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Archives for February 2006

A likely story

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As a young journalist fresh out of school, I decided to pursue criticism rather than reporting. I knew I’d chafe under the stricture of American journalism that forbade the expression of opinion. (Also, I knew I was temperamentally unsuited for shoving notebook or microphone under the noses of people who were recently bereaved, newly indicted or otherwise thrust into the spotlight.) If I became a reporter, I could wait 20 years and maybe, just maybe, if I worked hard and was good and got lucky, I’d earn a column, and, finally, be able to write what I thought, instead of having to seek out “experts” to say what I thought I already knew. Or I could become a critic — and start writing, immediately, not just about what I was observing but also about what I was thinking about it, which seemed more honest.

This is how it looked to me a quarter century ago, anyway. Since then I’ve ended up doing somewhat more reporting in addition to columns and criticism, and my respect for the insanely difficult work of reporting well has risen.

But also, the strictures have evolved. In the disintegration of journalistic norms taking place all around us today, it is increasingly common to find out-and-out opinions sitting right in the middle of ostensible “news” articles. I’m not talking about the kind of complaint you hear all the time from partisans of every stripe who dismiss facts that are inconvenient to their side by relabeling them as opinions. I’m talking about real opinions — statements that do not stand on their own as reported fact but hang in the void, unsupported by anything other than assertion.

These musings were occasioned by a piece in Sunday’s New York Times Business section by Louis Uchitelle. “Two Tiers, Slipping Into One” describes the decline of the bargaining power of Rust Belt unions. A union leader tells Uchitelle what he says to young workers who are getting a worse deal than their elders: “I assure them that five years down the road, when the present contract expires, we in the union are going to improve their lot in life.”

Uchitelle begins his next paragraph: “That does not seem likely.”

I am not questioning the accuracy of Uchitelle’s forecast, nor do I begrudge him his sarcasm. I am instead marveling at the forthright expression of an opinion. The union guy says one thing, and the reporter says, “Nope, sorry, not gonna happen.”

Uchitelle is a veteran labor and economics reporter. I have no reason to think he’s wrong. I’m just wondering — can we extend this practice a bit? If we’re saying it’s OK for reporters to point out that something a union leader says “does not seem likely,” maybe it would be OK for them to point out the same thing in other places and at other times, for other speakers?

Consider:

“We’re working with Congress to hold the line on spending,” Mr. Bush said Monday. “And we do have a plan to cut the deficit in half.”

That does not seem likely.

The insurgency in Iraq is “in the last throes,” Vice President Dick Cheney says.

That does not seem likely.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: “”There is no wiggle room in the president’s mind or my mind about torture.”

That does not seem likely.

Is this practice of writing truth to power going to spread across the pages of America’s dailies? That does not seem likely. But we can dream.

Putting Google’s capitalization in its place

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Cory Doctorow is a brilliant science fiction writer and one of the most eloquent voices on the Net today arguing against corporate lock-downs of intellectual property. But in catching up on my RSS backlog recently I did trip over something of a whopper in the middle of an otherwise typically persuasive rant against an ill-advised digital rights management scheme (in this case, Google’s):

  Google’s really good at adapting to the Internet — that’s why it’s
capitalized at $100 billion while the whole of Hollywood only turns
over $60 billion a year.

This comparison is, as I’m sure Doctorow would admit, pure apples-and-oranges. “Capitalization” is a number you arrive at by taking a company’s current stock price — the last dollar amount that a buyer and seller agreed upon for a block of shares — and multiplying it by the “outstanding shares,” or total number of shares in the company known to exist.

Google is doing quite well, and its high stock price gives it all sorts of advantages, but there is no pile of $100 billion flowing through its coffers. Its revenue — what it “turns over” each year, the number of actual dollars flowing into its operations — is more like $4-5 billion. That’s impressive, but smaller by a factor of 10 than the number Doctorow cites for Hollywood’s gross revenues (I found $63 billion as the global revenue figure for American movie studios).

Capitalization is a purely theoretical number. In the case of companies like Google, much or most of the value of stock that adds up to $100 billion is not being traded. If all or most or even just some significant fraction of the holders of that value decided, “Hey, it’s time to cash in,” and sold at the same time, the share price would begin a quick slide, and the capitalization would evaporate. Revenue streams aren’t permanent either, of course, but they’re a lot more tangible.

Google’s high capitalization essentially means that investors believe its impressive profitability growth will continue. (Or maybe they just believe that it’s 1999 all over again and not buying would mean missing out on a new bubble.) One thing’s for sure: despite the company’s claim not to be focused on short-term results, its management must be acutely conscious of the need to keep that growth charging along.

Which, ironically, is probably why Google is beginning to lose its user-friendly footing and adopt the kind of unpleasant, user-hostile DRM schemes that inspired Doctorow’s wrath in the first place.

Furnace heat

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I’ve always found that the music I love best, the music that stays with me through the years, is music that takes a little time to warm to. Songs that are instantaneously ingratiating are often quick to pale into boredom, but those complex enough to be initially off-putting reveal their appeal on third or fourth or fifth listen and become long-term infatuations.

Unfortunately, my life as a working parent these days does not leave as much room as it once had for third or fourth or fifth listens. And so sometimes I’ll check out a new band’s music and, if my auditory fancy is not instantly seized, I’ll put the CD or the files aside for months, even years. Frequently, this means I’ll miss the boat for an unconscionable length of time.

I certainly missed The Blueberry Boat. This album by the Fiery Furnaces was an indie-critical sensation when it came out in 2004. But the spectral nautical rambling of the album’s 10-minute opener, “Quay Cur,” didn’t grab me quickly when I brought it home, so it languished at the bottom of my pile, and I am only falling in love with it now.

It’s a collection of long story-suites (the band’s brother-and-sister creators, Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, have cited Who pop suites like “Rael” and “A Quick One While He’s Away” as influences) that hop restlessly from theme to theme, spitting off throwaway melodies and opaquely allusive, effusively articulate lyrics. The title track features an assault by pirates; “Chris Michaels” seems to tune onto the wavelength of a suburban gossip; “Mason City” takes snapshots of the 19th-century midwest from formal correspondence and railway company files; “Chief Inspector Blancheflower” seems to be a sort of Victorian policier unfolding in the mind of a bored typewriter-repairperson manque.

I hear fragments of everything from Phil Spector to Philip Glass in the mix; there are snarly-catchy guitar solos and even gospel flourishes (in the frantic “I Lost My Dog”). Some of Matthew Friedberger’s sound treatments hark back to the heyday of early Eno. (The fanfare at the start of “Mason City” sounds a lot like a sped-up outtake from Another Green World. And both Blueberry and Here Come the Warm Jets feature songs with “Paw-Paw” in their titles!) Other synthesizer flourishes fondly recall the bombast of the prog-rock era, though that label is one the Furnaces understandably do not embrace. One evening, when I turned up Blueberry Boat in my office, my wife shouted incredulously from the next room, “Wow — Emerson, Lake and Palmer?” Not exactly — but not crazy, either.

The followup to Blueberry, apparently a tribute to the Friedbergers’ grandmother titled Rehearsing My Choir, has gotten a colder critical reception. But before making up my own mind, I’m going to listen to it at least a half dozen times — as soon as I get the chance.

The buck(shot) stops where, again?

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I am not and almost certainly never will be a hunter, and I am in no position to judge the finer points of what happened on the quail-hunting expedition on which Vice President Cheney shot and wounded one of his hunting companions.

But the dance of denial, finger-pointing and cover-up that followed the hunting accident? That’s something anyone can see for the poor behavior it is — part of a pattern of secrecy and buck-passing that seems to be deeply etched in this administration’s DNA. Cheney and his retainers chose not to inform the press or the country in a timely manner. Then they decided that — in what even this city kid can see is a thoroughly unsportsmanlike fashion — the fault lay with the unfortunate victim, rather than with the veep with the wayward shot.

But I wouldn’t know a covey from a coven, so don’t take it from me — go read the Austin American-Statesman outdoors columnist, Mike Leggett, who writes,

 

Be a man. You shot a guy.

That would be my unsolicited advice for Vice President Dick Cheney.

You shot a guy. At least stay in town until he’s out of the hospital.

You shot a guy. Don’t blame the sun or the wind or the rotation of the Earth. And for goodness’ sake, don’t blame Harry Whittington.

Crystal ball hazing

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Back around the New Year I flagged for future comment this passage from a Wall Street Journal piece about what to expect in the year ahead:

  “The first thing to expect in 2006 is Google or Yahoo will buy a major content company — such as a movie studio,” says Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer at Publicis Groupe Media, a division of an ad holding company that seeks out advertising opportunities in new media. “At the very least they will do some similar combo with a studio where they buy a 10% to 15% stake, much like the way [Google] has structured its deal with Time Warner” to buy a stake in AOL. “What Google and Yahoo need is
content.”

With all the respect due to anyone who bears the title Chief Innovation Officer, I must say I find this forecast incomprehensible.

Google and Yahoo have both built fantastic businesses by not assuming the costly burden of paying people to produce content but instead (in Google’s case) leveraging the information everyone else on the Web creates in building links or (in Yahoo’s case) leveraging the content provided by other companies and the attention of the people who use its services. Both Yahoo and Google have prospered by not paying for content. Why would they want to change that? Why should they? For their own egos? Because Hollywood needs an exit strategy?

Now, it may irk me that Yahoo News, which employs a skeleton crew of editors to repurpose the efforts of editors and writers at other outfits, has become the traffic-king of Web-based news — or that Google News, which employs an even cheaper crew of algorithms, is another contender for the crown. Those of us who’ve labored in the trenches trying to produce real original Web content may well feel some sense of pained injustice at that outcome. On the other hand, it’s undeniable that first Yahoo and then Google saw and savvily exploited a gigantic business opportunity that we old-media transplants, with the “content is king” mantra echoing in our ears, missed.

So, while Yahoo is indeed gently dipping its toes into original-content waters, I will be very, very surprised if it dives in head-first and buys a movie studio or other old-school content producer in 2006. And I think the odds are even more fantastically against Google doing so. Google looks like they’ll be very happy for everyone else to keep producing content; the prize their eyes are on is serving as a central broker for the advertising that supports said content.

2006 has a long way to go, but it will be worth checking back ten months from now to see where we came out.

Land rush

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Sure, you can revolutionize the real estate market by doing a mashup of data and maps to create a nifty tool that lets anyone find the market value (or a market value, anyway) of homes across the land.

Agents? We don’t need no stinking agents, do we? “There’s just one thing left,” Jeff Jarvis says — “scheduling visits and accompanying the buyers.”

But hold on a quick second with that revolution — before any of this can happen, your nifty, agent-disintermediating tool has to work.

Right now Zillow’s site has a big red notice that says “Site seems slow? Close your eyes and envision your perfect home — by then maybe the server can handle our zillions of visitors.”

The thing is, the site isn’t slow, it’s non-functional, as far as I can tell, a good two days after its unveiling. Every single search I’ve tried has resulted in a “We’re sorry. We encountered a problem performing this search” message.

Launching a complex new service isn’t easy, to be sure. Bt I’d have thought Zillow’s team would have known that every single home-owner within earshot of their URL would be pounding on their site the moment it went live (that’s in addition to all of the Web 2.0 geeks and the real estate pros).

Well, it may not work — but at least it’s still free!

UPDATE: Nick Carr, at least, appears to have gotten Zillow to work — but he doesn’t like the quality of the data he found there.

An announcement about Salon Blogs — and more

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We started the Salon Blogs program three-and-a-half years ago, in July, 2002. Salon’s business wasn’t exactly thriving at the time, but we knew that there was an explosion of energy and creativity happening in the universe of blogs, and we wanted to figure out a way for Salon to participate. We lacked the resources to build our own system, so we partnered with Userland Software, which provided the software for users and took on the work of running the back end for us.

In charging a modest fee for our product, we were rowing upstream, since free alternatives were already available and would only grow more plentiful. Nonetheless, we were delighted and proud to see a smart little community grow under the Salon Blogs banner. Writers flourished; projects emerged; more than one book contract was obtained.

Still, 2006 is a whole different universe from 2002. Salon — today, thankfully, on a firmer financial footing — is beginning to explore some new ideas and approaches to the realm that business types call “user-generated content” (or, sometimes, “social software”), visionaries call “citizen’s media,” and old-timers like me still think of as “interactivity.”

I have the good fortune, and the challenge, of leading this exploration for Salon: this is the main focus of my work here, for now. As a lot of you know, I served as managing editor from 1999 until late 2004, when I took a leave of absence to write my book. It was the best job I’ve ever had — but five years is a long time to be managing anything, particularly during the roller-coaster ride of those particular years. Since last fall, Salon has been fortunate to have Jeanne Carstensen in the managing editor’s seat — and I get to go build some new things, which has always been my favorite role.

Since, among other possibilities, our new projects may involve a new approach to blogs, we’ve decided to stop taking new sign-ups for the existing Salon Blogs program. It doesn’t make sense to keep inviting people in that door. One big issue is that the Radio Userland software that the program is built around — and that I’m still using for this blog — turned out not to be the ideal tool for this sort of project. It installs easily, but long-term maintenance can be hard, since the program and all its data sits on your own hard drive. (This post by Paolo Valdemarin explores the topic further.) Radio had some very cool features ahead of its time, including a great built-in RSS-feed reader; but for many users those don’t outweigh the essential awkwardness of hosting all your blog data on your desktop machine. That model, whatever its strengths and weaknesses, is one that the world has moved away from, and Userland is putting more muscle behind developing other products.

Current Salon bloggers should not be alarmed (though I know some will be anyway). Your blogs will continue to live at the same Web address they’ve always had. You don’t have to do anything or change anything if you don’t want to. Userland has assured us that they’ll continue to run the blogs.salon.com server for you. The updates and ranking pages will remain in place, too.

You can keep blogging as you always have — we’re not shutting anything down. I imagine some current users will decide to look at alternatives; for those who decide they want to move their blogs, we and Userland will do what we can to help you with the transition. Or you may want to wait and see what Salon has to offer as this year progresses.

While we don’t yet know exactly what it will be — that’s part of the fun — if it attracts the sort of creative spirit that Salon Blogs has, we’ll know we’re on the right track.

(For those of you interested in the discussion about these new Salon projects, there’s a letter to readers up on the site now, and also a discussion in Table Talk — world-readable, but only Salon Premium subscribers can post.)