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Credit report

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I was amused recently by an ironic juxtaposition of two blog posts.

First, there was Jason Calacanis complaining that CNET had failed to credit Om Malik for “breaking” the story that the RSS aggregator FeedDemon had been bought by Newsgator. Business 2.0’s Malik had posted the news at 5:31 PM on Monday, May 16. CNet ran a story at 9:27 AM on Tuesday, May 17.

A few weeks later, the esteemed Dan Gillmor complained about how the Wall Street Journal, in its coverage of the Apple/Intel deal, self-servingly quoted a line from Steve Jobs implying that the Journal had the story first, when, in fact, CNET had it well before the Journal.

There’s no older complaint in the world of journalism than a reporter (or publication) that believes it broke a story feeling “ripped off” by another reporter (or publication) that follows on. Inevitably, this sort of complaint flows up the journalism food chain. CNET gets carped at for failing to credit a blog; the Journal gets carped at for failing to credit CNET.

Big fish eat little fishes’ stories — stop the presses!

I’ve seen this in action for a good 25 years now, ever since my days on the Harvard Crimson, where we believed we “owned” the university beat, and resented how national papers and magazines would swoop in to gather the fruits of our reporting labors — almost never giving us striplings credit.

Maybe I’ve mellowed, or maybe I’m just callused, but I’ve come to view this species of complaint as a waste of time. I can’t count the number of times over the past decade that Salon has broken real news and not been credited. Ultimately, so what? Whining doesn’t get you very far, and if you’re doing your job, you should be onto the next story anyway.

The type of story matters, too. If you invest the time and energy to do a long-term investigation of some scandal or underreported problem or issue, and emerge with something extraordinary that’s never been reported before and that wouldn’t be known if you hadn’t chosen to pursue it, it’s reasonable to expect some credit. But if you get wind of a business deal a handful of hours ahead of the competition, and the news is about to break wide anyway, well, okay, you’ve served your readers well, good work — but don’t expect a Pulitzer, or think you “own” the story.

Backlog

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I’ve got a big backlog of posts that have languished as I concentrate on my 1000-words-a-day march toward meeting my book deadline. I’m going to try to upload a bunch before leaving this weekend for a family trip to the ancestral homeland (NYC).

Cuecat redux

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Once upon a time there was a tech-industry boom. And the boom begat many follies. And among the most insane of those follies was a thing called the Cuecat. The idea was that actually typing in a URL from a print magazine ad was so laborious that, instead, you’d happily plug in a free (but ridiculously complicated to install) bar-code scanner to your PC and run that scanner over the magazine page to take you to a URL. (Of course this would limit your magazine reading to within a yard of your computer, but…never mind.) Absurd as this scheme was, its promoter somehow managed to raise tens of millions of dollars from respectable corporations that should have known much better.

I reviewed this misbegotten gizmo back in fall of 2000 when Wired magazine sent one to each of its subscribers. I predicted a future of filling landfills for the ill-fated devices, and assumed that they had long ago added their mass to some forlorn waste zone. But it seems that even the dumps would not take the Cuecats, and now two million of them are being auctioned off by a surplus house.

Help save the abandoned Cuecats! It wasn’t their fault that their creators were digital con artists. Don’t abandon them to a fate of disuse! You can help save these Cuecats — or you can turn the page. Why, they’re only 30 cents each!

Oops, there’s a 500K minimum order. Forget it.

Anonymous bosh

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In comments below, Scott Butki asked, “Does it seem odd – or hypocritical to you – that the mantra at news organizations in recent weeks has switched from ‘anonymous sources are bad to use’ to ‘Deep Throat was good for doing what he did and Woodstein good to use him,’ ignoring the contradiction between the two?”

Good question, and I’m sure one that many people are scratching their heads over. What’s going on here? Are anonymous sources really the big problem they seem to be in the wake of the Dan Rather and Newsweek/Koran controversies? On the other hand, if news organizations get too gun-shy about anonymous sources, how will anyone ever be able to keep reporting on the buttoned-tight Bush White House?

It’s funny to watch people try to get their heads around the apparent contradictions between “anonymous sources — good!” and “anonymous sources — bad!” Really, they’re only contradictions if you treat the issue as a matter of journalistic technique (the use of unnamed sources) rather than one about the end to which the technique is employed. The distinction that really matters isn’t between “anonymous source” and “named source”; it’s between “good source” and “bad source.” Good sources can be anonymous; bad sources can be on-the-record. What experienced journalists and editors do is assess, assess, assess. Make sure you’re not being used. Double-check your info. Use your sense of smell. The theory is that an on-the-record statement is more reliable than an anonymous statement, since the person quoted has to defend his words in public. That’s a good theory, and it often applies. But it doesn’t seem to stop most public officials from mouthing the most absurd lies, damned lies and statistics on the record. And despite the rule-of-thumb that on-the-record is more reliable, there are some circumstances where unnamed sourcing is the only way to get the truth out.

One reason people are getting confused is that Woodward and Bernstein’s use of Deep Throat was a fundamentally different kind of anonymous sourcing than we typically see in today’s Beltway. Mark Felt/Deep Throat fed information to Bob Woodward because (a) there were profound dangers to the nation in play — we had a president who was, among many other outrages, ordering his political opponents burglarized — and (b) going to the press was the only option, because the idea of “going to the authorities” is laughable when the authorities are the wrongdoers and they’ve corrupted the system from the top.

I’m not belittling the complexity of Felt’s choice; and obviously the man was conflicted for the rest of his life. It’s never easy to be a whistleblower, and if you’re an unconventional whistleblower stuck in a duel with All the President’s Men, you’ve got to be careful as well as right. Felt is certainly no pure hero, but the derision he’s received from the surviving coterie of Nixon loyalists is beneath contempt. This old guard of die-hard Nixonians still haven’t gotten it through their heads that their former boss actually stole an election (if it weren’t for all the dirty tricks employed against Democrats in 1972, who knows where the vote would have gone?) and, left unchecked, might well have destroyed the American system of government. Their complaints against Felt today only demonstrate how lucky we were that there was at least one “disloyal” Deep Throat willing to say, this nonsense stops here.

Today’s anonymous sources are, for the most part, different. They’re not risking anything by speaking up. Generally, they are choosing to be anonymous to avoid taking a risk. They want to float a trial balloon but don’t want their name attached. They want to undermine a political rival. They want to state something a little politically inconvenient without leaving it on the record.

Anonymous sourcing evolved in the years since Watergate from an extraordinary tactic for an extraordinary time into a depressingly routine way of doing business for the political elite. The Bush administration itself has been extravagantly dependent on the opaque cloak of anonymity — the “highly placed White House official” who assures us that the war is going better, or the economy’s on the mend. This is the sort of anonymous sourcing that ombudsmen and editorial editors and journalism pundits are right to say should be banned. There’s no need for it.

As for the Watergate tradition of anonymous sourcing: every time there’s a president who’s illegally abusing power, let’s hope there’s a Deep Throat ready to talk, a Woodward ready to take notes, and a Ben Bradlee ready to run the stories. Oh, yeah — it also helps if the opposition party controls at least one house of Congress. Otherwise, you could catch the President himself robbing a hotel room — or starting a war under false pretenses — and it wouldn’t matter.

Deeply Felt

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Since I spent a good couple of months in 2002 editing John Dean’s e-book “Unmasking Deep Throat,” I had my own interest in today’s news unveiling former FBI honcho Mark Felt as the original deep-background source for Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting. But if this outcome felt anti-climactic, it’s not just because the conclusions Dean so painstakingly reached — among other things, that Deep Throat was almost certainly an attorney, and that he couldn’t have been at the FBI — were simply wrong (to be fair, it appears that the bobbing and weaving Woodward and Bernstein have done through the years. and Felt’s own vehement disavowals, left a somewhat deceptive trail for the attentive sleuth). And it’s not just because Felt has been the “most likely suspect” for over a decade now.

It’s really because it marks the end of the mystery at the heart of the investigative-reporting act that inspired my generation of journalists. I was 15 years old in 1974; I listened to the Watergate hearings in the car radio every morning as I rode with my dad on the way to my summer job. I chose to become a journalist at perhaps the one moment in American history at which the public’s trust in reporters was higher than its faith in political leaders. The naming of Deep Throat represents the final coda to this old story — and reminds us of how much things have changed.

Meanwhile, the current generation of executive malfeasance awaits its comeuppance. Which public servant will step forward, in shadows, pseudonymously or not, to blow a loud whistle on this decade’s lies? Or has the Deep Throat of the George Bush White House already fed his tips — say, to Seymour Hersh — but we’re simply too fatalistically inured to the “disassembling” of our leaders to do anything about it?

Backpack

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Backpack is the latest Web-app info-management tool from the gang at 37 Signals (Basecamp, Ta-da Lists, etc.), and it is a winner, I think: I’ve already taken it past the “I’m playing with this to see if it’s any good” stage into the “I’m using this quite a bit and considering whether to move some part of my life into it” stage.

The 37 Signals approach involves not trying to do a million things but doing a few things really well. Backpack offers a smart, usable Ajax-style interface for storing random data in Web pages that can be loosely structured as lists and notes. You can (if you upgrade to a paid version) also store files and photos. You can flip a switch on a page to make it “shared” (essentially, public) and others can then not only read it but modify it (wiki style). The final, most unusual innovation here is email integration: No, it’s not an email client at all, but each page is addressable by email — you can send stuff to a page at its unique email address — and each page can be set to send out reminders via email. It’s a relatively small, contained application, but I haven’t even begun to explore all the possibilities.

Oh, it’s also been developed on the same much-buzzed-about software platform 37 Signals has used for its other products — Ruby on Rails. It serves as a pretty fine advertisement (in the best sense) both for that technology and for its company’s philosophy. Congrats, and thanks, to all involved.

Heilemann on Lessig

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For starters, don’t miss the amazing piece John Heilemann contributed to New York magazine this week, which tells the saga of a lawsuit about child molestation at a famous choir school in Princeton, New Jersey. The lead lawyer was also a victim; his name is well known to the world that pays attention to the intersection of technology and law: Lawrence Lessig.

Apres post, le deluge

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I’ve got a ton of backlogged stuff to post about, links and comments, both from D and elsewhere. So tonight, I’ve decided that, rather than try to perfect little posts on things, I’m just gonna start posting stuff in a random flood. Which is sort of what blogs are meant for anyway. I’m still fighting the decades of training in linearity!