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Murdoch’s Journal: Markets rule, indeed

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News that Rupert Murdoch has made a credible bid to acquire Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, has evoked two reactions: In newsrooms, among pro journalists and among devotees of investigative journalism, there is much rending of garments. The Journal is one of the world’s best news organizations. Its front-page features are often models of in-depth reporting. Dow Jones has maintained a reasonably good record of separating its news operation from its editorial page’s lunacy. Would a Murdoch-owned Journal let its editorial barbarians cross the great wall?

Outside of the journalistic fraternity, the prospect of a union between Murdoch and the Journal’s cartoon-conservative editorial page instead has many left-leaning readers either shrugging with indifference or indulging in a bit of schadenfreude. As one wag put it over on Andrew Leonard’s How the World Works blog, “Oy, it’s as if Shelob desired to acquire Barad-dur Industries, Inc.”

I count myself in both these groups. I would hate to see the Journal’s reasonably independent and often irreplaceable news coverage deteriorate; it is a central part of my daily information diet. But if the Journal’s grand newsroom tradition falls victim to a corporate acquisition, I can’t help feeling, also, that the fate is fitting. The Journal — its news pages as well as its editorial pages — is the daily bible of global capitalism, encompassing all of that term’s positives and negatives. It is a chronicle of the power of markets to reshape institutions. How could it expect to be exempt itself?

As for the rest of us, whether we embrace markets wholeheartedly or think they benefit from some fair rules and healthy counterweights, the prospect of a Murdoch-owned Journal — like the ongoing struggle for the New York Times’ corporate soul — is another reminder that, in the business world, good journalism has no uniquely protected status. It will flourish or perish as we find creative ways to support it. The old models are eroding. That’s not going to stop. The question is, how quickly can we find new ways to make sure that, whatever happens to the Wall Street Journal itself, someone somewhere is still able to provide Wall Street Journal-style coverage?
[tags]journalism, wall street journal, rupert murdoch[/tags]

Howard Rheingold — call for questions

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I’ve been doing some advising to Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net “citizen journalism” lab and its Assignment Zero project — an experiment in harnessing the work of a distributed group of volunteers to explore the complex questions surrounding harnessing the work of a distributed group of volunteers.

Recursive? You bet. But interesting enough for me to want to participate in — which I’m doing by taking on one modest assignment for the project.

Next week I’ll be interviewing Howard Rheingold as my contribution to Assignment Zero. I interviewed Howard way back in January of 1994, about his then-recent book The Virtual Community. In those days people were using the phrase “information superhighway” without (too much) irony. The Virtual Community described a looming decision point in the development of the online world. From my piece:

In particular, what’s up to us is whether the network turns out to be an open public space, like a town square or a civic forum, or a commercial enclosure, like a mall. To analogize, and doubtless oversimplify, the question is whether the network emerges as something like a souped-up telephone that we can all communicate with (known as the “many-to-many” model) or something like a jazzed-up cable TV (“one-to-many”) that provides us with more choices but not more power.

And Rheingold emphasizes that it’s up to us right now — during a brief window of opportunity, as the government bargains with the telephone companies, cable TV networks and other corporations to lay down new rules for the new roads.

We know how that turned out — then: the Internet trounced its “walled garden” rivals and became the global standard for electronic communication. Is that conflict a closed issue, or will we keep facing it in new forms? I’ll be following up with Howard about this and more.

NewAssignment.Net aims to channel “many-to-many” energies in its own way, so if you have topics you think we should explore, questions you want me to pose to Howard, or information you think is relevant to our talk, please post over at Assignment Zero (or right here, if you like!).
[tags]newassignment.net, howard rheingold, assignment zero, crowdsourcing[/tags]

Getting Moore’s Law right

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Everyone knows that Moore’s Law says chips will double in speed and/or halve in price every 18 months — right? But as with so many things that everyone knows, this is at best a wild oversimplification, and really just wrong. As Gordon Moore originally expressed his famous idea about the exponential progress of the semiconductor industry, the notion was that our ability to cram transistors into the same on-chip real estate would double at a regular interval (over time he tinkered with the length of that interval, from 18 to 24 months).

I was delighted recently to come across this piece in ExtremeTech — in which two analysts from Gartner discuss whether Moore’s Law has been, on balance, a blessing or a curse for the computer industry — because, among other things, the article gives us all one more reminder about the actual meaning of the concept.

This isn’t splitting hairs. The distinction is important because, if all Moore really said was that you were going to be able to make denser and denser chips, that left the industry with an existential choice of whether to use that capability to drive prices down or performance up. Moore’s principle did not map a straight upward path for his industry; instead, it laid out a crossroads, or rather a sequence of one crossroads after another.

The ExtremeTech piece is worth reading for its discussion of these choices of how to expend the Moore’s Law “bounty” (to borrow the fine word that Charles Simonyi applies).

Claunch added that: “if we were to make a PC run at the same speed as the original 8086 PCs, they’d probably cost about 10 cents to make. But nobody could afford to be in the business of selling PCs at 10 cents each. So instead, we have to use a different strategy. That different strategy is this: Pump twice as much stuff into the box, and if you do that, you can at least hold your price flat.”

But mostly I’m just grateful for the article’s refusal to oversimplify. Over the years I have had any number of arguments with editors so eager to apply Occam’s Razor and explain Moore’s Law “so anyone can understand it” that they’re willing to be inaccurate. (I worked hard to get it right in Dreaming in Code, which was largely about why software has had such a hard time keeping up with hardware — and thus why, even though we have chips unfathomably faster than those we used two decades ago, we rarely get our work done much faster.)

If there were a Moore’s Law for journalism, sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I think it would go like this: Every couple of years, our collective ability to maintain subtle distinctions and fine gradations of meaning collapses by half.
[tags]moore’s law[/tags]

Springtime music notes

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  • Tipped off by a positive NY Times review by Kelefa Sanneh, I got “The Body, the Blood, the Machine,” the new album by the Thermals, a Portland band, and it has been steadily knocking me out. Musically it’s relatively simple — flawlessly executed classic pop-punk in the Buzzcocks-to-Green Day tradition. Lyrically it appears to be a narrative song cycle. At first I thought its Biblically infused verses (full of Noah’s ark references and titles like “Pillar of Salt”) might be about a Heaven’s Gate-style cult, but I read on the band’s Web site that “the album tells the story of a young couple who must flee a United States governed by fascist faux-Christians,” which makes things a little clearer. It’s as if someone took American Idiot, subtracted the teen anomie and the Tommy-style riffs on celebrity, and injected it with a little bit of the acid from the Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia.” I’m finding it irresistible.
  • I’m also enjoying the new Mother Hips release, Kiss the Crystal Flake. This Northern California band’s sound — straying over the years from jam-band to country rock to folk and now neo-psychedelia — has always hovered on the edge of derivative cliche only to be rescued by great vocal harmonies, smart lyrics and a devotion to the sheer sonic pleasure of a well-played guitar well recorded.
  • We got a piano for my sons to learn on a while back, which means I can pursue my half-baked musical noodling on multiple instruments now. The other day I started playing the old Eno chestnut “St. Elmo’s Fire” — the kids love it! — and realized, in a flash, that its chord progression is almost identical to that of Elvis’s “Burning Love.” This is the sort of realization you are in an especially good position to experience if your piano-playing, like mine, consists of sounding out simple triads, because you are stripping the music down to its chordal essence (a nice way of saying that you make most of what you play sound the same).

[tags]thermals, mother hips[/tags]

“Lord of Light” in Tehran

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Wired has a remarkable story this month — a cloak-and-dagger saga about the rescue of a handful of Americans from Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-80. This group had slipped out of the U.S. embassy as it was overrun and taken refuge underground; a CIA operative rescued them by masquerading as a film producer and manufacturing new identities for the Americans as his crew.

The story is a great yarn in itself. But one little tidbit really stood out for me: the movie the producer was pretending to make was a film adaptation of a science fiction novel that was one of my absolute youthful favorites — Roger Zelazny’s 1968 Lord of Light.

The original book is set among human exiles from a lost earth — a spaceship crew stranded on a new home planet, where they have used technology to set themselves up as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Ironically, given its use by the CIA during the chaos following Iran’s overthrow of the Shah, it’s a tale of revolution: the “gods” maintain a monopoly on the body-swapping technology that makes them immortal, keeping the masses in a backward state; the hero, Sam, is a populist who sparks a war against the oligarchy. (In the novel’s parallel world, Christianity is represented by the original ship’s chaplain, who has become the menacing leader of a zombie army. It was the ’60s, remember?)

Here you can see all sorts of information about the CIA/Lord of Light connection, including the screenplay, designs by comic-book-art legend Jack Kirby, and an article by the CIA agent who led the rescue mission.

I don’t know that Lord of Light would ever have made a great movie; then again, who’d have thought that The Lord of the Rings ever would, either?
[tags]wired, cia, roger zelazny, lord of light[/tags]

More on email vs. phone

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There’s a great comment from John below in the email vs. phone discussion that I want to respond to.

Of course phone conversations (and even better, in-person interviews) have advantages that e-mail or blog communication can’t match. If you’re writing a lengthy profile of someone, you want to sit down with your subject, for all the reasons John cites. But most stories involve lassoing lots of comment from lots of people. Vogelstein is profiling Mike Arrington; he wants thoughts, no doubt, from a long list of bloggers. He’s looking for quotes, not trying to capture an interviewee’s soul. And he’s saying, I don’t do email interviews. That, to me, is crazy, because, as I said, some portion of the people you want to talk to don’t want to talk to you — they’ve been burned. You can say, too bad, forget it, or you can adapt, and work with the strengths and weaknesses of an e-mail or on-blog interview.

Sure, sometimes you’ll get stiff responses or prefabricated spin. I just don’t see that it’s so much easier to provide the prefab response in email than it is on the phone. The well-trained guarded interviewee will know what to say and when to shut up whether he’s talking or typing; the loose cannon will blow whatever the medium.

John concludes with this:

I rely on great reporters to not only accurately convey what they have been told, but to filter out the noise and present me with the most important things, and often to analyze that and/or give me their interpretation. You write about filtering parts of the conversation as if such efforts are part of a conspiracy to keep the reader in the dark. Rather, it’s a way to focus the light on what is truly important.

I agree, but there’s one word that renders the whole statement largely irrelevant. “Great” reporters are rare — this is, as they say in the software world, an “edge case.” When one gets a random phone call from a random reporter, am I going to assume I’m in the presence of greatness? Or am I going to assume that, like each of the last half-dozen people who’ve written about me or my company, they’re likely to get something important wrong?

Filtering is part of the journalist’s job, of course. The bit about transparency that Winer and Jarvis and others keep harping on is this: If you write your story, but also expose the source material — either by posting full interview transcripts yourself or because the dialogue happened on public blogs — then the interested reader can go back and review your filtering. (Just as anyone reading this can look at John’s comment, or follow all the previous links in this story, and see if I’m fairly representing the issues.) Any good reporter should welcome that.

That’s the value here. It’s something you gain when you move from phone interview mode to email/blog mode. Does that gain outweigh the loss of color and immediacy and so on? Not always — but, I think, a lot more often than the newsroom gospel would have it.
[tags]journalism, interviews, fred vogelstein, dave winer, jason calacanis[/tags]

The phone, email, blog interview flap

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This week saw a fascinating dustup as some of the blogosphere’s notables tussled with some journalists over how to conduct an interview. Wired’s Fred Vogelstein wanted a phoner; the bloggers, Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer, wanted either to answer questions by email (in Calacanis’s case) or (in Winer’s case) to receive questions by email and answer, publicly, on his blog. There was considerable snit on the part of several Wired writers in defense of their colleague once the bloggers went public with their disagreement.

If you want the full details, you can read about it on Calacanis’s blog and on Winer’s, and you can read Jeff Jarvis’s impassioned explication of the “empowered interviewee.” Vogelstein tells his side here.

It’s undeniable that pros prefer phoners. Partly it’s because the phone is fast, and most senior-level reporters today learned their craft when the phone was really the only channel available. Also, it’s because a good reporter can capture an extra bit of color by listening to an interviewee’s voice and tone. But mostly, it’s because reporters hope to use the conversational environment as a space in which to prod, wheedle, cajole and possibly trip up their interviewee.

Any reporter who doesn’t admit this is lying, either to his listener or to himself. Phone conversations have the additional advantage of (usually) leaving no record, giving journalism’s more malicious practitioners a chance to distort without exposure, and its lazier representatives an opportunity to goof without fear. (I have no reason to believe Vogelstein is either. But in his email to Calacanis, which the reporter later posted himself, Vogelstein explained his preference by saying, “Email leaves too much room for misinterpretation. You can’t hear the tone in someone’s voice.” And that just sounds disingenuous coming from someone who earns his living writing text — unless Vogelstein has reinvented himself as a podcaster while I wasn’t looking.)

Why are we hearing about more interviewees shunning the phone? As Winer argued and Dan Gillmor argued and I agree, too many journalists get too much stuff wrong, and self-defense is a reasonable concern, given the likelihood of misquotation, out-of-context quotation and factual error.

The pros are going to keep lining up to explain why the phone interview is superior, but I haven’t yet seen a persuasive argument. On a BusinessWeek blog, Heather Green says she prefers reporting by phone or in person because “a conversation allows me to do followup questions.” Gee, I’ve done tons of email interviews, and nearly all of them involved followup questions. But what’s most revealing here is the misunderstanding (Green isn’t unique here, it’s widespread) of how blogging works.

Blogging is a conversation. That’s not a metaphor — it’s a simple fact that this story itself illustrates: Calacanis and Winer and Vogelstein and Gillmor and Green and many others have been having one such exchange (and now I’m chiming in too). To argue that the amongst-blog conversation doesn’t allow followups is ridiculous; if anything, our blog conversations have too many followups — and they have a hard time finding a graceful ending (though that optimist David Weinberger finds positive value in this lack of closure).

But in the online conversation, the reporter doesn’t get the last word. And the reporter doesn’t get to filter which parts of the conversation are available to the public. No wonder journalists want to stick with the phone. But I think it’s going to keep getting harder for them to get their sources to take the calls.
[tags]journalism, interviews, dave winer, jason calacanis, fred vogelstein[/tags]

Everyone needs help with the new system

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Recently you may have found yourself watching this amusing video known variously as “Medieval Help Desk” and “Introducing the Book,” in which a befuddled monk seeks technical support assistance figuring out how to use the newfangled text-delivery platform called the book. (“I ‘turn the page’?”)

First we laugh at the missteps and worries of the monastic protagonist, who fears he’ll “lose text” if he turns the page; then we realize the joke cuts both ways, and that the monk’s trials are no different from our own struggles with unfamiliar new interfaces. Sooner or later, we’re all newbies in relation to something, and our confusion will be laughed at by those in the future (perhaps ourselves) for whom the novelty we once scratched our heads over has become second nature.

I thought about that video as I read Jon Udell’s recent post titled Online Incunabula. I’d always thought “incunabulum” meant anything that was in embryonic form, but Udell explained that the word has a more specific meaning: it applies to books printed before 1501, in the earliest days of printing, when the conventions of book publishing hadn’t yet coalesced into a set of common practices. Udell’s post refers to a podcast interview with Geoffrey Bilder, an executive with CrossRef, which develops a system for making scholarly citations work online. Udell excerpts this passage by Bilder:

People were clearly uncomfortable moving from manuscripts to printed books. They’d print these books, and then they’d decorate them by hand. They’d add red capitals to the beginnings of paragraphs, and illuminate the margins, because they didn’t entirely trust this printed thing. It somehow felt of less quality, less formal, less official, less authoritative. And here we are, trying to make our online stuff more like printed stuff. This is the incunabula of the digital age that we’re creating at the moment. And it’s going to change.

So much of the apparatus that we take for granted when we look at a book — the table of contents, page numbers, running heads, footnotes — that wasn’t common currency. It got developed. Page numbers didn’t make much sense if there was only one edition of something. This kind of stuff got developed and adopted over a fairly long period of time.

If you treat Vannevar Bush as Gutenberg, we haven’t even gotten to Martin Luther yet, we haven’t even gotten to 1525. In fact, whereas people stopped trying to decorate manuscripts by 1501, we’re still trying to replicate print online. So in some ways they were way ahead of us in building new mechanisms for communicating, and new apparatus for the stuff they were dealing with.

I love this quote’s reminder of how early the online game’s innings remain. One of the things I’ve always valued about blogs is that their features — reverse chronology, permalinked posts, time-stamps, comments and so forth — represent the first bundle of conventions for the online medium that is truly native to it. The format evolved to meet the unique needs of a publishing environment in which anything can be changed at any time and yet everything ought to have a permanent address. (This is a point that both Rebecca Blood and I have been making for a long time now.)

It helps to think that what we’ve been doing here on the Web for several years is slowly, by trial error, inventing the online equivalents to “the apparatus that we take for granted when we look at a book.” And we’ve only just begun.
[tags]blogging, jon udell[/tags]

Perfect iPod moments

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Steven Levy’s book about the iPod, The Perfect Thing, describes a transcendent moment the author experiences: In a funk one day in post-9/11 New York, with his iPod in shuffle mode, Levy hears the glorious opening chimes of the Byrds’ version of “My Back Pages,” and he has a Perfect Moment.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always loved that song, and would rather not wait for shuffle mode to surface it from my thousands of other songs. I continue to hand-pick my music, relying on shuffle only occasionally for novelty or distraction.

Still, iPod-fueled transcendence remains available even to us control freaks. This morning, for instance, I relieved a BART commute’s tedium by listening to the splendid live recording a fan made of a memorable Mountain Goats show I attended last month. (It’s posted here at the Internet Archive.) The set begins pensively with “Wild Sage’s” ruminations, makes its way to the equally melancholy “Get Lonely,” and then bursts into “Quito” — a defiant anthem of aspiring redemption and half-glimpsed rebirth. The song reached its visionary climax at the precise instant my train emerged from the tunnel into the morning Bay Area sun. Perfection! A film-editing wizard couldn’t have better synced sound and vision. I beamed; it made my morning.

It’s been a quarter century since the Walkman’s advent introduced us to the notion of provisioning our daily wanderings with a soundtrack of our choice. The iPod kicks this dynamic into a higher gear. (Levy ponders this and much else in his book; I covered his talk in Berkeley here.)

I’d argue that those of us who are not as shuffle-happy as Levy can feel a bit of extra pride: By virtue of our active personal DJ-ing, we become, instead of passive observers of serendipitous moments, more like coauthors of our own pleasurable juxtapositions. But either way, we’re having fun, and that’s what really matters.
[tags]ipod, steven levy[/tags]

Links for April 24th

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