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A government of men, not laws

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Thoughts occasioned by the confirmation hearings for Michael Mukasey to become the next U.S. attorney general:

Apparently there have been some interesting changes in the whole notion of the constitutional balance of powers since I studied such matters. As most of us learned at some point in our schooling, there are three branches of government established in the U.S. constitution. Congress passes the laws, as defined by Article I. the president executes the laws and handles a bunch of other stuff as defined by Article II. And the supreme court interprets the laws, as defined by Article III. Yes, I’m aware that the whole judicial review thing evolved over time and wasn’t grounded that explicitly in the constitution’s language. On the other hand, it’s served us pretty well for over 200 years, and it has been a keystone of the checks-and-balances system that has proven so resilient over those centuries.

Under the Bush administration we have seen two fundamental assaults on this system. One, embodied in the idea of “signing statements” that the president makes when he signs congressional legislation, proposes that the president is himself equal to the supreme court in his power to review the constitutionality of legislation. According to this notion, the chief executive has the unilateral authority to say, “I don’t think this or that part of this law is constitutional, so I will reserve the right not to enforce or obey it.” He’s not saying, “I think this is an unconstitutional law, so I’m going to challenge it before the supreme court.” He’s saying, “I think this is an unconstitutional law, so I’m going to ignore it.”

The second assault centers on the notion of the “unitary executive.” This theory proposes that the entire executive branch is a sort of “off limits” zone for congress. To the extent that a congressional law or rule constrains the president’s authority over the executive branch in some way, he is free to ignore it, because it’s unconstitutional — and, right, he gets to ignore laws he believes are unconstitutional.

Put these two notions together and you have, I think it’s fair to say, a whole new game in the federal government town. Forget checks and balances, or “government by laws and not men.” Say hello to a new world in which the unitary executive claims supremacy over both the congress (whose laws he can ignore at will and whose powers cannot reach into the executive branch) and the supreme court (whose role as reviewer of the constitutionality of legislation the president is now quite able to assume himself).

Now, it’s true that, as we say here on the Internets, I am not a lawyer. But I’m a citizen. And I have to report that these new ideas about the constitution make me a little concerned for the future of our political system.

I know that we have a vice president who got, let’s just say, peeved that the congress reined in a criminal president back when he was a young man, and who has spent the rest of his life itching to redress that old grievance. But this isn’t a partisan matter. An autocratic view of the chief executive — which is what Bush’s lawyers have propounded, and Munkasey, for all his superior forthrightness compared with the henchman who preceded him, endorsed in his testimony today — is a time-bomb for both parties. Once precedents for unchecked authority are set, who is to say that a Democratic president might not avail himself (or herself) of them?

“Checks and balances” is a big fat cliche, but it’s also a foundation that has supported two centuries and more of American political stability. Long after the pathetic corruptions and petty inhumanities of the Bush administration have receded from view, we’re still going to be trying to patch together a constitution that the Bush/Cheney legal establishment has shredded.
[tags]u.s. constitution, unitary executive, judicial review, michael mukasey[/tags]

Deborah Solomon and real-time quotations

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There’s an interesting dustup in the journalism world about the Q&A column in the Sunday New York Times magazine. A New York Press story about these interviews by Deborah Solomon included complaints from two of her subjects — one of them This American Life’s Ira Glass, himself no interviewing naif — that she misrepresented them and inserted questions in her own voice that she hadn’t actually asked them. Then on Sunday Times “public editor” Clark Hoyt devoted a whole column to the matter.

It always seemed hugely obvious to me that Solomon’s terse, one-page interviews were boiled-down and heavily edited. But I look at these things as an editor with some experience. What this controversy really reveals is the gulf between the reverence most newspaper reporters have for quotation marks and the relatively cavalier stance assumed by many magazine writers and editors. (Yes, of course these are gross generalizations, and the world has plenty of careless newspaper reporters and careful magazine journalists. But the patterns do exist, in my experience.) So it’s no wonder that the flashpoint for confusion here should be in the weekly magazine published by a daily newspaper. Times mag editor Gerald Marzorati told Hoyt, “This is an entertainment, not a newsmaker interview on ‘Meet the Press.'” But it’s also part of the New York Times, and that still carries a set of expectations about the reliability of everything between quote marks.

I got my start in journalism in newspapering, and what I learned was that anything between direct quotation marks ought to be a verbatim quote from your subject. If you took words out, you marked it with an ellipsis. If you were paraphrasing or otherwise changing words, you had to take the quote marks off — you then had an indirect quote.

When I started freelancing and experiencing the wide variety of editing standards at different publications I was appalled to discover that some significant portion of my editors were “fixing up” quotes in various ways. When I complained, they dismissed my objections. It seemed that they believed we had license to improve the statements of the subject for the benefit of the reader.

As with so many aspects of journalism, the rules here vary far more than just from publication to publication: there’s essentially a different set of rules for each journalist you meet.

Over the course of my career I came to the following set of practices: In news coverage of any kind, I stick to the verbatim quotation-mark reverence of my training. In my book, anything between quote marks represented words somebody said. In lengthy Q&A interviews where I’ve taped an interview, and where the purpose of the piece is to talk with a writer or artist about his or her work, I will take the liberty of tightening rambling answers and sharpening both questions and answers. I’ve done a lot of these and never heard an objection. If you’re helping interviewees explain their work or expose their ideas, they’re usually grateful for you to do a little editing, as long as it doesn’t alter the substance of their statements. But if you’re challenging them, it’s best to stick to the tape.

It looks like Solomon got into trouble because she frequently adopts a confrontational stance. That’s part of the appeal of her column, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But if you’re practicing “gotcha” journalism you can’t take liberties with the transcript. It’s inevitable that you’ll get called on it. And in today’s media environment, you’ll get called fast.
[tags]deborah solomon, new york times, quotations, journalism[/tags]

NY Post: Go online, end your career?

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From the “Did they actually write that?” dept., in Keith Kelly’s NY Post media gossip column (via Romenesko):

Not everyone who was spared in the Business 2.0 meltdown is going to Fortune.

Erick Schonfeld, who was an editor-at-large based in New York, has decided to end his 14-year career and jump to Michael Arrington’s influential blog, TechCrunch.

“It’s true,” said Schonfeld, “I’ve accepted a position to be co-editor at TechCrunch.”

“There was a ‘Schindler’s List’ [of Business 2.0 staffers who would be spared] at one point, but I took my name off it so I’d be eligible for a severance package,” he said

Mr. Schonfeld, as someone who left the comforting rituals of the print world for the wilds of the Web many years ago, I can assure you that career continuation remains a possibility. But even at this late date, I guess, there remains the possibility that colleagues and peers will consider you to have fallen off the edge of the earth…

(Here’s Schonfeld’s post about his move.)
[tags]media, journalism, errors[/tags]

Doc Searls: don’t count on ads

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Because I am always behind reading my feeds (aren’t you?) I only just read this post by Doc Searls from a week ago. Coming from a slightly different angle, using his increasingly valuable VRM argument, Doc’s “Toward a New Ecology of Journalism” arrives at a similar place to where I ended up earlier this week in the Times Select discussion:

…The larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work, and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding — or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it.

This trend is hard to see. While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I’m not saying advertising isn’t effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we’ve long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.

Google has radically improved the advertising process, first by making advertising accountable (you pay only for click-throughs) and second by shifting advertising waste from ink and air time to pixels and server cycles. Yet even this success does not diminish the fact that advertising itself remains inefficient, wasteful and speculative. Even with advanced targeting and pay-per-click accountability, the ratio of ‘impressions’ to click-throughs still runs at lottery-odds levels.

…The result will be a combination of two things: 1) a new business model for much of journalism; or 2) no business model at all, because much of it will be done gratis, as its creators look for because effects — building reputations and making money because of one’s work, rather than with one’s work. Some bloggers, for example, have already experienced this….

Just don’t expect advertising to fund the new institutions in the way it funded the old.

I think this is right, though the long-term-ness of the vision will have most hard-hearded business people smirking their disbelief as they point to corporate-media revenue numbers with long strings of zeroes dangling from them.

I also think that, frightening as it can look, this is ultimately a great opportunity for journalists. We have the chance to invent new ways to support our work — ways that don’t depend on the essential bait-and-switching of old-fashioned advertising.

We can also give up the contortions and distortions of the old-school “Chinese walls,” the barrier erected between the journalists who create the news reports that have value and the people who sell…other stuff that ends up paying the salaries of the journalists. In any case, I’ve long thought that this beloved wall — for all its ethical value, when it worked — had an insidious side-effect of allowing journalists to pretend that they weren’t working for businesses at all. This innocence (or naivete) has left many of them ill-equipped to do more than rend their garments as their industry undergoes slow-motion collapse.
[tags]vrm, doc searls, advertising, times select, future of journalism[/tags]

Columnists’ deposits and withdrawals in the good will account

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From a thoughtful piece in the Washington Monthly about why New York Times columnist Bob Herbert doesn’t get more buzz comes this:

Some experts suggest that human nature also just resists bad news. Dan Heath, coauthor of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, observed in an e-mail to me that columnists who inflict hard truths on readers

have to make deposits along with the withdrawals. Otherwise, if they cause us hurt twice a week, we instinctively look away, like smokers who don’t want to look at blackened-lung photos. Conversely, if Dave Barry took a stand on health care, I think it’d be fixed overnight … he’s made so many deposits and so few withdrawals that millions feel like they owe him something.

I imagine this principle applies even more heavily to bloggers.
[tags]wasington monthly, bob herbert, dan heath[/tags]

After Times Select: how do you support a big newsroom online?

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The demise of Times Select (see previous post) has served as a milestone moment for the continuing debate over the future of news online. Kara Swisher says it’s inevitable now that her paper, the Wall Street Journal, will follow the Times and tear down its pay gate. Jay Rosen offers a good overview of the discussion. His conclusion is optimistic:

I think real value is in weaving yourself into the Web. “Conversation” is blogger’s shorthand for that larger idea…. Advertising tied to search means open gates for all users. It means link rot cut to zero, playing for the long haul in Web memory and more blogs because they are Web-sticky.

If you read me here you know I agree. But of course there’s a “but.” And the “but” is all about money. The “but” is something that many of the believers in the bloggy future of news don’t always confront head on.

When you accept that the future for news on the Web is open and does not include much subscription revenue, you also have to accept that your revenue online isn’t going to match your old revenue; it won’t support as many full-time staff. Maybe it will improve steadily, but I don’t think it will ever reach the equivalent of print.

This is basic economics: in most cities, newspapers were monopolies or near-monopolies on paper for the last few decades. They’ll never be monopolies online. Or maybe a very small number (2 or 3) newspapers will become near-monopolies online by establishing their brand and authority — surviving into the Web age while the rest of their peers die off, as the Web replicates for the entire U.S. the same process of consolidation that happened, city by city, in the second half of the 20th century.

I write this with some experience from the trenches at Salon, where we had what I would consider hands-on, ahead-of-the-curve experience in trying to support an online-only newsroom with online-only revenue. For all Salon’s quality and achievements, that has always been an uphill fight.

Institutions like the Times will face the battle with all sorts of resources Salon lacked. Still: the near-monopoly newspaper always had subscription revenue, display ad revenue and classified revenue to bank on. Google ads can’t match that today, and probably not for a long, long time. Display ads placed on pages readers find through Google are better. But right now, all of the online advertising an open newspaper Web site can garner is at best icing on the old three-layer cake. If that’s all you need, great. But each of those three old revenue streams has already started to dwindle, and if you take the long view and accept that they’re all likely to vanish eventually, then you face inevitable shrinkage.

None of this is any argument for simply behaving as if the Web weren’t here and rolling up a drawbridge against change. It is instead an exhortation for both sides of the whither-journalism debate — the blogosphere and citizen’s journalism believers, and the old-school newsroom brigade — to come to terms with the bottom line of the journalism business today.

We know that the old newspaper business is on the way out. (We don’t know how fast but we know where things are heading.) We knew how to pay for newsrooms under the old business. But we still don’t have much of a clue how to take a newspaper-scale newsroom and support it on the Web.

Given all this, I think it’s important not to sugarcoat things. Even a well-managed transition from print to Web will diminish newspapers and shrink newsrooms. It’s understandable that newspaper workers are fearful: their jobs are indeed on the line.

If their profession has a future — and of course it does — the answers for how to support that future are unlikely to come from the sort of old-line newsroom management that gave us Times Select and so many other ill-fated big media schemes on the Web. It will come instead from some of the thousand and one little experiments in the Web journalism business that are flowering today.

Times kills for-pay service — till next downturn

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It’s hard to argue with the New York Times’ decision to tear down the ill-fated Times Select pay wall. (Here’s the paper’s letter to readers.) I never really understood the logic behind the for-pay service, launched in 2005, at a perfect counter-cyclical moment, just as everyone else on the Web was finally realizing that online advertising was beginning to fulfill the outsized promises made a decade before.

At Salon, we were more in sync with the Web’s business cycle: we started offering a for-pay service in early 2001, as we saw ad revenue heading into the toilet. In more recent years, as the ad revenue opportunity swelled, the company ratcheted down its subscription efforts.

So the Times is acknowledging a reality: that, for better or worse, charging for news content online is nearly impossible. The product is available in great abundance, for free, and the extra edge of brand and (frequent, though not guaranteed) quality that an institution like the Times offers is not enough to transmute into paying customers. (Watch Rupert Murdoch flip his abacus to the same conclusion at his newly purchased Wall Street Journal.) The Times was especially foolish in thinking that its columnists were the thing that people would most pay for — when commentary is the form of journalism in greatest over-supply on today’s Web.

Still, let’s be honest: the Web industry is cyclical. No one knows when this decade’s tide of froth will peak. (This event suggests we may be nearing the crest.) But someday it will. It will be 2001 all over again. And at that point all the execs who have been staking their careers on the promise of online advertising will stare at their dwindling quarterly returns and wonder why they hadn’t banked some subscription revenue as a hedge against a downturn.

It is this form of continuous knee-jerk reaction to market fluctuation that dooms the dinosaurs of today’s news business. These companies, like their companions in the broadcast and movie and publishing industries, seem to be incapable of taking risks and making long-term bets on new businesses. So they’re stuck in this dance of death, circling in the quest for a business model, always a little behind the curve.

Of course the Times, and the Journal, and institutions of similar scale and value will survive in some form. But they will never be as important tomorrow as they were yesterday. They can’t help viewing technology transitions as threats. So companies with no “legacy” revenue streams to protect will seize the opportunities that they can’t.

MORE: Jeff Jarvis’s commentary. Staci Kramer’s analysis. At O’Reilly, Jimmy Guterman, too, wonders what will happen to these companies in the next Net advertising dip.
[tags]journalism, media business, new york times, times select[/tags]

My Guardian piece on blog history

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This morning the Guardian published an op-ed I wrote following up on my post a while back, “There is no “first blogger.’ “ Its slightly verbose title is The blog haters have barely any idea what they are raging against. It was fun to expand on the argument and offer my own case for the long-term significance of blogging after a decade (or so).

It was also interesting to reread the piece (which I wrote a couple of weeks ago) after my post last night about corrections in the Times archive:

This confrontation between newspaper and blogosphere could easily leave you exasperated at both the Wall Street Journal’s sloppiness and the bloggers’ occasional self-righteousness. But as you rolled your eyes, you might miss the dust-up’s most interesting angle: the flurry of blogged retorts to the paper produced an accurate record of the facts around blogging’s rise. Bloggers aren’t any better than Johnny Deadline at getting facts right the first time around, but they’re a lot more efficient at correcting their own, and everyone else’s, goofs.

Meanwhile, Slate’s Jack Shafer pooh-poohs the Clark Hoyt public editor column about fixing the Times archives. Shafer thinks Hoyt’s specific examples are weak and that people who are aggrieved over errors in old Times stories should just combat the bad information by building their own Web sites.

I think this dismissal reflects head-in-the-sand thinking on Shafer’s part. It’s great that the Web lets people go out and publish their own retorts, but that doesn’t let newspapers off the hook. Professional journalists have no idea how frustrating and infuriating it can be to try to get a newspaper to fix a mistake. Even today, typically, the response from most newsrooms is defensive and the likelihood of obtaining satisfaction much smaller than it should be. As journalists, ourselves, when we face such problems we know how to pull the levers and we often get special, collegial treatment.

If the Times is capitalizing on its archives, it ought to take more responsibility for the new currency it has granted to old stories (and their errors). Shafer’s attitude is that people who are hurt by these old stories should go out and fix the problem themselves. I’d do that, if I were in their shoes, but I’ve been a journalist all my life. I don’t think the Times can take such a cavalier stance. Because in the end, if the paper tells its subjects that it’s their responsibility to establish an accurate public record, people will start wondering why they need the paper’s version of the record at all.

LATE UPDATE: JD Lasica’s post reminds me of the piece he did for my Salon Technology section back in 1998 titled The Net Never Forgets. These aren’t new problems; they’re just new for the Times — and it has, well, a longer tail of old issues to resolve.
[tags]guardian, blog history, jack shafer, new york times, corrections, errors, journalism[/tags]

Can newspapers fix old errors?

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The ombudsman’s column in Sunday’s New York Times was the sort of piece that a lot of people will scan and forget. It’s late August, Iraq is burning, the Bush administration is imploding. All Clark Hoyt can find to write about is little errors in old papers that should’ve been corrected and never were? What’s wrong with him?

But actually, I think, if you read between its lines, Hoyt’s column, “When Bad News Follows You,” represents a profound admission, from inside the belly of today’s wounded newspaper beast, of the core problem that industry faces.

Hoyt wrote about people who are coming forward to complain about errors, inaccuracies, slants or misjudgments in old Times stories. These buried arguments are reigniting because the Times’ SEO (search engine optimization) strategy has proven effective at gaining high Google rank for the paper’s old stories. So the Times’s success at boosting the value of its archival content (articles that it charges non-subscribers to access) has had the unintended consequence of unearthing every unfixed error and reopening the argument over every disputed story in the paper’s past.

The distraught subjects of these pieces want the Times to remove the articles from the Web. The paper’s attitude is to recoil in horror. That’s tampering with history! Hoyt seems to concur, at least in part.

You can’t accept someone’s word that an old article was wrong. What if that person who was charged with abusing a child really was guilty? Re-report every story challenged by someone? Impossible, said Jonathan Landman, the deputy managing editor in charge of the newsroom’s online operation: there’d be time for nothing else.

To its credit, the Times has begun trying to make some fixes on old stories, but it’s plainly daunted by the scope of the problem and it worries about messing with the historical record. Hoyt quotes one “ethicist” pundit at the Poynter Institute who advises “great caution” in tampering with old stories, and then another expert at Harvard’s JFK School suggests that the best solution might be for the Times to flush its archive of less important stories so there’d be fewer trivial errors to get right. (What? And give up all those Google hits that took so much work to win?)

I’m sorry, but none of these reactions is adequate. If the Times is truly the “paper of record” that it has always positioned itself as, and its archives deserve high Google rank by virtue of their unimpeachability, then the paper needs to divert some of the cash it will take in thanks to that rank and fund an operation to look into reader complaints about old articles.

Newspapers still have readers because those readers still trust newspapers to get stuff right. Some portion of the public — from progressives who think the Times blew it on Iraq to conservatives who think it’s edited by pinkos and terrorist sympathizers — has already given up on this. But the core of the paper’s readership still believes on some level that he Times can be trusted better than less professional, more casual online sources.

What happens to that faith when the Times — faced with a new series of challenges to the integrity of its stories — simply throws up its hands and says it’s “impossible” to review and either reaffirm or correct its challenged articles? I’ll tell you what happens: people will begin to look more approvingly at online sources with more flexible approaches. Sure, Wikipedia is full of problematic information; but when it comes to improving all that information, Wikipedia doesn’t shrug and say “impossible” — it has a system in place that, over time, tends to weed out bad errors. It’s admittedly and extensively imperfect, but it’s always possible to improve it. Assuming the Times editors accept that their archives are full of imperfections, too (and let’s remember Hoyt’s previous column reminding us that the paper “misspells names at a ferocious rate”), the it’s incumbent on them to figure out a similar way to open up its archives to some process of improvement. Either that or stop trying to peddle them as a valuable commodity.

Unless it accepts the difficult but important work of reviewing the old articles it’s seeding Google with when people challenge them, the Times is essentially declaring that the accuracy of the information it provides suffers a sort of half-life decay. I don’t think that’s a very smart way of, as they say in the biz, defending the franchise. There’s no statute of limitations on the truth.
[tags]clark hoyt, new york times, public editor, corrections, archives, seo[/tags]

The unbearable loudness of recording

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LoudQuietLoud is the title of a documentary about one of my favorite bands ever, the Pixies. It refers to one of the band’s simple but devastating trademarks: the contrast between very loud and spectrally soft passages, transitioned suddenly. It’s a simple but devastating device, and one that’s been frequently imitated.

Such contrast is hard to find in more recent recordings, not because it’s out of style, but because recorded music today is engineered to have no contrast between loud and soft passages. I first learned about this phenomenon a while back, through reading pages like this one or this one. An IEEE Spectrum piece — recently linked on Slashdot — brings the issue to the fore again.

For those of us already unhappy with the music industry’s bungling of the transition to digital distribution, here’s another thing we can blame them for. Seeking to have their products “stand out,” they entered a sonic race to the bottom. The links above can give you the full technical picture, but all you really need to do is look at the images comparing waveforms today and decades ago.

The irony is that we can only perceive loudness through contrast, so the contemporary recordings sound miasmic, not punchy. When you crank up all the dials to, as Spinal Tap would say, 11, everything sounds the same, your ears get tired, and you wonder why music doesn’t sound as good as it did when you were younger. You’re not just succumbing to nostalgia.
[tags]audio, dynamic compression[/tags]