The Accidental CEO's Tale

This is going to be an inchoate post from one exhausted blogger who found himself an accidental CEO of a media company that launched today. If you had told me two years ago I would be hosting such an incredible line-up of people at the Rainbow Room today, I would have thought you were the reincarnation of Timothy Leary.

But to begin with, let me say that Jeff Goldstein’s keynote address was brillant. We decided to use Jeff as a last minute replacement for Judith Miller when so may advocates of “free speech” attacked us for offering her a platform. (BTW, OSM will be offering plenty of people platforms with all sorts of views. Get used to it.)

Seriously, I thought Judith did a terrific job and her speech will be posted over at OSM as soon as we can get it transcribed (but not by me, because martini-fueled transcriptions tend to be…er… erratic). The general subject matter of a possible Federal Shield Law and what that will mean to bloggers and journalists (and those who go both ways) will be the subject of an on-going series of Blogjams on OSM. Many people have expressed interest in participating, among them Jay Rosen and attorney Andrew Deutsch (a specialist in this area). I even asked the Daily Kos to participate (everybody who blogs should be concerned with this issue) but received no reply. So it goes.

I also thought Sen. Cornyn, who joined our lunch via satellite from Washington, was surprisingly blog-friendly in his remarks.

And speaking of OSM… which I will often, I’m afraid… it’s now my day job… special heartfelt thanks to news editor Hillary Johnson and el nino de Barcelona Jos´e Guardia from all of us here in NY for doing triple-duty keeping the site up and running while we’re… er… drinking martinis at the W bar with the 5’1″ Tim Blair (he’s actually 5’3″).

UPDATE: A special apology to the those of you who have been emailing me. So far I am unable to send email out of the hotel in NY. Working on it. Of course, there are also, inevitably, many small errors and omissions (names missing, etc.) on the OSM site, which we are working on. We will be updating for the next week at least, I imagine. [But is Tim Blair really 5’3″?-ed. Actually, he’s 6’2″.]