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An editor! An editor! My kingdom for an editor!

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My computer meltdown meant I wasn’t able to post in a timely fashion on the Gregg Easterbrook/anti-semitism dustup, and I’m not going to launch into a lengthy dissertation at this late date. Here’s a short one instead.

Easterbrook has always struck me as a facile writer with some interesting ideas and a penchant for contrarianism even when it carries him into ridiculous waters (as with his ludicrous and contrafactual defenses of the Bush environmental record). But it seems pretty obvious to me that he is not an anti-semite. There’s no way he could have maintained a long association with the New Republic, that bastion of the Israel lobby, if he were an actual hater of Jews.

He posted something stupid on his blog; he apologized; I’m not sure there’d be any more of a story here, except that he is plugged into the New Republic/Slate Axis of Kinsley, has friends in the media falling over themselves asserting his innocence of prejudice, and his ugly words resounded through the echo chamber of the Beltway intelligentsia like a particularly loud bodily eruption that no one could ignore. Should he have been fired from ESPN? I don’t think so. (Read King Kaufman on this for more.)

It is clear that Easterbrook will now go down in the books as object lesson A on the subject of why journalists who are used to working with editors should think twice before giving up that safety net. Any editor with half a brain would have read Easterbrook’s paragraph singling out the bosses of Disney and Miramax as Jews who “worship money,” pulled the writer over and said, “Uh, you don’t want to say this this way.” Without the advantage of a second reader, post-first-think-later writers like Easterbrook will be free to hang themselves. Which is fine for many or most bloggers out there; indeed, the spectacle is part of the fun of this new media form. But those — like Easterbrook — whose livelihoods depend on their reputation as writers may sensibly retreat to the safety of editors.

Life in hell

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After two days in hardware hell I’m finally back in business.

It began with an apparently dead motherboard on Monday morning. Since Radio Userland is a client-side tool I couldn’t just move to my laptop and not worry about things. I had to get this box fixed. The quest involved swapping out the motherboard; buying new memory because I failed to account for the fact that the new mobo used DDR memory (but thank god memory’s cheap these days); then throwing my hands up in despair as the new hardware exhibited the same apparent symptoms as the old (no video out, no BIOS “beep” on startup).

Thanks to the amazing support resources on the Net I eventually figured out that what I had to do was hold a paper clip to a pair of solder points on the motherboard in order to reset the CMOS. I am not kidding. It’s 2003 and we’re still poking paper clips into our computers to get them to work.

In any case the computer is up again, Radio is running once more, and all I have to do is spend hours now reinstalling the rest of my life onto this new computer (I had to reinstall the OS too — the hardware transition was too much for the old Win2K installation).

Blog vs. blog

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John Markoff of the New York Times is one of the smartest and most respected tech reporters around. He’s also seen a lot of trends boom and bust. I didn’t take his comments in an OJR interview to be as dismissive of the phenomenon of blogging as many of my fellow bloggers have. Markoff said:

  I certainly can see that scenario, where all these new technologies may only be good enough to destroy all the old standards but not create something better to replace them with. I think that’s certainly one scenario. The other possibility right now — it sometimes seems we have a world full of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that’s what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it’s not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio. And, you know, give it five or 10 years and see if any institutions emerge out of it. It’s possible that in the end there may be some small subset of people who find a livelihood out of it and that the rest of the people will find that, you know, keeping their diaries online is not the most useful thing to with their time. When I tell that to people … they get very angry with me. …

I think he’s right to suggest that it’s going to take 5 to 10 years before we know whether blogging will actually have a lasting impact on institutional journalism. Like most journalistic pros, though, he sets professional criteria: he assumes the yardstick is going to be, can anyone “find a livelihood” from blogging, and do “any institutions emerge out of it.”

But like so many other Web phenomena, blogging may prove significant despite a failure to prove itself as a business. Institutions and livelihoods is not the point here. We already have a class of professional journalists. It does certain things quite well. It fails to serve many other needs. Blogs are something different. They are not displacing professional journalism but rather complementing it.

In one of those great fortuitous juxtapositions of blog-postings that we sometimes witness, on the same day as Markoff’s interview hit the Web, Jay Rosen chose to unveil an extremely pithy and useful list of “Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism”.

The whole list is worth reading, but let’s zero in on point number one: “The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market economy.” Pros live in the market economy and have a very hard time with this concept. And American culture uses dollars as the only yardstick of seriousness and significance, so stuff that is not measurable by that yardstick tends to evoke puzzlement or dismissal.

This is one of the things I tried to emphasize in my comments at Bloggercon: Online phenomena do not have to make money to be of value to people. Blogs can change individual lives — and even, conceivably, the world, in some way — without needing business models and marketing machines. In fact, what makes them unusual to many who produce and consume them is precisely that they are not simply another retread of the media business.

So while I understand, and to some extent share, John Markoff’s sense of deja vu as he surveys the blogscape — yes, sometimes it really does sound a lot like 1993-1994 out there — I don’t think that blogs are doomed to recapitulate the early Web’s cycle of starry-eyed idealism fueling insane visions of wealth collapsing into financial wreckage. If we remember the past we should not be condemned to repeat it, right? This is why my hackles go up when I hear about schemes to turn blogs into Big Businesses. That way madness lies.

Farewell to Emusic

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I’ve written rapturously in the past about the Emusic service, for which I’ve willingly paid for many many months, based on its high quality of unusual music and its smart policy on downloads.

Well, all good things must pass, and now it seems that Emusic has been acquired by new owners who’ve decided that it should become just like all the other online music services, limiting the amount of music users get for their money. It’s not all bad news; it sounds like Emusic will continue to offer real MP3s rather than DRM-crippled files, for instance. But the real value of the service as a place where you could get turned on to musical obscurities in abundance looks like it will vanish.

It’s tough to run any sort of business online these days and I assume Emusic is doing what it has to do to stay afloat. But I’ll probably be canceling my subscription, and something tells me a whole lot of other people are going to do the same.

Back to the future

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In a previous life I spent my time writing about plays and movies. At the S.F. Examiner — may it rest in peace — I had the privilege of being movie critic from 1992 to 1994. One of the challenges of the job was finding ways to respond creatively, and uniquely, to products that were rolling off Hollywood’s assembly line with depressing uniformity. Another of the challenges was to do so between the hours of 10:30 p.m., when a movie screening often ended, and my 2 a.m. deadline.

Sometimes I found ways to have fun. Today’s sad news from the recall election reminded me of one of those occasions, when, bored beyond reason by Schwarzenegger’s 1993 dud “The Last Action Hero,” I discarded the usual review format and instead wrote up an imaginary dialogue between video archivists of the future. It was clear to me then that Arnold’s career as an action star was tanking. I was not sufficiently prescient to predict his second career (third, really, if you count bodybuilder and movie star as one and two) as a demagogue.

I’m posting the piece here for those looking for some Schwarzenegger-y diversion.

The act became real

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Far be it from me to insist that politicians actually take positions before the election, but now that we’ve made Arnold governor, it will be neat to find out what he actually stands for and how he intends to deal with our various crises. It’s a little disheartening that his only campaign position with any specificity was to promise cutting the auto licensing “tax” (really a fee). We already have a budget gap in the tens of billions, so hey, what’s a few billion more?

As a California citizen and parent, I wait with great interest to find out how Schwarzenegger’s approach to the state’s cruel budgetary quandary is going to differ from Davis’s. Schwarzenegger is about to learn that funding a state’s schools and services is a different beast from funding a movie production.

Maybe what’s actually happened is that we’ve elected Pete Wilson as governor and Arnold as figurehead. Maybe Maria Shriver will call in the Kennedy brigade. One thing’s for sure: Somebody better write Arnold a good script, and fast, or all that telegenic flesh is going to ooze off him to reveal the metallic exoskeleton of greed and power-lust that actually shaped his campaign.

For my money, by the way, the absolute best piece of writing so far on this election is today’s piece in Salon by Cary Tennis. Here’s a taste:

  The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger is profoundly undemocratic not because the majority didn’t win but because the majority acted as moviegoers rather than as citizens. Democracy is not simply about the vote. The vote is not simply like a ticket bought at Disneyland. And citizenship is not about the satisfaction of the id.

Monday notes

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Bloggercon was fun. I saw some old friends, met some people in person who I’d only known by their writing, and got to chew on some toothsome ideas.

I think that my panel probably could have gone on for two more hours — felt like we just barely scratched the surface — but there were lots of other people who had as much or more that needed to be said. At this sort of conference, the distinction between who’s at the podium and who’s in the crowd is pretty meaningless — a room full of bloggers is a room full of people with a lot to say.

Other people took tons of notes if you want to follow some of the conversation (though keep in mind these transcripts are pretty rough — I’ve seen a few things here and there that I know are mistaken!). Dan Bricklin took some great pictures.

I’ve got more to say but it’s going to dribble out through the week, I think. Too much other work right now…

Presidential blogging

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One of the highlights of the sessions here at Bloggercon yesterday was the panel of presidential-campaign bloggers. Here we had lead bloggers for the Dean campaign, the Clark campaign, and the Democratic National Committee — along with a bright-faced 19-year-old volunteer for the Graham campaign. These folks are all central figures in the struggle to drag the world of political campaigns, in some cases kicking and screaming, into the Internet era.

In their own camps I have no doubt that these folks are the resident idealists, pushing their colleagues toward a better understanding of how online tools can make the political process more open, direct and engaging. But at this conference, surrounded by people who passionately believe that blogs are changing the entire universe, I think these campaign bloggers were a little surprised to find themselves cast as the pragmatists, the realists.

When Esther Dyson asked whether the campaign blogs had any impact on, or even discussions about, actual policy as opposed to campaign news and promotion, Joe Jones of the Graham campaign declared, with charming bluntness, that no one cares about policy, and of course blogs were all about PR and buzz.

The panelists were asked, what real-world impact is the Net actually having? And Mathew Gross of the Dean campaign reported that, while George Bush is raising millions in big-denomination contributions from well-heeled supporters, Dean is raising equivalent millions in small donations from a much, much larger number of supporters.

Money raised is usually considered the ultimate yardstick of campaign success. But conference organizer Dave Winer pushed the speakers: Weren’t they just using the Internet to raise money to buy TV ads? Why take money from the bright new distributed world of the Net only to feed it back into the Big Media machine? Why couldn’t the candidates commit to responding to one question from blog visitors every day? (Josh Marshall gently told the crowd that they simply didn’t understand how crazed the candidates’ schedules were.) The candidates were taking from the Net, but what were they giving back?

I think the panelists were all flummoxed by this line of questioning; they are used to trying to justify their seemingly quixotic online techniques by pointing to hardnosed results. Instead, they were being charged with playing the same old political games while paying lip-service to the notion of online participation.

I consider myself about 60/40 on the idealism/pragmatism scale, but all I could think was, get real. TV still controls American politics. No one is going to get elected in the U.S. today without spending millions on TV advertising. If you care about getting your candidate elected — or you care, as all these Democrats did, about seeing Bush defeated — then you’d be foolish and irresponsible to pretend that this is not reality.

It would be great to see that reality change someday, and maybe the kind of innovation exemplified by campaign blogging will help make the change happen. That won’t occur in the course of a single election. In the meantime, money still talks, and Dean’s success raising money through the Net is an extraordinary development, worth celebrating in itself. Dean may be using his blog — and the Net — as a means to an end; he is more interested in getting elected than in making an abstract point about online people power. To me, the 2004 election is too important to be used as a
testing ground for a new theory. Pragmatism should rule.

The offline blues

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Salon Blogs server has obviously been having some serious problems over the past 24 hours. I’ve been traveling and unable to monitor the situation but we appear to be back up. More as I learn more.