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Times/Journal convergence

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As long as I can remember I’ve read the New York Times (I grew up in NYC). Since the mid 90s — when I moved from being a newspaper critic to the Web universe, both covering it and participating in it — I’ve also read the Wall Street Journal daily. The Journal, despite its paleolithic editorial page, had a whole different slice of material than the Times: more in-depth coverage of tech business, lengthy investigative features, those quirky column-three features on the front page. The two papers were complementary.

Now, under Murdoch, the Journal is getting more — there’s no other word for it — redundant. The front page has more news headlines and fewer unique features. Increasingly, I find myself saying, “I’ve already read this.”

I don’t get why Murdoch is pushing the Journal to be more generic. The stuff the Journal does that nobody else does is the only reason to buy the paper (or read it online). Breaking news and color photos are commodities today.

Maybe Murdoch sees himself moving into some sort of old-fashioned newspaper war with the Times. But from where I sit, he’s just pushing me closer to the point where I say, “Why do I need two newspapers?”

Why the Web-only life is not worth examining

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Today’s Journal features a Portals column by Vauhini Vara that represents yet another attempt to gauge how far Web apps have come by attempting to “live on the Web,” forsaking all desktop-based software. (Others — like James Fallows in 2006 in Technology Review, whose effort I wrote about back then — have done this before.)

The trouble with this approach is that it’s a total straw man. No one would ever do this except to provide column fodder. The shifts in our software habits are incremental; we don’t “change state” 100 percent, we just drift in one direction. And the drift today is overwhelmingly towards the Web.

Of course Vara finds the trouble spots exactly where you’d expect: If you’re tied in to a corporate email system, giving up Outlook for a Web interface is still painful. Spreadsheets and PDFs are harder to work with. Web-based writing tools are pretty good but so far they haven’t provided a good replacement for Word’s clumsy but essential “track changes” feature.

OK. In the meantime, those of us who aren’t locked in to Outlook long ago went with Gmail or some other Web-based email system. We keep and share our calendars on the Web, and increasingly we use Web-based tools to coordinate small work groups. No one is holding a gun to our heads, so we happily mix Web apps and desktop apps. Why not?

If you’re starting a small business today, are you going to invest in Outlook or are you just going to piggyback on some Web service? When the business begins to grow, are you going to pay the big Outlook tax or stick with what’s working? As developers devise new useful tools for communication and coordination, are they introduced on the desktop or on the Web — or in both places?

These are the trends that matter. “All or nothing” is beside the point.

NY Times: Blogging’ll kill ya?

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Matt Richtel is on the front page of today’s Times with a piece about the tech blogosphere as a 24/7 sweatshop — one that might even be killing some of its (older) practitioners.

“It looks like a desk job, but for some bloggers it is more like a factory,” reads the pullquote.

The piece is, I think, reasonably accurate as a portrait of the tiny sliver of the blogging universe that the commercialized tech-news blog world represents. Where it goes awry is in suggesting that this represents the archetypal blogging experience.

This passage is the problem:

There are growing legions of online chroniclers, reporting on and reflecting about sports, politics, business, celebrities and every other conceivable niche. Some write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers — as employees or as contractors — or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind.

“Some write for fun.” I think, realistically, this might say, “Most write for fun.” The emphasis now suggests that “a limited number write for fun, but THOUSANDS write for publishers…” To me even “thousands” seems exaggerated — does the pro blogosphere really employ that many?

Leaving that aside, the “some/thousands” construction suggests that the majority of participants are in sweatshop mode, and that’s obviously wrong. This sentence should really read: “Millions write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers…”

Achieving more clarity on this point might have made the piece somewhat less appealing to the page one editors, of course.

More: Matthew Ingram says the Times was just “trolling” for links. Doc Searls points out that “scoops are overrated.” And Marc Andreessen mocks the Times with some other headlines we can look forward to, including “The Bloggers have WMD.”

P.S. I will make $0.00 on this post! And I’m at least 8 hours late with my observations. Then again, I got to drink my coffee before I sat down to write.

LATER: Larry Dignan of ZDNet has some sensible observations similar to some of what I was thinking as I read the Times piece:

Let’s put a little perspective on this blogging thing. You could be getting shot at in Iraq. You could be a single mom working three jobs to stay afloat (Happy Birthday mom). You could work in a coal mine. You could be in a life and death battle with Leukemia. You could be doing any one of thousands of high-stress jobs. Sure, the Web has a lot of stress but let’s get real: If you’re stressed out over 5,000 RSS feeds chances are good you’d be stressed by any profession you chose.

And Dave Winer points out in a comment below that there’s an element of professional-journalistic defensiveness in the article’s premise:

Of course this piece is aimed at themselves and others like them. Look, we’re being replaced by crazies who work for nothing, never sleep and die of heart attacks.

It’s like NAFTA for professional writers.

In the Web archives

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I’ve spent most of this week deep in the archival attic, researching the new book in old documents, digging through the dull roots of today’s Web, planted back in the 90s. It’s been strange and enlightening; I’ve found much interesting material.

One thing that becomes clear is that what we now think of as “the Bubble” was surprisingly brief. The Web actually experienced something of a downturn beginning in late ’97 and early ’98, and extending through the Long Term Capital meltdown later in ’98. It was only toward the end of ’98 that the bubble really began to inflate in a serious way. The High Bubble lasted till April 2000, when the market suddenly realized, like Wile E. Coyote poised in midair above a canyon, that it was standing on air.

So the era of high dotcom madness was really barely a moment: 18 months or so.

The other thing I’ve learned is how much more extensive the Internet Archive is than I’d realized. I’ve been using the archive heavily for days. I’ve picked up some pointers that, perhaps, others already know; I’ll share them anyway in case they prove helpful.

First of all, ignore all the error messages the Archive itself sends you, like “bad gateway” or “failed connection.” These are indicators of momentary failure; they don’t mean your page isn’t there. Try, try again; reload; eventually, you may get what you’re looking for. (On the other hand, error messages that are stored on target pages that represent the archive’s record of a snapshot of the web page itself — they’re real. They mean that the archive’s bot hit that error message and never recorded the page you’re seeking.)

Also: If the archive tells you that the earliest edition of a particular page it has is from, say, 1997, this doesn’t mean that the site’s content from previous years is gone forever. Iit’s true that you’ll probably never be able to recall, for instance, the Hotwired home page from 1995 — since it was constantly mutating, day by day with new content and year by year with new designs. But the material published on a site that lived at permalinked or semi-permalinked addresses can still often be dug up from Archive.org by poking your way carefully from the present into the past through the site’s own “back issues” or archives or “previously” links.

For instance, Web Review, the early GNN-backed web zine, vanished long before the Web Archive started up, along with most of GNN itself — a crib-death for one of the Web’s earliest original content ventures. Still, I was able to unearth my friend Andrew Leonard’s first piece (from Sept. 1995) for Web Review, all about “clickstream” measurement: Here it is.

We don’t have all of the early Web, but we have more of it than you might think!

Internet garbage dump? What Weizenbaum really said

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Joseph Weizenbaum — creator of the Eliza chatterbot and author of “Computer Power and Human Reason” — passed away recently. Running through all the obits was a quote that seemed to summarize this computing pioneer’s critical perspective on technology:

The Internet is like one of those garbage dumps outside of Bombay. There are people, most unfortunately, crawling all over it, and maybe they find a bit of aluminum, or perhaps something they can sell. But mainly it’s garbage.

This line appeared in outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Valleywag. Caught my eye, too.

The original quotation was in a New York Times article from 1999. But it’s not the whole story.

Weizenbaum wrote a letter to the Times after the article appeared:

I did say that, but I went on to say, “There are gold mines and pearls in there that a person trained to design good questions can find.”

Amazing what a little context can do!

Interestingly, although Weizenbaum’s critique of computing centers on the limitations of algorithmic problem-solving, it was Google’s pattern-matching prowess that unearthed this connection for me. I’d never have found it on my own.

Weizenbaum, whose family fled Nazi Germany in the ’30s, was right to urge us not to discount the value of the human compass in navigating our lives, and not to abdicate our judgment to machines. But I think he might have been a little too ready to dismiss the ability of machines to help us find informational gold and contextual pearls.

Give us each day our daily campaign call

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pro Publica: can investigative journalism thrive with no bottom line?

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

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

So why am I skeptical of the undertaking?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abandon hope, all ye who unsubscribe here

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

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

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

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

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

Word processing, then and now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The road goes ever oon

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NYT on Tolkien films

I don’t know which is more lamentable here:

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

or…

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

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

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