TUESDAY'S LINKS: Bloggers at Fashion Week, ABC's 9/11 Drama Lags, Auto Dealers See Online Ads in Future

By: E&P Staff In today's links, ABC's controversial 9/11 drama ended up third in the ratings, more auto dealers are moving their advertising online, and bloggers are finally getting on the inside at New York's fashion week.

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Despite Buzz and Controversy, Path to 9/11 Doesn't Top Ratings
Broadcasting & Cable: ABC's Path to 9/11 got a lot of pre-broadcast buzz for its controversial treatment of the Clinton administration, but it managed only a third-place finish for the night. In fact, the two controversial 911-related shows on Sunday night, ABC's drama and CBS' airing of documentary 9/11, were beaten by Fox's animated lineup of The Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad.

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Auto Dealers See Online Ads in the Future
New York Post: Big automakers have been rapidly shifting their ad budgets to the Internet in recent years, but deep-pocketed dealer groups are poised to pick up the pace of spending even more. Auto buyers' migration to the Internet has helped to push up ad rates for popular auto sites, along with bidding for related search terms on Google and Yahoo! Initially, it also made it expensive and inefficient for regional auto groups - made up of local dealers that pool their ad dollars -- to compete online. As local businesses, they also had to figure out how to zero in on buyers in their area.


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Google's News Archives Raise Questions for Internet Activist
Brewster Kahl in the Wall Street Journal: The issue we have with what's being built is that we are creating what is in effect a private library system. What we want, however, is a public library system, one where we can have many different points of view on the published literature of humankind. What we are actually building might end up being controlled by a single corporation. If this were some other industry -- plastic or software -- I wouldn't be as worried about it. But we are taking about the cultural heritage, the intellectual heritage, of humans. And that's too important to be left to one company.

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Blogging Under the Fashion Tent
Wall Street Journal: Once snubbed by the insular fashion world for their sometimes snarky reviews and tiny audiences, fashion bloggers are now attracting the attention of the fashion establishment. As blogs claim bigger followings, and advertisers shift more spending to them, designers see these independent Web publishers as a new marketing opportunity. Many small designers, in particular, now realize they can get valuable exposure on blogs that they might not get in mainstream media. This year, with 191 shows in New York, up 25% from five years ago, there aren't enough old-media critics to cover them all.

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Blogs Express Guilt, Anxiety, Disgust Over 9/11 Replay
CJR Daily: On the fifth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C., CNN Pipeline, the network's relatively new Internet television service, began its all-day, real-time re-broadcast of CNN's 9/11/01 coverage The most common emotion voiced by bloggers was guilt over even watching the feed, which runs until midnight tonight. "I admit, I am going to watch CNN Pipeline ... I didn't see this from the beginning and want to watch the first reactions (I was asleep at 9 a.m. back then)," writes Tina from North Carolina. Many expressed general discomfort over watching the footage. "I was fairly certain that I'd be able to set emotion aside and watch CNN Pipeline's replay of the real-time coverage from a purely intellectual level," admits Mesmerization Eclipse. "Still, though, just now, I felt a massive, almost heart attack-level jolt when I saw that second plane for the first time." Other Web scribes reacted with cynical grumbling.

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Mark Fefer to Helm 'Seattle Weekly'
Seattle Weekly: On October 3, Mark D. Fefer will become Seattle Weekly's new editor-in-chief. His hiring represents a second homecoming for Mark, who has spent his journalistic career in Seattle and New York City. Raised on the Eastside, a mile from where Microsoft's campus is now, Fefer graduated from Harvard in 1987 with a degree in English and moved to New York, where he started as a fact-checker at the satirical magazine Spy. He spent almost five years as a staff reporter for Fortune magazine before returning to Seattle the first time and signing on with the Weekly. He was a staff writer at the Weekly from 1995 to 2001, and also was the paper's jazz critic. He served as the Weekly's arts and culture editor from 2002 to 2004 before returning again to New York City, where he worked most recently as an editor for Bloomberg News.

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Suffering Through Marty Peretz's Warped New Blog
Jack Shafer in Slate: If insulting noise is the Web's disease, Peretz's new blog, The Spine, isn't the cure. Setting his computer on "flame," he hits the gas in his debut post, which went up today. He complains about unnamed journalists who "don't even pretend to know history ... don't know the sheer facts of yesterday" and "interview fools and knaves as if they were wise and good." He never identifies the stupid journalists, but by the end of the item Peretz adds some much-needed specificity to the post with an example: He's angry at the TV press for interviewing Al Sharpton!