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Murdoch’s Journal: Markets rule, indeed

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News that Rupert Murdoch has made a credible bid to acquire Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, has evoked two reactions: In newsrooms, among pro journalists and among devotees of investigative journalism, there is much rending of garments. The Journal is one of the world’s best news organizations. Its front-page features are often models of in-depth reporting. Dow Jones has maintained a reasonably good record of separating its news operation from its editorial page’s lunacy. Would a Murdoch-owned Journal let its editorial barbarians cross the great wall?

Outside of the journalistic fraternity, the prospect of a union between Murdoch and the Journal’s cartoon-conservative editorial page instead has many left-leaning readers either shrugging with indifference or indulging in a bit of schadenfreude. As one wag put it over on Andrew Leonard’s How the World Works blog, “Oy, it’s as if Shelob desired to acquire Barad-dur Industries, Inc.”

I count myself in both these groups. I would hate to see the Journal’s reasonably independent and often irreplaceable news coverage deteriorate; it is a central part of my daily information diet. But if the Journal’s grand newsroom tradition falls victim to a corporate acquisition, I can’t help feeling, also, that the fate is fitting. The Journal — its news pages as well as its editorial pages — is the daily bible of global capitalism, encompassing all of that term’s positives and negatives. It is a chronicle of the power of markets to reshape institutions. How could it expect to be exempt itself?

As for the rest of us, whether we embrace markets wholeheartedly or think they benefit from some fair rules and healthy counterweights, the prospect of a Murdoch-owned Journal — like the ongoing struggle for the New York Times’ corporate soul — is another reminder that, in the business world, good journalism has no uniquely protected status. It will flourish or perish as we find creative ways to support it. The old models are eroding. That’s not going to stop. The question is, how quickly can we find new ways to make sure that, whatever happens to the Wall Street Journal itself, someone somewhere is still able to provide Wall Street Journal-style coverage?
[tags]journalism, wall street journal, rupert murdoch[/tags]

Howard Rheingold — call for questions

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I’ve been doing some advising to Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net “citizen journalism” lab and its Assignment Zero project — an experiment in harnessing the work of a distributed group of volunteers to explore the complex questions surrounding harnessing the work of a distributed group of volunteers.

Recursive? You bet. But interesting enough for me to want to participate in — which I’m doing by taking on one modest assignment for the project.

Next week I’ll be interviewing Howard Rheingold as my contribution to Assignment Zero. I interviewed Howard way back in January of 1994, about his then-recent book The Virtual Community. In those days people were using the phrase “information superhighway” without (too much) irony. The Virtual Community described a looming decision point in the development of the online world. From my piece:

In particular, what’s up to us is whether the network turns out to be an open public space, like a town square or a civic forum, or a commercial enclosure, like a mall. To analogize, and doubtless oversimplify, the question is whether the network emerges as something like a souped-up telephone that we can all communicate with (known as the “many-to-many” model) or something like a jazzed-up cable TV (“one-to-many”) that provides us with more choices but not more power.

And Rheingold emphasizes that it’s up to us right now — during a brief window of opportunity, as the government bargains with the telephone companies, cable TV networks and other corporations to lay down new rules for the new roads.

We know how that turned out — then: the Internet trounced its “walled garden” rivals and became the global standard for electronic communication. Is that conflict a closed issue, or will we keep facing it in new forms? I’ll be following up with Howard about this and more.

NewAssignment.Net aims to channel “many-to-many” energies in its own way, so if you have topics you think we should explore, questions you want me to pose to Howard, or information you think is relevant to our talk, please post over at Assignment Zero (or right here, if you like!).
[tags]newassignment.net, howard rheingold, assignment zero, crowdsourcing[/tags]

“Lord of Light” in Tehran

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Wired has a remarkable story this month — a cloak-and-dagger saga about the rescue of a handful of Americans from Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-80. This group had slipped out of the U.S. embassy as it was overrun and taken refuge underground; a CIA operative rescued them by masquerading as a film producer and manufacturing new identities for the Americans as his crew.

The story is a great yarn in itself. But one little tidbit really stood out for me: the movie the producer was pretending to make was a film adaptation of a science fiction novel that was one of my absolute youthful favorites — Roger Zelazny’s 1968 Lord of Light.

The original book is set among human exiles from a lost earth — a spaceship crew stranded on a new home planet, where they have used technology to set themselves up as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Ironically, given its use by the CIA during the chaos following Iran’s overthrow of the Shah, it’s a tale of revolution: the “gods” maintain a monopoly on the body-swapping technology that makes them immortal, keeping the masses in a backward state; the hero, Sam, is a populist who sparks a war against the oligarchy. (In the novel’s parallel world, Christianity is represented by the original ship’s chaplain, who has become the menacing leader of a zombie army. It was the ’60s, remember?)

Here you can see all sorts of information about the CIA/Lord of Light connection, including the screenplay, designs by comic-book-art legend Jack Kirby, and an article by the CIA agent who led the rescue mission.

I don’t know that Lord of Light would ever have made a great movie; then again, who’d have thought that The Lord of the Rings ever would, either?
[tags]wired, cia, roger zelazny, lord of light[/tags]

More on email vs. phone

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There’s a great comment from John below in the email vs. phone discussion that I want to respond to.

Of course phone conversations (and even better, in-person interviews) have advantages that e-mail or blog communication can’t match. If you’re writing a lengthy profile of someone, you want to sit down with your subject, for all the reasons John cites. But most stories involve lassoing lots of comment from lots of people. Vogelstein is profiling Mike Arrington; he wants thoughts, no doubt, from a long list of bloggers. He’s looking for quotes, not trying to capture an interviewee’s soul. And he’s saying, I don’t do email interviews. That, to me, is crazy, because, as I said, some portion of the people you want to talk to don’t want to talk to you — they’ve been burned. You can say, too bad, forget it, or you can adapt, and work with the strengths and weaknesses of an e-mail or on-blog interview.

Sure, sometimes you’ll get stiff responses or prefabricated spin. I just don’t see that it’s so much easier to provide the prefab response in email than it is on the phone. The well-trained guarded interviewee will know what to say and when to shut up whether he’s talking or typing; the loose cannon will blow whatever the medium.

John concludes with this:

I rely on great reporters to not only accurately convey what they have been told, but to filter out the noise and present me with the most important things, and often to analyze that and/or give me their interpretation. You write about filtering parts of the conversation as if such efforts are part of a conspiracy to keep the reader in the dark. Rather, it’s a way to focus the light on what is truly important.

I agree, but there’s one word that renders the whole statement largely irrelevant. “Great” reporters are rare — this is, as they say in the software world, an “edge case.” When one gets a random phone call from a random reporter, am I going to assume I’m in the presence of greatness? Or am I going to assume that, like each of the last half-dozen people who’ve written about me or my company, they’re likely to get something important wrong?

Filtering is part of the journalist’s job, of course. The bit about transparency that Winer and Jarvis and others keep harping on is this: If you write your story, but also expose the source material — either by posting full interview transcripts yourself or because the dialogue happened on public blogs — then the interested reader can go back and review your filtering. (Just as anyone reading this can look at John’s comment, or follow all the previous links in this story, and see if I’m fairly representing the issues.) Any good reporter should welcome that.

That’s the value here. It’s something you gain when you move from phone interview mode to email/blog mode. Does that gain outweigh the loss of color and immediacy and so on? Not always — but, I think, a lot more often than the newsroom gospel would have it.
[tags]journalism, interviews, fred vogelstein, dave winer, jason calacanis[/tags]

The phone, email, blog interview flap

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This week saw a fascinating dustup as some of the blogosphere’s notables tussled with some journalists over how to conduct an interview. Wired’s Fred Vogelstein wanted a phoner; the bloggers, Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer, wanted either to answer questions by email (in Calacanis’s case) or (in Winer’s case) to receive questions by email and answer, publicly, on his blog. There was considerable snit on the part of several Wired writers in defense of their colleague once the bloggers went public with their disagreement.

If you want the full details, you can read about it on Calacanis’s blog and on Winer’s, and you can read Jeff Jarvis’s impassioned explication of the “empowered interviewee.” Vogelstein tells his side here.

It’s undeniable that pros prefer phoners. Partly it’s because the phone is fast, and most senior-level reporters today learned their craft when the phone was really the only channel available. Also, it’s because a good reporter can capture an extra bit of color by listening to an interviewee’s voice and tone. But mostly, it’s because reporters hope to use the conversational environment as a space in which to prod, wheedle, cajole and possibly trip up their interviewee.

Any reporter who doesn’t admit this is lying, either to his listener or to himself. Phone conversations have the additional advantage of (usually) leaving no record, giving journalism’s more malicious practitioners a chance to distort without exposure, and its lazier representatives an opportunity to goof without fear. (I have no reason to believe Vogelstein is either. But in his email to Calacanis, which the reporter later posted himself, Vogelstein explained his preference by saying, “Email leaves too much room for misinterpretation. You can’t hear the tone in someone’s voice.” And that just sounds disingenuous coming from someone who earns his living writing text — unless Vogelstein has reinvented himself as a podcaster while I wasn’t looking.)

Why are we hearing about more interviewees shunning the phone? As Winer argued and Dan Gillmor argued and I agree, too many journalists get too much stuff wrong, and self-defense is a reasonable concern, given the likelihood of misquotation, out-of-context quotation and factual error.

The pros are going to keep lining up to explain why the phone interview is superior, but I haven’t yet seen a persuasive argument. On a BusinessWeek blog, Heather Green says she prefers reporting by phone or in person because “a conversation allows me to do followup questions.” Gee, I’ve done tons of email interviews, and nearly all of them involved followup questions. But what’s most revealing here is the misunderstanding (Green isn’t unique here, it’s widespread) of how blogging works.

Blogging is a conversation. That’s not a metaphor — it’s a simple fact that this story itself illustrates: Calacanis and Winer and Vogelstein and Gillmor and Green and many others have been having one such exchange (and now I’m chiming in too). To argue that the amongst-blog conversation doesn’t allow followups is ridiculous; if anything, our blog conversations have too many followups — and they have a hard time finding a graceful ending (though that optimist David Weinberger finds positive value in this lack of closure).

But in the online conversation, the reporter doesn’t get the last word. And the reporter doesn’t get to filter which parts of the conversation are available to the public. No wonder journalists want to stick with the phone. But I think it’s going to keep getting harder for them to get their sources to take the calls.
[tags]journalism, interviews, dave winer, jason calacanis, fred vogelstein[/tags]

Journalists’ “see no evil” stats

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Dave Winer writes:

A J-school prof at Cal told me that most reporters have absolutely no idea which of their stories people read or don’t read. They’re flying blind. I bet TV news people are too.

But wait, it’s even worse than it appears. Not only do most reporters have no idea which stories are read, many if not most don’t want to know.

The traditional view in journalism is that such knowledge is corrupting. If you know what’s popular and what isn’t, you will be driven by such knowledge to degrade your product. So the proverbial “Chinese wall” that’s supposed to segregate editorial decision-making from business influence has generally kept readership data out of the newsroom.

At a crude level, journalists fear that, the more granular the information about readership and popularity, the faster the suits will crank up celebrity gossip and defund serious coverage. The falllacy here is that, sorry, the suits already know everything they need to know about the relative popularity of different kinds of content — it’s just the editorial people who are (often) in the dark.

And then there is a more sophisticated level: the idea that writers and editors themselves, unpressured by crude strongarming by the business side but simply motivated by their own human need for attention, will find their judgment subtly but inexorably shaped by detailed usage stats.

The second concern is, I think, at least partly real, but I don’t lose sleep over it. From day one at Salon, when we were a half-dozen people in sublet space who could barely access our servers, we circulated traffic data to our editors; it simply blew our minds that we could. Over the years we took some heat for the practice, but I still think it makes sense. Ignorance is never a very good state for a journalist. Why choose blindness? Knowing where readers click doesn’t have to dictate your decisions — unless your decisions are poorly reasoned to begin with. In the soup out of which good coverage bubbles, traffic data should be one ingredient of many.

The real defense against what used to be called “page-view pandering” is strong, smart editors and writers with their own moral compasses. If you have them, then they deserve access to as much information as exists. If you don’t have them, then you’ve got bigger problems, and restricting access to your traffic stats won’t save you.
[tags]journalism, ethics[/tags]

David Halberstam, RIP

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The journalist, who died in a car crash near the Dumbarton Bridge here in the Bay Area, was 73. (SF Chron; Mercury News.)

I first read his 1972 masterpiece, The Best and the Brightest, as a curious teenager trying to figure out how and why our country was stuck fighting a war that could not be won on behalf of people who plainly did not want us to do so. It’s fair to say that the book shaped my view of U.S. foreign policy, and of the need to curb our government’s predilection for fighting unnecessary wars. Halberstam’s chronicle of the arrogance of power illustrated how the confidence of Kennedy’s Harvard-trained managers meshed with the cupidity of the Cold War military-industrial complex to produce the Vietnam quagmire. The title, in other words, was ironic.

In some of his later works Halberstam allowed his reputation as a Pulitzer-garlanded star to inflate his style. But The Best and the Brightest was taut and tragic. Today it reminds us that the “Vietnam complex” was not some debilitating national illness that needed to be shucked off; it represented experience of imperial power’s limits, hard-won through an ill-begotten war. How shameful that those lessons vanished from Washington so soon, and that another generation of Americans must once more seek the answers I found in Halberstam’s book.

UPDATE: This from Clyde Haberman’s Times obit:

William Prochnau, who wrote a book on the reporting of that period, “Once Upon a Distant War,” said last night that Mr. Halberstam and other American journalists then in Vietnam were incorrectly regarded by many as antiwar.

“He was not antiwar,” Mr. Prochnau said. “They were cold war children, just like me, brought up on hiding under the desk.” It was simply a case, he said, of American commanders lying to the press about what was happening in Vietnam. “They were shut out and they were lied to,” Mr. Prochnau said. And Mr. Halberstam “didn’t say, ‘You’re not telling me the truth.’ He said, ‘You’re lying.’ He didn’t mince words.”

[tags]David Halberstam, journalism[/tags]

COPA plaintiffs win, yet again

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Alberto Gonzales has bigger problems these days, but his Justice Department just lost the latest round in a longstanding Internet censorship conflict.

The Child Online Protection Act went on trial again in recent months, and today, again, a federal court has struck down the law — which would require commercial online publishers like Salon to make sure that their readers are over 18 or face criminal prosecution for publishing material that might be “harmful to minors.” Publishers are supposed to be able to protect themselves from prosecution by requiring site visitors to register with their credit cards, thus ostensibly demonstrating their adult status.

The law is supposedly only aimed at commercial pornographers, but the law is absurdly vague. Somehow, publishers are supposed to trust the Justice Department to make the right call and understand who is a “bad” publisher and who isn’t. Placing such trust was problematic when the law was passed, under the Clinton administration; in the era of Bush justice, doing so would be utterly foolish.

Here’s the decision, which concludes that:

COPA facially violates the First and Fifth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs because: (1) COPA is not narrowly tailored to the compelling interest of Congress; (2) defendant has failed to meet his burden of showing that COPA is the least restrictive and most effective alternative in achieving the compelling interest;
and (3) COPA is impermissibly vague and overbroad.

I am proud that Salon has been a plaintiff in this suit since 1998, when the ACLU first launched it. (Here’s my account of the 1994 oral arguments before the Supreme Court in an earlier phase of the COPA fight.) I have no idea whether, defeated at every turn, the Justice Department will drag this proceeding into another decade by appealing it. In the meantime, we can take another deep breath and be glad for the victory.

Here’s the AP story. And here’s a post by Salon editor Joan Walsh, who testified in this most recent round of the case. And here’s the ACLU’s page. And here’s CNET’s story.
[tags]copa, aclu, child online protection act, salon, internet censorship[/tags]

WSJ headline writers hallucinate again

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Today’s Journal features an op-ed piece by Edward Jay Epstein on the recent confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”). The article is headlined “KSM’s Confession.” The subhead (that’s how it appears online — in the print paper, it appears as a blow-up quote) reads: “New Questions About the Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda.”

I’d read the general coverage of this event, in which the imprisoned al Qaeda leader confessed to a long list of attacks and crimes. I hadn’t followed it in great detail, but I couldn’t recall anything in the confessions that seemed to offer any real news about the long-discredited notion that, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam and al Qaeda were in cahoots (they were, it was reasonably clear before the war and even more evident today, enemies).

So I read the Epstein piece closely, looking for “new questions” about “the link” that never was. And, strangely, though the article discusses many subtleties about the information the 9/11 commission relied on, about possible connections between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks, and other complex intelligence issues, the name “Saddam” does not appear once in the piece. There is virtually nothing in the article about putative links between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

There is only one paragraph that even mentions Iraq: that’s where one of the 1993 bombmakers, a guy named Abdul Rhaman Yasin, fled. But the notion that this reopens the question of a Saddam-Qaeda link depends on a long list of conditionals — If KSM is telling the truth (which Epstein says is a big question); if the network KSM used to plot the 9/11 attack also drew on support from his former cohorts from 1993; if one of those supporters was the Baghdad-protected Yasin. There are no “new questions” at all; there is, at best, a set of preliminary question that, should they all align in one direction, might set up a new question or two. That may be why Epstein himself confines the matter to a convoluted aside in his article, which mostly focuses on what he views as mistakes made by the 9/11 commission (which he’s writing a book about).

Is it possible that someone at the Wall Street Journal editorial page is still clutching desperately at the thinnest reeds of justification for the Iraq war, still trying to put flesh on the ghastly skeleton of Dick Cheney’s misleading claims about the Saddam-Osama axis, still doing everything possible to burn the phrase “link between Saddam and al Qaeda” into our consciousness?

Oh, right, it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable.

Assignment Zero

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Jay Rosen and his team at NewAssignment.net, a sort of citizen-journalism or “open source reporting” lab, have unveiled their first project: Assignment Zero, a coproduction between Rosen’s group and Wired News. The focus of the work is an attempt to create a comprehensive study of the phenomenon known variously as “crowdsourcing” or distributed peer-production. This is precisely the form NewAssignment.net’s journalism takes. So, depending on whether you’re a glass-half-full or -empty type, there’s either a lovely form-follows-function dynamic happening, or the whole undertaking is hopelessly involuted and self-referential.

I’m betting that Jay’s idea is worth pursuing. There’s stuff to be learned here. Eventually this technique needs to be cut loose from introspection and trained on topics that are less “meta.” That, of course, is already taking place informally — most vigorously and impressively, to me, over at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. But I can see the value for NewAssignment to get its feet wet with one immersive overview of the field before it takes a deeper plunge.

I’ve been on the site’s advisory board from early on, and now I’ve volunteered to take on one of the literally hundreds of assignments the project has been broken down into — manageable morsels of reporting that will eventually be assembled into a tapestry of information. There’s lots of work for NewAssignment still in making its site easier to use; that will come in time. In the meantime, Rosen’s looking for more volunteers — pros and amateurs, people who want to do reporting and people who want to help organize the project.