in that amount of time, no matter how hard you try to spin it.

AND ANOTHER THING: As Katherine Coble so succinctly notes, “It’s really easy to armchair quarterback all of this, though. Heaton and Sechrist didn’t really have any models to analyse before their architecture.” This point cannot be emphasized enough. While criticizing the efforts of WKRN, Hobbs is using their bravery and pioneering to his advantage. We were first, the rest are using us as a model, no doubt, whether it be “do this” or “don’t do this.” There is something to be said, hell, praised, for having the balls to put it on the line. What the CPBlogs are doing is really safe. Good for them. But this overt swipe at WKRN’s bold experiment without any recognition of their trailblazing in new media really burns me up. Especially considering the source.

This landing page is seriously ugly. And the title in Times New Roman? Seriously?

Not Everyone’s War Stories Ended in High School (Red State Hipster Shirts)