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Anchordammerung

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I haven’t posted much on the CBS Guard memos saga because it didn’t seem like there was much more to say. CBS seems to have had the essence of the story right, but allowed itself to get duped by some bad evidence. The White House evidently found it credible, too. The moment the documents hit the Net they were questioned and ultimately discredited. CBS compounded its error by failing to take its critics seriously and adopting a blustery, “we stand by our story” wagon-circling defense.

That’s pretty much it. On the one hand, no one seriously doubts that President Bush obtained his Guard posting through family influence, then used family influence again to bail out on the service he’d signed on for. (Today’s New York Times account puts this story together one more time.) On the other hand, CBS has provided the Bush campaign with a great gift of distraction.

I don’t view this saga as a demonstration of the power of the Internet’s fact-checking multitudes so much as a display of the network’s extended ineptitude. Everyone makes mistakes; professionalism lies not in perfection but in responsibility, responsiveness and openness. CBS’s “we know better” response was the opposite. Dan Rather and his colleagues have now stuck a fork in the tattered remnants of the blue-chip brand name they inherited from Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

What really hurts, for CBS and the rest of the networks’ news operations, is that, at this late date in media history, trust is the only advantage the broadcast networks can claim. They no longer deliver the news faster than rivals, they certainly don’t deliver it in more depth or from more viewpoints or with more style. Their only remaining edge has been a sort of generic, fossilized authority. More people get their news from us than through any other channel, the broadcasters’ unspoken claim went. That makes us the arbiters of the news. And we take that responsibility seriously — you can count on us to get things right.

This claim was always problematic, of course, but it bore enough relationship to the truth, back in the days of Walter Cronkite, that when Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War in 1968, it actually meant something. Today’s network broadcasters simply glop together the mediasphere’s news judgments into boluses of headlines — and when they try to do original reporting, they slip on banana peels.

I don’t think CBS’s mishandling of the Guard memos story has much to do with left vs. right or Kerry vs. Bush; it’s about the passing of an ancien regime. The twilight of the anchors has been upon us for some time, but with the affair of the memos, the flames are now climbing up Black Rock.

In the end, it feels fitting that “60 Minutes’ ” vaunted TV news operation was taken in through its ignorance of the Selectric-to-software history of typography. The typed word — TV’s achilles’ heel!

Bonus links: Good reading on the subject from Reason’s Jesse Walker and, as always, from Jay Rosen.

Correction 9/21: It appears that, though the “Black Rock” building (a/k/a the CBS Building) is associated in the public mind with the network, it has not actually housed CBS for something like a decade.

More blabbing about blogs

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I’ll be talking on a panel about “The Role and Impact of News Aggregators,” sponsored by the Online News Association here in San Francisco next Tuesday, Sept. 21 (the equinox!). The whole thing starts at 6:30 pm at CNet, 235 Second Street. More details here.

Proportional fonts, welcome to your 15 minutes of fame!

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All I can say is, if the Bush-service documents CBS presented on “Sixty Minutes” yesterday really are forgeries, then boy, what incompetent work!

For those who missed the backstory, people — from the blogosphere to the Washington Post — are pointing out that those memos are typed in a proportional font, Times Roman, and such typography would have been unusual (though not totally impossible) in the early ’70s.

As a teen type geek at the time, I recall jealously eyeing those IBM electric typewriters — the IBM Executives — that did proportional spacing, and occasionally I got to play with them. (But boy was it hard to fix typos with Korectype — the characters wouldn’t line up!) But it’s strange to think a military office would have had one. So certainly, there’s something odd here.

But the forgery scenario has problems, too. It’s pretty damn easy to set your word processor to a monospace font like Courier. I do all my writing that way, in fact. (All right, I’m nostalgic — I still cherish that monospace clarity, see?) So if these things are fake, then someone took an immense amount of care to futz up the papers and make them look old and get a signature on there that experts seem to think is a pretty good rendition of Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian’s — then forgot to change the fonts on his word processor.

It’s certainly possible. But it seems awfully strange. Furthermore, if you were going to the trouble of producing a forgery, wouldn’t you go all out and really nail Bush directly on something more spectacular than the murkier, though still somewhat incriminating, details of these memos?

At the convention

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Blogging and bloggers are getting tons of attention as the Democratic Convention gears up. Dave Winer has set up a really useful blog aggregation of tons of the con-blogging.

Salon, meanwhile, has a half-dozen staffers in Boston. The coverage will be all over our home page, but a lot of it is already pumping through War Room, our political blog. Check out Tim Grieve’s report on Al Sharpton’s stemwinder:

“Sharpton contrasted his run for the presidency with Bush’s experience of ‘being born on third base and thinking he hit a triple.’ ‘I wasn’t even born in the stadium,’ Sharpton shouted. ‘I had to fight through the parking lot, get through the front gate, go around through the crowd, and thenhit a triple.’ “

Of, by and for

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Mitch Kapor, Bart Decrem and Joe Costello have launched an interesting new group blog called ob4 — “Of, By and For” — for musings, discussion and debate about democracy in the aftermath of the Dean campaign. (It also seems to be a sort of prototype testbed for a new edition of the open-source content management system Drupal being developed by CivicSpace Labs — evolving out of the experience behind the DeanSpace software.)

Blogs, bosses and bucks

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I had a good time yesterday at Supernova, but it seemed that one of the points I made on our panel caused some consternation among some listeners, so let’s look at it.

I had heard a certain amount of what I thought was wildly overoptimistic forecasting of the widespread adoption of blogging as a tool in corporate America. For instance, Tim Bray said: “Any corporation that doesn’t do this in the future is going to be playing catch-up. They can use the technology to make the enterprise provide a more human face to world.” (I copied this quote from a trade journal article on the conference and promptly lost the URL. Sorry. I wasn’t taking notes myself so if it’s wrong, apologies in advance.)

I agree with Tim and the other optimists that blogging can give enterprises a more human face. But will they let it? What I said yesterday is that I thought the successes to date in public blogging by software developers at places like Microsoft and Sun weren’t likely to be duplicated in other, more traditional corporations any time soon. Software professionals are relatively unique in feeling that (a) their talents are in demand and (b) if they get fired from one job they can probably (except maybe at the very bottom of an economic cycle) get another one pretty easily. In other words, they feel more empowered to spout off on their blogs without fearing for their livelihood than the typical American worker does.

I’m not sure why, but Tim seemed to take this comment to mean that I thought that people in other fields — I think he mentioned construction, it’s hard to remember — wouldn’t succeed as bloggers because they’re “not as interesting.” Of course, that’s not what I said, and it’s precisely the opposite of what I think. Everyone has stories to tell, and everyone’s stories are worth telling: that’s a credo of the digital storytelling movement that I’ve been involved with for a decade now.

The stories that programmers are telling in the current explosion of blogs have given their work a vital new visibility; as developers tell their stories to each other, creating a pool of technical, practical and philosophical knowledge, they are also giving the public a new and fascinating window onto their discipline. (I’m as aware of this as anyone — my work on my book is infinitely easier thanks to the profusion of programming blogs.)

Do I think it would be a Good Thing for this pattern to be duplicated in other fields? Of course — and it’s happening in some, predictably in those areas where individual professionals have a tradition of independence (the legal world, academia).

But the utopian vision of blogging somehow flattening corporate hierarchies and allowing Cluetrain-like voices of authenticity to trumpet forth from every Fortune 500 headquarters? Maybe it’s possible on the sort of time scale that Supernova keynoter Tom Malone talked about — from hunter-gatherers to agriculture, that sort of thing. But I don’t think it’s going to happen in our lifetimes.

I’m sorry to be the pessimist at the party. But for large numbers of workers in America, particularly those at big companies, the dominant fact of life remains don’t piss off your boss. And, in an era of health-insurance lock-in and easy outsourcing and offshoring, many U.S. workers remain doubtful that they can simply waltz into a new job should their activities displease the current hierarchy to which they report. So the odds of them feeling at ease publishing honest Web sites about their work lives are extremely poor. The blogs you’re going to see from within most traditional companies will be either uninformative snoozes or desperate attempts at butt-covering and -kissing. Not because people don’t have great stories to tell — but because telling the truth has too high a cost.

Someone at Supernova got up and said that he worked in investment banking and thought it was a field that was ripe for blogging. No doubt! I’m assuming that your typical investment banker has managed to sock away some private unemployment insurance cash (also known in some industries as “fuck you” money, something Dick Cheney apparently has in abundance).

For those with such resources, blog on! For those lucky enough to work for a company that says “blog on” and means it, cherish your luck. But for most of the rest of the working population, the blogging revolution will be happening in some other office.

Standing room

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Like some other well-known bloggers before her, Chris Nolan is working on turning her blog into more of a revenue-generating business. I like Chris’s stuff, even as I sometimes disagree with it, because it’s sharp and unpredictable and rooted in her years of experience as a reporter, and so I wish her well in her efforts to sell ads and subscriptions.

Lord knows it’s not an easy road. Reading Chris’s manifesto for “Stand-Alone Journalism” — she argues that’s a better label for what she does than “blogging” — brought me back to some distant memories from the dawn of the Web. After learning HTML and participating in the San Franciso Free Press experiment, I thought to myself, hey, there’s nothing to stop me from starting my own publication on the Web!

So I did. In January 1995 I took a week’s vacation time from my job at the SF Examiner and published a site. I focused on what was then quaintly known as “multimedia”; I called it Kludge, as a nod to its essential clumsiness and improvised nature, and I posted an issue. This was years before personal content management software, needless to say; it’s all just cruddy hand-coded HTML and crude self-designed graphics. But the articles weren’t so bad (hey, here’s an interview with Marc Canter! Here’s a satirical take on the CD-ROM explosion/implosion!).

What I quickly realized was that, as much fun as writing, editing and designing all that material was — bringing me back as it did to my teenage roots in mimeograph publishing — it was just the beginning of getting a Web site going. If I was serious about making it something more than a labor of love — if I wasn’t going to do all that work on my vacation days — I’d need to figure out how to get people to visit the site, and how to sell ads, and so forth. My best efforts involved dumping a pile of flyers in the lobby of a multimedia conference at Moscone Center. (While I was doing that, a couple of guys named Jerry Yang and Dave Filo stood at a booth under a big Yahoo banner, giving away T-shirts.)

After briefly toying with the notion of applying to AOL’s Greenhouse program for funding, I thought, nah. When David Talbot started talking about a new publication he wanted to create, I helped persuade him that he should do it on the Web instead of in print. Salon turned out to be a great place for me to write and edit and build Web sites without having to wear all the hats myself (though there have certainly been times during the last decade when my pate has felt a little crowded).

Today, would-be “Stand-Alone Journalists” can rely on much better software tools to create and publish their work. They can plug into far better organized online networks to spread the word of their activities. And they can even turn to simple plug-in approaches to advertising, like AdWords or BlogAds, to try to bring in some cash. But being a “Stand-Alone Journalist” still requires a combination of journalistic and entrepreneurial traits that’s rare. Being a good journalist requires the ability to not mind pissing people off sometimes (Nolan, whose career has had its share of controversy, is no shirker in this regard); being a good entrepreneur demands the ability to charm people as often as possible. Both pursuits, of course, demand persistence, patience, and, in the face of indifference, a stubborn belief in the value of one’s undertaking.

When I read Nolan’s proposed label for the solo-blogger-journalist, the first thing that popped into my mind was the famous quote from Ibsen’s Dr. Stockman in “Enemy of the People”: “The strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone.” Standing alone has many wonderful advantages — it’s a stirring posture. But remember what happens to old Dr. Stockman: He is right to blow the whistle about the polluting of his town’s waters, but he’s dreadfully naive about the world around him, he’s ultimately ineffective, and he fails to accomplish much besides his own martyrdom.

So I’m not sure the “Stand-Alone Journalist” label is one that will stick. The linked nature of the Web is ultimately even more important than the independence of the blogger. Standing alone is useless without being connected.

Syndication city

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I’m a late addition to a panel at the Supernova conference this Thursday, June 24: I’ll be joining some very interesting people (Technorati‘s David Sifry; blogger, XML leader and now Sun engineer Tim Bray; and Paul Boutin of Wired and Slate). We’re talking about syndication and RSS. The question the panel faces: “Is there more to syndication than reading 300 blogs at once?” What interesting, useful applications for RSS and RSS-like tools are out there or just around the corner?

I’ve got my own answer(s), but in the decentralized spirit of the conference, I’ll open the floor here in comments, and present anything you folks suggest, too.

Fallows on blogging, Murray on Bush

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Sometimes it just takes me longer to get around to posting on certain topics than I expect. One advantage to delay is that, quite often, someone else winds up making the same point. Instead of rolling out my own rhetoric, all I need do is link to somebody else. Conserves effort; even helps reduce depletion of the global rhetoric reserve!

For instance, I was all set to point out the flaws in the estimable James Fallows’ argument in last Sunday’s New York Times business section about the blogging business. Fallows offered a qualified but optimistic picture of the way Google’s AdSense text ads might provide a healthy business model for bloggers. I was primed to point out the problems here — AdSense doesn’t work well unless your blog has a very narrow focus, and doesn’t bring in many dollars unless that focus is on something sellable (like tech gadgets). But Dana Blankenhorn beat me to it. So you can go read his response.

Similarly, I was gearing up to fulminate about the absurdities in Alan Murray’s Wall Street Journal column arguing that President Bush’s deceptions surrounding the war in Iraq somehow didn’t “break a covenant” with the American people the way President Clinton’s deceptions about Monica did. What Bush critics label as “lies,” Murray argues, the president actually believed in at the time: “Mr. Bush’s broad-brush division of the world into good guys and bad guys can be criticized for its crudeness and simplicity. But most who know him believe it is how he sees the world.”

But Murray’s effort to get Bush off the hook for his pre-war distortions of reality collapses in the face of the president’s continued assertions — up to this week — about ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The rest of the world knows these assertions are utterly bogus. The 9/11 Commission, with its access to classified information and its staff headed up by a former Bush administration official, has now confirmed they are utterly bogus. (Various attempts on the part of some conservative commentators to defend what Bush is saying these days on the basis of technicalities are appalling; by contrast, the Clinton-era parsings of “the meaning of is” — which at the time were elevated to the level of impeachable offenses — were small potatoes.)

At this point, Bush’s and Cheney’s repetitions of the Saddam/Al-Qaeda link represent desperate acts of official mendacity that are simply indefensible. In any world other than one in which, as Dennis Hastert’s spokesman recently reminded us, one party controls “all three branches of government” (refreshing honesty about the Supreme Court, there, no?), we would be hearing talk of impeachment once more.

But no need for me to vent further — Brad DeLong has laid this all out ahead of me.

Technorati: 2.4 million and counting

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Yesterday evening I visited Technorati‘s first “developers’ Salon,” an event at which non-developer bloggers and “content producer” types like me were made to feel quite welcome. You can find blog notes about the event from JD Lasica and Christian Crumlish.

Dave Sifry and Kevin Marks presented the latest stats from the “cosmos” of blogs that Technorati tracks: 11-12,000 new blogs are added each day. (Roughly 45 percent are abandoned over time.) Over 200,000 new blog postings per day. 2.4 million blogs total tracked.

That’s some serious volume — though it pales compared to the total size of the Web that, say, Google surveys Technorati specializes in tracking, and keeping up with, the part of the Web that’s constantly being updated. The blogs it follows provide a collective editorial filter on the news and the Web (see for instance the Technorati “Current Events” page).

Among the most interesting graphs were those that demonstrated the size and dynamic importance of blogging’s “tail end of the curve.” There’s a vast number of blogs that don’t have thousands of readers or links; maybe they only have ten or a hundred people reading them and linking to them. But, both individually and aggregated into small relational groupings, they provide a wealth of data about what people care about and what’s on their minds. Sifry said that Technorati is trying to figure out better ways to “expose the really interesting stuff that’s going on in relatively small communities.”

The room was packed with three or four dozen developers and blog enthusiasts filled with pizza and beer and the unquenchable notion that their code could make a difference. Technorati is a small startup company (eight on staff now, Sifry said) with a clear and honestly communicated notion that it will at some point need to bring revenue in via advertising and subscription services. But right now it’s at that happy moment when its programmers can just explore new ways of making their users’ worlds more interesting.