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Noises off

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In turning off comments on a blog that it had recently opened as a channel for dialogue with its readers, the Washington Post today followed the same road that the L.A. Times went down last year when it shut down an experiment with wiki-based editorial reviews. Instead of grappling with the flood of input from their customers, these institutions are throwing up their hands and reasserting the one authority that they are most comfortable with — control of the mike.

The Post had been trying to contain a brewing controversy over a piece by its ombudsman, Deborah Howell, which enraged many readers by stating (incorrectly, as Howell eventually admitted) that Democrats as well as Republicans had received contributions from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. (It’s Abramoff’s clients that directed some portion of their cash toward Democrats, though the lion’s share seems to have wound up in Republican pockets.)

Post readers thronged the paper’s blog with complaining comments. Unfortunately, we can’t read those comments now and decide for ourselves whether the Post was right to turn them off — the paper didn’t just block further comments, it effaced the entire body of reader contributions.

CBS News blogger Vaughn Ververs reports that the many comments he read were angry or disrespectful and many called for Howell’s head, but they weren’t “hate speech” or explicitly personal attacks. Of course, maybe we never saw those: A “late update” to Post Web editor Jim Brady’s discussion of the decision suggests that Post editors were already pounding the “delete” key like mad, and getting tired.

What’s obvious is that, like the L.A. Times before it, the Post was sadly clueless about how to deal with the situation. If, in 2006, you’re an iconic media institution that’s seeking to give the public a platform to vent its disagreements and complaints, you should plan for a certain volume of problems. You should expect some disrespect. You should state what standards you intend to enforce, and you should have a plan for how you expect to enforce them.

Instead, we have the repeat spectacle of newspapers naively opening their doors — imagining, it seems, that they are going to have a little tea party with their readers — and then, shocked at the volume and the vitriol, slamming the same door shut again.

Ververs tries to lay some of the blame for the Post’s abrupt retreat at the users’ feet: “More than that, the news audience has been terribly served by a few loudmouths incapable of having a rational discussion….Real dialogue, after all, is a two-way street.”

I don’t doubt that there were a lot of obnoxious loudmouths posting screeds on the Post blog. But that’s a given, an inevitability. Hosting any kind of forum means taking measures to keep the loudmouths from swamping the rest of the speakers.

I wouldn’t expect newspaper editors to start out as experts in that difficult art. But it’s not too much to expect them to try to learn it — or simply to acknowledge that, if they want to host a dialogue, it’s part of their job.

COPA’s latest collateral damage — Google users’ privacy

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Salon — along with the ACLU and a diverse group of plaintiffs — has been in the thick of the fight against the misguided and, we believe, unconstitutional Child Online Protection Act since 1998. The argument went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2004. Having lost the five-year-long preliminary round, the Bush Administration is taking the matter to full trial. And guess who’s getting dragged into the argument? Google, and all its users for an entire week — among whom, most likely, are you and me.

The Mercury News reports today on this strange turn of events. It appears that the Bush Justice Department believes that, somehow, a gigantic, indiscriminate data dump of a week’s worth of search engine activity logs will help it demonstrate that the 1998 law is not a censorship measure at all but rather an effective measure limiting minors’ access to online porn.

It’s a peculiar idea, given the vast volume of Net smut that originates outside of U.S. jurisdiction, the reasonable effectiveness of search engines’ own decency filters and the likely use of the law by prosecutors to go after uppity publishers. But it’s of a piece with the rest of the new Imperial Presidency’s tactics: When in doubt, seize as much private citizens’ information as you can and see what kind of a case you can patch together!

Just as we are supposed to let the Bush Administration decide in secret when and how to break the wiretap laws, we are supposed to trust it to use discretion in applying this broadly-worded statute — which punishes all publishers of material considered “harmful to minors” with fines of up to $50,000 and imprisonment of up to six months for each day of publishing such material, unless the publisher puts it behind a wall of credit-card verification.

Relax, says the administration lawyers — we’ll only go after the real bad guys. If you’re a legitimate publisher, you’ll be okay. Why am I not reassured? I’d be wary of any government receiving that power; this particular administration long ago squandered any trust it might have possessed.

Note the error in the Mercury copy, which reads, “The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content inaccessible to minors.” I assume the paper meant, “accessible.” Actually, who knows what the law was meant to do? All that’s certain is that, if it is ever enforced, it will give the government a potent new weapon to use against any online publisher it doesn’t like, if said publisher dares to post non-PG-rated material.

Hitsville Yahoo

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I know I’ve already lit into Lloyd Braun, Yahoo’s Hollywood guy, but it’s irresistible.

Today’s Journal carried news of his latest plot to bring TV-style hit shows to the Web — a revival of the long-forgotten, ill-starred reality show “The Runner.”

Braun’s aim, the Journal reports, is “For Yahoo to create the first mass-market Internet hit, which would do for the medium what ‘The Sopranos’ did for pay cable or Milton Berle did in the early days of broadcast TV.”

Now, this is not a direct quote from Braun. Maybe he’s not as dumb as the Journal summary implies.

That aside, well, Braun needs to be brought up to speed about the Web. And wait, he’s in luck! All he needs to do is hop on his private plane and fly up to Sunnyvale and sit down with two guys named Jerry Yang and Dave Filo. They can tell him a lot about what a “mass-market Internet hit” really is. Yang and Filo created the very first one; it was even a reality show of a sort — just a little directory of Web sites that evolved into the juggernaut we now know as Yahoo.

Some other Internet hits Braun could study: Amazon. EBay. Napster. Linux, Apache and open source. You fill in the rest.

Sure, these are not “shows” at all — they’re complex hybrids of businesses, services and communities in which people connect and, in a sense, perform for one another.

That is what a “hit” on the Web looks like. Few of us could see that a decade ago. To not see it today is just plain blind. Braun’s quest for a mass-market “hit show” on the Web displays a complete misapprehension of its nature.

I get this picture of a TV executive in the early ’50s. Someone who worked in the movies until this new thing came along. He sits, fretting, in his office. He knows exactly what he’s looking for — that first breakthrough TV show, one so compelling, so overwhelmingly great that people would want to see it in a movie theater!

Random links (yearend clearance dept.)

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## The Dynamic of a Bush Scandal: Peter Daou’s cynical but depressingly accurate precis of how the Bush administration and its allies shrug off and spin away scandal after scandal. Peter predicts the current cycle of outrage over the government’s flagrantly illegal domestic spying will pass like each previous cycle. He might well be right.

## David Edelstein says Munich is the best film of the year: “Today, saying our enemy is ‘evil’ is like saying a preventable tragedy is ‘God’s will’: It’s a way of letting ourselves off the hook for crimes committed in our name. Not incidentally, it’s also a way for our enemies to let themselves off the hook.” Guess I’ll have to see it now!

## Doc Searls continues to advance the conversation on the “unbundling” of media (my small contribution, on the unbundling of the newspaper, was here):

  What will happen, I wondered, when Toyota does the math, realizes how inefficient local TV advertising is, and drops its dealer advertising co-op program? Is this not inevitable? Why don’t we have better ways for sellers and buyers to inform each other? Terry puts the onus on advertisers, who are on the supply side; but why not equip demand to notify markets about what it desires? Why should I not be able to publish, selectively, and in a private yet usefully exposed way, that I would like to rent a 4+ bedroom house on Younameit Beach for the last week in April? Why should I have to go hunting among sellers for the same thing, ignoring all the promotional crap that goes with the seller-controlled nonconversation we call marketing?

## Salon readers know Laura Miller as a co-founder of the site, our one-time books editor and longtime book critic, who has shone a bright and steady light in all her work. Years ago she recommended Philip Pullman’s magnificent “His Dark Materials” trilogy to my wife and me, and they were the only books I can remember being able to finish — indeed, being compelled to finish — in the months of harrowing sleep deprivation I experienced during my twin sons’ infancy. Now Laura has written a beautiful profile of Pullman for the New Yorker, “Far From Narnia” — which his work truly is, in the best possible way.

Meanwhile, The Guardian also has an interesting profile of Ursula Le Guin, another great fantasist of our time.

More on melting papers

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Some followups on the melting newspaper meme:

Ryan Tate asks, “I don’t understand why people would want to continue to read national news in print but not local and state news in print. And are you saying that even giveaway local papers like the altweeklies and the Examiner will go away, as well?”

I guess I wasn’t clear. I actually think that most newspapers as we know them — big and small — will vanish. Paper will get more and more expensive, and people won’t want to read a static medium.
I don’t think in the long run that the Times and the Journal will survive in their present form, just that they will survive as institutions — their newsrooms and brands will transition to whatever new devices and media emerge. The locals don’t have the same resources, flexibility or raison d’etre, and I think it’s far less likely that incumbent local papers will cross that gulf.

Ryan writes: “My theory: the ossified incumbent local daily papers may very well die, opening room for some pretty vigorous competition among new, energetic newspapers bundling information in new ways, mostly but not entirely to narrower niche markets.” I agree, with the proviso that the vigorous new competitors are simply not going to be on paper. The cost structure is too high, and as the Net continues to mature and serve more mobile devices better, the idea of delivering these bundles of information on paper is going to look increasingly wasteful and inefficient.

Dave Winer says some very kind things about me (thanks!) but also offers some challenges. Winer argues that efforts to devise new sorts of bundles will “run out” as we move deeper into an era of disintermediation: “What’s under attack is much bigger than newspapers, it’s all forms of aggregation. Aggregation can now be customized, and it can be done by machine… Once we’ve disintermediated the San Francisco Chronicle and NY Times (unlike Scott, I don’t think any news organization is going to escape) the next target is AdSense. No need for a middle-man there either. So it’s the whole notion of value in bundles of information that’s going by the wayside. Bundling is not going to be a way to make a living in the future.”

Dave has a pretty enviable record in this area, so I take his perspective extremely seriously. I hope he’s wrong, because it’s the very concept of bundling that has made it possible, for the past century or more, to support a number of enterprises that are fundamentally not supportable on their own. Sending reporters abroad, conducting months’-long investigations, plowing through mountains of court documents — these cost lots of money, and generally advertisers don’t particularly care for the result.

Certainly, today’s papers haven’t always delivered as much of this costly but valuable work as they could have; many have forfeited their muckraking role. But if we give up on the idea of bundling, or if it simply becomes impossible, then the only kinds of reporting and writing that will survive are those that individual entrepreneurs can find sponsors for, or those done by people who are financially independent or who work for nothing in their spare time. Much great work can be pursued that way, and there is a grand tradition of the gentleman (and woman) muckraker that is being reincarnated in the clothing of today’s citizen journalism movement. Still, if we become unable, for instance, to hand some of the New Yorker’s fashion advertising dollars over to Sy Hersh to tell us what’s really going on inside the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” it will be a big loss.

I’m hopeful that, even as the power of networked software kicks in and the passions of millions of empowered individual publishers ignite, there will still be a place for creative bundling, for good editors to lay bets on unlikely stories and pay for those bets with their winnings from more surefire investments. Doubtless this place will be a diminished one. As I wrote before, the survivors will have to be smarter, work harder, offer better services and insights. But I think, and hope, they’ll still find a niche in the next-generation news ecosystem.

All that is newspaper melts…

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Joe Menn of the L.A. Times talked to me for his story gauging the dwindling fortunes of the San Francisco Chronicle as a bellwether for the fate of newspapers in the Net era. It’s a good piece, and he quotes me accurately, but as always the quote is a snippet of a much longer discourse. Since my words are now part of this record I’d like to fill in the rest.

I told Joe that the newspapers I grew up loving and that I worked for during the first half of my career represent a model that we’ve taken for granted because it’s had such longevity. But there’s nothing god-given or force-of-nature-like to the shape of their product or business; it’s simply an artifact of history that you could roll together a bundle of disparate information — news reports, stock prices, sports scores, display ads, reviews, classified ads, crossword puzzles and so on — sell it to readers, and make money.

Today that bundle has already fallen apart on the content side: there’s simply no reason for newspapers to publish stock prices, for instance; it’s a practice that will simply disappear over the next few years — it’s sheer tree slaughter. On the business side, it is beginning to fall apart, too. It just makes way more sense to do classified advertising online. And it’s cheaper, too, thanks to Craigslist, the little community (I am proud to have been a subscriber to Craig Newmark’s original mailing list on the Well back in 1994 or 1995 or whenever it was) that turned into a big deal.

The loss of classified revenues doesn’t doom newspapers, by any means. But if classifieds represent — as Menn’s piece says — 27 percent of newspaper revenue, and the newspaper industry is accustomed to a 20 percent profit margin, well, your industry just went from a healthy black to a nasty red.

What should be really alarming for newspaper owners is that the same process that ate their classified income is going to affect their other revenue streams. Just as classifieds went from costly to free, the display advertising will begin to dry up, as youth-seeking national advertisers follow their targets to the online world. And the very core of the newspaper product, the professional news report, is under siege, thanks to a myriad of missteps in the newsrooms and the rise of amateur (in the best sense), free alternatives.

It’s not a happy picture. I still read two newspapers a day, but I’m in the field, and I know there’s no chance my kids will. As Menn’s piece accurately recounts, these changes are rolling through the Bay Area first because we’re the advance guard of the transition from print news to digital delivery.

But what’s happening here will happen everywhere. A handful of large newspapers that perform national and international newsgathering and that serve as “opinion leaders” will survive and prosper, assuming they don’t make gargantuan business goofs: The Times and the Journal, surely; the Washington Post and the LA Times, probably; a handful of others. Local papers will vanish into the ether; there’s no reason for them not to. I love hearing the last-ditch arguments here, like, “Hey, you can’t read your laptop/cellphone/PDA on the subway!” But of course you will, soon enough. (BART is getting wireless as we speak; even the IRT will get there.)

Even as the newspaper industry begins to see the writing on the wall, the news profession and the practice of journalism are engaged in a difficult but valuable process of self-examination and reinvention. Newspapers may wither but people still need to know what’s happening in the world. The old newspaper bundle-of-stuff that supported a thriving industry from the 19th century to the threshold of the 21st is falling apart. The challenge for all of us — most definitely including us at Salon — is to find new bundles-of-stuff that make enough business sense to continue to support the function of full-time professional reporting.

Today, free online alternatives are numerous and often high-quality. But journalists shouldn’t wring their hands — the competition is healthy. It means there’s even less room for the kind of inertia, laziness and sloppiness that our predecessors often got away with, and that a comfortable, long-established, often monopoly business model protected. As always, we have to provide essential work; as never before, we have to be creative about supporting it.

Edelstein moves on

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My friend, the movie critic David Edelstein, has been writing wonderfully alive and intelligent pieces for Slate from its very beginning in 1996. That makes him a true Web old-timer. (He’s also on NPR’s Fresh Air.) But today the news broke that he is leaving Slate for Adam Moss’s revamped New York magazine, which will begin featuring his reviews beginning in January. Congratulations to David — the Web’s loss is New York’s gain, and those of us beyond the five boroughs now have one strong reason to point our browsers to nymag.com.

CPB rots from the head

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It seems that the former chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the now disgraced Kenneth Tomlinson, may have been up to something else beyond his now well-documented effort to swing public broadcasting to the right. In that campaign, Tomlinson took the CPB, which was created to be a firebreak against politicization of public media, and tried to turn it into a sort of Political Correctness Bureau to promote Bush administration policies and attempt to punish its critics.

It seem that, in addition to this bit of partisanship, Tomlinson may also have been busy pursuing that other favorite activity of the Republican power elite — funneling public money into private pockets. The details are outrageous enough — for instance, there’s a $400,000 severance package for one official carefully structured to avoid public disclosure. Now an audit has Tomlinson’s successors squirming. (Details from the Times are here.)

What strikes me, though, is how the whole scandal is a win/win sort of thing for the right, no matter how it turns out, since conservatives don’t really believe in the idea of public broadcasting anyway and would be happy to see it vanish in a puff of free-market dust. If Tomlinson’s meddling achieved its goal by slanting coverage, well, mission accomplished; if he got caught, that would just discredit the whole enterprise. If Republican appointees manage to reward their pals, great; if they get caught, well, gee, public broadcasting has become a sinkhole of corruption — let’s shut it down!

We are so deep into the universe of foxes staffing the henhouse that this stuff is almost making sense.