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Say Everything: some initial coverage

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Say Everything’s official publication/on-sale-in-stores date is July 7, but it’s already received some great coverage I want to acknowledge and tip you off about:

  • While in New York I stopped by BusinessWeek for a chat with Steve Baker (whose book The Numerati is pretty fascinating). Here’s the video.
  • Steven Levy interviewed me in the July Wired:

    Wired: Here’s something I bet a lot of people ask: If blogs are so great, why did you have to write a book?

    Rosenberg: It’s an inevitable question, but it’s illogical. When Greil Marcus writes a book about Bob Dylan, do you say to him, “Why’d you write a book? You should have written a song.”

  • Paul Kedrosky, the super-sharp econoblogger (and an early pioneer of hosted blogging), wrote: “Rosenberg’s book is funny, authoritative, full of great-great stories and anecdotes, and admirably even-handed.”
  • Rafe Colburn, who was blogging before we called it that, wrote two posts (first and second) with his reactions to the book: “It’s pretty clear to me that this book will be seen one day as incredibly important.”
  • And there was a lovely starred review in Kirkus Reviews that concluded: “Rosenberg suggests that blogging’s ‘outpouring of human expression’ should ‘delight us.’ This fair and fascinating account should delight as well.”

Every newspaper is a glass house

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The halls of professional journalism rang out with schadenfreude-fueled howls of derision this week at the Washington Post’s ludicrously misbegotten “salon” scheme. (Catch up with the story here if you’re out of the loop.) That the Post’s publisher would have even considered trying to turn her living room into a sort of influence-peddling bazaar has shocked, shocked everyone in its newsroom and most journalists outside.

Of course it was a bad idea. Arguably the Post did even more damage to its credibility in trying to explain itself than it did with the original concept — as for instance with the declaration that a beautifully designed and widely distributed flyer was a “draft.” (Surely the paper of Watergate record understands the old adage about the coverup being worse than the crime? Maybe not.)

But before the critiques gets too self-righteous, let’s recall that the blurring of editorial and business lines is happening everywhere. Magazine journalism is full of it. We will see even more of it as the business of print publishing continues to decay and publishers scramble for revenue. The Post’s “salons” aren’t the first instance of this kind of aggressive monetization of a journalistic reputation, and they won’t be the last. Because, alas, integrity doesn’t pay for health insurance. I say that with no glee, but rather as someone who fought countless similar battles over the years at Salon — mostly, I’m happy to say, winning ones — to keep the lines from blurring too far.

The Post’s hamfisted exercise in influence-peddling was a sitting duck the moment it became public. It’s the more obscure and fuzzy integrity questions that can be more dangerous to a publication’s credibility over time. I’m thinking of the questions that popped into my head as I read a recent New York Times profile of a society wife named Lisa Marie Falcone. About halfway into the piece, the writer informs us that Falcone is married to a man named Philip Falcone whose hedge fund “owns about 20 percent of The New York Times Company.” Whoa! (The story also tells us that Falcone became a billionaire by betting against subprime mortgages. So while the government was busy bailing out the financial firms that had made the stupid bets in the mortgage market, the cash went right into the pockets of the people who’d made the smart bets — presumably, the Falcones of the world.)

Is there any direct connection between Falcone’s stake in the Times and the article I read? Probably not — but who really knows? The piece’s problematic scent is unmistakable; you can’t help thinking that every word it uses to describe its subject — “wide-eyed idealism,” “quirky, independent” — had to have been agonized over. And that awareness on the reader’s part that something is off about the piece makes it unsatisfying and opaque. Whatever the story behind the story is, we’re not getting it.

The dance of awkward partial disclosure performed by journalists given the unenviable job of writing about their owners is even more painful to watch than the ritual self-lashings of an institution caught, as the Post was, in straightforward acts of corruption. I can’t help thinking that one remedy for both species of trust-eroding behavior is for newsrooms to get way more serious about transparency — which is a fancy way of saying they should be honest, forthright and open. Journalists have the opportunity to model for the rest of the world the behavior their work demands of others: tell the truth; don’t hide from questions; reveal your practices and processes; and if you screw up, tell all, fast.

The Times profile of Falcone concludes with this quote from her: “”I speak from my heart… I know that sometimes can get me in trouble. But that’s the only way I know how to be.” On the basis of the Times piece I actually think Falcone is hardly a paragon of “speaking from the heart.” But it would be nice if more journalists, editors and publishers understood how valuable “speaking from the heart” can be today. And if they did, we might pile on them a little less mercilessly on those occasions when they screw up.

At Personal Democracy Forum

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I’m in NY attending the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual gathering where political geeks (from both ends of the partisan spectrum) meet geeky politicos. It’s got a great lineup of speakers and events.

I’m talking tomorrow on a panel titled “Why Blogging Still Matters,” with Dan Froomkin, whose recent unceremonious booting by the Washington Post has occasioned much justifiable outrage; Eric Boehlert, who’s got a new book out titled “The Bloggers on the Bus” tracing the impact of the Web on the 2008 election; and conservative blogger Jon Henke. It’s moderated by Ana Marie Cox and should be fun. I’ll link to coverage later.

Another Say Everything excerpt: Journalists vs. Bloggers

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Today: a second full-chapter excerpt from Say Everything for your consideration. This time, it’s Chapter Nine: Journalists vs. Bloggers. (Previously I’ve posted the introduction and Chapter One, the story of Justin Hall.)

I have been writing about the tormented relationship between journalists and bloggers for a decade. When I reached the part of Say Everything that involved chronicling this long relationship, part of me quailed: Oh, no — not again!

Then I started writing and everything came together: 10,000 words or so of my effort to wrangle this sprawling subject into a single narrative.

A side note: My reflex in naming the chapter was to write, “Bloggers vs. Journalists.” But after finishing it, I realized that over time, the preponderance of the aggression in this relationship has shifted. Once upon a time, certainly, you would find bloggers on the attack more frequently, and journalists simply going about their business. Today, I think, the situation is more frequently reversed. Thus the ordering of the title.

Salon.com IPO: It was ten years ago today

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Ten years ago today, Salon.com, the website I helped found in 1995 along with a group of colleagues from the San Francisco Examiner under the leadership of David Talbot, went public. We raised $25 million in an IPO that, from the vantage of a decade later, looks mirage-like in its improbability.

Today, of course, a Web company with little to offer besides some (extremely good) original content could never raise $25 million from investors, right? Actually, it seems to happen again and again. Strangely, this is a road that others continue to charge down with, apparently, only a vague sense of the history or the pitfalls.

One of the things we were proudest of about Salon’s IPO was the open, Dutch-auction style approach taken by our lead investment bank, W.R. Hambrecht & Co. (Jim Surowiecki wrote about the approach in Slate.) Hambrecht’s idea was to make the entire IPO process more fair and transparent by allowing investors to participate in setting the opening price in public through a novel auction approach. Our choice of this model was later vindicated when another little Silicon Valley company named Google adopted it for its own IPO in 2004.

Other things about that era are, certainly, painful to contemplate from this distance. The idea of using the IPO proceeds to go on a hiring binge looks insane, in retrospect — even though it was “what everyone else was doing” and it was what the company had explicitly promised investors it was going to do with their money. Almost precisely one year after the IPO, Salon, having grown to roughly 140 employees, would begin the first of several rounds of layoffs that eventually returned the company to the rational size it has remained at, roughly, to this day. (Read Gary Kamiya’s piece on Salon history from the site’s tenth anniversary in 2005 for more on all this.)

As I’ve written, during the dotcom bubble I was a father of newborn twins, and I spent much of the era in a haze of caffeine and adrenaline. Meanwhile, the pace of decision-making at Salon at the time was crazy — we were one small precinct of an entire industrial outbreak of madness. One conclusion I’ve drawn from that experience for myself is: never rely on a vehicle that’s moving too fast to steer. (And no, to answer a question some will probably have, I never made a cent on the offering myself: insiders weren’t allowed to sell stock at first, and by the time we were allowed to, the price had already begun to plummet. Besides, I really did believe in the company’s future.)

Salon survived, against the predictions of a chorus of schadenfreude-driven critics, and found its place as the Web resumed its growth from the post-bust rubble. I left the company two years ago to work on Say Everything, but I’m proud of the project I conceived and developed in my final year there, Open Salon. Under Kerry Lauerman’s leadership it has emerged as a true community of writers and readers — in some ways, fulfilling the original concept of Salon that David Talbot articulated in 1995 even more fully than the old-school Salon site.

Every post I’m writing here at Wordyard these days is mirrored over at my Open Salon blog (as well as on Facebook and other services). Write once, publish everywhere, talk with people anywhere they want to engage with you: not a concept that would have made it into a 1999 IPO prospectus, but one that makes a lot of simple Web sense today.

Peggy Noonan to Silicon Valley: cut out the silly names

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At the end of an otherwise reasonable column about the Iranian uprising Peggy Noonan went off the deep end again yesterday. First she unleashed her inner Edmund Burke, dialing the Wayback Machine to the 1790s to try to reimagine the excesses of the French Revolution ricocheting around the world via Twitter. She asks, “Would Thomas Jefferson have been able to continue his blithe indifference if reports of France grimly murdering France had been Twittered out each day?” Hey, Tom — forget about the allies who just helped you win independence. Never mind your own revolutionary experience. Disavow those tumbrels!

This spasm of Noonanity is immediately followed by another, even sillier one, an observation on the inconsiderate naming habits of technological innovators:

The great question is what modern technology can do not in the short term so much as the long. It is not the friend of entrenched tyranny. Connected to which, it would be nice if the technologies of the future were not given babyish names. Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc., have come to be crucial and historically consequential tools, and yet to refer to them is to talk baby talk. In the future could inventors please keep the weight and dignity of history in mind?

That’s right, Sergei and Larry, Ev and Biz, Zuckerberg et al: Listen to your old aunt Peggy. Stop making fools of yourselves. Every time you give one of your companies a wacky name, you are sabotaging the gravitas of pundits everywhere. Just stop it, kids, now: you’re making the talking heads look silly!

Iran and the ghost of history

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There’s a chorus on the right, including some GOP leaders, complaining that President Obama ought to be saying more or doing more to support the Iranian protesters. It is unclear what, exactly, they wish him to do about Iran. Now, perhaps, is not the time for bombing, although that was, until recently, considered a dandy option by many; to offer loose words about support for protests risks repeating past American leaders’ errors in such situations, who have sometimes made perceived promises of help to uprisings and then failed to follow through — or even betrayed the protesters.

I think Obama is playing a careful hand: he knows that if he embraces Moussavi too closely he is, perversely, helping Ahmadinejad, whose chief recruiting tool has always been the anti-American banner.

But I also think that few Americans, and sadly even too few in the American media, have a full understanding of the arc of history here and the twisted record of American involvement in Iranian “regime change.”

The formative, primal event in the history of modern Iranian politics took place in 1953, when the U.S. government, working clandestinely through the CIA, helped overthrow an elected Iranian government and install the Shah as a friendly dictator. (Read more on this beginning here and following up here.) Everything that has happened since in Iran has happened under that shadow. Most Americans simply don’t remember this, but you can bet that Iranians do.

So a U.S. president has a particularly poor platform to stand on and lecture Iranians about violations of the electoral process. Obama — who in his Cairo speech publicly admitted the American role in the 1953 Iran coup for the first time — seems to understand this reality and to be working from that understanding, rather than denying it. It’s time for his critics to learn a little of that history, too.

MediaBugs: a Knight News Challenge winner

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This qualifies as “woohoo!” level news: my entry in the Knight News Challenge is one of the winners this year (announced today).

The project is called MediaBugs. The plan is to build a Web service that’s like an open-source project’s bug tracker, but aimed at correcting errors and resolving problems with media coverage. You can read an FAQ about MediaBugs here.

It’s an idea I’ve been talking about for a long time. (I posted briefly about my application last fall.) I’m grateful to the Knight Foundation for giving us a chance to see how the idea will actually pan out. It’s a two-year grant; we’ll be starting a pilot project in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year.

I’m at Knight’s Future of News and Civic Media conference now and for the rest of this week. Much more on this before long. With this grant and the July 7 release date of Say Everything, this is turning out to be a very busy — and happy — time indeed.

All is flux

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I’m at the Oakland Airport waiting for a flight. They’re rebuilding the terminal here to accommodate fancier and doubtless more expensive concessions. The seating area near the gate for my flight was crowded, and I was early, so I moved to a less crowded area down the hall. Twenty minutes later, I looked up and saw that the flight’s gate had been changed: I was now sitting five feet from my plane’s departure doorway. I’d been stationary; the situation had just moved in my direction.

When I was studying software development, I learned that smart developers build products not for the market as it exists at the time but for where they think the market is going to be in the future. This wisdom recalls the famous hockey saying about skating not to where the puck is but where it’s going to be.

I’ve been thinking about these ideas as I watch the news industry struggle with changes that it could have (and should have) foreseen years ago. For me, making the transition from newsprint to digital in 1995 looked like the obvious thing to do — surely that was where the puck was heading, right? What surprises me today is not that the media-industry meltdown is happening but that it has taken so long to happen.

I recently discovered the wonderful game Fluxx, which I’ve been playing with my kids. It’s a simple card game with one profound concept: the rules and goals of the game are constantly shifting; the cards you play frequently alter both the process and the winning conditions.

Fluxx is enormously fun and entirely unpredictable. It’s also, I think, excellent training for life. It’s a crash-course in flexibility and agility. It teaches you to plan for change — but also to not get too attached to your plans.

Perhaps the next time news executives gather to ponder their options they should set aside a session for a few games.

Chronicle of an industry death foretold

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As a young man in love with the nuts and bolts of publishing, beginning in high school in the 1970s, I spent a lot of time in print shops. The industry had just undergone a wrenching transition from “hot type” to “cold type” — abandoning a venerable technology involving hulking machines and heavy metal slugs in favor of phototypesetting systems that input text digitally (usually clumsily, via paper-tape rolls) and churned out fast-drying galleys on thick paper. Many print shops of the time existed, like those used by both my high school and college papers, as small offices carved out of much-larger spaces that had been used for the hot-type machinery. Often, the big old rooms were dark and still littered with debris — linotype detritus, boxes of metal slugs. The homes for the cold-type machines were comparative oases, well-lit and air-conditioned to keep the expensive new equipment happy.

This technological transition seemed momentous for the newspaper industry at the time; it rendered an entire tradition of printing skills obsolete and led to wrenching labor battles. But of course it was only a preface.

sc00b5af28I was cleaning out my garage recently, combing through some old files, and stumbled on a research paper I wrote in 1981 as a senior in college. The title was “The Electronic Newsroom and the Video Display Terminal.” I was writing about the moment that the digital transition rolled out from the back shop to engulf the newsroom, as — almost overnight — the typewriters were put out to pasture and a generation of journalists learned to love cut/paste and the “delete” key. What would that mean for the future of news?

The paper isn’t a big deal; it was written for a course I’d taken mostly for its reputation as an easy way for humanities types like me to fulfill the science requirement. But I’d spent enough time as both a student journalist and a computer enthusiast to know that the changes taking place wouldn’t stop at the newsroom door. Here’s what I wrote:

In trailblazing information delivery uses for electronic technology, the newspapers have in a way introduced a Trojan horse into their midst: for in the coming decades newspapers may well find themselves supplanted by a combination of home video terminals, central information computers, and entrepreneurs in specialized information delivery systems.

Let’s see: “Home video terminals”? Check: that would be your PC. “Central information computers”? Check: the vast network of web servers that feed you your Google, YouTube and so on. “Entrepreneurs in specialized information delivery systems”? That would be your blogging multitude.

I make no claim for great prescience — quite the reverse. I was a college kid who had no particular inside knowledge or knack for future-gazing. Even so, it wasn’t hard to see where things were leading.

I’ll think of my little paper every time I hear news execs making the excuse that “no one could see” how things were going to play out between print and the online world. If a kid could see it nearly 30 years ago, maybe they should have tried a little harder.