During each election season, most days, each campaign runs a daily conference call with the media. These calls are the candidates’ equivalent of the White House “presser” — not real press conferences with the candidates or the president himself, but rather check-ins between the campaigns’ (or the White House’s) press handlers and the reporters.

I don’t know exactly when this practice started, but it’s been standard for a while. The calls are “on the record”; the campaigns are trying to get their messages out, to push and shove coverage in the direction they wish to see it go. But they’re not exactly public, or at least they haven’t been. If you were an everyday citizen — or, for that matter, say, a blogger — you mostly didn’t have a chance to listen in. You couldn’t actually hear what the campaigns were saying; you had to hear the reporters’ takes on what the campaigns said, and maybe a snippet of recorded material.

In the old days this might have been tenable. Today we’ve got this Internet thing that forces a nice clean line between the private and the public. Today, something is either truly private — limited to a very few — or it’s fully and irrevocably public. The grey zone is gone.

Dave Winer recently started trying to rustle up each day’s calls from each campaign and post them as MP3s. He argues, persuasively to me, that voters have the right to hear these on-the-record events first-hand if they want to — just as the White House pressers are now televised, online and transcribed. Sure, you could argue that most people have neither the time nor the interest to tune in to this stuff every day. And you’d be right. But that’s still no argument to keep them out of the hands of anyone who does want them. They are the primary source material, and it’s always good to have a chance to check what we read in the paper and see on the screen against the original.

From what I can tell, the trouble Winer has had in getting access to the material each day hasn’t been a matter of anyone trying to keep a big lid on the calls — some of them get posted already. It’s more a case of old-school journalistic professionalism, of a lingering “this is backstage stuff, no need for the public to listen in” attitude, and of a cave-in to convenience. The campaigns can’t invite a million bloggers on the call, so they draw the line that’s familiar and easy: they say, if you want to get on our e-mail list with the daily call info, you need credentials. And apparently no one with the credentials has yet stepped forward to provide the calls to Winer or the wider Web. Too bad.

There’s a parallel here to the institution of corporate earnings calls: they used to be accessible only to handpicked analysts and reporters; today, it’s still mostly those folks asking the questions, but the calls get posted online for all to hear.

I think it’s inevitable that the campaign calls will, too. It would be nice for that to happen before this critical election passes too many more milestones.

As the business model that supports traditional journalism erodes, with digital distribution dissolving the bonds that held together the elements of the old paper and broadcast product bundles, one refrain has been constant: How, ask the elders of the profession, can we protect the most important work that we do — investigative journalism? It’s costly and politically sensitive and hard to justify on the bottom line; it’s also what gives journalists the right to claim a valued and sometimes privileged spot in the civic landscape.

Today the highest profile effort to rescue investigative journalism from the industry’s wreckage is Pro Publica, a not-for-profit enterprise that is gearing up as a sort of rescue craft for in-depth muckraking. ProPublica is led by Paul Steiger, formerly managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, and plans to open a newsroom in New York with 24 full-time reporters. It launched to much trumpeting last October and boasts an “advisory committee” featuring illustrious leaders of the field, including several whom I know and respect.

So why am I skeptical of the undertaking?

Investigative journalism is a peculiar calling that calls to peculiar practitioners. The best in the field that I’ve known have been dogged, ornery, sometimes slippery and occasionally unhinged personalities. Editing an investigative journalist is perhaps the most psychologically challenging task an editor will face.

When investigative journalists go after a story, it’s not like covering a fire or a speech or writing analytical commentary. Their employers are sinking money — sometimes months of a salary — into a project with no guarantee that it will ever pay off. If it does pay off, then the publication faces all sorts of ethical and legal questions on the road to publication. Resolving them most typically pits the company’s business interests (don’t put the owners/shareholders at risk!) against its editors’ journalistic instincts (bring the truth to light!).

In theory, having a nonprofit employ your investigative team should be a buffer against such problems. But Pro Publica’s plan is to fund investigations and then offer these stories to other publications. In practice this means you’ve got extra layers of review and caution that will make it harder, and slower, to get these stories out the door. (Also, the more respected the publication, the more likely that pride of ownership — or the “not invented/reported here” syndrome — will make editors reluctant to publish the work of others.)

And it’s not as if non-profit status eliminates all conflict-of-interest problems: Pro Publica’s money comes from Herbert M. and Marion O. Sandler, identified in the Times story as “the former chief executives of the Golden West Financial Corporation, based in California, which was one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders and savings and loans.” Gee, there’s an area full of targets for investigation today! Whatever Pro Publica does (or doesn’t) pursue on the topic will be surrounded by questions.

Steiger has said that Pro Publica will be able to protect its projects from bottom-line pressures: “It is the deep-dive stuff and the aggressive follow-up that is most challenged in the budget process.” Maybe so. But budget pressures can help the cause of investigative journalism, too.

The most sensitive and difficult editorial job in an investigative project is getting the obsessive investigative reporter to hand over the copy. Left to their own devices, these reporters will typically — and understandably — want to keep reporting forever. The editor must, sometimes, pull the paper from the typewriter. (OK, image needs updating: the editor must, er, get the reporter to press “send.”)

In my experience of nearly a decade helping handle this sort of project at Salon, I watched these conflicts unfold. And I observed that Salon’s hunger to break stories, as an independent company struggling for financial stability, worked to the advantage of our investigative efforts: it gave editors a basis for bringing projects to fruition (or abandonment), and reporters an incentive to go along. Everyone understood that resources were precious and limited and had to be used wisely. (We had our screwups, sure, but so has every publication, including those with far heavier institutional ballast.)

Will there — can there — be such hunger at an all-star-team style operation like Pro Publica? Will the Pro Publica newsroom (physical or virtual) be the sort of place that puts the kind of pressure on investigative journalists that they need in order to produce? My fear, in reading about its plans, is that it will be a very comfortable place for experienced investigative reporters to pursue open-ended projects without feeling any particular fire to wrap them up.

I certainly wish Pro Publica well. But my guess is that the new models for investigative journalism will come not from this blue-ribbon assemblage but, as innovation usually does, from small operations in left field.

BONUS LINKS: I meant to post these thoughts when Pro Publica was announced. Back then, Jeff Jarvis was cautiously optimistic about Pro Publica’s prospects. Then I meant to post them when it announced its advisory board last month; at that time, Dan Gillmor pointed out that the Pro Publica board isn’t exactly topheavy with digital expertise.

See? On my not-for-profit blog, the stories just sort of linger in the pipeline!

LATE UPDATE: Over the weekend the Times published a column by Joe Nocera about the Sandlers, who are backing Pro Publica, suggesting that they are classic wealthy progressives who believe, among other things, that “The story of subprime is worse than anyone has written so far” — so maybe this won’t be a problem for Pro Publica. But there’s always a tangled string from a project’s financing; if Pro Publica goes after the subprime story, it could be criticized for pursuing the Sandlers’ former competitors. My point is that, one way or another, the sources of funding for a news organization always raise questions, and being nonprofit provides no exemption.

For some reason I’m getting some email product newsletter that I don’t want. It’s called “Web Buyer’s Guide Technology Product Update.” Since it appears to be not true spam but what I’d call gray-market — a legit company (Ziff Davis, in this case) that got my email address somehow a long time ago — I figure I have a shot at genuinely unsubscribing.

I click on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email. First thing I see is an interstitial ad for EWeek magazine! That’s right, I have to view an ad before I can unsubscribe.

Finally, I get to the unsubscribe page. Only that’s not what it is. It’s a long long list of newsletters that I can now subscribe to! Or, if I can figure out which on the list is the one I’m getting — there are several “Web Buyer’s Guide”s — I can check the box and instead press an unsubscribe button.

But I can’t do that unless I can tell them which of my many email addresses to use. They haven’t kept track of this themselves. And of course now I’m giving them my email address on a page that could well, you know, by accident end up subscribing me to dozens of their newsletters.

There are smart and considerate email marketing companies out there today that know how to do this better.

Clive Thompson writes about how software can shape our creative work:

Our tools, of course, affect our literary output. And all this made me wonder how other writing tools affect what’s written. I use Movable Type to write my blog, and I’m constantly annoyed by how small the text-entry boxes are. Whenever I write an entry, the text quickly flows down several box-lengths, which can make it hard to keep track of my argument. The problem, of course, is that the tool was designed with the idea that people would be writing extremely short, pithy entries … whereas my entries tend to drag on and on and on. It reminds me of the writing on one of those old, proprietary-hardware word-processors from the 80s, which were outfitted with screens that only let you see seven lines at a time.

Wordpress lets you set the posting box to any size you want. But for longer posts, I compose in a text editor. It’s just handier. I have no doubt, though, that browser-based editing will eventually evolve to the point where I don’t need to do that.

Thompson also references Virginia Heffernan’s recent Times piece on word processors, which recommends the Zen-like blank-screen approach of the Mac-based WriteRoom. (Of course, the dominant DOS-based word processor, WordPerfect, offered what was very close to a blank screen; in a pre-Windows world, you didn’t have a browser or e-mail always competing for screen real estate.)

For those of us who learned Basic on a Zenith Z19 and started word processing on a Kaypro (anyone?), the retro green-and-black now takes the breath away. It’s not just the vintage features available on WriteRoom, it’s also that the whole experience is a throwback to a time before user-friendly interfaces came to protect us from technology’s dark places. In those days, the mystery of the human mind and the mystery of computation seemed both to illuminate and to deepen each other.

All of which brings back involuntary, wincing memories of one of my earliest word-processing experiences, at the Boston Phoenix. In the early ’80s the Phoenix had some ancient minicomputer sitting in a back room, feeding the newsroom’s small and much-fought-over handful of dumb terminals. When I say dumb, I mean really dumb. In a limitation that is inconceivable today, these terminals had so little memory that they could only handle a few hundred words at a time. Most Phoenix reviews were way longer than that, yet many of us composed directly on this system (who could afford one’s own PC on what that alternative paper paid its writers?).

To compose a lengthy piece you had to write a chunk (a “buffer”), then save it — sending it on a leisurely journey back to main memory — to make room on the terminal for the next installment of your opus. Unfortunately, these terminals also had a habit of crashing. Too often you’d press that “send” key only to see the screen freeze, and you’d know then that you’d just lost all your work stretching back to the last time you’d saved your work. Only sometimes pressing “save” would itself trigger the dreaded freeze — a tragic Catch-22 indeed.

As a result — in a tableau that somehow seemed to epitomize all the pain of human composition in a technological age — you might occasionally spy some desperate writer hunched over notebook and pen in front of a frozen screen, painstakingly copying the slim remnant of his verbiage that was still visible, rescuing some fragment of inspiration before the inevitable reboot wiped the words clean.

I don’t know which is more lamentable here:

The revelation that the Tolkien estate has apparently received zero dollars for the (phenomenally good) movies New Line made of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy…

or…

The inability of the New York Times, at this very late date, to spell the author’s name right in a headline.

Surely the paper’s staff is riddled with people weaned on “The Hobbit” and the trilogy — people whose brains, at the first peripheral-vision scan of that misspelling, light up with red “error” messages shooting from axon to dendrite?

[This image is from the National Edition on paper, distributed here in the Bay Area. One can only hope that it got fixed for the later editions...]

I’ve been reading with some fascination the latest round in the garment-rending “What’s happening to our newspapers?” lament — this one sparked by the current season of The Wire and a Washington Post op-ed by its auteur, former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon.

I haven’t been watching The Wire. (I know, I should be.) But I’ve read Simon’s piece — a thoughtful but I think sentimental and wrongheaded portrait of the decline of newspapering that coddles the industry for its failure of foresight.

Simon writes with the perspective of a newsroom veteran who entered the field in the wake of Watergate:

Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperback copies of “All the President’s Men” and “The Powers That Be” atop our Associated Press stylebooks. No business school called to us, no engineering lab, no information-age computer degree — we had seen a future of substance in bylines and column inches.

My journalism pedigree is of the same vintage as Simon’s, and though I never went to journalism school, I shared his idealistic fervor. During the 13 years that Simon worked for the Sun, I worked first for the Boston Phoenix (three years) and then for the San Francisco Examiner (a decade).

But my memory’s a little different from Simon’s. Apparently he was lucky enough to experience the ’80s as a golden age of fat editorial budgets and bold projects. Not once in my career have I worked for a newsroom that actually had the resources to devote to the sort of comprehensive coverage that Simon fondly recalls. When I entered print journalism in the early ’80s recession, with magazines closing left and right, it already seemed to me to be a decrepit and failing institution.
(more…)

Many years ago, thanks to some mutual friends, I had the privilege of meeting the late George W.S. Trow, and of sitting in on a class he was giving as part of a journalism workshop at Bard College. Each morning Trow would sit down with the day’s New York Times front page and begin to find links between the stories — not hypertext (this was way pre-Web), but causal connections, cross-currents and submerged conflicts, relationships that the newspaper couldn’t or wouldn’t overtly illuminate but that you could make out if you just let the stories rub against one another in your mind.

The author of In the Context of No Context (which I wrote about in Salon a decade ago) was giving us a lesson in how to place the loose atoms of conventional news reporting into molecular structures of context. Once the lesson took, the methodology was impossible to shake.

I got those old Trowvian vibrations again this morning as I scanned the front-page of the Wall Street Journal — crammed as it is these days with four or five headlines where there used to be three, an immediate result of the new Murdoch regime.

The lead story, “Trader Made Billions on Subprime,” tells of hedge fund operator John Paulson, who has made $3 to $4 billion, personally, by “betting against the housing and mortgage markets.” Since those markets, you may have heard, have been going through a rough patch, Paulson’s “bets” paid off.

Paulson himself sounds almost contrite about his success: he’s “reluctant to celebrate while housing causes others pain,” intends to increase his charitable giving, and thinks that “a lot of homeowners have been victimized.”

This stands in contrast to Los Angeles real estate investor Jeff Greene, the subject of the Journal’s second lead, a friend of Paulson’s. Paulson invited Greene into his housing-crash fund, but Greene went off and implemented the investment strategy on his own. Paulson is irked, but Greene protests, “He never told me, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”

The “bet” paid off for Greene, too. He now has three jets. (What does one do with three jets?) He believes that he is “pretty conservative in the way I spend money”; after all, his newest jet is an “older model” Gulfstream that he got for only $2 million — a steal!

We understand that the financial engineers of Wall Street have always been handsomely rewarded. Lots of people and institutions in the financial industry lost the gambles that Paulson and company won. But I can’t help thinking there is something broken with a system in which Olympian financiers place their bets on incomprehensible financial instruments and risk winning or losing bonuses and jets — while these same transactions bear real consequences that are very comprehensible and tangible for the people whose lives they affect. When the roulette wheel of the derivatives market stops, some people get to buy jet number three; other people lose their homes.

Which leads us to headline number three: “States to Tighten Belts as Weakness of Economy Cuts Into Tax Receipts.” Here we move down from the rarefied air of Wall Street back into the thicker atmosphere of everyday reality, where, it seems, the mistakes made in the mortgage market — all the stuff that Paulson “bet” against — are now dragging down the economy, dampening consumer spending, slowing economic growth, reducing employment and cutting into government coffers. Which means less money for schools and police and children’s healthcare and other stuff that people without three jets — or even two jets! — might care about.

Finally, if your eyes scan down the page, you hit headline number four, “Toxic Factories Take Toll on China’s Labor Force” — an account of the cadmium battery industry. Making the batteries requires toxic chemicals, and when the U.S. started regulating their manufacture, the industry simply moved to a lower-cost, no-hassle home in China, and took its poisonous impact with it.

The story pulls our gaze out from the national to the global scale, reminding us that the U.S. economy now rests, even more completely than in the past, on foreign foundations. James Fallows explains how in painfully clear terms in the new Atlantic:

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China.

There you have it: the story of the economic world today, from prosperous financial buccaneers to worried middle-class America to the developing-world workforce that can only dream of someday upgrading its problems to the sort we in the United States contend with. It’s all on the Journal’s front page today, but the newspaper won’t connect the dots for you — that work is left to each of us.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
– John Muir

The only way to make sense of the news that the New York Times has hired William Kristol as an op-ed writer is to imagine that, tomorrow, we will learn that the Wall Street Journal has handed a column to Noam Chomsky.

The 10ZenMonkeys blog has the transcript of an extraordinary speech by Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland delivered at a recent conference for the Craigslist Foundation. (Found via BoingBoing.)

This passage about admitting your mistakes is worth taking to heart, particularly for those newsroom veterans who scratch their heads over posts like my last one:

Number Three, Don’t Lie. This is for real. There is something about the relationship between the not-for-profit sector, the government, the foundations, and the donors that creates a massive incentive to lie — flagrantly, and often.

And it’s not just a one-sided thing. The relationship between not-for-profits and foundations is like the relationship between teenagers and parents. You don’t really want to tell them everything that’s going on, and they don’t really want to know. So there’s this dance of deceit, shall we say.

“What’d you do this weekend?”
“Oh… Studied! With my friends.”

And the parents say “Good! So glad to hear that!” Because they don’t want to know. And so what do you say?

“How did the year go?”
“We had success after success! All goals were met, and a good time was had by all.”

And what was there left to say? “Good! Good!” They don’t want to know about the youth in your program that cussed you out and set the building on fire. They don’t want to know that you hired somebody once again who was a complete idiot. They don’t want to know, and you don’t want to tell them, and therefore we all stay very ignorant. Then the actual innovation curve has flattened out, because nobody’s telling the truth about what we’re going through any more. We’re all self-deceiving and trying to make it look good.

At the Ella Baker Center, we adopted a reporting form that freaked out our board and advisors. It was very simple: highlights, low lights, and lessons learned. We created a discipline in the organization that we would report out the bad stuff. First of all, everybody knows the bad stuff anyway, because the person you fired is talking right now, so it’s not like it’s not out there. But did you learn anything?

Program officers at foundations, donors, and philanthropists are just inundated with lying, false crap. And they know they’re being lied to. If you took all your annual reports and just read them end to end, you’d have to conclude that we’re now living in a socialist paradise. Everything’s going well, people are being served, and all the children are happy. And then you look at any newspaper, and it’s very clear that we might be fudging a bit.

So my experience has been that donors and program officers love to actually get the truth. They don’t punish you for it if you learned something. I think if all of us started to confess a little bit more, we would learn a little bit faster.

I was flipping through my Wall Street Journal this morning when I noticed something unusual. Buried deep in the paper’s Weekend section was a long list of names that took up a full half page and featured, at the top of the column in small type, that bashful word “CORRECTION.”

I looked more closely. The list was apparently a new version of one that had appeared a month ago in the same section, as the centerpiece to a cover story titled “How to Get Into Harvard” about how different elite high schools around the country fared in placing graduates at elite colleges. Now, there are myriady ways one could take issue with the premise of such a piece. But now it appears that, on its own terms, the article’s ranking was totally screwed up. Today’s Journal publishes a new list that is substantially different from the first one, and much expanded.

I assume that, upon the appearance of the first list, the Journal was inundated with complaints and questions from those fancy private schools that, for one reason or another, failed to make the list. (The one I attended many years ago, Horace Mann School in New York, was absent from list number one, but made it to the bottom of the corrected ranking.) For better or worse, this sort of ranking means everything to these schools and the parents who pay fortunes to send their kids to them. Surely the Journal’s editors knew that; heck, they probably send their kids to the same schools.

So strike one against the paper was simply fumbling such a predictably emotional piece of research. Presumably the paper knew of the problem within a matter of days, if not hours. Strike two is for not publishing an immediate notice that the original list was going to be disavowed and replaced. (At least I never saw such a notice, and I’m a regular reader.)

But the third strike-and-out goes for the way the Journal buried this massive correction. The original story gets front-page play; the correction turns up on page 7, under a tiny header. (It is similarly difficult to find on the Journal web site.)

The authority of the professional media is under massive assault today for all sorts of reasons, many legitimate, many not. But some of the most gaping wounds are self-inflicted. Twenty, 30 years ago, maybe a publication could get away with this sort of sweep-it-under-the-carpet defensiveness. Today, it just looks ludicrous. If you blow a front page story, you should admit it on the front page. Even if it’s “just” the Weekend section.