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No TV? No problem!

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Dave Winer and I were talking about journalism, politics and the upcoming Bloggercon session I’ll be leading, and I mentioned to him that I have not regularly watched television news in 20 years. He seemed more than a little shocked by that statement and suggested it required disclosure, so here it is: It’s true, I don’t watch TV news on any regular basis, never have. From my teens on I got my news from newspapers and magazines; once the Web came along that became another center for my personal information flow. Our house has only one TV and we don’t even get cable.

Of course I turn the TV on for earthquakes and terrorist attacks; of course I watch the presidential debates, and the TV is on for election night. When I’m traveling I’ll sometimes turn on the hotel TV for a taste of the cable news networks and the local broadcasts. That’s about it. For me, TV simply feels like an inefficient way to learn what’s happening in the world; it takes too much time to tell you too little, and it’s pretty much hopeless when it comes to any subject of any abstraction or complexity, particularly economics.

So there it is. I completely understand that this information diet seems alien to most people and marks me as peculiar and even un-American. Oh well. And I know that by not watching much TV I’m disconnected from the central arena in which our politics are (temporarily, I believe) forged. But I will not hand over the hours of my life to a medium I neither trust nor enjoy.

The spirit of startups past

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Nine years ago, just about to the day, I left my job at the San Francisco Examiner — where I’d worked for, oh, nine years and a few months — to join the handful of people who at that time constituted Salon. We’ve been through a lot of different offices in our existence, starting out with rented space in a downtown architecture firm on Main St.; then to our first real digs in China Basin Landing, down the hall from Howard Rheingold’s Electric Communities and the old Well Engaged, but otherwise isolated from civilization by the vast tracts of empty space below Townsend Street that have since been crammed with development; then to the corner of Third and Mission, just upstairs from Rochester Big & Tall, a perfect perch from which to watch the dot-com bubble begin to inflate; then, aloft on that bubble ourselves, over to the top two stories of a fancier building on Fourth Street off Mission; then consolidating on one of those floors; then moving downstairs to our comfortable, slightly smaller digs in the same building.

During the bubble’s boom years we’d see, through the lenses of retracting elevator doors, the hustle of VC-inflated commerce on floor after floor of expensive office space. Then, from late 2000 on, we observed the gradual depopulation of those same floors, as one failed dot-com after another dismantled its cubicles and closed up shop.

In my current office, every time I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling I’m faced with a grim reminder of that era, a memento dot-com mori in black Smartie ink scrawled on an oh-so-fashionably exposed duct with the name of the company that preceded us in the space:

food.com on an air duct

I don’t know why it was important that these ducts be so labeled. It’s certainly not worth the effort to efface the writing. It’s just one of those little bits of office archaeology serving to remind you that we’re all just passing through. Still, I’m sort of grateful for it. As I read intimations of a new wave of speculative excitement in the industry, I lean back in my chair, let my eyes float up ductward, and vow, never again!

Bonus link: While we’re musing about the Internet Bubble, Paul Graham (of “Hackers and Painters”) has written a thoughtful essay on “What the Bubble Got Right.”

Away

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And with that, I’m off for a weeklong vacation. Offline, even. See you back here on the 23rd or thereabouts.

Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked

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Two decades ago I had the odd and daunting experience of defending my undergraduate thesis, on several of Shakespeare’s plays, before a panel of scholars. While hardly as rigorous as the real orals a PhD thesis is supposed to be subjected to, this encounter was part of what my department at Harvard required for graduation, and I faced it with some trepidation.

When I walked in, I was introduced to William Alfred, the playwright, poet and English professor. I hadn’t studied with Alfred, and had no idea what to expect from the rumpled man. He broke the ice with a simple question: At the start of “King Lear,” Cordelia refuses her royal father’s demand for a profession of love. There’s a foreign phrase that describes her act in legal terms — what is it?

I’m not sure how many layers of my brain I had to dig through to find it, but somehow I retrieved the desired answer, the medieval label for an injury to the royal office: “Lese majeste!” Alfred’s eyes twinkled; my response seemed to satisfy my interrogators’ basic requirement of literacy, and from there, all went swimmingly. (Alfred, a brilliant and generous soul with whom, alas, I only had a handful of further conversations, died in 1999.)

Of all things, this distant recollection popped into my head after I finally caught up with Michael Moore’s much-debated “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Many words have already been flung across the political spectrum about the movie. I will limit my contributions to this one phrase: What Moore has, I think, accomplished, particularly in the movie’s more coherent and better-assembled first half, is an outrageous and highly effective act of lese majeste.

George Bush campaigned as an informal man of the people, and he did not carry a very dignified bearing into the Oval Office. (Remember that strange boil on his face during the Florida recount?) But from 9/11 on, his team of handlers began to weave a cocoon of larger-than-life pomp around him. Partly, it was what the nation wanted; it was also smart political opportunism. It has, to be sure, frayed some since the Iraq war and its attendant scandals. The “Henry V”-style bullhorn at ground zero struck a chord with many Americans; the “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier stunt backfired.

But “Fahrenheit 9/11” methodically dismantles this president’s carefully manicured dignity: It says to the viewer, “Pay attention to the man behind the curtain — he’s smaller than life.” The movie’s most indelible sequences are those that show our president as he really was in the face of the great crisis of 9/11: Not, as we were told by Showtime’s “DC 9/11,” a stirring take-charge commander, but a passive photo-op participant who sat paralyzed for achingly long minutes of “My Pet Goat” rather than take the initiative to say “excuse me” to the class and leave the room.

My colleague Andrew O’Hehir drew a connection between Moore and Dario Fo, the Italian playwright/performer most famous for his assaults on the dignity of the papacy. To be sure, Moore has none of Fo’s skills as a physical clown and only a fraction of his instincts as an entertainer; Fo is an artist, while Moore is chiefly a propagandist. Still, it’s a good comparison: The two men share a willingness — more than that, a ferocious determination — to strip away the niceties of ceremony from powerful men so that we can see their misdeeds.

That refusal of deference is, after you get past all the various problems with “Fahrenheit 9/11” as documentary and as history, what counts. The TV networks (though they thought nothing of rummaging through the details of Bill Clinton’s tawdry sexual escapades) have decided to protect Bush from unflattering images. It falls to Moore to dig up the footage of protesters pelting his inaugural limousine with eggs, and play it for us again.

By the end of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Moore has flung his own messy indictment at the presidential portrait, and it won’t be easily cleaned up. The filmmaker is deliberately, methodically, overflowingly disrespectful at a moment in our history when there’s far too much respect in the land. When the throne holds an ignorant, incompetent, profligate pretender, lese majeste becomes a patriotic duty.

Supremes’ COPA decision

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I don’t have details yet, but Ann Beeson of the ACLU, who has represented Salon and many other plaintiffs in the long-running litigation over the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), just sent out the following: “We just learned that the Supreme Court struck down COPA. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority in a 6-3 opinion in our favor.” I wrote about the Supreme Court arguments in March here. More info when I get a copy of the opinion.

Standing room

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Like some other well-known bloggers before her, Chris Nolan is working on turning her blog into more of a revenue-generating business. I like Chris’s stuff, even as I sometimes disagree with it, because it’s sharp and unpredictable and rooted in her years of experience as a reporter, and so I wish her well in her efforts to sell ads and subscriptions.

Lord knows it’s not an easy road. Reading Chris’s manifesto for “Stand-Alone Journalism” — she argues that’s a better label for what she does than “blogging” — brought me back to some distant memories from the dawn of the Web. After learning HTML and participating in the San Franciso Free Press experiment, I thought to myself, hey, there’s nothing to stop me from starting my own publication on the Web!

So I did. In January 1995 I took a week’s vacation time from my job at the SF Examiner and published a site. I focused on what was then quaintly known as “multimedia”; I called it Kludge, as a nod to its essential clumsiness and improvised nature, and I posted an issue. This was years before personal content management software, needless to say; it’s all just cruddy hand-coded HTML and crude self-designed graphics. But the articles weren’t so bad (hey, here’s an interview with Marc Canter! Here’s a satirical take on the CD-ROM explosion/implosion!).

What I quickly realized was that, as much fun as writing, editing and designing all that material was — bringing me back as it did to my teenage roots in mimeograph publishing — it was just the beginning of getting a Web site going. If I was serious about making it something more than a labor of love — if I wasn’t going to do all that work on my vacation days — I’d need to figure out how to get people to visit the site, and how to sell ads, and so forth. My best efforts involved dumping a pile of flyers in the lobby of a multimedia conference at Moscone Center. (While I was doing that, a couple of guys named Jerry Yang and Dave Filo stood at a booth under a big Yahoo banner, giving away T-shirts.)

After briefly toying with the notion of applying to AOL’s Greenhouse program for funding, I thought, nah. When David Talbot started talking about a new publication he wanted to create, I helped persuade him that he should do it on the Web instead of in print. Salon turned out to be a great place for me to write and edit and build Web sites without having to wear all the hats myself (though there have certainly been times during the last decade when my pate has felt a little crowded).

Today, would-be “Stand-Alone Journalists” can rely on much better software tools to create and publish their work. They can plug into far better organized online networks to spread the word of their activities. And they can even turn to simple plug-in approaches to advertising, like AdWords or BlogAds, to try to bring in some cash. But being a “Stand-Alone Journalist” still requires a combination of journalistic and entrepreneurial traits that’s rare. Being a good journalist requires the ability to not mind pissing people off sometimes (Nolan, whose career has had its share of controversy, is no shirker in this regard); being a good entrepreneur demands the ability to charm people as often as possible. Both pursuits, of course, demand persistence, patience, and, in the face of indifference, a stubborn belief in the value of one’s undertaking.

When I read Nolan’s proposed label for the solo-blogger-journalist, the first thing that popped into my mind was the famous quote from Ibsen’s Dr. Stockman in “Enemy of the People”: “The strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone.” Standing alone has many wonderful advantages — it’s a stirring posture. But remember what happens to old Dr. Stockman: He is right to blow the whistle about the polluting of his town’s waters, but he’s dreadfully naive about the world around him, he’s ultimately ineffective, and he fails to accomplish much besides his own martyrdom.

So I’m not sure the “Stand-Alone Journalist” label is one that will stick. The linked nature of the Web is ultimately even more important than the independence of the blogger. Standing alone is useless without being connected.

Syndication city

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I’m a late addition to a panel at the Supernova conference this Thursday, June 24: I’ll be joining some very interesting people (Technorati‘s David Sifry; blogger, XML leader and now Sun engineer Tim Bray; and Paul Boutin of Wired and Slate). We’re talking about syndication and RSS. The question the panel faces: “Is there more to syndication than reading 300 blogs at once?” What interesting, useful applications for RSS and RSS-like tools are out there or just around the corner?

I’ve got my own answer(s), but in the decentralized spirit of the conference, I’ll open the floor here in comments, and present anything you folks suggest, too.

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Things have been real slow here while I tried to catch up with various other aspects of my life. Now I’m giving up. Back to the blog! I’ve still got some interesting notes from the D conference to transcribe. Soon…

http://www.wordyard.com/2004/06/16/615/

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Last night’s post about Reagan has elicited a good and spirited back-and-forth in the comments. I’ll let that debate be, with one clarification: When I wrote, “America would have been a lot better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president,” some readers seem to take that to be synonymous with “America was a lot better off in 1980 than in 1988 (when Reagan left office).” Of course things changed in 8 years, some of them for the better. Was Reagan responsible for all those changes? Would a different president have seen inflation decline (Paul Volcker did more to accomplish that than Reagan, and guess who appointed him?)? Or seen the Soviet Union begin to decline and fall? Could the positives of the Reagan era have been realized without the hefty negatives? Could a real leader rather than a Potemkin-village leader have done a better job? This is the direction in which my comment was aimed.

And no, I do not think that — outside of popular music (even Elvis Costello managed to produce one bad album!) — the ’80s were a dark age. But the moment at which Reagan won office felt to me, as a young man who’d come of political age in the ’70s, like a closing of horizons and a snuffing out of hope. (If I’d been writing in the morning instead of at midnight, the sentence would have read, “that moment felt like the start of a dark age.”) In retrospect, that feeling was plainly unwarranted. But the world looks different to you at 21 than at 44. If it doesn’t, something’s probably wrong!

http://www.wordyard.com/2004/06/07/611/

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I’m here at the Wall Street Journal “D” Conference, where I finally got the Internet connection in my room working after an hour of fiddling (problem turned out to be — no joke — a loose cable, but not a loose ethernet cable; rather, a loose connection from the mini-hub to the wall-jack– sheesh!). So I’ll have to post notes on Bill Gates’ talk tomorrow.

But first, a note on the passing of Ronald Reagan. This conference began with a moment of silence in memory of the 40th president. (It is, after all, a Wall Street Journal event.) I’m sorry for his relatives and friends that he’s dead; I had a relative who suffered from Alzheimer’s, and I know how painful that is.

But can we stop with the canonization, please? Maybe too many Americans are now too young to remember, or maybe Reagan looks good by comparison with the current occupant of the White House, or maybe the passage of time just makes us all forgetful.

But Reagan — however “nice” a man he was — was no saint, and in fact in most ways he was a terrible president. I know, de mortui nil nisi bonum and all that, but there is a great whitewashing going on in the media, and I can’t stand it.

I was a senior in college when Reagan was elected — in a very close election which he’d probably have lost had it not been for the participation of a third party candidate (John Anderson) — and that moment was like the start of a dark age. As a fiery young writer of editorials for my college paper I’d railed against Carter for his compromises with conservatism, and proudly chose to cast my first vote for an American president not for Carter against Reagan but for Barry Commoner.

It was a stubborn gesture, and in retrospect a dumb one. Too much was at stake to throw my vote away just so I could feel consistent. (Naderites, take heed.) America would have been a lot better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president. This was true while he was alive, and it is no less true now that he is gone.

http://www.wordyard.com/2004/06/06/610/