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The Times, John Dean and the elephant in the room

February 22, 2009 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

New York Times ombudsman — excuse me, “public editor” — Clark Hoyt published a piece today about a sorry recent incident in which the Times ran a front-page piece granting some exposure and credibility to Watergate revisionists. The piece described the efforts of a writer named Peter Klingman to discredit the work of historian Stanley Kutler, suggesting that Kutler had doctored his transcripts of the Watergate tapes in an effort to protect John Dean and blacken President Nixon’s name.

Hoyt’s piece is fine as far as it goes: it basically points out how weak the Times story was, and how unfair to Kutler. Hoyt concludes that “the Times blew the dispute out of proportion with front-page play, allowed an attack on a respected historian’s integrity without evidence to support it, and left readers to wonder if there was anything here that would change our understanding of the scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency.”

But Hoyt’s discussion conspicuously avoids the elephant in the room (and yes, it is an elephant). I don’t know Klingman’s exact motivations or political affiliations, but it doesn’t take much thought to realize why someone in 2009 might be interested in attacking John Dean and lightening Nixon’s burden of guilt. Dean’s testimony was central in the collapse of Nixon’s presidency. Dean served a prison sentence for his role in Watergate — time that Nixon should have served, too, but avoided by wangling a corrupt pardon for himself. But many conservatives are still itching to exact further punishment for Dean’s betrayal. In the past decade, Dean became an outspoken critic of the Bush administration. Discrediting him would be sweet revenge.

It is bizarre to watch Hoyt dig in at such length about so many of the scholarly and journalistic issues surrounding this story yet fail to discuss the politics.

Full disclosure: I worked closely with Dean back in 2002 on an ill-fated (but still, to me, worthwhile) e-book titled Unmasking Deep Throat. You can read Dean’s take on the Times controversy in this column from the Daily Beast.

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California gridlock, courtesy GOP diehards

February 18, 2009 by Scott Rosenberg 12 Comments

Here in the state of California we are being treated to the spectacle of a small minority of Republican dead-enders in the legislature holding the entire state economy hostage to their tax-cutting religion.

The story, for those blissfully beyond Sacramento’s reach, is that our state rules require a 2/3 vote to pass a budget. So that even though Democrats control both houses of the legislature, they need a few Republicans to pass a budget. And our local GOP reps have apparently signed a pact in blood that they will never, ever, under any circumstances, support tax increases. The Democrats — along with our Republican governor — have found two GOP state senators to come to terms with reality, but they need a third, and can’t seem to find it. (It’s as if Obama’s stimulus package died in Congress because one of the three Republican moderate senators got cold feet.) In the latest development, the GOP diehards have spurned their own leader as an apostate because he was willing to negotiate with the evil tax-boosters.

Every time something like this happens we need to remind ourselves of the deep misreading of history that underlies the tax-cutting religion. The theory is that the only way to grow the economy is by cutting taxes. Reagan cut taxes in the early ’80s, and the ’80s were a good decade if you were a bond trader or an investor in the PC industry, but for the middle class they were, at best, so-so. Bush pere and Clinton raised taxes in the early ’90s and the ’90s were the best decade economically that most of us have experienced. Bush fils cut taxes in the early 2000s and we had a lousy decade again, except if you were a hedge-fund investor or a house-flipper, and even a lot of them got clobbered in the end, along with everyone else.

Given all this, anyone who preaches the universal efficacy of tax cuts is, in my book, not fit to sit at the grownup table.

If California is going to meet its obligations, California has to raise taxes. Would it be kinder to the people of California not to raise their taxes in the face of the bad economy? Of course. The state could use a lot more help from Washington (where, whoops, the GOP has stood in the way of greater aid to state and local governments). Someday, these tax increases probably ought to be rescinded. But right now? The state can’t print money, and it needs to pay its bills.

Which brings us to the real question: as this economic calamity courses through our system and our lives, how much of the machinery of government and the infrastructure of local communities are we going to allow it to destroy? And what kind of a society do we want to have left on the other side of the cataclysm?

What the Republicans who stand in the way of a California budget are saying to our community’s schools and fire departments and other services is: shut down. Go away. We don’t need you. It’s the logical endpoint of the strangle-government-in-the-bathtub philosophy of America’s hard right, which actively wants to wreck government’s ability to serve as a stabilizing and supportive force in our lives and our economy.

With any luck, this crisis will help voters see this philosophy for the dead end that it is. Obviously we here in California need to change the 2/3 rule that gives a small minority this kind of power over the public’s business. We can also hope that the communities who elect these ostrich legislators never have to face the full brutal consequences of their ideological idiocies.

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Where’s Scott?

February 17, 2009 by Scott Rosenberg 4 Comments

As the new book is finishing the copy-edit phase of its production cycle, I’ve turned my energy to a number of new projects, which explains the slow blogging here.

I’ve already posted a bit about my entry in the Knight News Challenge competition — MediaBugs, a public “bug tracker” for errors and other problems with media coverage. I’ve now submitted a budget for that project, and we’ll see how far I get as the competition advances.

I’m also working with two great collaborators — Dan Gillmor and Bill Gannon — on developing a new site focusing on media criticism. We’re still in the early stages but moving quickly, and I’ll be writing more here about the work as it moves toward public release.

Then I’m also in the early stages of building a site devoted to blog history. In the course of my book research I accumulated a huge amount of material relating to blog history, vastly more than could be included between the covers. There is no reason for this material to be locked away on my hard drive. Much of it is of course public already on the Web, but scattered. Some of it is off the live Web and now accessible only through Internet Archive URLs. Some of it is original interview material that just didn’t make the book but that’s valuable in its own right.

I would like to put as much of this information out onto the Web as I can, in a useful way, as an open public resource on the subject. I’ve been exploring options for wikifying it all and will report more on that as it moves forward.

So that’s all keeping me busy indeed — and staving off anything like the writerly equivalent of post-partum depression.

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Isaacson’s pitch for micropayments

February 5, 2009 by Scott Rosenberg 8 Comments

Today Walter Isaacson, the venerable former editor of Time and current boss of the Aspen Institute, unleashes a multipronged offensive on behalf of the idea of micropayments for news. In a lecture delivered yesterday and also in a Time magazine essay, he argues that the advertising-only model for Web revenue warps traditional journalistic values, and advocates new efforts by publications to charge tiny sums for access to individual pieces of content.

I have to admit that my jaw dropped at the point where Isaacson admitted that he no longer pays for the New York Times. Something tells me Isaacson is in a slightly higher income bracket than me, yet I still buy the paper. Thanks, Walter, for making me feel like a chump! Keep talking and you may yet drive the Times’ circulation down a few more points.

Seriously, though, Isaacson’s argument is worth following. In his speech he presents a ready familiarity with the history of the early Internet and its evolution from the “walled gardens” of the for-profit online services to the open Web. (He was running Time’s ill-fated digital efforts back then, so he knows the stories first hand.) Though he admits that recent history is littered with failed micropayment schemes, and mentions the “many tracts and blog entries [that] have been written about why the concept can’t work because of mental transaction costs and the like,” he believes that “things have changed.” Like David Carr before him, he points to the success of iTunes and the Kindle as “pay-per-drink” precedents.

The key for attracting online revenue, I think, is coming up with an iTunes-easy, quick micropayment method. We need something like digital coins or an E-Z Pass digital wallet – a one-click system that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog, application, or video for a penny, nickel, dime, or whatever the creator chooses to charge.

Micropayments may seem newfangled to some newspaper managers, but in advocating them, Isaacson is tapping into one of the longest-running debates on the Web. The canonical “tract” about why micropayments can’t work is Clay Shirky’s from 2003. Shirky, in turn, points back to a 1996 essay by Nick Szabo on the “mental transaction costs” of micropayment systems (the paper, alas, is no longer online). Here’s Shirky’s thesis:

The vanishingly low cost of making unlimited perfect copies put[s] creators in the position of having to decide between going for audience size (fame) or restricting and charging for access (fortune), and the desire for fame, no longer tempered by reproduction costs, [will] generally win out.

Shirky’s essay offered a critique of a new micropayments scheme then being championed by Scott McCloud (author of Understanding Comics), who was experimenting with charging a small amount for a new comic strip. As the author of Understanding Comics, McCloud already had a substantial following among the geek set who were interested in his project. McCloud also responded at the time to Shirky.

In April, 2007, the company that McCloud was using to sell access to his comic went under. McCloud began giving away his comic. Round to Shirky.

But April 2007 was another market peak like early 2000, and the micropayments debate revives every time there’s a downturn. My own experience at Salon, where we began selling subscriptions in early 2001 and briefly “closed the gates” on all of our news content after 9/11 sent advertisers into hiding, suggests that it cannot and will not save the newspaper business: We were a popular, high-traffic news website with enormous good will from our users and Web colleagues. Yet when we started asking for money, our traffic plummeted — users fled, and other sites stopped linking.

We soon changed course. True, we were asking for subscription fees, not per-article payments, but our experiments with the latter were failures as well. When you demand money for access, you’re not only invoking the “mental overhead” of a decision on the reader’s part; you’re effectively seceding from the Web, cutting off the online circulatory system of inbound links, and risking a slow, painful slide into irrelevance.

Here’s a telling example: as I prepared this post I found a reference to an IEEE article from 2004, Micropayments: An idea whose time has passed twice?, by M. Lesk, which is highly pertinent to the subject. But I originally decided not to link to it because I couldn’t easily read it. Even if you built an easy-to-use micropayment system allowing access to that article, I’d be thinking, “Should I point my readers to something that’s going to cost them money? Shirky’s post is pretty good reading, and it doesn’t cost a cent.”

OTHER LINKS: Bill Wyman takes Isaacson’s argument apart: “Newspapers had an advertising-only model. They made untold millions. (Billions.) And they did produce a lot of sections about gardening and home improvement.”

Mark Potts: “The idea that forcing readers to pay for general online newspaper content will somehow magically solve the industry’s problems–never mind the horrific effect subscription plans would have on traffic-based ad revenue–is just folly.”

The LA Times’ David Sarno wrote about micropayments last month, interviewing Shirky and Columbia professor William Baker. Doug Fisher wrote a response, quoting Wired editor (and Free author) Chris Anderson: “The huge psychological gap between “almost zero” and “zero” is why micropayments failed.”

In 1998 and again in 2001, Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen predicted micropayments would become a prevalent economic model.

The CapGemini consultancy assembled this report on micropayments in 2004.

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