Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Site for “Say Everything” is now live

by

Today I humbly offer you the website for my forthcoming book SAY EVERYTHING: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. The book’s publication date is July 7. (But it’s never too early to preorder it.)

Among much else, I’ve posted the full text of the book’s introduction and first chapter — which is all about Justin Hall, the early-Web wunderkind who helped create the original template for websites as mirrors of the self. The evolution of Hall’s site at links.net in its first few years prefigured the future phases of the entire Web: from repository of information to haphazard efflorescence of creativity to structured daily updates.

Like many people caught up in the Web excitement of 1994 and 1995 in the Bay Area, I met Justin, liked him and admired the prodigious energy behind his personal publishing project. But I also found myself wondering, “Why is he posting so much personal information? Isn’t it going to come back and bite him?” My chapter tells the story of Hall’s personal storytelling online from its effusive start in 1994 to its abrupt end in a traumatic video posted in 2005. Hall hasn’t vanished from the Web — today he’s creating online games at the helm of a new company — but he’s using the medium in an entirely different way. His story provides an outline of the allure and the pitfalls of online self-revelation — a tale that is, if anything, even more pertinent today than it was when Hall lived it.

Also on the Say Everything site, you’ll find a full table of contents for the book; a brief FAQ about it; and a page with some of the kind things some early readers of the book have had to say about it (i.e., blurbs).

This site launch marks the start of a number of Say Everything-related projects and posts that I’ll be rolling out here over the next six weeks. Once the book is out, I’ll also be posting the full index of the book with all links fully HTML-ized and wired up to their original sources.

Yesterday, AOL/TimeWarner; today, Twitter and…

by

There’s a ridiculous amount of chatter in the tech blogosphere about who’s going to buy Twitter. And if the right offer comes along with enough zeros behind it, I don’t doubt that Twitter will sooner or later sell itself. But I doubt its founders are going to do it any time soon. Industry veterans understand that the day you sell your company is the day that innovation ends and “value extraction” begins.

Evan Williams knows that since he lived it. When Google acquired Blogger it secured the service’s future and insured its growth to the household name it became. (One of the many tales told in Say Everything…) But you didn’t exactly see Blogger pushing the boundaries or adding exciting new wrinkles. The innovation was done.

Google, being Google, didn’t rush to extract value. But that’s what we’re seeing now with MySpace and News Corporation. Having invested in the social network because of its market share and buzz but with little idea how to make money with it, Rupert Murdoch is now impatient to ramp up the revenue. The competition over at Facebook — still independent and still run by founders — is more focused right now on adding features and figuring out what their service is all about than in raking in the dollars. If they sell now, they know they’re likely giving up further explorations of what Facebook is (explorations that today are underwritten, to be sure, by investors who hope someday to cash out).

Meanwhile, the granddaddy of this sort of deal — the great AOL/Time Warner merger of 2000 — is receiving its final interment this week with the announcement that Time intends to fling the old albatross off its neck in a spinoff. When it was first announced, that combination was hailed as “the deal of the millennium,” but none of the people involved really had a clue about the future — not the AOL executives who shrewdly sold off their business at the peak of its market value, and certainly not the Time Warner execs who very quickly realized the two companies had absolutely no business combining forces.

AOL was never a hugely innovative company, but it was good at getting people online quickly and easily in the early days of the Web. Maybe it had a future doing the same thing in the broadband era. But from the moment AOL sold itself to Time, it ceased being a force of any consequence on the Net and began a long, slow downward slide from which it has never recovered, and from which I doubt it ever can — even with ex-Googler Tim Armstrong at the helm.

Reading about the spinoff this week reminded me of one of my most amusing experiences during the dotcom bubble. In January 2000 I was a new dad with three-month-old twins at home; elated but sleepless, I was running on caffeine and adrenaline. When I woke up to news of the AOL deal I rubbed my eyes and banged out a very quick column raising some questions about it.

Later that day I got a call from some producers at CNN asking if I would go on the air to talk about the deal. I thought, yeah, sure, as long as I can keep my eyes open… What I realized once the anchorperson started asking me questions was that I’d been cast as the deal’s Dr. Doom. In retrospect I think I was perhaps the only pundit they could get in front of their cameras who wasn’t convinced that the deal was going to reshape the Web world.

I saved video from the show. Here it is:

“What’s the problem?” indeed! I can’t claim any astute prescience; I couldn’t foresee just how quickly the boom would go bust and the deal would turn sour, and I worried more about big companies trying to strangle the Web than, in retrospect, I needed to. But I knew a fear-driven deal when I saw one and was in no mood to cheer what looked like the blind mating dance of clueless media barons.

It’s good to remember that today as the chorus on the sidelines starts chanting for new matches. They rarely work — and even when they do, they usually mean that the fun is over.

When MP3 was young

by

In early 2000 I got a call from a producer at Fresh Air, asking if I’d like to contribute some technology commentary. Fresh Air is, to my mind, one of the very best shows on radio, so yes, I was excited. For my tryout, I wrote a brief piece about this newfangled thing called MP3 that was just beginning to gain popularity. We’d been covering the MP3 scene at Salon since 1998, but it was still a novelty to much of the American public. I went down to KQED and recorded it. As far as I knew everyone liked it. But it never aired. I had four-month-old twins at home and a newsroom to manage at work. I forgot all about it.

In a recent file-system cleanup I came across the text of the piece and reread it, and thought it stood up pretty well. The picture it presents — of a future for music in which its enjoyment is divorced from the physical delivery system — has now largely come to pass. But at the time I was writing, the iPod was 18 months or so in the future; the iTunes store even farther out; the “summer of Napster” still lay ahead; and the record labels’ war on their own customers was still in the reconaissance phase.

Here it is — a little time capsule from a bygone era, looking forward at the world we live in today:

The phonograph I had as a kid played records at four different speeds. 33 was for LPs, 45 was for singles. There were two other speeds, 16 and 78, but I had no idea what they were for — they made singers on regular LPs sound like they’d sunk to the ocean floor or swallowed helium. Later I learned that the 78 speed was for heavy old disks, mostly from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s; I’m still not clear what 16 was all about.

These old-fashioned playing speeds represented what, in today’s era of rapid obsolescence, we’d call “legacy platforms” — outmoded technologies that are no longer in wide use. The phonograph itself became a “legacy platform” in the 1980s with the advent of the compact disk. Now it’s the CD’s turn, as the distribution of music begins to move onto the Internet.
[Read more…]

The passion of Jim Cramer

by

cramerBy now the entire Internets have witnessed the extraordinary performance on Jon Stewart yesterday, in which Jim Cramer, the bug-eyed host of CNBC’s Mad Money show, took withering, and deserved, shots about his, and his network’s, participation in the market’s recent massive failure. (TPM has the whole thing up here if you want to watch it again.)

For me the high point came towards the end, with Stewart calling Cramer on the investing hucksterism that has been standard fare on CNBC for so long:

I understand you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game… Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything — any time you sell people the idea that, sit back and you’ll get 10 or 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s gonna be a lie? When are we gonna realize in this country that our wealth is work, that we’re workers, and by selling this idea of, hey man, I’ll teach you to be rich, how is that different from an infomercial?

Cramer spends most of the lengthy interview admitting failure and hanging his head. I give him credit for showing up — something that ludicrous grandstander Rick Santelli couldn’t bring himself to do — even though I found his rationalizations mostly unconvincing.

Watching Cramer’s show, which I have only rarely done, has always been a bizarrely alienating experience for me. I got to know the host three decades ago when we both worked at the American Lawyer magazine, Steve Brill’s feisty startup. (I recently wrote a bit about that experience.) I was a callow summer intern, Cramer was a hard-working reporter, and he was extraordinarily generous and helpful to me. I learned a lot from him about how the work of investigative reporting is done. He was clearly an intense and driven guy who seemed to require very little sleep. But, with me at least, he was also for real.

On TV these days, of course, he is anything but. He presents a strange caricature of the addled, hyper-reactive Wall Street lunatic. Since I knew Cramer under other circumstances, I have always assumed that this was a persona, a dramatic construct, a Brechtian parody of the personality of capitalism — and a daily illustration of the “greater fool” theory.

Maybe that’s giving Cramer the benefit of too much doubt; but it does seem hard to miss that the show is intended as comedy. Do people actually make investment decisions by listening to a man who (as Stewart puts it) “throws plastic cows through his legs shouting ‘Sell, sell, sell!’ “? And if they do, should Cramer at least share with them the blame for losses resulting from such gullibility?

I don’t know. But I do know that if you play a role long enough, you become the part. (As I recall, Vonnegut’s Mother Night has something to say about this. Also, in a different vein, Kurosawa’s Kagemusha.) In his Jon Stewart appearance, I thought I saw glints of the real Cramer poking through the madman act. But at this stage of the show, they’re pretty faint.

Writing and rewards: an author marches on his stomach

by

The thing about writing a book is — pardon the obviousness — you have to write a whole lot of words.

Now, plenty of bloggers do lots of writing, over a period of six months or a year they might easily reach the 80-100,000 word sum of a typical book. There are two big differences for the author of a book: First, you’ve got to write according to a plan, so that the little bricks of words you are piling up form something coherent and shapely, whereas bloggers win a free pass to be discursive each time they hit “post.” Second, bloggers’ work is fueled by a daily reward of feedback and reaction to their posts, whether it’s an onslaught of comments or just a small jump on the site-traffic meter. Authors don’t get that. That is why, so often, we devise systems of our own — tracking systems to help keep ourselves on plan, to know whether we’re ahead or behind, and personal reward mechanisms, to provide incentives across arduous weeks and months.

My tracking system is simple: a small spreadsheet with word-count quotas and tallies. I don’t really need to do this, but the ritual of recording each day’s verbal production keeps me moving. The reward mechanism is even simpler.

I have a taste for red licorice. I grew up loving an odd Danish confection called Broadway Licorice Rolls — you got four little rolls of tape-like shapes in a plastic foil wrapping from the candy-store counter. Far as I can tell, they no longer exist. (A brand called Delfa Rolls was distributed online until recently, but is now marked discontinued.) Haribo red licorice wheelsThe closest substitute I have found is Haribo red licorice wheels. I buy them in bulk and dump a big bag in a candy jar in my office. When I’m writing a book, each day after I’ve drafted my target amount of prose — usually 1000 words, sometimes more if I’m behind — I mark the occasion with one or two of these fragrant corn-syrup-solid bonbons.

Now, I know what you’re thinking; or rather, I know there are two groups of you out there. One group is snorting with derision at this crude methodology — self-doping with sugar! All I can say to them is, you do whatever it takes to get the job done. The other bunch is thinking, “How do you avoid stuffing your face every time you hit a rough spot?” All I can say to them is, that would feel like cheating at solitaire. Maybe I scored when they passed out the genes for delayed gratification.

On yesterday’s Fresh Air the science writer Jonah Lehrer was describing a bit of brain research that he discusses in his new book How We Decide. Test subjects divided into two groups were asked to memorize numbers. One group was assigned two digit numbers, the other seven digit figures. Then the members of each group were offered a choice between some sort of gooey, fatty dessert and an austere fruit salad. Of course the seven-digit crew opted much more heavily for the junk food than the double-digit gang.

This result, according to Lehrer, displayed how easily the prefrontal cortex can be overtaxed. The task of remembering the longer numbers had impaired the subjects’ long-term decision-making capacity — the part of their brains that would say, “Don’t eat that crud, it’s bad for you.”

Maybe so. Lehrer has read the study and I haven’t. I only know that as I heard him describe the experiment, and before he offered his interpretation, I sat there and thought: of course the seven-digit people went for the sugar. They’d been asked to do something hard! Now they were rewarding themselves.

The Times, John Dean and the elephant in the room

by

New York Times ombudsman — excuse me, “public editor” — Clark Hoyt published a piece today about a sorry recent incident in which the Times ran a front-page piece granting some exposure and credibility to Watergate revisionists. The piece described the efforts of a writer named Peter Klingman to discredit the work of historian Stanley Kutler, suggesting that Kutler had doctored his transcripts of the Watergate tapes in an effort to protect John Dean and blacken President Nixon’s name.

Hoyt’s piece is fine as far as it goes: it basically points out how weak the Times story was, and how unfair to Kutler. Hoyt concludes that “the Times blew the dispute out of proportion with front-page play, allowed an attack on a respected historian’s integrity without evidence to support it, and left readers to wonder if there was anything here that would change our understanding of the scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency.”

But Hoyt’s discussion conspicuously avoids the elephant in the room (and yes, it is an elephant). I don’t know Klingman’s exact motivations or political affiliations, but it doesn’t take much thought to realize why someone in 2009 might be interested in attacking John Dean and lightening Nixon’s burden of guilt. Dean’s testimony was central in the collapse of Nixon’s presidency. Dean served a prison sentence for his role in Watergate — time that Nixon should have served, too, but avoided by wangling a corrupt pardon for himself. But many conservatives are still itching to exact further punishment for Dean’s betrayal. In the past decade, Dean became an outspoken critic of the Bush administration. Discrediting him would be sweet revenge.

It is bizarre to watch Hoyt dig in at such length about so many of the scholarly and journalistic issues surrounding this story yet fail to discuss the politics.

Full disclosure: I worked closely with Dean back in 2002 on an ill-fated (but still, to me, worthwhile) e-book titled Unmasking Deep Throat. You can read Dean’s take on the Times controversy in this column from the Daily Beast.

Where’s Scott?

by

As the new book is finishing the copy-edit phase of its production cycle, I’ve turned my energy to a number of new projects, which explains the slow blogging here.

I’ve already posted a bit about my entry in the Knight News Challenge competition — MediaBugs, a public “bug tracker” for errors and other problems with media coverage. I’ve now submitted a budget for that project, and we’ll see how far I get as the competition advances.

I’m also working with two great collaborators — Dan Gillmor and Bill Gannon — on developing a new site focusing on media criticism. We’re still in the early stages but moving quickly, and I’ll be writing more here about the work as it moves toward public release.

Then I’m also in the early stages of building a site devoted to blog history. In the course of my book research I accumulated a huge amount of material relating to blog history, vastly more than could be included between the covers. There is no reason for this material to be locked away on my hard drive. Much of it is of course public already on the Web, but scattered. Some of it is off the live Web and now accessible only through Internet Archive URLs. Some of it is original interview material that just didn’t make the book but that’s valuable in its own right.

I would like to put as much of this information out onto the Web as I can, in a useful way, as an open public resource on the subject. I’ve been exploring options for wikifying it all and will report more on that as it moves forward.

So that’s all keeping me busy indeed — and staving off anything like the writerly equivalent of post-partum depression.

RIP John Mortimer

by

I was sad to read of the recent death of John Mortimer — playwright, author, bon vivant and barrister. Here’s the story of my own extremely distant connection with him.

I never had much luck applying for internships in college. Part of it was, I’m sure, the times (the late ’70s and early ’80s were almost as brutal a time in publishing as the present) and part of it was my own belief that self-promotion was uncool and my talents spoke for themselves. But my junior year I did finally land an internship reporting and writing for the American Lawyer monthly — something I now recognize as a startup company led by a young journalist named Steven Brill. My heart lay in writing arts criticism, but I had a good head for investigative reporting and I knew a little about the law, so I took the job and got a few clips, and got to know a colorful (and incredibly talented) gang of future luminaries like Jim Cramer, Jill Abramson, James Stewart, Connie Bruck and many others.

John Mortimer

John Mortimer

I wrote stories about lawyers and law firms, but I really wanted to write about playwrights and artists. So when I started freelancing full time after graduation I pitched the editors at American Lawyer with ideas for pieces about the occasional overlap cases — people like Louis Auchincloss and John Mortimer. In 1982 Mortimer’s wonderful autobiography Clinging to the Wreckage had just come out in the US, and Mortimer was doing interviews in NY, so I got to meet him. He decided that our interview should take place at Maxwell’s Plum, the legendary but by then (to me) tacky East Side cafe and singles bar, because he’d once set a scene in a story there but had never actually set foot inside. So the tape of my otherwise delightful interview with this drily charming subject was rendered nearly untranscribeable by the loud chatter of the surrounding wannabe-socialite gaggle. At that stage of my career I was still sometimes intimidated by the prospect of interviewing writers I admired; Mortimer was the kind of conversationalist who got me over that generously and quickly. The American Lawyer piece from 1982 isn’t online but a second interview I did with him years later, at Salon, still is.

Here’s Charles McGrath’s Times appreciation. McGrath, like nearly every other obit writer, reminds us of Mortimer’s label as a “champagne socialist,” one that he embraced. He may have lived just long enough to see its utility return for a new era of cheerful crusading on the left.

Why second newspapers (used to) matter

by

I worked for a decade at the SF Examiner, a newspaper that was in a very similar position to the Seattle P-I, whose probable death-knell was sounded today when Hearst announced it would shut down the paper if it can’t sell it. The Examiner, too, was owned by Hearst, and it, too, was the “number two” paper in its community, and it, too, was perennially in financial distress, despite being part of the legal monopoly known as a Joint Operating Agreement. JOAs were the product of a Federal law called the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 that was intended to save “number two” newspapers from disappearing and leaving monopolies in their wake.

JOAs couldn’t really change the long-term dynamic of the news industry (lobbiers for the ludicrous idea of a federal newspaper bailout, take note!), but they saved some jobs and kept some troubled papers on artificial life support for a few decades. The main thing they accomplished was to preserve editorial competition. Two papers meant that there wasn’t just one person covering city hall but two. There wasn’t just one sportswriter covering the hometown team’s ups and downs but two. There wasn’t just one daily-paper theater critic at opening night, but (at least for the big shows) two.

San Francisco became a one-paper town nearly a decade ago when the Examiner basically disappeared. (There is still an Examiner in SF but it’s a freebie that makes little pretense to the sort of comprehensive coverage real old-fashioned papers aimed at. For example, as far as I can see its idea of entertainment coverage does not include local theater at all.) And I think the Chronicle, the surviving paper (now owned by the same Hearst Corp. that used to own the Examiner and that’s about to shut down the P-I), is the worse for being a monopoly.

In the competitive sport of journalism as in the competitive market of business, two is qualitatively different from one. When there’s just one person covering anything, human nature kicks in. It’s easy to cut corners and rest on your laurels. Once there’s someone breathing down your neck, everything’s different: You’ve got something to prove. If you screw up, it’s far more likely to come out.

Competition doesn’t always keep people honest. (In my era, there was the case of the Chronicle dance critic who filed a review of a performance panning a particular dancer who, it turned out, had gotten sick and never appeared onstage that evening. As I recall, even the Newspaper Guild couldn’t save that guy’s job.) But it greatly improves the likelihood of journalistic diligence.

Plainly, the long-fading era of any metropolis supporting more than one newspaper is drawing to its final close. Are we then going to face an onslaught of the lazy mediocrity of monopoly journalism? I think we might. But the climate today is wildly different from the late ’80s and early ’90s of my newsroom stint.

Sure, most reporters today have far fewer peers to compete against. But on the Web, their work is subjected to much wider, faster and closer scrutiny than ever before. The monopoly that newspapers are winning by surviving in one city, they’re losing all over again online. Whether it’s the national correspondent whose work can be instantly compared with that of every other publication’s coverage, or the local restaurant critic whose goofs are immediately pointed out by legions of foodie experts on the paper’s website or their own blogs, the local paper’s contributors can’t get away with the sort of coasting that monopolies used to allow. And that’s a relief.

From Village Voice to blogosphere

by

Louis Menand’s account of the early history of the Village Voice in this week’s New Yorker concludes with the following observation:

More than other magazines and newspapers, the Voice was doing what the Internet does now long before there was an Internet. The Voice was the blogosphere — whose motto might be “Every man his own Norman Mailer” — and Craigslist fifty years before their time. The Voice also helped to create the romance of the journalistic vocation by making journalism seem a calling, a means of self-expression, a creative medium.

Menand has it about half-right, I’d say. What was blogospheric about the Voice? For one thing, the way its writers were free to speak their minds, and to squabble with each other in public, in the pages of their own publication. These spats were part of the theater of the thing, and other publications looked down their noses at them. Also, decades before the term “MSM” had been coined, the Voice (in its Press Clips column) pioneered the sort of aggressive take-down of conventional journalism’s missteps that’s a blogging staple today.

But the Voice plainly wasn’t the blogosphere. It was too small, for one thing, too parochial. It did only a tiny bit of “what the Internet does” today, in terms of both quantity and variety. It was a newspaper: Its writers got paid, and there were editors, and you had to send them clips and a resume if you wanted your stuff published.

That’s what I did. As a young freelance journalist fresh out of college, I got my first break, my first pro byline, from M. Mark at the Voice’s book review section. She liked a piece I submitted — not well enough to run it, but enough to toss me a book to review. It was an experience I remain thankful for. But it had absolutely no similarity to what I’d do if I were 22 today, with the opportunity to publish open in my browser.

Menand is right, though, about the romance part. The belief that the form of journalism could stretch to contain a far wider spectrum of creative self-expression than the newsroom oldtimers were attempting incubated at the Voice. I inherited it from my college-newspaper mentors and carried it through my career. In the 1970s and ’80s this approach still had a renegade quality; today it is pretty much the norm, from blogs to the New York Times.