Tomorrow.sg and Racist Blog

Steven,

Since you asked on your blog what the 'spat' was - I thought I would send you the comments in that post which may give you a hint of what happened. The fun bit to Bloglines is that anything that gets fed via RSS is kept in the buffer until it is pushed out by new entries. Deleting the source does not remove entries remaining in the buffer. Hence I was able to go back and retrieve the actual comments instead of trying to reconstruct things and getting it wrong.

There was a lot said, not all relevant, but I'm passing you every comment made in that post so to retain the spirit of the discussion. I've highlighted the two pertinent comments from jseng and fembot which would give us a hint as to the spat. I admit I'm only guessing that it is jseng that La Idler is talking about, but having been part of the grapevine for some time (though no longer), and knowing some of the editors personally, I think my guess is not too far off the mark. Plus certain behaviours displayed in public had already made a number of us wary of the direction of Tomorrow, though I was thinking perhaps cooler more sensible heads can prevail. Obviously not. Below is a link to an entry in Nicholas Liu's blog where you can witness the exchanges in full 'glory'.

http://buttermilk.blogspot.com/2005/06/thank-you-sir-may-i-have-another.html

Anyway, do what you wish with this information - it doesn't matter to me. I would like to request anonymity - mainly because I do know some of the editors as friends and do not wish to have this be taken as some personal attack.

rgds-

Racist blog on Malays

*sigh* this is getting tiring so this will be my last post on this "why it this on tomorrow" red-herring.

Tomorrow dont work by consensus. Tomorrow dont work by popular opinion. That job is a for mainstream media, not us. Most important for all, Tomorrow works by POSITIVE not negative enforcement.

What this means is we value people who contributes positively more then those who is all-talk-no-action. We value those who recommends article constantly (which is why we feature them on our sidebar) over those ask us to take things down.

This also apply to the editorial process. Even if 12 out of the 13 editors say no, the odd one out say yes, then it is a yes. The plus is more important then the all the minuses. That's why we pick our editors carefully to ensure we come from very diverse background and because of that, we disagree a lot. If we find ourselves agreeing all the time, then we are not diverse enough.

Now, there are many reasons why the editor click publish. Sometimes we think it is a good article, sometimes we think it is worthwhile to highlight it and sometimes we put it up to be burn alive.

ps: you either believe in freedom of speech or you don't. there is no such thing as a line.

Posted by jseng on 3 August, 2005 - 3:34pm

Comment on "Racist blog on Malays" by fembot

Racist blog on Malays

so if I as an editor deems it unappropriate, can I unpublish it? After all it takes just one doesn't it?

Posted by fembot on 3 August, 2005 - 4:33pm

For the entire email, plus the comments that appeared with it click here.

Related Links:
Tomorrow.sg
Stupid White Men
http://juzbren.blogspot.com/
Born on Nineth of August

Human Rights