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David Simon asks, does news have any value?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[tags]george trow, wall street journal, subprime crisis[/tags]

The value of coming clean about mistakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Journal buries massive correction (or, why people dislike the media, example no. 7394)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clash of the titanic business-press cliches

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My eight-year-old sons don’t pay much attention to the business pages, but yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Business cover — featuring three cartoon characters in a boxing ring — caught their eyes over breakfast.

“Who’s the big fat guy?”

That, I told them, was supposed to be Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO. “The one in glasses?” Bill Gates. They’ve heard of him. The third figure, I said, was a poor likeness of Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

As their interest dwindled, I explained the illustration. And it occurred to me what about the cover bugged me. The headline, no joke, was “Clash of the Titans” (omitted from the Web edition, for some reason). And the whole tired frame for the story had been constructed with an eye to the sensibility of eight-year-olds.

It’s the oldest cliche in the business-journalism book: Corporations are led by warriors and market conflicts are military campaigns — “clashes of the titans.” The trouble is, it’s not only infantile, it distorts our understanding of reality.

Are Microsoft and Google in conflict? Of course. They have fundamentally different visions of where computing’s headed — visions that the Times article, by Steve Lohr and Miguel Helft, ably lays out. But it’s not as if they are feudal fiefdoms fighting over some fixed patch of ground. Their conflict will play out as each company builds its next generation of software and services, and the next one after that, and people make choices about what to buy and what to use.

Those choices are the key to the outcome. In a battle, civilians are mostly bystanders or casualties. In the software business, civilians — users — determine who wins.

Remember that the next time you see a business publication trot out the old corporate-battlefield cliches to talk about the software industry. And if you want to know where the software world is headed, watch your nearest eight- or ten- or twelve-year old — they’ll be making decisions over the next couple of decades that, far more than any punches thrown by Ballmer or Gates or Schmidt, will determine which titans prosper.
[tags]software business, business press[/tags]

Becoming a cranky geek

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Back in the dotcom era I used to appear occasionally on ZDTV’s “Silicon Spin” and chew on the tech headlines with John Dvorak and other guests. Dvorak is doing pretty much the same thing once more, in somewhat less lavish circumstances but with a somewhat more honest name for the show — Cranky Geeks.

I joined the panel today for a lively discussion about Facebook’s Beacon ad-policy brouhaha; the mysterious firing of a GameSpot editor, apparently for panning an advertiser’s game; Google’s entry into the wireless spectrum auction; AMD’s CEO bad-mouthing Intel (which really doesn’t qualify as news, does it?); and more.

You can stream or download the Cranky Geeks episode from this page.
[tags]john dvorak, cranky geeks[/tags]

Marshall McLuhan and the Web: Hot, cold, or…

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Today Nick Carr — whose new book, The Big Switch, comes out in January — has an interesting piece about McLuhan and today’s Web. Although Wired hoisted the Canadian media theorist into the digital era as its “patron saint” (the company’s book imprint even republished a couple of his collaborations with Quentin Fiore), it’s always been difficult to figure out how, exactly, to apply McLuhan’s theories to the Web. I took a stab at it in 1995 (an effort to which Carr kindly links), suggesting that the Web was neither a “hot” medium nor a “cold” one but rather some weird new lukewarm hybrid:

It remains almost exclusively a medium that transmits and reproduces vast quantities of text at high speeds. McLuhan interpreted the evolution of writing from ideograms and stone tablets to alphabetic characters and print reproduction as a “hotting up” “to repeatable print intensity.” By that standard, the Net is boiling.

On the other hand, its functional characteristics match those McLuhan identified as cool. There’s no question that the Internet is among the most participatory media ever invented, like the cool telephone. And its cultural patterns — with its oral-tradition-style transmission of myth and its collective anarchy — match those of McLuhan’s tribal global village.

…McLuhan said that all media are tranquilizers, but these hot-and-cold media have an especially potent numbing effect: They seduce us into lengthy engagement, offer us a feeling of empowerment and then glut our senses till we become indifferent.

My view of the Web has probably grown more positive since then; my own experience over the past 12 years has been one of growing engagement rather than creeping indifference. I think I was too pessimistic about the downside of glut.

But I think McLuhan would probably have shared that pessimism. He’s usually remembered in his high-priest-of-the-’60s mode, as a critic all too willing to dance on the grave of print. What I found when I dug deeper into McLuhan’s writings in the course of reviewing his biography for the Washington Post in 1997 (that piece is no longer available online so I’ve posted it here) was considerably more complex. He was, it turned out, most decidedly a lover of print himself.

In a 1959 letter, decades before the popularization of the Internet, he predicted: “When the globe becomes a single electronic computer, with all its languages and cultures recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant and impossible, no matter how precious.”

Ultimately, McLuhan’s perspective remains valuable more as a provocation to critical thought than as a fully worked out critical framework. He overloaded so many meanings on terms like “hot” and “cold” media that they could come to mean whatever you wanted them to mean. But there remains lasting value in McLuhan’s grand challenge to us — that we step out of the media bath in order to understand its effects on our organisms. What we most remember is his descriptive writing that mapped the impact of new media forms. We forget his prescriptive goal, of “immunizing” us from the worst influences of those media.

Carr reminds us of this in recalling McLuhan’s prophetic warning about the manipulative power of corporate media: “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”
[tags]marshall mcluhan, media studies, nicholas carr[/tags]

Five-letter word, begins with “s”

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For as long as I can remember, people have gotten Salon and Slate confused. Maybe it was that they are somewhat similar sites — at least if you compare both to, say, EBay or Flickr — and both have five-letter names beginning with “S.” I don’t know why. But here it is, 12 years after I joined Salon’s merry startup crew and several months after I finally left the place, and I’m still finding myself referred to as “Slate’s Scott Rosenberg” (this by tech blogger Robert Scoble a little while back, since corrected) or “Slate co-founder Scott Rosenberg” (this by Cyberjournalist.net, published by the Online News Association, which, you know, really ought to know better).

I’m always grateful for the links, but before Google starts to associate my name too closely with that of a publication I’ve never been connected to, I think it’s time to stop this train. So, once and for all, let me provide a simple disambiguation guide.

  • Salon is a fine publication that began publishing in November 1995. Slate is another fine publication that started about eight months later. Both were pioneers of the “webzine” format.
  • Salon has always been an independent company. Slate was funded first by Microsoft and is now owned by the Washington Post.
  • Salon was edited for many years by David Talbot and is now edited by Joan Walsh. Slate was edited for many years by Michael Kinsley and is now edited by Jacob Weisberg.
  • Salon has plenty of great commentary but prides itself on its independent investigative reporting. Slate occasionally breaks stories but seems more editorially centered on digest-style features like “Today’s Papers” and explanatory commentary.

I wrote a huge number of articles for Salon over the years and also edited many more and helped run the publication and manage its site for many years. I have never, that I can recall, written for Slate.

There. I feel better now.
[tags]web magazines, salon, slate[/tags]

Remixing news: A river runs through it

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News organizations spend an extraordinary amount of time and effort deciding what “leads” — what goes on the front page; what goes in the newscast at the top of the hour; what’s important. This is how professional news organizations deploy the minds and time of some of their best-paid and most experienced employees: They sit down at daily meetings and argue this stuff out; sometimes they agonize over it.

In the era of scarce column-inches and broadcast time this made a lot of sense. But that era is fading. With the Web reshuffling how the most avid users of news get their information, editors’ roles are changing — not vanishing, but definitely being challenged.

These thoughts are occasioned by Dave Winer’s new experiments remixing the New York Times. A while back he offered us the Times River — a simple reverse-chronological list of “head-and-deck” links from the newspaper’s RSS feed that is perfect for scanning on mobile devices or just checking in to see what the latest Times stories are. In his latest rethinking of the flow of Times headlines, Winer has built an outline-style interface to the same set of headlines, built around the Times’ own keywords.

These pages are notable for their simplicity. There are no distracting ads, no complex navigational tools, no typographical elegance or design flourishes. It’s just the text and you. A part of me looks at this and thinks, “How crude.” Another part of me looks at it and sees the same spare utility as the original Google home page — and wonders if, a handful of years from now, I’m going to prefer keeping up with my Times this way over continuing to kill trees with my lifelong (but now imperiled) newspaper consumption habit.

Years ago, during the dotcom mania, as Salon’s home page got more and more festooned with stuff that Salon was playing around with to try to increase revenue, a software developer did something similar with our news flow — he “screen-scraped” our headlines and presented them in an ultra-simple list form. (His script still appears to be running but it no longer works properly — Salon’s home page has been redesigned a bunch of times since then.) This was a kind of proto-Salon River. Use of it never spread beyond a tiny handful of geeks. If it had — if hordes of Salon users essentially defected and said they preferred that version of our home page to our own — it would have presented us with a business dilemma.

But I think the real resistance to this new vision for news delivery will be less on the business end (business tends to extract some kind of value anywhere large numbers of people can be congregated) than in the newsroom itself. Because the whole “river of news” approach, like the “newest posts on top” design of all blogs, takes a big bite out of the editor’s job. The reader who looks at Times River and says “this is how I want my news” is a reader who is saying to the Times editors, “Don’t waste all that time figuring out what to tell me you think is important.”

As Winer put it, “They [editors] have a very powerful internal gravity driven by a philosophy that their job is to arrange our thinking.”

I think that there are still plenty of readers who like what editorial judgment adds to the arrangement of the news. Of course, they don’t always agree with it, and many like to argue with it. But they want their quick scans of the news to be ordered by something besides chronology, so they choose a publication to make a deal with, saying, in effect, “I’m giving you my attention and you tell me what you think is important. If I disagree often enough I’ll move on, but in the meantime, tell me what you think matters.”

The real question over the next decade or so will be, how many of those readers are there? Is it the vast majority — which is what most editors believe? Or is it a shrinking tribe of news consumers who grew up under the old dispensation?

Although most professional editors will immediately dismiss the scenario, I think it’s quite possible that the “editors’ cut” of the news will dwindle in importance until we hit some threshold where the majority of users decide they don’t want their thinking “arranged” for them.

At that point, the “river” will roll right across the front page. And some editors may need to find other outlets for their talents.
[tags] future of news, editors, dave winer, river of news, times river, new york times[/tags]