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Reporters: Pay no attention to that customer behind the curtain

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I see that the Washington Post’s new publisher, Katharine Weymouth, says the following in a memo: “We must focus better on what the consumer indicates they want, and be less quick to emphasize only what we think is important.”

These are words that most journalists have conditioned themselves to grimace at. To the old-school reporter, “listen to the customer” is assumed to be code for one of the following: (a) cave to the politician; (b) coddle the advertiser; (c) pander to the ignorant; or (d) give credence to the crazies. Customer research is for the marketing guys on the other side of the wall; here in the newsroom, we chart our own course, and we must stuff our ears and tie ourselves to the mast any time our ship passes close enough to readers for us to hear what they’re saying. Otherwise, we might betray our values.

To those of you in businesses outside of professional journalism, where listening to the customer is simple common sense, I realize that this sounds nuts. But it’s true. Here is a very amusing statement of it from one of the most successful journalists of our time:

At the Post I learned how to cruise the newsroom from the master, Michael Specter, who is now the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times… Michael also taught me how to deal with angry and rude readers, which is a major occupational hazard in the newspaper world. I used to get all flustered and apologetic and depressed when people called up to yell at me. But Michael would just listen for about 10 seconds, roll his eyes, and say: “You seem to have forgotten one thing. I DON’T WORK FOR YOU!” Michael is my idol.

This is Malcolm Gladwell, writing in 1996 in Slate. He is recording what a surprising number of journalists believe: They do not work for their readers. This is a fine thing to say, until the person they do work for turns out to be a profit-hungry capitalist less interested in the values of journalism than in boosting shareholder value (or, today, avoiding bankruptcy). At that moment, suddenly, the journalist becomes a convert to the notion of Serving the Reader. Only the commitment is an abstract one; it is made to The Reader, not to specific readers, and so defining its specific meaning remains in the journalist’s hands.

I am writing harshly here because a profession that I love is falling apart. Once upon a time I, too, would have heard a line like “we must focus better on the consumer” and rolled my eyes. Today? I wish the Post luck in figuring out who those consumers are, what they want, and how to get it to them.

The newspaper industry’s family affair

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The Tribune Company bankruptcy is a sad thing, but it cannot be said to be a surprising thing. Sam Zell’s purchase of the company was a heavily leveraged deal — that means he borrowed a ton of money to pay the previous owners/shareholders and figured he’d pay off the debt with the profits of the newspapers. Only now those profits are tanking (although in fact we’re told that every single Tribune paper is still in the black for the moment) and the credit markets, as you may have heard, are suddenly much less, er, forgiving.

Of course, as some are speculating, Zell may have figured all along he’d end up needing to take this route, and he may not view it with horror. One of the things he can presumably do in Chapter 11 is renegotiate all the painful labor deals that newspaper owners have always chafed at. Bankruptcy can deal you a “get out of contracts free” card.

Still, it’s a mess, and one that can’t really be laid at the feet of the new-media iceberg that the entire newspaper industry is cruising towards, except in the broadest of ways. If you trace the lines of responsibility for this train-wreck you find they all point back to that sacred cow of the newspaper industry — the Caretaker Family.

In the newspaper biz there is a lot of mythology around family ownership. The idea is that the proprietors’ descendants understand the sacred trust that is journalism and will serve as a strong protection for both newspaper employees and the public that depends on quality news sources.

The problem is that these families are just normal human beings who like to earn money. Over the past decades many or most of them decided — accurately, at least in the short term — that they could make a lot more money by selling shares to the public than by running their firms as private companies. Many newspapers created a dual ownership structure, so that even though the public was buying shares, the families retained effective control of the companies through preferred stock with special voting privileges. That’s how, for instance, the families that owned both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal set up their stock structures. But control turns out to be effective only when the money’s rolling in. When it slows or stops, the family members get restive.

The Bancrofts, who owned the Journal, sold out to Rupert Murdoch with barely a whimper the moment it looked like the Journal was no longer going to line their pockets. They proved faithless protectors of tradition. Of course, sometimes a family will make a smart (or lucky) move. Consider that, as I understand it, the Washington Post owes its relative financial stability to its purchase, in 1984, of the Stanley Kaplan SAT testing outfit, which — unlike the reporting of world and national news — turns out to be a pretty lucrative line of business.

In the case of Tribune, I don’t know how much of the company the family still owned by the time Zell acquired it. But if they weren’t directly responsible for selling to him, then they had bailed some time before. Either way, they hardly protected anything.

I took a look at the company’s proud corporate history here and found an account of an upward march of progress and profits under the wise stewardship of various McCormicks and Medills. Then in 1983 the company goes public and begins aggressive expansion, acquiring a bunch more broadcast outlets and boosting revenue to new heights. In 2000 Tribune acquires Times Mirror (another newspaper empire abandoned by another clan, the Chandlers). By 2002 Tribune has become a true Goliath, with more than $5 billion in revenue. Only here, strangely, the history goes nearly blank. A bland “Tribune returned to private ownership in December of 2007” is the only mention of the firm’s recent troubles; its new private owner is not even named. Where were those McCormicks and Medills now?

Newspapers, as a business, are simply a huge mess today. For a long time they blamed TV, and now of course they blame the Web. Let us also not forget to blame the families.

I worked for an exemplar of those families myself once, and saw the good and the bad. Our publisher at the old Examiner was Will Hearst, scion of the Hearst clan. He was responsible for a wavering but heartfelt effort to shake some life into the old paper in the 1980s, when I joined it. But after a decade he’d had enough, and moved on (to Silicon Valley). Once he left, I knew it was time to jump ship too. The iceberg was visible enough then. So was the evidence that families were never going to save the newspaper industry.

Carr diagnoses the economy: How irrational are we?

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A couple weeks ago, Peggy Noonan had a hilarious column in which she noted the strange (to her) disconnect between the depressing economic information in the news and the apparently unchanged commercial bustle of her Upper East Side neighborhood, where “nothing looks different.” My friend Andrew Leonard eviscerated her for her “let ’em eat cake” obliviousness.

There’s a slightly different species of cluelessness at work in the premise behind David Carr’s New York Times column this morning, in which Carr muddily hypothesizes that the speed of new-media information transmission has accelerated the current economic downturn.

The piece is the sort of chin-scratcher that never sums up its thesis because it doesn’t quite have one. But the heart of it seems to be something like this: Things are bad, but even people who haven’t been directly hurt by the recession are cutting back on spending because they’re being bombarded by bad news in new, faster, more enveloping ways. “This recession got deeper faster,” Carr says, “because we knew more bad stuff quickly.” He describes the result as a sort of “emotional contagion” or “neurosis” that is fueling further economic slowdown.

I had my eyes glued to the screen during the last recession at the start of this decade, which was centered on my industry, the Internet. So the idea that there’s something new going on seems hard for me to buy. But the more significant mistake Carr makes is to suggest that the choices people are making to scrimp and scrub their budgets are “emotional,” “neurotic” — irrational. And that’s dead wrong.

What does it take to feel that a recession is real? Carr, like Noonan, seems to be waiting for the appearance of Hoovervilles. There are millions of lost jobs, and many more whom the labor statisticians miss whose hours have been cut back involuntarily. One in ten U.S. mortgage holders is a month or more behind in their payments. Any rational person ought to look at this situation and feel that things have indeed changed.

Yet the question keeps arising: For people who haven’t actually been laid off, “nothing has changed,” so why are they going all Scrooge-like on the economy?

What has changed, for everyone, is our picture of the future. For years we made our economic choices based on one set of assumptions. Even those of us who didn’t take on loads of credit card debt or leverage our homes or otherwise turn ourselves into family-sized debtor nations made assumptions when we looked at our financial plan for the next year or decade or retirement: our homes would grow in value, our 401(k)s would appreciate at a certain rate, we could send our kids to college if things kept going the way they were.

And of course now they are not. So any rational person is having those hard family conversations and scrubbing the personal budget. This is not acting on fear. It is neither “emotional” nor “neurotic.” It is acting rationally, the way economists expect us to act. Much as I am a lifelong skeptic of the classical economists’ hyperrational model of human behavior, in this case, the real world behavior fits the model pretty perfectly.

That it is deepening the recession is to be expected, not the fault of some new-media dynamic of hyperactive blogging but a sign that the signals we are receiving about the economy are strong enough today to shock us back into the “rational actor” mode. Carr implies that the Web jumped the gun on the recession: “The recession was actually not officially declared until last week, but the psychology that drives it had already been e-mailed, blogged and broadcast for months.” But the official declaration noted that the recession actually began a year ago. Of course we have all been talking about it for a year: We weren’t premature, we were reflecting the real-time event. It was the officials who lagged.

Watching your spending? Cutting out what you can? You aren’t being neurotic or irrational. The irrational behavior, it turns out, was what so many Americans were doing previously in this decade — cruising along obliviously and piling up debt while Wall Street concocted escalatingly baroque financial engineering schemes that exponentially inflated the risk at the root of our economy until the whole thing went bust. If a scary market has shocked such irrationality out of our system, let’s hope the effect is long-lasting.

If newspapers were gone tomorrow

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For those still following the small-picture “death of the newspaper industry” tragedy while the much larger “collapse of the global economy” unfolds around it, there is a worthwhile exchange unfolding between Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer (starts with Jeff here, Dave answers here, Jeff responds, Dave replies).

It’s all food for thought but I want to highlight an analogy Dave raises today, which has, I think, a great clarity:

Imagine a group of doctors knew that all hospitals and pharmacies were about to shut down. What would they do? Might they do something to make sure their client’s health needs were at least partially attended to?

The same would presumably apply to many other professions, whose services are in some way necessary for life: police, fire, bus drivers, garbage collectors.

We’re often asked to believe how noble the profession of news is — now that is about to be tested in a whole new way. Are we just supposed to cry for this industry and throw our hands up and wait for the collapse before starting to put it back together, or would they like to help while they’re still here?

What’s valuable about this analogy is that it reminds journalists that they are actors in this drama, not victims. Victimhood is written deeply in the culture of the newsroom. It’s always the fault of the guys with the green eyeshades, or the publishers, or the advertisers, or even the readers.

Well, at this point, it hardly matters whose fault it is. Many of these ships are going down fast. If you’re a journalist who cares about the field as a vocation in the old sense (something to which you are called, and to which you feel a responsibility), if you believe that an informed public is a prerequesite for a functioning democracy, then think about Dave’s question. I am.

One of my formative professional experiences was working on the San Francisco Free Press in 1994. When the Newspaper Guild called a strike against the Examiner, where I worked, and the Chronicle (a strike over the jobs of truck drivers!), the Guild decided to publish a strike paper. We published a few editions on paper, but we posted daily on the Web. (The Well still has it up.) We did it partly because it was fun, but partly because we felt a responsibility to our community to keep providing it with news and information. That responsibility remains, whatever happens to the business model of the newspaper industry.

Andreessen’s newspaper advice echoes Grove’s, a decade ago

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We’re moving into the endgame for newspapers today, though the industry hasn’t quite reached the Kubler-Rossian stage of acceptance.

Yesterday the venerable Christian Science Monitor announced it was abandoning daily print publication. In Portfolio, Marc Andreessen proposes that other newspapers follow suit and finally give up on print:

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?

Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business — shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.

The Intel reference here is an oblique reference to Andy Grove’s famous comment to the ASNE that the newspaper industry had three years to adapt or die.

That was in 1999.

Andreessen’s advice makes total sense in many ways — it would be fascinating and worthwhile for at least one major newspaper publisher to try it. This sort of turn-your-company-on-a-dime idea is part of the Silicon Valley ethos. But I just don’t see it happening.

Hard though it no doubt was, it’s still a lot easier for a hardware company like Intel to retool its fabs and its engineers to produce a different kind of chip than for a newspaper company to retool its reporters and editors to produce a different kind of media product.

Shutting off the presses at the New York Times, or any other major newspaper publisher, would make the company an “internet-only company.” But it wouldn’t make it an Internet Company, in the larger sense. You’d still have a newsroom full of people used to doing things a certain way, proud, with good reason, of that way, and suspicious of change. It’s much easier to build a new company from scratch than to transform an existing one into something new.

But the bigger problem isn’t psychological, it’s financial. I base my views on a decade of experience at Salon, trying to support an online-only newsroom with online-only revenues. It turns out that the hardest part of this massive and inevitable industrial transition is not reconstituting high-quality journalism in a new media environment. That’s only mildly hard. Top-notch journalists will always seek to do top-notch work.

The really tough part — the part that to this day remains unsolved — is figuring out how to support those top-notch journalists with the salaries and benefits they are accustomed to, and often deserve. (That’s not even taking into account the loss of jobs on the printing and distribution side. But they are disappearing eventually no matter what.) The problem today is not much easier than it was when we started Salon in 1995: Look at Politico — an online success d’estime that still earns 90 percent of its revenue from a niche print product.

Newspaper companies are clinging to their dwindling print profits because they can’t yet see a way to keep anything close to their current pay scale and benefits in an online-only world. And the hardest pill for the industry to swallow is that there may not be any way to do that.

Internet companies pay top dollar to their engineers, not their “content producers.” There is no shortage of reasonably high quality content on the Web, much of it produced for free or little pay. Of course blogs and “user generated content” can’t replace the collective output of the nation’s journalism professionals today. But they offer plenty of alternatives, and enough occasions on which they surpass the pros (or expose the pros’ failings) to keep readers occupied, and sometimes satisfied.

As Bruce Reed wrote in Slate last year during the Hollywood writer’s strike, “There is no such thing as a writer’s market. With or without subsidy, words are always in surplus, and it’s always a reader’s market.”

No amount of handwringing will change that. If newspapers are really going to take the leap Andreessen proposes, they will have to do it while simultaneously restructuring their deals with their employees and mandating painful cuts that nobody wants to accept. Which is why I don’t think they will do it at all.

Ironically, of course, those jobs will vanish anyway. As I wrote in June, I think the newspaper-company ships are doomed to sink, and individual journalists will have to find their own individual lifeboats and routes to shore. The sooner they start, the better.

ELSEWHERE: Mark Potts thinks “Newspapers haven’t even scratched the surface on potential online advertising revenue” and an exclusively online operation could rake in more money. I don’t know; I’ve been there, done that, and it’s not so easy. Alan Mutter says the magic multiple is 3 — newspapers would have to triple their current online revenue to break even.

Sullivan’s new blog manifesto

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Andrew Sullivan’s essay “Why I Blog,” in the new Atlantic, is a valuable meditation on the act of blogging from one of the key figures in the story of the rise of the political blogosphere. (It echoes a lot of what Sullivan wrote in a blogger “manifesto” back in 2002 — now available, as far as I can tell, only on the Internet Archive.)

It’s not surprising to find Sullivan focusing on the provisional, in-the-moment nature of a blogger’s work: of all the prominent political bloggers, he has charted the most extended voyage of partisan transformation, from a belligerent supporter of President Bush post 9-11 through disillusionment with the botched Iraq war and its accompanying moral failures to a current pro-Obama stance.

Sullivan describes blogging as “writing out loud,” a form that “exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before”:

It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

I think it’s important to say that Sullivan offers blanket declarations about the nature of blogging that really ought to be understood as descriptions of his particular mode of blogging. The picture of blogging Sullivan paints is very much one from the perspective of a writer trained as a print journalist. Nothing wrong with that; I’m in the same boat. But blogging is, as Sullivan says, an enterprise of the individual, and individual experiences are all over the map — many, almost certainly the majority, very different from his, yet no less valid.

Another point Sullivan makes is that bloggers are actually more accountable than their conventional-journalism colleagues, not less — because “there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness” in the give-and-take of email or comments or linked-back posts.

So permit me to point out one sloppy error in “Why I Blog” — Sullivan’s description of Slate as “the first magazine published exclusively on the Web.” Sullivan also wrote for Salon, and he pairs Salon and Slate later in the piece, so I’d guess the error was careless rather than malicious. Still, let the record show that Salon published its first issue, “exclusively on the Web,” a full eight months before Slate — Nov. 1995 as opposed to mid-1996. (Here’s a piece I wrote back then making fun of some of what Slate editor Michael Kinsley had to say about the Web, which he plainly didn’t understand.) And Salon wasn’t the first, either, anyway. Steven Johnson and Stefanie Syman were publishing Feed for about six months before us. Hotwired, for that matter, launched a full year earlier than Salon. All were professional online-only “magazines” that paid their writers and sold ads. No doubt there were others I’m forgetting.

This really is the sort of mistake that fact-checkers are paid to prevent — trivial in one sense, but self-perpetuating in another, because the next time some fact-checker wants to know who published the first online magazine, they’ll cite this Atlantic piece as an authority.

As Sullivan puts it:

Unlike newspapers, which would eventually publish corrections in a box of printed spinach far from the original error, bloggers had to walk the walk of self-correction in the same space and in the same format as the original screwup.

Sarah Palin vs the media filter

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One of the themes of the book I’m working on is the whole notion so many bloggers have had that the media represent a “filter,” and blogging allows it to be bypassed. Not an idea that’s original to me — you betcha! — but one that is entwined with the whole subject I’m covering.

So you know that my ears perked up in the vice-presidential debate last week when Sarah Palin said:

I like being able to answer these tough questions without the filter, even, of the mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they’ve just heard. I’d rather be able to just speak to the American people like we just did.

She hit the same point again on Fox on Friday, discussing her disastrous performances with Katie Couric:

I guess I have to apologize for being a bit annoyed, but that’s also an indication about being outside that Washington elite, outside that media elite also, and just wanting to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for.

And here she is again in William Kristol’s column today:

She doesn’t have a very high opinion of the mainstream media… She described the debate on Thursday night as “liberating,” and she emphasized how much she now looked forward to being out there, “getting to speak directly to the folks.”

It’s fair to say, I think, that “bash the MSM and yearn to speak directly to the folks” is now at the front of Palin’s deck of talking-point index cards, right up there with “maverick.” Before diving in for a look at this rhetoric, a caveat: It may ultimately be impossible to try to read Palin’s words here, as elsewhere, too closely. Like some smudged-out ancient scroll, her text is simply too corrupted in too many ways to support a confident interpretation. Still, her animus against the “filter” is no coincidence, and bears scrutiny.

A filter can be a highly useful thing. Most of us value the idea that the news media will boil down a torrent of information into something manageable. But filters can distort a signal, and they can malfunction: they can filter out something we want, or include something we don’t want. So we need filters, but we don’t always trust them.

Some of the earliest blogs viewed themselves as filters of the Web (Michael Sippey called his proto-blog Filter, or later Filtered for Purity); their idea was a curatorial culling of tidbits found during Web wanderings. (The tradition is upheld today by BoingBoing, Kottke and many others.)

But there’s also a long tradition among bloggers of viewing blogs as the antidote to filters. In this view, the media are literally an unreliable middle-man who must be cut out. The media filter will get your age wrong or mangle your words or just not tell your story in the way you think it should be told. Now that anyone can publish, you don’t have to take this lying down. So today we have public figures like Mark Cuban blogging, putting his own statements and thoughts directly on the record.

Now comes Palin, trying to join this parade. The problem is, your typical ranter against the evil ways of the media filter is someone who has been covered for some time and has built up a critical mass of resentment at factual errors or misquotes.

But Palin? Who’s filtering her? She has spent her month as a major-party vice presidential candidate without holding a single press conference. She has submitted to a number of interviews that you could count on the fingers of a single hand, and still have fingers left over. Yet she has the chutzpah to gripe that she would happily “speak directly to the folks,” but the darned media filter keeps getting in her way!

No, Palin’s problem isn’t too much filter — it’s not enough signal.

Obviously Palin’s preference is for a media channel in which no one will interrupt her talking points or challenge her on a stumble or a lie. She longs for some sort of combination of blogging’s directness and the Olympian remoteness of a broadcast medium that brooks no challenge. “Let me talk to you without the filter,” she says, “but I won’t take questions.” Every politician would love that — but nearly all accept that they’re not going to get it.

Alas for Palin, we have not yet devised that ideal communication method which would bypass media filters and miraculously convey her vision directly directly to the American people via, say, telepathy (or even speaking in tongues). There simply is no such thing as “speaking directly to the American people” without also having the “mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they’ve just heard” right afterwards.

They did so right after that very debate that Palin said she “liked” for its directness, so go figure. It’s here, I think, that the unreadable-text problem grows insurmountable. For Palin, what we really need isn’t a filter but rather a text-unscrambler.

In any case, the spirit of blogging is all about mixing it up, posting and counterposting and dealing with critical comments. You get to “speak directly” — but so does everybody else. It’s not the equivalent of having no press conferences at all; it’s like having a continuous press conference in which everyone, officially credentialled or no, gets to ask questions. It would be fascinating to see Palin try speaking that directly.

Spinspotter’s campaign against bias targets the wrong problem

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Plenty of Web startups begin with a good idea and fail because it’s just plain hard to build software well, and Web sites are tricky beasts, and getting users isn’t easy. Then there are the startups where the trouble isn’t with execution; it’s with the initial idea. The company has simply set out to solve the wrong problem.

I have to say that Spinspotter, which debuted at Demo today, looks like it’s in that latter category to me. This is a site that uses an algorithm to detect what it defines as bias or “spin” in news coverage. (Here’s coverage from the Times, the Journal, and BusinessWeek.)

The pitfalls and perils in getting an effort like this to work in any sort of way that doesn’t evoke titters are legion. But let’s not even bother with that part of the debate. (Businessweek offers a list of the six criteria, which include everything from too much passive voice to too much “reporter’s voice.”) The real issue here is that the very idea of SpinSpotter is wrongheaded.

Is having a computer program scouring news articles and underlining each appearance of what it defines as bias going to improve any journalist’s work, or any reader’s understanding of the news? If Spinspotter succeeds in redlining every appearance of what it considers “bias” from the news, surely the resulting gelded coverage — deprived of any trace of anyone’s voice, echoing with what Jay Rosen calls “the view from nowhere” — will no longer be of interest to any reader more human than the Spinspotter code.

There is plenty of room for Web sites and services that enable us to better sort fact from fiction, to help us think about what coverage is fair and what is duplicitous, to figure out who we might want to trust and who we might want to distrust among our media sources. But the helful site needs to start by asking those questions — not by simply exhorting its users to “Find bias and tear it a new one.” (The slogan makes me all warm and nostalgic for the blogosphere’s old promise of “we can fact-check your ass.”)

The complaints about “bias in the media” today do not emerge in a vacuum. It’s not as if there were some platonic ideal of news, an attainable and perfect “objective news reporting” standard that our reporters and editors just need to sweat a little harder to achieve. The frequent accusations of bias you hear today, from every point on the political spectrum, are a symptom of the extreme divisions in our political system and our nation.

Journalists are human beings. “Objectivity” is not within their capacity. Bias will always be charged. Sometimes it will come as a result of genuinely shoddy journalism, where reporters have slanted coverage unfairly based on their own prejudices; sometimes it will come as a result of shoddy news consumption, where a reader just doesn’t like the facts that a reporter has presented because they conflict with his world view. Spinspotter promises both “wisdom of the crowd” style voting and human “referees” to build checks and balances into its system. But I suspect these will just end up either recapitulating the left-right fusillades that already fill the political blog-comment-sphere, or reproducing the “view from nowhere” bromides that satisfy no one.

SpinSpotter’s design starts from an assumption that there is some abstract and definable concept of “bias” independent of our own relative perspectives. But we all encounter the biases in the coverage we read through the lens of our own pre-installed biases. And so what? Every act of journalism is biased! We can’t and shouldn’t set out to eliminate bias from journalism, not only because it is impossible but because it is unwise. Instead, we should expect journalists do a better job of being fair and accurate and passionate in their quest for the truth as they see it. We should help readers find the journalists they trust and question the ones they don’t. And we could all use help finding our way through this new era when there is little boundary left between the one group of journalists and the other of readers.

The real problem with our media in this decade has not been too much bias. The problem has been that too often our most influential journalists have not stepped forward to call out official lies. We have suffered from a surfeit of “on the one hand, on the other hand” journalism, which is a poor substitute for anyone’s truth. The Spinspotter-style effort to eliminate “bias” ultimately leads down the road to more of that ritual, not less.

Spinspotter’s home-page rhetoric crows, “The truth is back in town”…”Behold the epiphany of unfiltered news”…”take back the truth” — as if the truth were some golden residue left behind once you have stripped off all the layers of bias you can find. But I think that, even if Spinspotter could somehow perfect its algorithms and unerringly remove all the human perspective and “reporter’s voice” from the articles it points at, you’d find there’s nothing of any value left.

Noonan agonistes — or, journalists should write what they know and think

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The problem with too many journalists — and especially those journalists inside the Beltway — is this: they do not write what they’re thinking. The reporters do not tell us what they know. The columnists and analysts do not tell us what they believe. Their resulting work is boring, uninformative, and manipulative.

Today at the Republican convention, Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for the first President Bush who now writes a column for the Wall Street Journal, got caught by a mike that I guess she thought wasn’t on. She was talking with Republican strategist and former McCain associate Mike Murphy. Here’s Salon’s transcription of the exchange:

Apparently referring to some of McCain’s current advisors, Murphy then says, “These guys, this is all like how you win a Texas race — you know, just run it up. And it’s not gonna work.”

Noonan can then be heard agreeing with Murphy, saying, “It’s over.” A little later, Noonan responds to a question about whether Palin was the most qualified woman McCain could have chosen. “The most qualified? No,” Noonan responds. “I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives … Every time Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.”

(You can watch the video and read a full transcript over at TPM.)

Now, if Peggy Noonan wrote a column every week that was as honest with her readers as she is here, with her colleagues, when she thinks the microphone is off, I would read it religiously. She’s part of a world that I don’t inhabit. But now I have a bright picture of the fact that she’s not writing what she knows and believes.

I know columnists are people; they have relationships to protect; they want insiders to keep talking to them. Still: virtually every journalist in DC could go a lot farther down the road of writing what they know and think. Doing so would probably earn them more respect, and more readers, and the sources and players would end up talking to them anyway.

We went through this five years ago when Laurie Garrett, a talented reporter, sent an email to her friends from Davos telling them about the big conference there in blunt, unvarnished and informative terms. Then she freaked out because this report — in which she was doing exactly what she ought to have been doing in her role as a journalist — became public and embarrassed her.

Here is some of what Noonan published today in the Journal about Palin:

Gut: The Sarah Palin choice is really going to work, or really not going to work. It’s not going to be a little successful or a little not; it’s not going to be a wash. She is either going to be magic or one of history’s accidents. She is either going to be brilliant and groundbreaking, or will soon be the target of unattributed quotes by bitter staffers shifting blame in all the Making of the President 2008 books. Of which there should be plenty, as we’ve never had a year like this, with the fabulous freak of a campaign.

So: in print, it’s up in the air. But in truth, “it’s over” and the McCain campaign got seduced by “bullshit about narratives.”

How can anyone ever read a word by Peggy Noonan again and take it seriously? (And she’s been around the block long enough not to get too much sympathy for, you know, not knowing that microphones can betray you.)

If her editors had any respect for their readers, they’d fire her.

UPDATE: Noonan says the excerpt was edited or truncated and that her “it’s over” did not refer to the McCain campaign or the Palin nomination. I don’t know if that’s true; hope we can find out. Even if it is, she still expressed herself far more directly, bluntly — and persuasively — when she thought she was off-mike. That’s really my point.

Premature spotlight on Spot.us

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I met David Cohn through my association with Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and have kept up with his sometimes frenetic activities online. Recently Cohn won a grant from the Knight News Challenge for Spot.us, a service he’s developing that’s trying out a new model of paying for investigative journalism by raising money online through aggregating small donations (i.e., “crowdsourcing”).

It’s a promising idea, David is an energetic and creative guy, and I have high hopes for what the experiment can teach us. (I tossed in a small contribution to Spot.Us’s pilot project — a study of political ads in the upcoming San Francisco election.)

But Spot.us is in what you might describe as a pre-alpha state. It’s an idea that is in the process of becoming embodied on the Web. Cohn is bravely developing it in public, showing his blog readers his designs as they evolve, plunging forward with improvised test-bed proof -of-concept efforts.

This is all well and good: it’s the best way to get a Web project moving. But it did cause me to do a double-take when I saw this extensive Sunday New York Times think piece on Spot.us. The piece calls Spot.us an “experiment” but barely gave its readers any indication that the project it was describing remains in the fetal stage.

I suppose when you work transparently this is the risk. And getting a big piece in the Times isn’t something to complain too loudly about. For the Times, I can’t fault them for spotting a trend early and wanting to highlight it. But there’s something a little careless, even sloppy, about not acknowledging — up front and in bold — that this thing they’re writing about really, you know, doesn’t exist yet. Cohn wrote yesterday about his concern whether Spot.us “deserves the attention yet”: “I honestly want to scream at the top of my lungs, ‘come back in the Fall!’ ”

The impression we’re left with is that the news industry is so desperate for salvation (or so lacking in confidence) that it will grab at the thinnest reed of any story that suggests a way out. What I want to know is: will the Times, and others, be there to give Spot.us more attention once it is fully functional and cranking out stories?