Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Form and content: not separated at Web’s birth

by

Looking for inspiration as I worked on my video for Say Everything, I went back and re-viewed Michael Wesch’s brilliant Web 2.0 video, “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” It’s had something like 10 million views on YouTube, so you probably saw it already, but if not, it really is worth your 4 minutes.

One of Wesch’s basic points is that it was the separation of form from content — of the software layer that presents content from the layer that stores the data — that made the entire boom of the user-contributed Web possible. In many ways this is inarguable. Such separation is a basic principle of good content-management software; the tool that publishes my blog (and millions of others) depends on code that keeps these realms pretty much in their respective corners, allowing us to alter at will how we dress up what we publish, and to flow the same material easily through different digital pipes.

But two things nag at me about this argument.

The first is a historical observation. The code we rely on today to produce Web sites and blogs, with its XML and XHTML and versatile but painfully complex CSS templates, is daunting to the uninitiated. When I built my first website in 1994 you could learn enough HTML to do so in an hour or so. You couldn’t do a fraction of what we can do today; but you could publish. As Justin Hall trumpeted on his how-to pages, “HTML is easy as hell!”

And it was that sort of ease that kickstarted the early Web and inspired the whole long train of development that has led to millions of blogs and Flickr and Facebook and Twitter and whatever’s coming next. It wasn’t essential to separate form and content to get this stuff going. Had HTML been more elegant, it would probably also have been more impenetrable and unforgiving. And we would all be the poorer for it.

Now today, of course, most of us don’t know or care about either HTML or the more complex layers behind it; our tools (mostly) succeed in hiding all that from us. But it’s important to remember that the vision of a fecund, collaborative, populist Web preceded the emergence of the tools that made it a mass reality. And the vision was in turn inspired by the “easy as hell” nature of the Web’s original authoring technology — which didn’t bother to separate form from content.

The second observation is an aesthetic one. Even as Wesch’s video is extolling the cordoning off of form from content, it is giving us a lesson in the intricate interweaving of content and form. Wesch tells his story in images and screen-grabs that embody the points he is making. The video’s own saga — in which a hitherto obscure young anthropology professor in Kansas cobbles together a video and reaches a global audience of millions — further reflects its themes.

This inseparability of form and content has always been a hallmark of artistic achievement. In successful creative work, form infuses content and content informs form and the two are joined at the hip in ways only a fool would ever wish to separate. That is something Wesch obviously understands. It’s important for the rest of us, in this era of streamlined content management and templated presentations, not to forget it.

Once more into the pay-wall breach: No gravedancing edition

by

Rick Edmonds at Poynter offers a summary of a white paper that the American Press Institute provided to attendees of the recent newspaper execs’ conclave. (The paper doesn’t seem to be available on the API site. UPDATE: Nieman JLab has it.)

The overall thrust seems to be: time to make the customer pay up. Newspapers must “establish that news content online has value by charging for it.” If this is really the level of the paper’s economic reasoning, the industry is in even worse trouble than I thought. News flash: Pricing a product does not establish its value. What you have to do is find a price that people will pay.

Similarly, the report urges a new “Consumer Centric” strategy, which sounds dandy, until you realize that “Refocus on consumers and users” does not mean “serve the customer better” but rather “refocus” on their wallets instead of those of advertisers.

Reading this made me sigh. In the contours of this latest iteration of the argument over charging for content, I’ve recognized an unfortunate pattern. Those who advocate the “charge ’em” strategy cast themselves as hardheaded pragmatists and their opponents as wild-eyed Web idealists and anarchists.

Sadly, however, I submit that most of us in the “charging for content is a bad bet for newspapers” camp are coming at this from the perspective of bitter experience. We are grizzled veterans of this argument. We have Been There and Done That. We aren’t grave-dancing; we’re saying, “Maybe you don’t want to fall into that grave that almost swallowed us.”

During my time at Salon we tried every online revenue strategy you can imagine: Gate off some of the content. Gate off all of the content. Don’t gate any content but ask users for cash to join a premium program. Slate tried a subscription program well before us. Many others followed. Yes, there are differences between such sites and local newspapers. Yes, 2009 is different from 2000-2002. But the fundamental lesson remains: you can get some revenue from readers, and there’s nothing wrong with trying; but if in doing so you cut yourself off from the rest of the Web in any way, you are dooming yourself to irrelevance and financial decline. Don’t make your content less valuable at the instant you’re telling people it’s going to cost them more to get it.

The strongest confirmation of this fact (as I pointed out in an earlier post that was recently echoed by Silicon Alley Insider, and it’s nothing new either) comes from that poster-child for pay-wall advocates, the Wall Street Journal. The Journal has the longest-running and arguably most successful subscription program around, but it has smashed a giant hole in its pay wall and allowed anyone arriving from Google to read any article on its site. (That’s right: you don’t need a WSJ subscription. Just plug any WSJ headline into Google and walk on through the wall.)

The Journal execs can say, “Hey, we’re just being flexible, it’s a hybrid strategy,” and they’re correct, in a sense. What their strategy fails to take into account is how much traffic and mindshare they have lost from the perception that their articles aren’t a linkable part of the Web.

The Journal’s subscription model isn’t a crime or a disaster. It just isn’t the future. As the company’s own discovery that it needs to let Googlers in for free shows, this model is classic newspaper-industry short-term thinking. It’s backward-looking, and won’t help newspapers figure out where they need to be tomorrow.

It’s not the pay, it’s the wall

by

When we talk about “charging for articles” we sometimes mix up the impact of charging itself and the impact of the steps taken to make sure people pay. I was guilty of this in my “charging for articles” post.

The problem with newspapers charging for their articles on the Web isn’t that there is anything wrong with publishers seeking to obtain revenue from their Web pages. Publishers can and will find ways to make money from the Web. They just won’t be the same as they were in print, and they probably won’t be as lucrative, because print was often a monopoly in a way that the Web will never be.

The problem is that the steps publishers take to maximize revenue end up minimizing the value and utility of their Web pages. Building a “pay wall” typically means that only a paying subscriber can access the page — that’s why it’s a wall. So others can’t link directly to it, and the article is unlikely to serve as the starting point for a wider conversation beyond the now-narrowed pool of subscribers.

In other words, when you put up a pay wall around a website you are asking people to pay more for access to material that you are simultaneously devaluing by cordoning it off from the rest of the Web. This makes no sense and is never going to work to support general-interest newsgathering (though it can be a perfectly good plan for specialty niches).

If your journalism is utterly unique you might be able to make a go of this approach, though even then I think it would be tough sledding and take a long time to become self-supporting. But 98 percent of the material newspapers are likely to start charging for can’t claim that kind of uniqueness. It’s wishful to think otherwise.

(I wrote more on this last month in The OPEC Plan For Newspapers.)

Do you prefer Google Wave’s swirl or a clean river?

by

Google Wave interface

Google’s Wave announcement yesterday kicked off an orgy of geek ecstasy yesterday. Why not? A novel new interface combining email, instant-messaging, social networking and sharing/collaboration, all backed by Google’s rock-solid platform, and open-sourced to boot. Who couldn’t get excited?

When I first looked at the screenshots and demo of Wave, I got excited too: It’s a software project with big ambitions in several directions at once, and I have a soft spot in my heart for that. But the longer I looked, the more I began thinking, whoa — that is one complex and potentially confusing interface. Geeks will love it, but is this really the right direction for channeling our interactions into software?

One of the most interesting pieces I read this week was this report on a scholarly study of information design comparing the effectiveness of one-column vs. three-column layouts. The focus was more on social-networking sites (Facebook vs. LinkedIn) than on news and reading, but I think the conclusions still hold: People like single-column lists — the interface that Dave Winer calls “the River of News” and that most of us have become familiar with via the rise of the blog.

In Say Everything I trace the rise of this format in the early years of the Web, when designers still thought people wouldn’t know how to, or wouldn’t want to, scroll down a page longer than their screen. It turns out to be a natural and logical way to organize information in a browser. It is not readily embraced by designers who must balance the needs and demands of different groups in an organization fighting for home-page space; and it is the bane of businesspeople who need to sell ads that, by their nature, aim to seduce readers’ attention down paths they didn’t choose. Nonetheless, this study validates what we know from years of experience: it’s far easier to consume a stream of information and make choices about what to read when there’s a single stream than when you’re having to navigate multiple streams.

Wondering why Twitter moved so quickly from the geek precincts into the mainstream? For most users, tweets flow out in a single stream.

I think about all this when I look at the lively but fundamentally inefficient interfaces some news sites are playing with. Look at the Daily Beast’s unbearably cacophonous home page, with a slideshow centerpiece sitting atop five different columns of headlines. There is no way to even begin to make choices in any systematic way or to scan the entirety of the site’s offering. When everything is distracting, nothing is arresting. You must either attend to the first tabloid-red editorial shout that catches your eye — or, as I do, run away.

I feel almost as put off by the convention — popularized by Huffington Post and now increasingly common — of featuring one huge hed and photo and then a jumble of run-on linked headlines underneath. These headlines always seem like orphan captions to me. The assumption behind this design is that you must use the first screen of content to capture the reader’s attention. That’s only the case if you are waving so many things in front of the readers’ eyes in that one screen that you exhaust them.

Google Wave has an open API that will presumably allow developers to remix it for different kinds of users. So just as Twitter’s open API has allowed independent application providers to reconfigure the simple Twitter interface into something far more complex and geeky for those who like that, perhaps Wave will end up allowing users who like “rivers” to take its information in that fashion. But the default Wave looks like a pretty forbidding thicket to navigate.

ELSEWHERE: Harry McCracken wonders whether Wave is “bloatware.”

How charging for articles could hobble the future of journalism

by

Apparently there was a big meeting of news executives today in Chicago under the auspices of the Newspaper Association of America. The de jure name for the topic at hand was “Models to Monetize Content” but the de facto subject of the conclave seems to be building paywalls and ending what James Warren glibly calls “the age of content theft.” Such conversation needed to take place under the watchful eye of a legal counsel to avoid antitrust problems; but who can doubt that some sort of collective action — simultaneous, if ostentatiously uncoordinated — is at hand?

We are, then, nearing a moment of real decision on the part of the beleaguered newspaper industry, a genuine fork in the road. The papers can decide to keep participating in the open Web, which would require accepting that their legacy business — the old paper bundle and the broadcast model — is going to change into something almost unrecognizable. Or they can decide to put up the walls and gates and behave as if it’s 1997 again, and the Web is just a better delivery truck rather than an intricately evolving social organism. Down one path, dissolve into the Web; down the other, secede from the Web.

These two paths map neatly onto the two camps into which you can group virtually everyone in the old argument about the news business and the Web. On one side, you have the people who feel that newspapers simply took a wrong turn on their journey to the Internet. They were seduced by the Web hypesters! They should have charged for their articles from day one! Because they didn’t, they’re in a bind now — but their only hope is to shut the door belatedly and salvage what can be salvaged. We heard this same cry back in 2000-2002, during the last Web-business ice age.

If this is what you believe, then the appropriate business strategy is a no-brainer: Start charging your readers. Start demanding that Yahoo and Google et al. pay to link to you. Then see what happens — and, I’d advise, duck as the masonry starts to crumble.

In the other camp, the one where I put my own tent, you find everyone who believes that the Web has radically and irreversibly changed the way people get their information, weakening or dismantling all of the buttresses and structures that held the old business of media together. This change is neither all good nor all bad; but it is real, and wishing it away won’t help.

I’ve argued this position consistently for years now, but here is another angle worth considering. In at least one area, the newspaper web sites of the 90s didn’t give away the store. The Web was an obviously superior platform for delivering classified ads, but newspapers traditionally made a good chunk of their revenue from classifieds, so many newspapers adopted a sort of half-hearted classified strategy: if you paid for a print classified ad, you got a web listing free. Or maybe the paper would sell you a Web classified at a different rate from a print classified.

So, in this realm at least, the papers never committed that original sin of offering their product for free. What happened? The papers mostly sat tight and figured that their brand and their prominence in their communities would outweigh the lameness of their software and their indefensible overcharging for a product that now cost little or nothing to deliver. There were big venture-funded startup companies that set out to build standalone classified businesses, and some of them prospered as for-profit enterprises. But the greatest success of all came in the unlikely form of Craigslist, a community-based enterprise led by a shy programmer who offered classifieds not as a profit-making enterprise but (in all but a tiny subset of categories) as a free service.

As a result, newspapers’ classified businesses today have been devastated. But you can’t blame Craig Newmark; if he hadn’t done it, others would have, in some slightly different form. The Web itself made that inevitable. Newspapers had the opportunity to be Craig Newmark; they couldn’t imagine that. Regrettable, but understandable.

Similarly, you can blame Wikipedia for the woes of Encyclopedia Britannica’s paper-edition business, but really, it was less that unforeseen project that doomed the bound-volume encyclopedia than the very existence of the Web itself, which gave people an ill-ordered but livelier source for much of the information they sought.

In each of these cases, no one gave the store away. The shopkeepers didn’t play along, they tried to fight. But the scope of Web-induced change made their battle mostly hopeless. And their choice to fight the Web rather than work with it meant they only hastened their own downfall.

Similarly with the pay-wall argument. I fear that if our newspaper publishers take the collective charge-our-users approach, they will not only doom their own enterprises but will also make the transition we are currently facing — from a paper-and-broadcast news world to a purely digital one — longer and more wrenching.

If news publishers today accept that their future is online and that said future will not and cannot offer the same profit margins, or support the same size staff, as a monopoly, they can still participate in building new models for the new world. Some will survive and some will fail, but all of them (and all of us) will benefit from the lessons they can teach us. But if they shunt themselves off behind pay walls, they will not only surely fail, they will also make it far harder to seed the Web with the knowledge and experience of today’s professional journalists. The work of newsroom professionals will be cordoned off into their own disconnected islands online that fewer and fewer people will visit. New traditions will evolve independent of the old ones.

I can understand that news publishers — the owners and stockholders and managers — will do everything they can to cling to a failing model, because that is the way of the business world. A revenue stream is a revenue stream; it’s hard to give it up today, even when you know it’s going away tomorrow. But the journalists who care about their own craft’s values and traditions should think twice before applauding the intransigence of their business colleagues. In the long run, it will do nothing to save their jobs. And it will make it that much harder for all of us to rebuild a vibrant and sound news tradition online.

UPDATE: Recommended reading — Steve Buttry on “Seven reasons charging for content won’t work”

Dowd’s changed story

by

Is “talking” a synonym for “emailing”? Not to most journalists I know.

Times public editor Clark Hoyt has a short item about the Dowd affair today. In talking to her own colleague Dowd walks back her line about how she was “talking” with a friend; now she admits — as was obvious — that she was actually *emailing* with a friend, and she lifted the paragraph in its entirety from that email, inserting one small wording change.

So we now have a classic coverup pattern on top of a classic “inadvertent plagiarism” incident. Dowd plainly didn’t know she was stealing from Marshall, but she either (a) knew she was borrowing from a friend and thought that was fine, or (b) needs to improve her personal workflow routines, which currently don’t distinguish between her own notes and text cribbed from others.

As I said, I don’t think a single incident of this kind of carelessness merits firing. But it merits *some* sort of reaction from the Times beyond a correction. Unless the paper thinks it’s OK for writers to lift entire paragraphs from others. Editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal seems to dismiss concerns; Hoyt quotes him indirectly as saying, “journalists collaborate and take feeds from each other all the time.” Sorry, but collaboration and using feeds are not the same thing as lifting text. Hoyt’s response is one I share: “That is true with news articles, but readers have a right to expect that even if an opinion columnist like Dowd tosses around ideas with a friend, her column will be her own words. If the words are not hers, she must give credit.”

As always, the problem here isn’t the actual incident, which is hardly earth-shattering; it’s the personal and institutional instinct to circle the wagons, which here has made it look like Dowd and the Times care more about preserving their reputations than leveling with their readers.

The “we stand by our story (or writer)” reflex is an old one that news organizations developed in a different era; it serves them poorly today. The reflex ought to change to a more cautious and open sequence of, first, “we’ll get back to you” and then “here’s exactly what happened.”

UPDATE: Dave Winer writes: “The Times is stonewalling, all of which seem obvious to me. I don’t know about other readers, but it’s this casual attitude, the inside-dealing I see both within the press and with the people they cover that makes me unenthusiastic for ideas meant to “save” them. I’m more into reformation. I want a new kind of journalism that sees incidents like this as bugs to fix.”

I share Dave’s view about viewing these problems as bugs to fix (that’s the essence of the project I entered in the Knight News Challenge). But I think “stonewalling” isn’t the right word for the paper’s response; there was a quick correction (online, at least — haven’t seen it in print, I don’t think). Stonewalling is when you give no answer or response at all. In this case, the Times and Dowd responded; they just didn’t give the full story at first. Subtle distinction.

FURTHER UPDATE: Dave notes that he meant the Times is stonewalling by not revealing the name of Dowd’s friend.

MORE: Eric Boehlert keeps pulling at this thread, suggesting that the Times can lay it to rest by producing the email that Dowd says she took the passage from.

Why Dowd’s “talking” explanation makes no sense

by

Something in Maureen Dowd’s explanation of her apparent plagiarism of Josh Marshall just doesn’t make sense.

An eminent technologist once explained to me that any specific ordering of a relatively brief sequence of words — I forget the exact number, but it was certainly no more than nine — is distinct enough that (unless it is some boilerplate phrase that gets repeated over and over in some type of document) it can be used as a unique fingerprint for the entire document. He demonstrated this for me with Google searches. (Try it yourself, using the “exact phrase” setting — search string in quote marks.) It’s a pretty nifty idea with all sorts of implications.

One of them is that the odds of reproducing the exact phrasing of a 40-word passage by chance are almost impossibly low.

As you may have read, in a recent column Dowd included a passage of that length that happened to exactly match the wording of a recent post on Marshall’s Talking Points Memo (with only one phrase changed — “we” became “the Bush gang”). Dowd’s explanation has been that she was “talking to a friend” who suggested the same point that Marshall was making. She plugged her friend’s idea into the column without knowing that its original source was Marshall. (She and the Times have since posted corrections.) Dowd seems to have been very specific about distinguishing between actual spoken conversation with said friend rather than, say, emailing.

There are a couple of problems with this explanation. The lesser one is that it bespeaks an awfully casual attitude toward attribution — as if, though it would not be OK to lift an idea or passage from Josh Marshall, it is OK to do so from one’s friends.

More importantly, it is simply not possible to credit the idea that Dowd picked up this passage while talking with a friend — and somehow, by sheer coincidence, landed on exactly the same 40-word sequence that Marshall had used to express it. Doesn’t wash. Couldn’t have happened.

The evidence we have overwhelmingly suggests that Dowd either (a) cut and pasted this paragraph herself or (b) received it in some typed form from a friend who had cut and pasted it (or, who knows, recited it over the phone).

This strikes me as more of a misdemeanor than a felony — an act of carelessness and laziness, embarrassing but not career-ending. Unfortunately, it now seems Dowd is going down the cover-up road, despite the knowledge burned into every journalist’s psyche that the cover-up is always worse than the crime.

The Times wants to move on, and Marshall says that’s fine with him. But the fact still rankles, as does the Times’ apparent unwillingness to hold its stars to normal standards.

Note to Peggy: your goose already croaked

by

Oh dear: we’re losing contact with Peggy Noonan again! As we enter a movie season featuring a cartoon about an aged, out-of-touch curmudgeon floating off from reality in a private balloon, let us not forget that we already have a similar character in journalism.

Here’s Noonan today:

Mr. Obama’s government, in all its flurry of activism, may kill the goose that laid the golden egg. This is as dreadful and obvious a cliche as they come, but too bad, it’s what people fear. They see the spending plans and tax plans, the regulation and reform hunger, the energy proposals and health-care ambitions, and they–we–wonder if the men and women doing all this, working in their separate and discrete areas, are being overseen by anyone saying, “By the way, don’t kill the goose.”

The goose of course is the big, messy, spirited, inspiring, and sometimes in some respects damaging but on the whole brilliant and productive wealth-generator known as the free-market capitalist system. People do want things cleaned up and needed regulations instituted, and they don’t mind at all if the very wealthy are more heavily taxed, but they greatly fear a goose killing. Economic freedom in all its chaos and disorder has kept us rich for 200 years, and allowed us as a nation to be generous and strong at home and in the world. But the goose can be killed–by carelessness, hostility, incrementalism, paralysis, and by no one saying, “Don’t kill the goose.”

Note to Noonan: The goose passed away last year. It is an ex-goose. Its neck was slit, over and over, by a decade-long procession of greedheads and vandals. Michael Lewis even wrote the obituary! The liver was extracted to produce foie gras that is still being feasted on in certain corners of Manhattan, southwestern Connecticut and Los Angeles. But there will be no more eggs until we figure out how to re-stock the farmyard. Indeed, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke are up all night in the financial labs trying to reconstitute the beast’s DNA.

I guess this cluelessness should not surprise us, given that Noonan is the same columnist who, last December, looked around and wondered why the economic crisis was not visible to her.

Still, this bears repeating: “What people fear” is not that the fragile life of the free market will be extinguished. What we fear is the lingering presence, and indeed power, of the buccaneers and charlatans who slaughtered it — and who will jump at any opportunity to strangle its successor, if they are given a tenth of a chance. Yet they are, apparently, as invisible to Noonan today as that goose-corpse was to her last December, when everyone else was gagging from the smell of its rot.

Journalism is no meritocracy — stop the presses!

by

Like nearly everyone else in the journo-blogosphere I have been reading writer Dan Baum’s account, on Twitter, of how he got fired by the New Yorker. It is a canny PR move on Baum’s part, and the New Yorker is a fascinating enough institution that a little glance under the tent flap is hard to resist. But aside from getting a lot of extra attention, and helping promote a new book, why did Baum deliver this confessional kiss-off via Twitter?

He didn’t use Twitter in any particularly creative way, and now he says he’ll be “posting the account, in proper order,” on his website. So he’s admitting that the reverse-chronological ordering on Twitter is “improper” — it makes it harder to read the tale. Why Twitter it at all?

The answer lies in what I will call Rosenberg’s Law of New Media: Each new media form invites a new round of “firsts” that the older media will over-cover. You can see this in action from the first arrival of online interaction pre-Web, to the rise of the Web, to the rise of blogging, and now with the Twitter craze: First there was the first couple to marry who’d met on the WELL. Then there was the first couple to marry who’d met on the Web. Then there was the first couple to marry who’d met in comments on a blog. And any day now I’m sure we’ll learn about the first couple to marry who met via Twitter. (Maybe it happened already and I missed it.) And each “first” becomes the hook for some breathless story. First book deal! First company founding! First suicide!

So Baum is just shrewdly exploiting this law, gathering a crowd for his little tell-all. Can’t blame him for that. But I wish that, having gathered such a crowd, he had had something more illuminating to say.

A couple years ago Baum’s New Yorker contract wasn’t renewed, and he believes this was not because of the quality of his work but because New Yorker editor David Remnick took a dislike to him. He has posted the articles Remnick rejected so you can decide for yourself. And he offers, as a lesson from it all, the following jaw-dropping moral:

“The biggest disappointment was learning that, after all, it’s not only about the work on the page. That the writing life is not a pure meritocracy, or a refuge from office politics. All that crap still matters. Even at the top of the heap. Perhaps especially at the top of the heap. Who knew?”

My reaction to reading this observation is: If I were your editor and you ever said anything like that to me, I’d seriously consider firing you on the spot. No reporter can afford this level of naivete, and no editor’s budget should be spent on it. Reporters have to understand the world pragmatically, as it is, in all its mess and compromise; how can you trust a reporter who doesn’t even understand how his own profession works?

I spent the early part of my career as a freelancer writer, and every time I was rejected I wondered what was wrong with me and my work. Later in life I wound up for many years on the other side of the equation, as an editor, accepting and rejecting pitches and sitting in editorial meetings debating ideas. And I learned what everyone who’s done that knows: editors have to say “no” many more times than they can say “yes,” and they can’t always tell writers the reason behind the “no.” Sometimes it has nothing to do with the writer and his work; and when it does, telling the whole truth can be hurtful.

It’s hard to say to a writer, “You’re sloppy” or “You’re just not original enough” or “Your sensibility just doesn’t fit here.” Most editors don’t. The same principles apply to the hiring and firing of staff writers (New Yorker writers like Baum are typically on year-long freelance contracts); if anything, honesty is even harder in those cases.

I think none of this is news to 95 percent of people working in 95 percent of newsrooms, nor should it be. I could imagine some young writer at the start of his career imagining the New Yorker, or any other top-flight journalistic organization, as a pure meritocracy. But for an experienced mid-career magazine writer like Baum, it suggests some sort of disconnection from reality.

(There’s also this strange business of the double-byline that isn’t: On his website Baum says that all of his work is a collaboration with his wife, Margaret Knox, and that “everything that goes out under the byline ‘Dan Baum’ is at least half Margaret’s work,” but he gets the bylines because — I dunno, you read the explanation and see if it makes sense to you. Seems at the least awfully retro to me, and at the worst, pretty unfair both to Ms. Knox and to the couple’s readership.)

I don’t know why Remnick fired Baum. Maybe Baum’s pieces really didn’t fit into the New Yorker as Remnick envisions it. Or maybe, as Baum has it, it was just a personal dislike on the New Yorker editor’s part. But Baum’s clueless tweet made me think there might be more to Remnick’s side of the story. Which, quite properly, we’ll probably never know.

Dan Baum's twitter

Coll, Kinsley, Bronstein kick newspapers around

by

At Fort Mason last night it was Yet Another Panel on the Future of Newspapers. I went because of who was on the panel: the impressive investigative reporter and former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll; Slate founder Michael Kinsley; and Phil Bronstein, my ertwhile boss at the old SF Examiner and more recently longtime editor of the SF Chronicle. NPR’s David Folkenflik moderated. I figured it might be worth listening, and a line out the door of the hall suggested plenty of other people did too.

The good news was that the event, titled “What Comes After Newspapers?,” really didn’t waste a lot of time asking, “How do we save newspapers?” but largely accepted that their day is ending. You might think this is obvious, but too many of these gatherings today are still stuck in rescue mode. The Senate hearing this week, for example, lingered far too long on plans for saving the bottom lines of newspaper publishing companies when it should have been talking about what the Fort Mason panel concentrated on: During the next period of transition, with an old business model collapsing and a new one not yet fully in sight, how do we insure the survival of the essential civic value journalists provide — keeping the public informed snd holding institutions and officials accountable?

This is where Coll started. He said he wasn’t plumping for the preservation of newspapers: “I don’t think there’s anything magical about a newsroom, or an entity that simultaneously publishes crossword puzzles and dispatches from Baghdad. I think that’s a beautiful thing, and it’s passing.” But “embedded in the newsroom is a system of independent reporting and investigation and witnessing,” and the public has an interest in seeing that survive.

He described how the “monopoly model” of newspaper ownership over the past four or five decades supported “a body of journalistic practice built up by accident,” one in which “persistent professional activity” by journalists creates a relationship between reporters and sources in which those sources are willing to “pass risky dangerous information down the pipe” because they trust it will be handled carefully and will reach the public intact. Monopoly power gave papers like the Post the resources to resist direct pressure from the government, even during Watergate. Can small web-based operations muster the same kind of backbone?

Wait a minute, Kinsley retorted: Don’t you think “bloggers in underwear” will be at least as resistant to such pressure as big corporations with profits to protect? Kinsley described the alarm over the future of news as “a large fuss over a medium-sized problem” and took a generally sanguine view of the Web as a locus for journalism. “There’s far more pressure for accuracy on the Internet than in traditional media,” he said. If “God forbid” the San Francisco Chronicle stops publishing, “some site will come up as the curator of news in San Francisco.”

Bronstein has hung up his editor’s hat to become a blogger for his paper, but he presided over its long decline, and he sounded rueful over missed opportunities and mistakes. “We were living in our own kind of bubble…There was all this possibility, and we were not really interested in it.” He spoke hopefully about new experiments online and described the value to reporters and newspapers of having comments open on their websites. But he was left without much to say when a former Chronicle copy editor stood up and asked, simply, what plans the Chronicle’s owners had for keeping journalists employed: “Where’s the conversation with the newsroom, the public articulation from Hearst?”

Coll reiterated his argument from a January blog post at the New Yorker on behalf of a “university-sized endowment” for a newsroom, to be provided by some generous benefactor to create a public-interest nonprofit entity of some kind. Of course, such nonprofit newsrooms already exist (in print, Poynter’s St. Petersburg Times, and on the web, ProPublica). If wealthy people can be persuaded to pony up for additional such enterprises, well, the more the merrier. But it seems to me that Coll’s vision is “Batten down the hatches, the dark ages are coming — let’s be sure we keep some monasteries around to hand the manuscripts and beer recipes on to future generations.” And I just don’t think things are quite that bad. There’s too much freedom to experiment on the Web, too many opportunities to make our way quickly through whatever transitions we face.

One such opportunity, personified, stepped forward during the Q&A: A young journalist who’s started up a blog that focuses on the 2010 census. Today we call this a “niche site”; but it’s also what we used to call a beat.

Some other interesting tidbits:

Coll mentioned that in the Senate hearing, Sen. Claire McCaskill had described the value to her of the two or three reporters (out of a much larger herd) who knew their stuff and paid close attention to what her office was doing: they kept her “scared” (in a good way). All of which made me think, hmmm, isn’t this exactly what’s happening to journalists themselves, as their work gets scrutinized by a crowd on the Web — many of whom don’t know what they’re talking about, but a handful of whom actually know more than the journalists, and can keep them honest — or scared?

Bronstein disagreed with David Simon’s complaint in his Washington testimony that bloggers don’t cover City Hall: they’re there, they’re “the people we used to refer to as gadflies.”

Also, sounding remarkably like a cranky blogger, he declared: “If you’ve ever been written about, there’s one thing you know — they never get it right.”

Coll, in response to a question about objectivity, described it as “a cultural artifct that is as strange as opera,” one that arose as a side-effect of the monopoly business model, in which newspapers had to aim for a broad reach and inclusive content.

In the Q&A, someone pointed out that decades ago most major U.S. cities had many newspapers. “We survived the collapse of newspaper competition in America. Is this worse?”

Here’s coverage of the event from the sponsor, and here’s video.