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As news of Hillary Rodham Clinton's impending concession filters through the Internets today, I think all webby journalists should be thinking about one person. Mayhill Fowler.

"Who?" you may ask. This 61-year-old citizen journalist has followed the campaign all season for The Huffington Post, and she is single-handedly changing the way the rest of this presidential campaign will be reported.

Last night, Fowler recorded former President Bill Clinton saying some off-the-cuff remarks that became breaking news this morning. Earlier this year, Fowler reported some comments that Barack Obama made at a fundraiser. Both times, she went to places where reporters don't usually report, and she made national headlines.

Citizen journalists like Fowler have been ignored and ridiculed for years--and nobody ever expected them to make news. Now they are, and all writers should pay attention. Jay Rosen summed it all up a few months ago. All the rules have changed, and reporters of all stripes need to figure out what to do about it:

"Michael Tomasky of the Guardian thinks we broke the rules, emphasis on “the.” Or that Gawker gawked. We’re in uncharted territory here. Descriptor languages missing. People get mad when they don’t know what to call things. Mad or daft."

What do you think? Is Fowler breaking the rules? Or fixing a broken press?

I'm typing ODD AND THE FROST GIANTS currently. Am wondering whether to change the title to Odd and the Frost Giant, because only one Frost Giant ever comes onstage (as it were), although there are others in the background, and of course there's always Loki.

I was just looking at the new expanded Beowulf website, over at http://www.beowulfmovie.com/. They had TV spot trailers up, and I was pleased to see in this new one had lots of little bits of footage that weren't in the stuff I've seen so far (which is minutes 15-30 approximately) -- shots from the Race with Brecca, of Beowulf from the last part of the film as an older man, bits of Dragon footage, and a lot more than just Grendel's Mum in human form. It says it's easily embeddable, so I will give it a shot.

Am really looking forward to seeing it all and finding out what it is that Bob Zemeckis and his team actually made.

(The video's acting a bit oddly when I put it into Blogger. Let's keep our fingers crossed that it behaves when I post this. And if you're reading this on an RSS feed and it cuts off here, click on the link to actual the neilgaiman.com/journal webpage to keep reading)




Meanwhile... the web takes you odd places. I mean, I'm out of Marmite. Not a problem in the UK, but problematic in the US. So I google to find out how to order Marmite, and the next moment I'm discovering that you can make Marmite go white by hitting it for half an hour. FOR THE SAKE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY, WHO ORIGINALLY HIT MARMITE FOR HALF AN HOUR AND DISCOVERED THIS? It's at http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuunsaiki/303084929/

Hi Neil,Thanks for link to the Wikipedia entry on cants. Now I finally have a word to describe Carny Talk, a language my grandparents taught me, that they used in the carnival back in the 30's. I'm always looking for more information about that. Here's the page where I discuss the version I was taught: http://www.winterscapes.com/carny.htm
-Kate Winter

Thanks, Kate. I loved your link to http://welcometothefair.com/lingo/ and thought I should link to it here for people who are planning to write Novels in November. After all, half of those words are plots...

I was fascinated by this Guardian article -- http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/10/observer_books.html -- not only because it links to the winners of the Guardian "graphic short story" prize (suddenly I find myself turning into Eddie Campbell, and wanting to explain that Graphic Novel just means comics anyway, and Graphic Short Story actually means er, comics), but I was bemused by the view of history in which quality UK newspapers started reviewing comics seriously in 1996, about eight years after the real reviews started. I think what the writer is actually saying is that he was surprised when he started editing the book page to find that his reviewers were doing reviews of graphic novels, but to his surprise these reviews and the books they were reviewing were as good as the other books they were writing about.

Bill Stiteler sent me this link to a set of photographs from a parallel universe -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/williamhundley/sets/72157594235409275/

Joshua Middleton has some lovely pictures up from a Sandman project that didn't happen at http://joshuamiddleton.blogspot.com/2007/10/one-that-was-put-to-sleep.html

and I think I should offer congratulations to Holly Gaiman on becoming employed.

...

Thanks to Dan the mighty WebGoblin, people who go to http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2004/01/you-think-theyre-cuddly-but-i-think.asp, or who just click on the final link in this post can once again download or hear The Sinister Ducks song.