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Archives for October 2008

Andreessen’s newspaper advice echoes Grove’s, a decade ago

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We’re moving into the endgame for newspapers today, though the industry hasn’t quite reached the Kubler-Rossian stage of acceptance.

Yesterday the venerable Christian Science Monitor announced it was abandoning daily print publication. In Portfolio, Marc Andreessen proposes that other newspapers follow suit and finally give up on print:

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?

Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business — shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.

The Intel reference here is an oblique reference to Andy Grove’s famous comment to the ASNE that the newspaper industry had three years to adapt or die.

That was in 1999.

Andreessen’s advice makes total sense in many ways — it would be fascinating and worthwhile for at least one major newspaper publisher to try it. This sort of turn-your-company-on-a-dime idea is part of the Silicon Valley ethos. But I just don’t see it happening.

Hard though it no doubt was, it’s still a lot easier for a hardware company like Intel to retool its fabs and its engineers to produce a different kind of chip than for a newspaper company to retool its reporters and editors to produce a different kind of media product.

Shutting off the presses at the New York Times, or any other major newspaper publisher, would make the company an “internet-only company.” But it wouldn’t make it an Internet Company, in the larger sense. You’d still have a newsroom full of people used to doing things a certain way, proud, with good reason, of that way, and suspicious of change. It’s much easier to build a new company from scratch than to transform an existing one into something new.

But the bigger problem isn’t psychological, it’s financial. I base my views on a decade of experience at Salon, trying to support an online-only newsroom with online-only revenues. It turns out that the hardest part of this massive and inevitable industrial transition is not reconstituting high-quality journalism in a new media environment. That’s only mildly hard. Top-notch journalists will always seek to do top-notch work.

The really tough part — the part that to this day remains unsolved — is figuring out how to support those top-notch journalists with the salaries and benefits they are accustomed to, and often deserve. (That’s not even taking into account the loss of jobs on the printing and distribution side. But they are disappearing eventually no matter what.) The problem today is not much easier than it was when we started Salon in 1995: Look at Politico — an online success d’estime that still earns 90 percent of its revenue from a niche print product.

Newspaper companies are clinging to their dwindling print profits because they can’t yet see a way to keep anything close to their current pay scale and benefits in an online-only world. And the hardest pill for the industry to swallow is that there may not be any way to do that.

Internet companies pay top dollar to their engineers, not their “content producers.” There is no shortage of reasonably high quality content on the Web, much of it produced for free or little pay. Of course blogs and “user generated content” can’t replace the collective output of the nation’s journalism professionals today. But they offer plenty of alternatives, and enough occasions on which they surpass the pros (or expose the pros’ failings) to keep readers occupied, and sometimes satisfied.

As Bruce Reed wrote in Slate last year during the Hollywood writer’s strike, “There is no such thing as a writer’s market. With or without subsidy, words are always in surplus, and it’s always a reader’s market.”

No amount of handwringing will change that. If newspapers are really going to take the leap Andreessen proposes, they will have to do it while simultaneously restructuring their deals with their employees and mandating painful cuts that nobody wants to accept. Which is why I don’t think they will do it at all.

Ironically, of course, those jobs will vanish anyway. As I wrote in June, I think the newspaper-company ships are doomed to sink, and individual journalists will have to find their own individual lifeboats and routes to shore. The sooner they start, the better.

ELSEWHERE: Mark Potts thinks “Newspapers haven’t even scratched the surface on potential online advertising revenue” and an exclusively online operation could rake in more money. I don’t know; I’ve been there, done that, and it’s not so easy. Alan Mutter says the magic multiple is 3 — newspapers would have to triple their current online revenue to break even.

Twitter’s link-sharing limits

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One of the main things that I do on Twitter these days, and that the people I follow do, is share links. Sharing links is one of the primal activities on the Web. It was one of the first things people did once they started building Web pages; it was one of the two driving forces behind the rise of blogging (the other was unedited self-expression).

Twitter was built for people to share “status messages” — the answer to the “What are you doing?” question — but most of the people I follow don’t use it for that very much. They use it to comment on news events and to share links they like. Because of this disjunction between original design and “street use,” I find that Twitter gets only one thing about sharing links right — and pretty much everything else wrong.

What it gets right is immediacy. Twitter is fantastic when there’s a breaking story and you want to see what links people are handing around. It’s a much speedier way to tune in to what’s happening (Senator Stevens — guilty!) than RSS feeds or reloading a news site’s front page.

But Twitter privileges “now”-ness over everything else. You can’t tag your links. You can annotate them only if you can say what you wish in under 140 characters (actually, under 140 minus the length of the URL). You can’t even see what the actual URL is, most of the time, since people use URL-shorteners to save space. There is really no other way to say this: For a service that is so widely used to share links, Twitter really sucks at it.

Delicious has long offered the best combination of features for simple link saving and sharing (it’s got space for annotations and a spiffy new interface). You can use Delicious to “follow” (subscribe to) specific tags, but not, as far as I can tell, to follow specific users. (If I’m behind on Delicious’s feature set, enlighten me!) You can use Delicious-generated RSS feeds for that, but we’re getting pretty far afield — nothing remotely approaching Twitter’s simplicity.

So here’s an opportunity for Twitter, or for someone else, if the Twitter team is too busy: Offer a service very similar to Twitter but optimized for link-sharing. (FriendFeed is cool but it’s trying to do so many other things at the same time that I don’t think it suits what I’m talking about.) Make it easier to share links real-time; expose the actual URL; give us some rudimentary tools for organizing the links; and watch something cool grow.

Of course, Twitter has the critical mass of usage right now, and that’s not going away. But surely there’s room for improvement.

Noonan: maybe economic crisis will “fade”

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New Yorker writer (and blogger) George Packer’s series of “end of an era” posts — he begins here, and follows up in three subsequent posts (as of now) — puts a clear and explicit name to the twin convulsion the United States is going through.

Over the past month we have seen the collapse of an entire economic philosophy that has driven our nation for decades. In parallel to this ideological failure, we are experiencing the political failure of the Republican right that has dominated American politics since 1980. These are cataclysmic changes, like nothing we’ve seen in at least 30 years.

Thursday Alan Greenspan sat before Congress and said he had “found a flaw” in his worldview. Indeed! Or as they say in the ‘sphere thes days, EPIC FAIL. It was as if he took a look at the whole foundational edifice of the global economic system he engineered and, morphing into Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella, let out a whimpering “Never mind.” Meanwhile, the GOP isn’t waiting for Election Day to begin the customary circular-firing-squad behavior of the losing party, a ritual that most of us under a certain age have only seen executed on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Yet there are holdouts in the punditocracy who don’t seem to have taken full measure of just how much things have changed in the past month. I hate to pick on Peggy Noonan again — hey, some people think she deserves a Pulitzer! But in her column today, headlined “43 percent isn’t nothing,” she engages in precisely the kind of reality-denial that her fans insist she is immune to.

The “43 percent” are the people who are still voting Republican this year. (Time was, not long ago, that the GOP was touted as having built a “permanent majority,” so 43 percent might seem like a real comedown. Then again, President Bush didn’t actually win a majority in 2000, either, did he?) Noonan, ignoring her own candid conclusion six weeks ago that “It’s over,” wants to look at ways McCain might still pull out a victory.

How might McCain still win an upset? Noonan asks, “What if…the financial crisis seems to fade?” (Noonan implies that this is part of an argument in a Boston Phoenix column, but if you read the source, there’s nothing in it about financial crises fading.)

It boggles the mind that any journalist could get such words past a sentient editor. Imagine someone, four weeks after 9/11, asking, “What if the terrorism crisis seems to fade?” Memo to Ms. Noonan: even if the Dow skyrockets next week, the financial crisis isn’t fading any time before November 4. We will be lucky if it has faded before November, 2012. It is a world-historical event. It will be reshaping our economic lives for many years to come, even in the best of scenarios.

Later in her piece, Noonan contemplates the unthinkable — what if Obama does win? — and offers the standard-issue columnist boilerplate advice: he’d better govern from the center! Or else! Then she lets loose this doozy:

if he goes left — if it comes to seem as if the attractive, dark-haired man has torn open his shirt to reveal a huge S, not for Superman but for Socialist, if he jumps toward reforms such as a speech-limiting new Fairness Doctrine, that won’t yield success.

I do believe that we need, not perhaps a new Fairness Doctrine, but a special new Rhetorical Honesty Act — or, I guess, a constitutional amendment, to get the rule past the First Amendment — banning any Republican from trying to spook a Democrat with the “Socialist” label ever again. Because we already have a “socialist” president. His name is George W. Bush, and he is, as I write this, nationalizing the banks and presiding over the greatest expansion of government meddling in private industry that the U.S. has ever seen.

“Stick to the center” is a natural fall-back for the losing party in a presidential election. Winners are free to embrace it or reject it as they choose. I recall that the conservative punditry never offered this advice to George W. Bush in 2000. Once he took office after the most hotly disputed election resolution in American history, he took an unearned “mandate” to radically reshape much of American government and foreign policy.

But if, as seems quite possible, Obama wins a sweep and the Democrats wind up with a strong majority in both houses of Congress, you will hear a loud chorus from the right and center-right press: President Obama, they’ll say, don’t “go left” — you have no mandate. In fact, in that scenario he will indeed have a mandate, and I imagine he will use it. But I also think he will govern toward the center — not because of what Noonan or anyone else says, but because it seems to be his nature.

UPDATE: More “S”: This hysterical piece from Mark Levin at NRO’s The Corner paints Obama as a “hardened ideologue” and “charismatic demagogue” who will wreck America with “the soft authoritarianism of socialism.”

Reports of blogging’s death are…

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Just in time for me to include somewhere near the end of my book, there’s a little wavelet of argument out there suggesting that blogging is, well, over.

From Paul Boutin in Wired comes the simple form of the argument: Blogging’s no longer hot. The cool kids are all playing with Twitter and Facebook. The blogosphere has been “flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge.”

Boutin seals his case by reference to Jason Calacanis’s much-ballyhooed retreat from his blog to a mailing list. Boutin somehow buys Calacanis’s public rationale — “He can talk to his fans directly, without having to suffer idiotic retorts from anonymous Jason-haters” — which sounds great until you think, uh, couldn’t he have just turned off the comments?

Then there’s Robert Scoble, who now reserves his blog for longer essays and can be found in many other spots on the Web distributing links and videos and tweets. Scoble’s choice seems perfectly sensible to me; he is a restless early adopter and experimenter, but he’s not exactly abandoning his popular blog.

Boutin’s piece betrays a nostalgia for what it explicitly refers to as a “golden age” of blogging, which apparently occurred circa 2004 and was led by people like Calacanis and Scoble. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my book research it’s that each of us locates blogging’s “golden age” in whichever era it was that we discovered the phenomenon. For me, it was probably 1998, when I found my job as Salon’s technology editor incomparably enriched (and also assisted) by the first flowering of the tech and web-design weblog movement. For many others, it was the early days of Blogger in 2000-2001, or the explosion of political blogs and “warblogs” post-9/11.

There were, in other words, at least three — and probably several more — waves of bloggers preceding Boutin’s version of a “golden age,” each of which felt they were discovering something new. (See Rebecca Blood’s “law of Weblog history.”) And, inevitably, after our personal “golden age” experiences, whenever they were, we tend to get disillusioned. Some will gravitate entirely away from blogging; others achieve some peace with it despite its limitations and problems. I guess Boutin is somewhere in that cycle now.

I share his distaste for the way that the commercialization of the Technorati Top 100 has turned a certain type of blogging into a rat race, but I don’t see that as having ruined blogging for the rest of us. Nor do I see a phenomenon with tens if not hundreds of millions of participants as dead. Of course the Silicon Valley early-adopter crowd has moved on — that’s what they’re supposed to do, once something they pioneered has gone mainstream. Boutin, meanwhile, is now a full-time blogger at Valleywag. Perhaps that dismal gig is what’s got him so down.

A broader epitaph not so much for blogging itself but for the promise blogging made of widening our democratic discourse comes from Nick Carr (on his, er, blog, of course). Carr writes about the changes since he started blogging in 2005: apparently in that distant halcyon time, Technorati could be reliably used to track discussions in the blogosphere, but now, Google does a better job. Google Reader, too, has supplanted Bloglines as the RSS reader of choice for many (me, too). Back in 2005 the Web was “centrifugal,” pulling us away from centers of gravity, but today, as Google becomes the center of so many Web services, the medium has once again become “centripetal,” Carr argues. He is smart enough to admit that centrifugal forces remain — enterprising sites and bloggers that still employ “deliberately catholic linking” — but says they’re weaker than the centralizing forces.

“For most of us, most of the time, the World Wide Web has become a small and comfortable place. Indeed, statistics indicate that web traffic is becoming more concentrated at the largest sites,” Carr writes.

I recall reading identical passages a decade ago, when the first flush of Web novelty had worn off and the portals were taking over. Then, as with Carr’s observation today, we were told that the Web’s innovative days were over, its disruptive potential was used up, and the big media conglomerates were back in charge. At that moment, you could still count the number of weblogs on your fingers (and maybe toes); Google hadn’t even been founded yet.

I continue to bet on the flexibility of the Web as a platform for personal expression that will keep mutating and surprising us. Blogging has been a central part of that phenomenon for a decade. Of course it will continue to evolve. But I don’t see it diminishing in importance.

Consider the case of Merlin Mann, whose excellent 43 Folders blog rose to stardom during Boutin’s “golden age.” Mann’s experience made an effective case study for how a blog could grow from a personal obsession to a profitable small business, but over time he grew disenchanted with much of what “pro blogging” had become. As he wrote last month:

the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web’s glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, did these guys love to post and post and post.

Mann didn’t just go off in a corner and sulk; he decided to reinvent his blog, transforming it from “personal productivity” coaching to a broader theme of helping creative people think about how to focus on what’s important to them. Kottke wrote a bit about Mann’s changes here.

I’ve come to enjoy Twitter, and made my peace with Facebook, and I don’t doubt there are plenty of people who will prefer to use these services rather than start a blog. But as long as blogging remains a form that can absorb the energy of people like Merlin Mann and serve as a creative outlet for millions of others, I will treat all reports of its demise as unreliable.

Or maybe, as Matthew Ingram Seamus McCauley suggests, Boutin was just trolling.

UPDATE: Two useful comments (from Twitter):

Paul Kedrosky: current wired piece by paul boutin about death of blogs is silly. only reason 30-author blogs exist is because of ad bubble. that’s over.

Anil Dash: Dear tech blogosphere: Paul Boutin blogs for a living in a competitive market, and just said you should stop blogging. Guess why he said it?

It should be noted that Dash’s “The Blog Cycle” is an authoritative description of the “golden age” phenomenon I described above.

Sullivan’s new blog manifesto

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Andrew Sullivan’s essay “Why I Blog,” in the new Atlantic, is a valuable meditation on the act of blogging from one of the key figures in the story of the rise of the political blogosphere. (It echoes a lot of what Sullivan wrote in a blogger “manifesto” back in 2002 — now available, as far as I can tell, only on the Internet Archive.)

It’s not surprising to find Sullivan focusing on the provisional, in-the-moment nature of a blogger’s work: of all the prominent political bloggers, he has charted the most extended voyage of partisan transformation, from a belligerent supporter of President Bush post 9-11 through disillusionment with the botched Iraq war and its accompanying moral failures to a current pro-Obama stance.

Sullivan describes blogging as “writing out loud,” a form that “exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before”:

It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

I think it’s important to say that Sullivan offers blanket declarations about the nature of blogging that really ought to be understood as descriptions of his particular mode of blogging. The picture of blogging Sullivan paints is very much one from the perspective of a writer trained as a print journalist. Nothing wrong with that; I’m in the same boat. But blogging is, as Sullivan says, an enterprise of the individual, and individual experiences are all over the map — many, almost certainly the majority, very different from his, yet no less valid.

Another point Sullivan makes is that bloggers are actually more accountable than their conventional-journalism colleagues, not less — because “there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness” in the give-and-take of email or comments or linked-back posts.

So permit me to point out one sloppy error in “Why I Blog” — Sullivan’s description of Slate as “the first magazine published exclusively on the Web.” Sullivan also wrote for Salon, and he pairs Salon and Slate later in the piece, so I’d guess the error was careless rather than malicious. Still, let the record show that Salon published its first issue, “exclusively on the Web,” a full eight months before Slate — Nov. 1995 as opposed to mid-1996. (Here’s a piece I wrote back then making fun of some of what Slate editor Michael Kinsley had to say about the Web, which he plainly didn’t understand.) And Salon wasn’t the first, either, anyway. Steven Johnson and Stefanie Syman were publishing Feed for about six months before us. Hotwired, for that matter, launched a full year earlier than Salon. All were professional online-only “magazines” that paid their writers and sold ads. No doubt there were others I’m forgetting.

This really is the sort of mistake that fact-checkers are paid to prevent — trivial in one sense, but self-perpetuating in another, because the next time some fact-checker wants to know who published the first online magazine, they’ll cite this Atlantic piece as an authority.

As Sullivan puts it:

Unlike newspapers, which would eventually publish corrections in a box of printed spinach far from the original error, bloggers had to walk the walk of self-correction in the same space and in the same format as the original screwup.

Financial meltdown blame game: Fannie/Freddie or derivatives?

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The big political argument over the financial meltdown basically goes like this. Democrats point to the rise of incredibly complex financial instruments, in particular the species of derivatives called credit default swaps (CDSes), as ground zero for the disaster. Republicans prefer to point their fingers at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for making it too easy for people to get mortgages.

It’s easy to see how these preferences arise. Democrats can argue that CDSes became a problem because the Republican Congress (with limited Democratic help) chose not to regulate them, in keeping with the party’s decades-long deregulation fever. Republicans can argue that subprime mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddie became a problem because Democrats pushed to make home ownership more widely available to people who couldn’t really afford it.

These arguments have become a political shorthand, but responsible voters should take some time to sort them out. A couple of places to start: this point-counterpoint style debate between two pundits lays out some of thepolitical faultlines. This news analysis from McClatchy offers some factual background.

My take: Sure, Fannie and Freddie became a big mess, and you can’t let them off the hook. But the subprime mortgages were mostly originated by private banks, not F&F. And if the financial system’s only problem were subprime mortgages, you could simply buy up the worst of them for a few hundred billion and call it a day. That’s not why the banks got into trouble. It was the CDS market that took those mortgages and turned them into something “toxic.” By securitizing the risk involved in the mortgages and transforming it into a market theoretically worth tens of trillions of dollars but actually worth, well, who knows?, the CDS peddlers and purchasers pushed the entire financial world into the unknown. Specifically, they now have no idea what their credit-default swaps are worth.

That is why the banks stopped trusting each other. It’s the uncertainty over how to value these CDSes that seems to have caused the credit freeze that is the heart of today’s crisis. (That’s why Paulson originally wanted a bailout that would buy them — he trhought he could resolve the uncertainty — but that approach apparently proved unworkable.)

The uncertainty over subprime mortgages is old-fashioned and reasonably known: some percent of mortgage holders will pay up, some others won’t. Banks and insurance companies know how to handle that kind of risk. It was the effort to engineer new kinds of securities based on that risk that pushed us over the edge. The CDSes were supposed to reduce risk, and they ended up magnifying it inconceivably instead. And here we are, wishing that someone had had the forethought to regulate this marketplace, instead of keeping hands off, as Alan Greenspan and Phil Gramm wanted.

I can’t see how either candidate would be able or willing to go this far into the weeds during tonight’s debate (and it isn’t even that far!). But this is what voters really need to understand.

In conversation with Leo and friends

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I had a good time yesterday afternoon chatting with Leo Laporte, Harry McCracken (formerly of PC World and now a free-agent blogger at Technologizer), and Tom Merritt of CNET’s Buzz Out Loud on Laporte’s “This Week in Technology” podcast. We talked about Apple’s forthcoming notebook announcements, Sarah Palin’s email accounts, whether Google should be feared, whether the NSA’s eavesdropping should be feared, whether Google’s Android phone should be cheered, whether charging for SMS text messages at both ends will kill off the technology, and a lot more.

I am a mere amateur when it comes to Apple geekery and cellphone connoisseurship, and what I know about SMS text messaging could be communicated via SMS text messaging, so the invitation to hobnob with the experts was a gracious one — thanks, Leo! And we did talk a little about my book and the story of blogging.

You can listen to the whole thing here.

Review of Randall Stross’s Google book

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I will poke my head up ever so briefly from my labors to note that I have a book review up at Salon today of Randall Stross’s new “Planet Google.”

Here’s a couple passages:

“Planet Google” further reinforces the picture we now have of Google as the Mr. Spock of Internet companies: intellectually supreme, agile and engaged with the world, but prone to respond to the unpredictable behavior of its customers by cocking an eyebrow and exclaiming, “Highly irrational!”

Is there a Bones McCoy anywhere in the company who can provide a humanist counterweight to all that calculation? Maybe — but you’re not likely to learn who it is from Stross’ research. “Planet Google” is solid and informative, and Stross, refreshingly, avoids the frothier sort of Google hype sometimes heard from the tech-punditry choir. But the book is hardly the insider’s-eye view of Google that it has been painted to be.

Also:

If Google is going to falter over the coming decade, it is likely to be the result of avidly pursuing its “organize the world’s information” goal even as the evidence mounts that its Spock-like principles and engineering-first culture may not get the company to its destination. Stross’ account provides several case studies — including accounts of the oddly neglected Orkut social networking site and the ill-fated Google Answers service — in which innovative Google ventures foundered because of the company’s clumsiness at managing human interaction.

Obama, McCain: Tortoise, hare

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When the story of this election gets written, expect to read a lot about how the financial-system implosion gave Obama an unexpected post-GOP-convention boost that turned the dynamic decisively. And of course to an extent that’s undeniable. But this analysis implies that the candidates are mere victims of events. Big Things Happened and there was nothing John McCain could do to recover.

But why, exactly, has it been that the Wall Street meltdown has proved so lethal to McCain’s electoral prospects? Pundits now blithely say that “Democrats are traditionally the party voters turn to on pocketbook issues.” This claim may draw evidence from certain poll questions, but in the history of the past few decades you find the most successful Republican president (Reagan) credited with resurrecting a moribund economy, and you find voters often turning to the GOP as the party that could keep American business humming. So it’s not as though McCain had nothing to work with.

I think that the picture of McCain as victim of Wall Street chaos disintegrates on close examination. The financial situation has hurt him the way virtually every significant event or crisis of the campaign has: it has shown how improvisational, seat-of-the-pants and ultimately unsteady his style of leadership is (which is why his “steady hand on the tiller” rhetoric fails to connect).

Opportunity favors the prepared. And the rich irony of this election has been that, “green behind the ears” though he may appear to be, it is Obama, the rookie, who has been showing us what “prepared” really looks like.

He has run a methodical, strategically intelligent, eyes-on-the-prize campaign from the start to near the finish. He has not allowed poll-dips or transitory squalls to knock him off course. He has applied creative and energetic attention equally to ground organization and Web activism. These are qualities we’re all going to want to see in a national leader as we try to pick up the pieces of the country from the Bush-era wtreckage.

When the markets began breaking down, yes, Obama kept talking about the middle class and the failed GOP policies of deregulation. But he’d been talking about them for a year-and-a-half already. He didn’t have to declare a bogus suspension of his campaign to show how he “got it.”

If the financial crisis has pushed Obama into a firm lead, it is not because events somehow distracted voters from other negatives about the candidate. Rather, the crisis offered a decisive illustration of what kind of president he’s likely to be — and a contrast with what we might get from the other guy.

All of which is reassuring, at a time when we could all use some reassurance. As it turns out, for all the imagery we’ve seen of Obama as the second coming of JFK, it’s looking, depressingly, like we’re going to need him to be FDR instead.

(This email over at TPM expresses a similar view of McCain’s self-inflicted troubles.)

Sarah Palin vs the media filter

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One of the themes of the book I’m working on is the whole notion so many bloggers have had that the media represent a “filter,” and blogging allows it to be bypassed. Not an idea that’s original to me — you betcha! — but one that is entwined with the whole subject I’m covering.

So you know that my ears perked up in the vice-presidential debate last week when Sarah Palin said:

I like being able to answer these tough questions without the filter, even, of the mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they’ve just heard. I’d rather be able to just speak to the American people like we just did.

She hit the same point again on Fox on Friday, discussing her disastrous performances with Katie Couric:

I guess I have to apologize for being a bit annoyed, but that’s also an indication about being outside that Washington elite, outside that media elite also, and just wanting to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for.

And here she is again in William Kristol’s column today:

She doesn’t have a very high opinion of the mainstream media… She described the debate on Thursday night as “liberating,” and she emphasized how much she now looked forward to being out there, “getting to speak directly to the folks.”

It’s fair to say, I think, that “bash the MSM and yearn to speak directly to the folks” is now at the front of Palin’s deck of talking-point index cards, right up there with “maverick.” Before diving in for a look at this rhetoric, a caveat: It may ultimately be impossible to try to read Palin’s words here, as elsewhere, too closely. Like some smudged-out ancient scroll, her text is simply too corrupted in too many ways to support a confident interpretation. Still, her animus against the “filter” is no coincidence, and bears scrutiny.

A filter can be a highly useful thing. Most of us value the idea that the news media will boil down a torrent of information into something manageable. But filters can distort a signal, and they can malfunction: they can filter out something we want, or include something we don’t want. So we need filters, but we don’t always trust them.

Some of the earliest blogs viewed themselves as filters of the Web (Michael Sippey called his proto-blog Filter, or later Filtered for Purity); their idea was a curatorial culling of tidbits found during Web wanderings. (The tradition is upheld today by BoingBoing, Kottke and many others.)

But there’s also a long tradition among bloggers of viewing blogs as the antidote to filters. In this view, the media are literally an unreliable middle-man who must be cut out. The media filter will get your age wrong or mangle your words or just not tell your story in the way you think it should be told. Now that anyone can publish, you don’t have to take this lying down. So today we have public figures like Mark Cuban blogging, putting his own statements and thoughts directly on the record.

Now comes Palin, trying to join this parade. The problem is, your typical ranter against the evil ways of the media filter is someone who has been covered for some time and has built up a critical mass of resentment at factual errors or misquotes.

But Palin? Who’s filtering her? She has spent her month as a major-party vice presidential candidate without holding a single press conference. She has submitted to a number of interviews that you could count on the fingers of a single hand, and still have fingers left over. Yet she has the chutzpah to gripe that she would happily “speak directly to the folks,” but the darned media filter keeps getting in her way!

No, Palin’s problem isn’t too much filter — it’s not enough signal.

Obviously Palin’s preference is for a media channel in which no one will interrupt her talking points or challenge her on a stumble or a lie. She longs for some sort of combination of blogging’s directness and the Olympian remoteness of a broadcast medium that brooks no challenge. “Let me talk to you without the filter,” she says, “but I won’t take questions.” Every politician would love that — but nearly all accept that they’re not going to get it.

Alas for Palin, we have not yet devised that ideal communication method which would bypass media filters and miraculously convey her vision directly directly to the American people via, say, telepathy (or even speaking in tongues). There simply is no such thing as “speaking directly to the American people” without also having the “mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they’ve just heard” right afterwards.

They did so right after that very debate that Palin said she “liked” for its directness, so go figure. It’s here, I think, that the unreadable-text problem grows insurmountable. For Palin, what we really need isn’t a filter but rather a text-unscrambler.

In any case, the spirit of blogging is all about mixing it up, posting and counterposting and dealing with critical comments. You get to “speak directly” — but so does everybody else. It’s not the equivalent of having no press conferences at all; it’s like having a continuous press conference in which everyone, officially credentialled or no, gets to ask questions. It would be fascinating to see Palin try speaking that directly.