February 24, 2005
When Awards Don't Matter
(Hat tip: LGF)
Wired.com has given combat journalist Kevin Sites the 2005 Wired Rave Awards for Blogs, though apparently "relevancy" was not one of the criteria for judging.
Why? According to Wired, Sites, "pioneered the new new journalism of war-blogging." Really? Someone please tell that to the many milbloggers that came before him, such as Lt. Smash or Argghhh!. Sites was not the first war-blogger, and his writing, though often quite good, rarely held the tension of Armor Geddon, or intelligence of Austin Bay. He was pedestrian, sometimes better, but never near the best of the military and war-bloggers.
Other blogs had far more national and international impact.
Powerline and Little Green Footballs exposed the fake documents scandal at CBS News that brought down Dan Rather and shook professional journalism to the core, and Powerline was named Time Magazine's Blog of the Year, based upon "The Sixty-First Minute," an article that is arguably the most important single post in the history of the blogosphere.
While Sites does not publish his blog's traffic statistics, it probably wouldn't rate in the top 250 for traffic, nor in the top 100 for links, according to a comparison of selected sites in the TTLB Ecosystem rankings against blog search relavancy results at Technorati.com.
Sites doesn't appear to score well for overall relevance, nor impact, nor traffic, nor linkage.
One would be forced to believe that the only reason Sites was chosen for this award was because of a single incident of relevance, when Sites released and blogged about controversial footage of a young Marine killing a wounded terrorist in a Fallujah mosque. Ultimately, even that had little relevance, as the Marine is not likely to face charges. Bad things happen in war.
That news, and the otherwise insignificant blog covering it, hardly seems worthy of an award.
