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NYT NSFW

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Back in 2003 my jaw dropped to find the word “asses” on the New York Times’ front page. Today, it dropped again: There, in Tom Friedman’s column, was the full quotation from President Bush’s now notorious open-mike moment at the summit in Russia in all its barnyard epithet glory. The Times hadn’t published Bush’s “shit” in its news columns, which bowdlerized the president, referring to his choice word as “a vulgarity.” But Friedman boldly seized the four-letter moment in his op-ed column. I assume this is some by-product of the bureaucratic Maginot Line that separates the Times’ news department from its editorial and op-ed pages.

It used to be that the niceties were supposed to be observed in newspapers because of the old “breakfast table” argument and related “protect the children” rationales. In an era when the breakfast table (and the kids) are treated to depressingly regular displays of mangled corpses, grieving relatives and collateral-damage rubble, those niceties simply seem out of touch with reality.

POSTSCRIPT: Lance Knobel points us to this fascinating post by Benjamin Zimmer on the Language Log, chronicling the Times’ publication (in transcript, though not in news columns) of “shit” as used by Nixon on the Watergate tapes. A.M. Rosenthal then made clear that the Gray Lady was not swooning into the gutter, saying “We’ll only take shit from the President.”

Pew Study: Bloggers ‘r’ us

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I’ve been reading and digesting the new Pew study of bloggers (page, PDF) that’s been making headlines this week. The study’s central finding — that the majority of bloggers are in it as a creative personal outlet, blog occasionally rather than obsessively and don’t seek or expect mass readership — come as no surprise. But the coverage, along with portions of the report itself, reveals some confusion about the relationship between blogging and journalism. Let’s dig in.

Take that Chronicle story. Its lead tells us that we think that bloggers are “pajama-wearing partisan ranters” who “fancy themselves a new type of journalist.” Now, thanks to Pew, we can see that in fact bloggers are “more like Christina Palsky,” who “blogs as a creative outlet and does not fancy herself a journalist.”

Note that we are being told that there’s an either/or situation here: Either you’re a wannabe-journalist partisan ranter who dreams of making a big splash or you’re a creative diarist who blogs for friends and relatives.

This misses the most interesting characteristic of blogging (and the Pew report, though less oversimplified than the Chronicle piece, misses it too): because of the nature of the Web, any posting to a little public diary can, under the right circumstances, end up in a national or global spotlight. Every “I’m just doing it for myself” blogger is a potential journalist. If you’re in the right (or wrong) place and time — when the next tsunami hits, say, or the next Rodney King incident unfolds — and you decide to write about it or post photos or video, you’re a journalist, whether you think of yourself as one or not. You’re witnessing events and telling the world about them. And the Web’s structure means that the information you provide can spread quickly and widely.

At its worst, if people see blogging as a competition for the spotlight, this potential could drive people to do dumb things to attract attention. This happens, but it’s hardly epidemic. At its best, it creatively blurs the boundaries of the old mass-market news world. Every “consumer” of news is also a potential producer.

I am saying nothing new here. It’s just strange to see the Pew report — and the discussion around it — fail to take note of the obvious.

The blog rebooted

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Almost exactly four years ago, on July 22, 2002, I started my first blog. Blogging felt natural to me since I’d been writing for the Web since 1994 and self-publishing since 1974 (originally via mimeograph).

My blog was part of a larger blogging program I’d put together at Salon, in partnership with Userland. It was the tech-downturn doldrums — an era when every time we at Salon opened the papers or fired up our browsers we knew that someone, somewhere, would be predicting our imminent demise. And there wasn’t a lot of extra cash at the company at the time, so the blogs program was chiefly a labor of love, launched in the wee hours. I did the CSS, wrangling Salon’s home-page design into Radio Userland templates, all by myself (which anyone who knows anything about CSS can probably tell with a single glance at the unruly code).

I loved Radio Userland at the time for the way it combined a blog publishing system and an RSS reader. But times change; Userland put its energy into other products; Salon Blogs produced many great blogs but not a substantial change in Salon’s business; and my blog settled down from the program’s focal point to a personal-publishing bullhorn.

Several months ago, in anticipation of Salon’s plan to build a new platform for users to contribute their own writing, we closed off new signups to the old Salon Blogs platform. Today I’m moving my own blog to a new home, here, at Wordyard.

I’ve managed to export my whole four years’ worth of archives (over 1000 posts, averaging about one per weekday for the whole timespan) to WordPress. (For those who care, I used the Radio Userland exporter, which pops out a plaintext file in Movable Type export format; edited that file to make things like titles and categories work; then imported into WordPress.) The comments, alas, will remain back at the original Salon Blogs location, where they will continue to be available.

With this move, I plan to blog somewhat more vigorously, and to provide more posts about my forthcoming book, Dreaming in Code, as its January 2007 publish date nears. I also look forward to leveraging some of the great features and plugins created by the WordPress open-source community.

If you subscribe to my RSS feed in Bloglines (the reader I’ve been using daily for years), the transition should be transparent — Bloglines will do the flip for you, you don’t need to touch anything. If you subscribe through other feed readers or services, you’ll have to resubscribe to the new feed address, which is here.

More anon!

Fallows, PIMs and Chandler

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James Fallows has been writing thoughtfully about computer software for longer than most of us have been using it. Years ago he wrote a definitive paean (long online here but apparently no longer) to Lotus Agenda, Mitch Kapor’s legendary personal information manager. (I say “a” rather than “the” because this program evoked such loyalty from smart writers it actually ended up with two definitive paeans; the other was by Jimmy Guterman.)

In the new issue of the Atlantic, Fallows writes about two latter-day PIMs — Microsoft’s OneNote and Chandler, the long-gestating project of Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation, the tale of which forms the central narrative of my book, Dreaming in Code. He interviewed me for the article; though most of our conversation wound up on the cutting-room floor, I did make it into one paragraph. I wish the article were online (there’s a stub here, but the full piece is only accessible to subscribers). But I couldn’t ask for a better venue for my first distant-early-warning book publicity. Here’s the relevant graph:

Despite substantial follow-up grants from foundations and universities, the team developing Chandler has so far released only a partly functional calendar application. Scott Rosenberg, of Salon magazine, became an “embedded journalist” on the Chandler project from 2003 to 2005 in order to investigate why good software is so hard to make. (His book about Chandler and complex software design, Dreaming in Code, will be published in November [now, January]). “It is taking a long time, but anyone who writes off Chandler is being short-sighted,” he told me. “They are on a quest.”

Fallows asked me whether I thought the book had turned out to be a comedy or a tragedy.

“Neither,” I replied, thinking furiously on my feet, my brain flashing back to my decade as a theater and movie critic. “It’s an epic!”
[tags]James Fallows, Dreaming in Code, Chandler[/tags]

The Journal vs. the Times

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Sometimes when I read things in the Wall Street Journal like the recent editorial attacking the New York Times over its expose of the Bush administration’s secret banking surveillance program, I’m tempted to cancel my subscription.

Then I think of articles like Greg Jaffe’s “A Camp Divided,” a detailed and arresting portrait (from June 17, 2006) of the conflict between two American colonels over how to approach the effort to build an Iraqi army. Or today’s fascinating feature about a schism between two competing Afghan-exile poetry reading groups in Washington, D.C. And I remember that the Journal editorial page — which serves up doses of bitterness, invective and hypocrisy in nearly every piece it publishes — should not be held against the impressive work of the larger Journal newsroom.

In yesterday’s Times, Frank Rich dissected how the Journal editorialists, in their effort to knock the Times and promote Bush’s anti-journalism power-play, wound up unfairly denigrating their own newsroom colleagues. (Rich’s column is behind the Times pay wall; Editor and Publisher offers excerpts.)

Meanwhile, the Times’ op-ed page has two conservative columnists, while the Wall Street Journal failed to replace its last centrist when he departed, and now presents its readers with an ideologically pure roster of righties. Oh, I forgot, conservatives don’t believe in diversity anyway.

Craigslist’s money left on the table?

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Brian Carney’s Wall Street Journal piece about Craigslist wants to know why Craigslist isn’t maximizing its revenue:

One industry analyst has estimated that Craigslist could generate 20 times that $25 million just by posting a couple of ads on each of its pages. If the estimate is to be believed, that’s half a billion dollars a year being left on the table… Google has turned unobtrusive text ads into a multibillion-dollar revenue stream. And posting a Google-type ad or two next to its search results wouldn’t cost Craigslist users one thin dime. So why not cash in?… If Craigslist does what its users ask of it, and Craigslist doesn’t need or seem to want all the ad revenue it declines to collect, maybe we, as end-users, should ask them to post some banner ads and give us the money instead.

Carney is either failing to see or deliberately ignoring a simple element in the equation here: The absence of ads is one of the key factors behind Craigslist’s phenomenal success. No barriers, no annoying popups, no distractions, none of the gaming and manipulation that Google text ads increasingly invite. Instead, simplicity and effectiveness — and trust.

Of course Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster could turn on the ads and rake in some cash, short-term, but they would undermine what they’ve built and compromise the principles that have served them so well to date. They’ve clung tightly to those principles, against the conventional wisdom, and doing so has served them too well to stop now.

NY Times research says people don’t want RSS

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From David Weinberger’s report on a panel at an Annenberg Center conference, I find Martin Nisenholtz of New York Times Digital making the following statement (I’m trusting David’s report of the words, but they’re notes, not a news article):

“Our research says that a relatively small group of people want to aggregate RSS feeds.”

I don’t doubt that the Times has such research, and that it is an accurate snapshot of current Net user desire. But it’s a bad predictor, because when you ask most Net users, “Do you want to aggregate RSS feeds?” their likely answer is, “Huh? Aggregate what?”

Imagine it’s, say, 1995, when a lot of us early adopters were already spending tons of time online but much of the world barely knew the Web existed or how it worked. And imagine you did research then that asked people, “Do you want to access Web pages with HTTP?”

Such research would have shown that a “relatively small group of people” wanted to surf the Web. And that research would have guided you in precisely the wrong direction.

Perils of group editing — revenge of the users

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I’m basically a believer in the general value and usefulness of the Digg/Reddit model in which users submit stories and vote on them. The debate over at Edge on Jaron Lanier’s critique of the “hive mind” notwithstanding, I see these services as interesting additives to the old-school editorial world I still work in, rather than as potential replacements, and I enjoy using them.

Now Jason Calacanis (of Weblogs Inc. and now AOL) has revamped AOL’s moribund Netscape.com property as a somewhat modified Digg clone. Digg devotees appear to have taken umbrage, and registered their disapproval by flooding the site with votes for a story headlined “AOL Copies Digg” (Valleywag captured the screen). That story was the new Netscape’s top headline in the day after its launch. Another headline voted up by Netscape users reads “Digg rules…Netscape is utter Crap.”

If you’re going to empower the vox populi, you’d better be ready for, and okay with, its inevitable yen to bite your ankle.

Crimson reminiscence

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I decided not to schlep 3000 miles to attend my 25th college reunion which, shockingly, is happening right now. I’m not a big fan of such events and life is just too busy. However, the students currently running the place where I spent nearly all my time as an undergraduate, the Harvard Crimson, asked me to write an op-ed for the big issue they put out every year at graduation — known as the Commencement issue, because that is the name for the day-on-which-diplomas-are-granted at Harvard (which always has to name things just a little bit differently from the rest of the universe).

So I wrote something. It’s online now — a brief musing about the passing of the typewriter era, the transformation of media over the past 25 years, and a little political deva vu:

The nuclear fears of my graduating class were never, thankfully, borne out. Instead we have lived to see arguments we thought were well-settled reopened, and lessons we thought were well-learned ignored, by leaders whose careers we thought were well-buried. (Didn’t Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld get voted out of the White House when we were in high school?)

The Crimson’s Web site is pretty impressive, and it has done a great job of digitizing vast quantities of its archives back to the 19th century.

In defense of Al Gore’s history lesson

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The Wall Street Journal kept up a group blog during the D conference. Here’s how it characterized my post below about Gore’s talk:

  “I went into the hour-and-a-half session hoping that Gore would run in 2008, and by the end I was hoping he wouldn’t,” Mr. Rosenberg wrote, adding that after Mr. Gore’s talk, he sees more potential for him as a media player than a politico.

Thanks for the link and all, but this is just wrong, distorting a positive posting into a negative review. I said that Gore’s critique of the media was so powerful and delivered with such passion that I thought it might be even more important for him to dedicate himself to “changing the very structure of the media landscape” than merely to run for president. In other words, I’m not talking about Gore as a “media player” but rather as a media game-changer. I think anyone who read my admittedly lengthy post could see that.

While we’re on the subject: It was amazing to hear how people — among the crowd at D and the Journal people covering it (like Alan Murray, here), and even the conference hosts, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher — responded to Gore’s discussion of the history of media. What I found a familiar but valuable review of how we got into the media-political mess we’re in today was, apparently, unbearable to many others.

Let’s put this in perspective: Gore wanted to explain the motivation behind Current.tv, and to put today’s Internet-shaped changes in a historical context stretching back to the middle ages. He talked about how literally cloistered monastery libraries were, and how Gutenberg changed all that, making books and ideas accessible to a much wider slice of society, setting the groundwork for the great public arguments of late-18th century America that shaped the founding of this nation. He pointed out that the rise of broadcast TV in the mid-20th century limited the political conversation to a stifling, one-way communication, and described how the Internet — and, in a related way, Current.tv — offers some hope of getting more people involved once more in public dialogue and self-expression.

In other words, Gore spent maybe five minutes of a 90-minute conversation reviewing a little history. It wasn’t unique or earth-shattering, but neither was it inordinately detailed or arcane; it wasn’t that different from what you might hear from bloggers like Jeff Jarvis or Dan Gillmor. Maybe the manner was a little professorial, but so what?

And this, apparently, was taxing. This was intolerably dull. To Alan Murray, a writer whose normal beat involves the scintillating fluctuation of interest rates and stock averages, this was cause for “stacking Zs.” This was more, it seems, than the brains of the D crowd — an unabashedly elite concentration of the corporate and media class — should be asked to bear.

I don’t get it. Maybe we’ve grown so accustomed to brain-dead leaders, anti-intellectualism in high places and the assiduous scouring of historical knowledge from the corridors of power that when a public figure dares to display some actual perspective and tries to communicate it, we respond with a barrage of sarcasm and cynicism. Mocking politicians who talk about history may give some of us a little jolt of solidarity with the people we imagine as “regular folk” — and that commodity may be precious at a conference where an unusually high percentage of attendees arrived by private jet. But it doesn’t help us improve the quality of national leadership.

I, for one, would have felt a lot better, for instance, if a president who tried to lead us into a war in Iraq had been able to talk, extemporaneously, for five or ten minutes about the history of past interventions in Iraq, and how, exactly, ours was going to be different. History isn’t dead knowledge — it’s the best foundation we have for peering into the future. Making fun of Gore, or any other leader who tries to bring history to bear on our problems today, isn’t just unfair; it’s head-in-the-sand dumb.