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If newspapers were gone tomorrow

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For those still following the small-picture “death of the newspaper industry” tragedy while the much larger “collapse of the global economy” unfolds around it, there is a worthwhile exchange unfolding between Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer (starts with Jeff here, Dave answers here, Jeff responds, Dave replies).

It’s all food for thought but I want to highlight an analogy Dave raises today, which has, I think, a great clarity:

Imagine a group of doctors knew that all hospitals and pharmacies were about to shut down. What would they do? Might they do something to make sure their client’s health needs were at least partially attended to?

The same would presumably apply to many other professions, whose services are in some way necessary for life: police, fire, bus drivers, garbage collectors.

We’re often asked to believe how noble the profession of news is — now that is about to be tested in a whole new way. Are we just supposed to cry for this industry and throw our hands up and wait for the collapse before starting to put it back together, or would they like to help while they’re still here?

What’s valuable about this analogy is that it reminds journalists that they are actors in this drama, not victims. Victimhood is written deeply in the culture of the newsroom. It’s always the fault of the guys with the green eyeshades, or the publishers, or the advertisers, or even the readers.

Well, at this point, it hardly matters whose fault it is. Many of these ships are going down fast. If you’re a journalist who cares about the field as a vocation in the old sense (something to which you are called, and to which you feel a responsibility), if you believe that an informed public is a prerequesite for a functioning democracy, then think about Dave’s question. I am.

One of my formative professional experiences was working on the San Francisco Free Press in 1994. When the Newspaper Guild called a strike against the Examiner, where I worked, and the Chronicle (a strike over the jobs of truck drivers!), the Guild decided to publish a strike paper. We published a few editions on paper, but we posted daily on the Web. (The Well still has it up.) We did it partly because it was fun, but partly because we felt a responsibility to our community to keep providing it with news and information. That responsibility remains, whatever happens to the business model of the newspaper industry.

The Gift keeps on giving

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I read the recent New York Times magazine profile of Lewis Hyde with some interest. As it happened, I wrote a review of Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift just about 25 years ago as one of my early assignments at the Boston Phoenix. My editor at the time, Kit Rachlis, thought I might find Hyde’s uncategorizable mixture of literary criticism, sociology and anthropology intriguing, and he was right. (As the profession of editing moves into eclipse, let’s not forget that this matching of writer and subject is one of the subtle arts that we do not yet know how to automate.)

At the time, Hyde’s effort to establish a language of value separate from the financial marketplace spoke hauntingly to me — as a disaffected young liberal stunned by the Reaganite rise of free-market, anti-government ideology. The book’s themes feel somehow timely again today, at the end of the arc of history that began a quarter-century ago, as we scrabble through the ruins that said ideology has left of our economy and try to imagine rebuilding along different lines.

I was fascinated to learn from the Times piece that in the years since, The Gift has become a volume of almost totemic stature to writers like David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem and others whom I admire. I’d written that Hyde’s book would “probably be most read and appreciated by those who already grasp its lessons, the visionary writers and artists from whom Hyde draws so many examples.” It appears I was right. But I’m glad to know that the book has had such perennial success — and that Hyde, now a fellow at the Berkman center, has moved on to studying the concept of the “commons,” newly relevant in the Web era. I’ll look forward to his work on that topic.

In the meantime, if you want to read more, I’ve reposted that 1983 review of The Gift, which holds up pretty well, I think (though today I’d write a less involuted lead!).

Why Obama let Lieberman go

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A lot of people are upset that the Democrats didn’t go all vindictive on Joe Lieberman and boot him from his committee chairmanship. I have no love for Lieberman and detest his choice to stump for the Republicans this year. But I think I understand what Barack Obama was up to in pushing the Senate Democrats to bury the hatchet.

Obama spent most of the marathon campaign that just ended telling people that he wanted to move beyond the old partisan politics. Having won the election, he now faces a set of problems of a magnitude we haven’t faced since the 1930s. Just as Obama was Mr. Consistency on the campaign trail, sticking to the same themes and policies across the states and months, so, I think, he wants to demonstrate consistency from the campaign through the transition into government. “Remember what I said on the trail?” he’s in effect saying. “I meant it. And I’m going to act on it.”

A president with that sort of carry-through would be something extraordinary — and unfamiliar. I understand why Obama partisans might discount the promise of transcending partisanship as being so much blather. Our last president made campaign noises about “being a uniter, not a divider” and proceeded to pursue an intensely divisive agenda with the thinnest of mandates.

After such an experience, we can be forgiven for collectively discounting all talk of moving beyond the old battles. But I think Obama meant it, and means it, and means to see what happens when a president actually tries to deliver on that promise. While removing Joe Lieberman from his post might satisfy many an activist’s sense of justice, it won’t move us any closer to fixing the economy, reforming healthcare, or reversing the Bush Administration’s destruction of our functioning government. Whereas holding on to Lieberman’s vote in the Senate might.

In other words, settling scores is, and ought to be, a lower priority than delivering on a big policy agenda. If Obama can achieve that — and anyone who defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries and won the White House as a black candidate knows something about achieving tough goals — then the scores will have a way of settling themselves.

“One voice can change a room”

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I guess I’m going through campaign withdrawal, but stumbling on this clip from the end of the campaign (via Mark Bernstein) got me all teary. In four minutes, a perfect oratorical arc, from relaxed storytelling to “Fired up! Ready to go!” With the disasters we face, we’re going to need this sort of inspiration.

“One voice can change a room. And if a voice can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state, it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change the world.”

Knight Challenge, John Leonard, writing productivity, outliners [Links for November 11th]

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  • MediaBugs: an open service for anyone to report, track and try to resolve errors in media coverage: My project in the Knight News Challenge has made it into the second round. Have a look and post a comment! [Update: unfortunately this link no longer works — Knight seems to have taken all the applications down from public view.] It’s been tough to focus on this while trying to finish the book but they write the checks, so they get to name their deadlines. I’m excited about this idea — applying the concept of bug-tracking software as used in open source projects to the news media, a proposal I first floated years ago (followup here; of course the idea has since evolved). We’ll see whether I get the chance to try to build it.
  • Twitter / denise caruso: @scottros crap! 1500 words …: Denise Caruso wonders: what’s a reasonable target for how many words to write in a productive day? I’d Twittered at the end of the day yesterday that, having written 1500, I was ready to quit. She’d been aiming for 3000. I think it all depends on your style (I tend to polish as I go along rather than speed-drafting rough cuts for later refinement). Also on the overall size of the project. I’ve been writing roughly 1000 words per day for months now (with breaks for family, interviewing and other research). There’s a different pace to a marathon than a sprint…
  • Taking note: Outlines and Meshes: Interesting thoughts on the nature of outliners springing off a post I wrote a couple years ago that still seems to get regular traffic. Maybe there’s something to this outlining thing…

Can we retire the “echo chamber” now?

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There’s so much to reassess today. Here’s one relatively small — but to me, interesting — thing.

For the past eight years, beginning with the Florida recount and ending with Sarah Palin’s last-ditch culture war, we’ve heard about the intense partisanship of the divide between red and blue. And one common idea about that divide has been the notion that the Web has helped create it, with its “echo chamber” effect. We have become a nation of “confirmation bias” addicts; we only read what we already agree with; we construct our own reality according to our close-minded beliefs. And that is why America is so angry, so split, so impossible to govern.

If that were true, then how did the most Web-enabled presidential campaign in history lead to such an overwhelming, incontestible outcome?

We’ve now had an election that was — whether you choose to call it a “landslide” or not (I do) — not close at all. We had “rednecks for Obama” and “Obamacon” neoconservatives for Obama and Republican loyalists looking up in the voting booth and saying to themselves, “Oh my god, I’m voting for Obama.” We had the most potentially divisive candidacy in our lifetime — an African American liberal from an urban Northern state running on a peace platform! — produce a victory that was won with an almost shocking degree of calm and respect.

Obama himself and his campaign deserves most of the credit for this, of course. But perhaps we can also reserve a little mental space for a reevaluation of our assumptions about the role the Web plays in our political discourse.

It hasn’t been my practice to post writing from my new book here (it’s just a fuzzy draft right now!), but this is a short passage from a discussion about the “echo chamber” argument that I think is pertinent:

Yes, American politics had grown bitterly polarized in the 2000s. But were the angry arguments on the Web the cause of those divisions? More likely, they simply mirrored profound disagreements among the American people about the impeachment of President Clinton, the contested outcome of the 2000 election, the Bush administration’s tactics in its war on terror, and the invasion of Iraq. What kind of media environment that accurately represented the political pysche of the American population would not bristle with rancor under the pressure of such events?

Today, we have at least an opportunity to begin to reduce that rancor and rebuild a national consensus. We have the first president in ages who can legitimately claim a mandate and work with a Congress of his own party. And I think we will see that the Web has a part to play in fashioning such a consensus. It doesn’t have to be a force for division; using it as such is a choice, not a technologically determined inevitability.

Election-night exorcism: the bogeymen that didn’t bark

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Okay, we can all exhale now.

For all the Democrats who have spent the last several months not daring to get too overconfident, fearful of some last-minute dirty trick, worrying despite all the evidence that some Karl Rovian demon would spring out of the darkness of the national psyche to trip up our candidate: It’s time to let all that go.

Over the last few weeks, I collected a few links for this moment, which I was confident all along we would arrive at — mementos of naysaying that deserve one last snort before we despatch them to the Web scrapheap.

Here, for instance, is a strange post from the Asia Times by “Spengler”: “McCain will win in November, and by a landslide.”

There was also that refrain of concern that Obama was “not a closer” — first outlined by doubters during the primary season, more recently propounded by Karl Rove to spook the Democrats.

Even more insidious was a high-flown piece by Lee Siegel (of sockpuppetry fame) in the Wall Street Journal, which sang the praises of “the Republicans’ unilateral mastery of the cultural strategy” in the wake of the Palin nomination, under a headline touting the “edge” that “Sarah Palin and the Republicans” had this fall. Siegel also threw in a gratuitous sneer at Obama’s name (“like having a Democratic candidate for president named Pruschev at the height of the Cold War”).

In the Boston Phoenix, my haunt in the ’80s, Steven Stark spun out the masochistic scenario of a last-minute Truman-like turnaround for McCain.

We can put all that behind us now. There, I feel better.

Obama on the verge

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I wrote about why I supported Obama back in February. It seems like eons ago. For me the choice between Obama and McCain is far simpler than the one between Obama and Hillary Clinton was. But the four arguments for Obama that I offered six months ago all still hold:

Pressing the reset button internationally — We need a president who can start over with the rest of the world. It’s obvious.

The “Muslim factor” — the lies about Obama’s religion are a pathetic effort to sway the ignorant. But Obama does have a different understanding of the world thanks to having spent some time as a kid in Indonesia. It will help the U.S. to have a president who actually knows something about Islam.

Electability — “Rather than limiting a Democratic campaign to a desperate hunt for one point over the 50-50 line that has marked Bush-era politics, Obama’s new throngs could tip the election in a stalemate-breaking way,” I wrote in February. Tomorrow we’ll know whether that proves out, as all indications suggest it will.

Positive vibration — “It’s hard to remember any political campaign as relentlessly upbeat as Obama’s, or as unwilling to sling mud.” Though the race certainly got tougher on all sides, I think that judgment still holds. To the extent that Obama has campaigned negatively, he has taken aim largely against the failed policies and record of the GOP, not against the person of John McCain. Like many Democrats, I worried back then whether Obama was “ready to rumble” when the Rovian attacks kicked in. But we were wrong. Obama and his team understood that the sharp counterattacks that please his partisans turn off voters in the undecided middle. He kept his eyes steadily on that prize. It has paid off beautifully in the last six weeks, when he could say, accurately, that he’s talked nonstop about the economy while McCain has talked nonstop about…him.

To these arguments, we can now add one more crucial one that has emerged: the even keel.

People are scared, and have been since the market meltdown in mid-September. They want to elect a president who looks like he’s able to figure out an effective strategy to revive the economy and then apply a steady hand in executing it. Anyone who’s been paying attention to Obama can see such qualities in the way he has run his campaign. McCain’s strategy of the week approach, by contrast, feels erratic and opportunistic. (And that’s not even bringing up Sarah Palin.)

The campaign started with McCain as the choice of voters seeking steadiness and reassurance and Obama looking like something of a gamble on the unknown. But we ended the campaign with the two exactly reversed. Of course other factors have been vital: the Obama campaign’s passionate organizing on the ground, the intelligence and heart of the candidate’s speeches, the astonishingly effective online fundraising from small donors, and the determination to contest the election beyond the old red/blue state lines.

But in the end, I believe Obama will win tomorrow because he is the candidate who has earned voters’ trust: trust that he can begin to solve the nation’s myriad problems; trust that he can begin to unwind the Bush legacy; trust that he can handle whatever comes up.

He is the unlikeliest candidate ever, and he had to go a lot further to earn that trust than his opponent. He has amazed us all by going even further than we dreamed.

Andreessen’s newspaper advice echoes Grove’s, a decade ago

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We’re moving into the endgame for newspapers today, though the industry hasn’t quite reached the Kubler-Rossian stage of acceptance.

Yesterday the venerable Christian Science Monitor announced it was abandoning daily print publication. In Portfolio, Marc Andreessen proposes that other newspapers follow suit and finally give up on print:

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?

Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business — shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.

The Intel reference here is an oblique reference to Andy Grove’s famous comment to the ASNE that the newspaper industry had three years to adapt or die.

That was in 1999.

Andreessen’s advice makes total sense in many ways — it would be fascinating and worthwhile for at least one major newspaper publisher to try it. This sort of turn-your-company-on-a-dime idea is part of the Silicon Valley ethos. But I just don’t see it happening.

Hard though it no doubt was, it’s still a lot easier for a hardware company like Intel to retool its fabs and its engineers to produce a different kind of chip than for a newspaper company to retool its reporters and editors to produce a different kind of media product.

Shutting off the presses at the New York Times, or any other major newspaper publisher, would make the company an “internet-only company.” But it wouldn’t make it an Internet Company, in the larger sense. You’d still have a newsroom full of people used to doing things a certain way, proud, with good reason, of that way, and suspicious of change. It’s much easier to build a new company from scratch than to transform an existing one into something new.

But the bigger problem isn’t psychological, it’s financial. I base my views on a decade of experience at Salon, trying to support an online-only newsroom with online-only revenues. It turns out that the hardest part of this massive and inevitable industrial transition is not reconstituting high-quality journalism in a new media environment. That’s only mildly hard. Top-notch journalists will always seek to do top-notch work.

The really tough part — the part that to this day remains unsolved — is figuring out how to support those top-notch journalists with the salaries and benefits they are accustomed to, and often deserve. (That’s not even taking into account the loss of jobs on the printing and distribution side. But they are disappearing eventually no matter what.) The problem today is not much easier than it was when we started Salon in 1995: Look at Politico — an online success d’estime that still earns 90 percent of its revenue from a niche print product.

Newspaper companies are clinging to their dwindling print profits because they can’t yet see a way to keep anything close to their current pay scale and benefits in an online-only world. And the hardest pill for the industry to swallow is that there may not be any way to do that.

Internet companies pay top dollar to their engineers, not their “content producers.” There is no shortage of reasonably high quality content on the Web, much of it produced for free or little pay. Of course blogs and “user generated content” can’t replace the collective output of the nation’s journalism professionals today. But they offer plenty of alternatives, and enough occasions on which they surpass the pros (or expose the pros’ failings) to keep readers occupied, and sometimes satisfied.

As Bruce Reed wrote in Slate last year during the Hollywood writer’s strike, “There is no such thing as a writer’s market. With or without subsidy, words are always in surplus, and it’s always a reader’s market.”

No amount of handwringing will change that. If newspapers are really going to take the leap Andreessen proposes, they will have to do it while simultaneously restructuring their deals with their employees and mandating painful cuts that nobody wants to accept. Which is why I don’t think they will do it at all.

Ironically, of course, those jobs will vanish anyway. As I wrote in June, I think the newspaper-company ships are doomed to sink, and individual journalists will have to find their own individual lifeboats and routes to shore. The sooner they start, the better.

ELSEWHERE: Mark Potts thinks “Newspapers haven’t even scratched the surface on potential online advertising revenue” and an exclusively online operation could rake in more money. I don’t know; I’ve been there, done that, and it’s not so easy. Alan Mutter says the magic multiple is 3 — newspapers would have to triple their current online revenue to break even.

Twitter’s link-sharing limits

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One of the main things that I do on Twitter these days, and that the people I follow do, is share links. Sharing links is one of the primal activities on the Web. It was one of the first things people did once they started building Web pages; it was one of the two driving forces behind the rise of blogging (the other was unedited self-expression).

Twitter was built for people to share “status messages” — the answer to the “What are you doing?” question — but most of the people I follow don’t use it for that very much. They use it to comment on news events and to share links they like. Because of this disjunction between original design and “street use,” I find that Twitter gets only one thing about sharing links right — and pretty much everything else wrong.

What it gets right is immediacy. Twitter is fantastic when there’s a breaking story and you want to see what links people are handing around. It’s a much speedier way to tune in to what’s happening (Senator Stevens — guilty!) than RSS feeds or reloading a news site’s front page.

But Twitter privileges “now”-ness over everything else. You can’t tag your links. You can annotate them only if you can say what you wish in under 140 characters (actually, under 140 minus the length of the URL). You can’t even see what the actual URL is, most of the time, since people use URL-shorteners to save space. There is really no other way to say this: For a service that is so widely used to share links, Twitter really sucks at it.

Delicious has long offered the best combination of features for simple link saving and sharing (it’s got space for annotations and a spiffy new interface). You can use Delicious to “follow” (subscribe to) specific tags, but not, as far as I can tell, to follow specific users. (If I’m behind on Delicious’s feature set, enlighten me!) You can use Delicious-generated RSS feeds for that, but we’re getting pretty far afield — nothing remotely approaching Twitter’s simplicity.

So here’s an opportunity for Twitter, or for someone else, if the Twitter team is too busy: Offer a service very similar to Twitter but optimized for link-sharing. (FriendFeed is cool but it’s trying to do so many other things at the same time that I don’t think it suits what I’m talking about.) Make it easier to share links real-time; expose the actual URL; give us some rudimentary tools for organizing the links; and watch something cool grow.

Of course, Twitter has the critical mass of usage right now, and that’s not going away. But surely there’s room for improvement.