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The Times, John Dean and the elephant in the room

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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.

California gridlock, courtesy GOP diehards

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Here in the state of California we are being treated to the spectacle of a small minority of Republican dead-enders in the legislature holding the entire state economy hostage to their tax-cutting religion.

The story, for those blissfully beyond Sacramento’s reach, is that our state rules require a 2/3 vote to pass a budget. So that even though Democrats control both houses of the legislature, they need a few Republicans to pass a budget. And our local GOP reps have apparently signed a pact in blood that they will never, ever, under any circumstances, support tax increases. The Democrats — along with our Republican governor — have found two GOP state senators to come to terms with reality, but they need a third, and can’t seem to find it. (It’s as if Obama’s stimulus package died in Congress because one of the three Republican moderate senators got cold feet.) In the latest development, the GOP diehards have spurned their own leader as an apostate because he was willing to negotiate with the evil tax-boosters.

Every time something like this happens we need to remind ourselves of the deep misreading of history that underlies the tax-cutting religion. The theory is that the only way to grow the economy is by cutting taxes. Reagan cut taxes in the early ’80s, and the ’80s were a good decade if you were a bond trader or an investor in the PC industry, but for the middle class they were, at best, so-so. Bush pere and Clinton raised taxes in the early ’90s and the ’90s were the best decade economically that most of us have experienced. Bush fils cut taxes in the early 2000s and we had a lousy decade again, except if you were a hedge-fund investor or a house-flipper, and even a lot of them got clobbered in the end, along with everyone else.

Given all this, anyone who preaches the universal efficacy of tax cuts is, in my book, not fit to sit at the grownup table.

If California is going to meet its obligations, California has to raise taxes. Would it be kinder to the people of California not to raise their taxes in the face of the bad economy? Of course. The state could use a lot more help from Washington (where, whoops, the GOP has stood in the way of greater aid to state and local governments). Someday, these tax increases probably ought to be rescinded. But right now? The state can’t print money, and it needs to pay its bills.

Which brings us to the real question: as this economic calamity courses through our system and our lives, how much of the machinery of government and the infrastructure of local communities are we going to allow it to destroy? And what kind of a society do we want to have left on the other side of the cataclysm?

What the Republicans who stand in the way of a California budget are saying to our community’s schools and fire departments and other services is: shut down. Go away. We don’t need you. It’s the logical endpoint of the strangle-government-in-the-bathtub philosophy of America’s hard right, which actively wants to wreck government’s ability to serve as a stabilizing and supportive force in our lives and our economy.

With any luck, this crisis will help voters see this philosophy for the dead end that it is. Obviously we here in California need to change the 2/3 rule that gives a small minority this kind of power over the public’s business. We can also hope that the communities who elect these ostrich legislators never have to face the full brutal consequences of their ideological idiocies.

Where’s Scott?

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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.

Isaacson’s pitch for micropayments

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Today Walter Isaacson, the venerable former editor of Time and current boss of the Aspen Institute, unleashes a multipronged offensive on behalf of the idea of micropayments for news. In a lecture delivered yesterday and also in a Time magazine essay, he argues that the advertising-only model for Web revenue warps traditional journalistic values, and advocates new efforts by publications to charge tiny sums for access to individual pieces of content.

I have to admit that my jaw dropped at the point where Isaacson admitted that he no longer pays for the New York Times. Something tells me Isaacson is in a slightly higher income bracket than me, yet I still buy the paper. Thanks, Walter, for making me feel like a chump! Keep talking and you may yet drive the Times’ circulation down a few more points.

Seriously, though, Isaacson’s argument is worth following. In his speech he presents a ready familiarity with the history of the early Internet and its evolution from the “walled gardens” of the for-profit online services to the open Web. (He was running Time’s ill-fated digital efforts back then, so he knows the stories first hand.) Though he admits that recent history is littered with failed micropayment schemes, and mentions the “many tracts and blog entries [that] have been written about why the concept can’t work because of mental transaction costs and the like,” he believes that “things have changed.” Like David Carr before him, he points to the success of iTunes and the Kindle as “pay-per-drink” precedents.

The key for attracting online revenue, I think, is coming up with an iTunes-easy, quick micropayment method. We need something like digital coins or an E-Z Pass digital wallet – a one-click system that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog, application, or video for a penny, nickel, dime, or whatever the creator chooses to charge.

Micropayments may seem newfangled to some newspaper managers, but in advocating them, Isaacson is tapping into one of the longest-running debates on the Web. The canonical “tract” about why micropayments can’t work is Clay Shirky’s from 2003. Shirky, in turn, points back to a 1996 essay by Nick Szabo on the “mental transaction costs” of micropayment systems (the paper, alas, is no longer online). Here’s Shirky’s thesis:

The vanishingly low cost of making unlimited perfect copies put[s] creators in the position of having to decide between going for audience size (fame) or restricting and charging for access (fortune), and the desire for fame, no longer tempered by reproduction costs, [will] generally win out.

Shirky’s essay offered a critique of a new micropayments scheme then being championed by Scott McCloud (author of Understanding Comics), who was experimenting with charging a small amount for a new comic strip. As the author of Understanding Comics, McCloud already had a substantial following among the geek set who were interested in his project. McCloud also responded at the time to Shirky.

In April, 2007, the company that McCloud was using to sell access to his comic went under. McCloud began giving away his comic. Round to Shirky.

But April 2007 was another market peak like early 2000, and the micropayments debate revives every time there’s a downturn. My own experience at Salon, where we began selling subscriptions in early 2001 and briefly “closed the gates” on all of our news content after 9/11 sent advertisers into hiding, suggests that it cannot and will not save the newspaper business: We were a popular, high-traffic news website with enormous good will from our users and Web colleagues. Yet when we started asking for money, our traffic plummeted — users fled, and other sites stopped linking.

We soon changed course. True, we were asking for subscription fees, not per-article payments, but our experiments with the latter were failures as well. When you demand money for access, you’re not only invoking the “mental overhead” of a decision on the reader’s part; you’re effectively seceding from the Web, cutting off the online circulatory system of inbound links, and risking a slow, painful slide into irrelevance.

Here’s a telling example: as I prepared this post I found a reference to an IEEE article from 2004, Micropayments: An idea whose time has passed twice?, by M. Lesk, which is highly pertinent to the subject. But I originally decided not to link to it because I couldn’t easily read it. Even if you built an easy-to-use micropayment system allowing access to that article, I’d be thinking, “Should I point my readers to something that’s going to cost them money? Shirky’s post is pretty good reading, and it doesn’t cost a cent.”

OTHER LINKS: Bill Wyman takes Isaacson’s argument apart: “Newspapers had an advertising-only model. They made untold millions. (Billions.) And they did produce a lot of sections about gardening and home improvement.”

Mark Potts: “The idea that forcing readers to pay for general online newspaper content will somehow magically solve the industry’s problems–never mind the horrific effect subscription plans would have on traffic-based ad revenue–is just folly.”

The LA Times’ David Sarno wrote about micropayments last month, interviewing Shirky and Columbia professor William Baker. Doug Fisher wrote a response, quoting Wired editor (and Free author) Chris Anderson: “The huge psychological gap between “almost zero” and “zero” is why micropayments failed.”

In 1998 and again in 2001, Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen predicted micropayments would become a prevalent economic model.

The CapGemini consultancy assembled this report on micropayments in 2004.

YouTube – 1981 primitive Internet report on KRON

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This newscast from KRON in San Francisco in 1981 has been making the rounds recently. It’s labeled “primitive Internet report,” but what it presents is actually one example of the many pre-Internet efforts that the newspaper industry made to try to plan for an online future — and stake out its own turf in that forthcoming world.

This particular example has a lot of personal resonance because the newspaper involved is the SF Examiner. The video’s now antediluvian-looking images have a Proustian quality for me: In 1981 I was just graduating from college, but five years later I’d be going to work in the newsroom you see in this video. Those green-on-black screens you can see the reporters working on (“Coyotes,” they were called) strained my eyes for a decade. Dave Cole, the guy who introduces the Examiner’s “experiment” in making its content available via modem to home computer users, was still there, working on the computerization of the paper’s operations; he went on to become a well known industry consultant.

In the video, you can hear Cole say, of the “Electronic Examiner” he was demonstrating, “We’re not in it to make money.” At the end, the announcer points out that an entire edition of the paper takes two hours to download, at a $5/hour cost — making this “telepaper” little competition for the paper edition. “For the moment at least,” the reporter declares, over the image of a sidewalk news vendor hawking the afternoon edition, “this fellow isn’t worried about being out of a job.”

Though the piece does say that “Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer,” its underlying message is — Don’t worry. This crazy computer stuff isn’t going to change anything much for now. And indeed it took 10 years for any sort of online service to become even remotely popular. Almost 30 years later, newspapers are still in business; some are even still sold by guys on sidewalks. It has taken this long for the technology to transform the newspaper biz in a big way.

What you can see at work in this clip is the “computers will replace trucks!” perspective that continued to hobble the news industry’s online efforts for many years. The “Electronic Examiner’s” use of the computer as an efficient transport mechanism for the same old product was understandable; it was a Herculean effort in 1981 just to get this stuff to work (and there were precious few customers/users).

But even as the downloads sped up and the connect-time costs dropped, the industry held onto that approach, instead of coming to grips with the fundamentally different dynamics of a new communications medium. What had made sense in the early days over time became a crippling set of blinders. The spirit of experimentation that the Examiner set out with in 1981 dried up, replaced by an industry-wide allergy to fundamental change.

“Let’s use the new technology,” editors and executives would say, “but let’s not let the technology change our profession or our industry.” They largely succeeded in resisting change. Now it’s catching up with them.

More on this stuff from Jeff Jarvis (who was there at the Examiner in the early ’80s, before me) and Susan Mernit.

RIP John Mortimer

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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.

Obama’s hard words

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“No drama Obama” found his drama this morning in the best possible way. Given the weight of expectations on his shoulders today, this wasn’t a foregone conclusion. I’m not sure exactly how one rises to such an occasion, how one finds the words to fit such times, but for me at least, our new president did.

One clue I realized as I listened to Obama’s words: this speech, stern in many ways and uningratiating by design, stuck to hard nouns and verbs. There was little flowery rhetoric. The sentences had weight not by being heavy but by being solid. In that solidity, I heard the cadences of Whitman and Melville, American voices full of rough power rooted in the experience of nature and the effort demanded by the settling of the land.

In speaking of “the risktakers, the doers, the makers of things,” Obama found words that could encompass both the laborers who have represented the old school of the Democratic Party and the entrepreneurs and digital innovators who represent its newer supporters. In telling us to it was time to “put away childish things,” he may have been referring to the bitter divisions of the past decade, the political squabbling that has diverted so much precious energy and time. “Childish” might well describe the stupidity of the Clinton impeachment drama; but — painful though it may be for many of us to accept — it might also refer to the passion for a settling of accounts with the malefactors of the Bush administration that so many of the new president’s supporters share. We’ll have to see, over time, exactly how Obama defines this “new era of responsibility.”

There was a roll-up-our-sleeves quality to the whole address that was sober without being grim. I’ll want more time to digest the whole thing. Right now, I’m left with the picture of Malia, the president’s older daughter, pulling out her own digital camera to take a picture right as the TV camera was trained on her. It was a little pointer to the future, a gesture for a new generation that will be taking charge of its media in ways we can’t yet imagine.

“Write it yourself” is Jay Rosen’s sharp advice to the new president. He means, “Write that new White House blog yourself” — but also, in that moving-finger-writes way, write the whole story, the big drama of the next four years, yourself. Really, it’s what each of us needs to do.

Shafer’s this-ain’t-the-Web dream world

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Jack Shafer seems to be locked into the same mental cul-de-sac as David Carr when it comes to the future of news consumption. In his Slate column responding to what he calls Carr’s “excellent” challenge to invent the “iTunes for news,” Shafer argues that publishers should invent their own standard and bypass potential Apple-like aggregators (the role Amazon has taken for its Kindle reader):

Just as the iPhone and other smartphones obliterated the PDA category, mobile PCs and smartphones used as electronic readers could render the Kindle obsolete overnight if publishers joined forces to create technical standard for over-the-air delivery of books and publications.

That’s my bold in the quote, because that phrase encapsulates the error in Shafer’s thinking. It is the same error that electronic publishers made in the early ’90s when they thought they could “repurpose” existing media on shiny CD-ROMs. It’s the same error that the early experimenters in motion pictures made when they pointed their cameras at the stage to record plays.

The future of news does not lie in “over-the-air delivery of books” and existing publications (newspapers, magazines). Books, newspapers and magazines work quite beautifully on paper. But they cannot be transposed into digital form as is. That’s why all the kludge-y attempts to provide a newspaper look-and-feel on screen (including one by the New York Times that Shafer inexplicably adores) are such disastrous failures, and will never become widely used products.

It is hugely unlikely that news and information as presently delivered in newspapers and magazines will be consumed as newspapers (or magazines) simply repackaged for download onto some device. Why? Because there already is a “technical standard” for “over-the-air delivery” of such news and information: it’s called the Web. And if netbooks become popular devices for consuming such news and information, as Shafer credibly argues, users will use them freely to assemble their news and information from the Web. If newspapers try to sequester their content into pay-only downloads, people will simply ignore their products. (Books are a somewhat different can of worms, but I’ll leave that for another post.)

Yet that is what Shafer is urging them to do. In his dreamworld, the newspaper and magazine publishers will secede from the Web and start charging users to read their products on netbook PCs via some proprietary interface. I’m not making this up:

By eschewing the Web browser, the Times Reader also sent the same message the nonbrowser interface for the iTunes sends: This isn’t the Web, dude. This isn’t free. You’re going to have to pay.

In 2009, it’s simply ludicrous to imagine that any such scheme could prosper. (The iTunes comparison doesn’t hold because music is a fundamentally different product from news and information.) But if you are clinging to the pipe-dream that news publishers can maintain their old profit margins, you have to convince yourself that this sort of approach could work. It’s a shame to think that some news companies will squander their dwindling resources on such desperation moves, when what they ought to be doing is accepting reality.

In reality, the old business model is disintegrating, and the public and the journalism profession need the business to figure out how to fund in-depth reporting and investigative journalism in the new digital world. The more energy the news industry wastes trying to repackage the dead old form in new, ill-fitting digital clothes, the fewer resources it will have to tackle the real challenge.

Carr’s “iTunes for news” already exists

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David Carr is looking for a new business model for news, and says it needs an iTunes. Part of what he wants is to charge for the articles, and, you know, good luck with that. (Times Select, RIP.) But part of what he wants is simply the elusive new online revenue stream that will pay for the newsroom.

Well, it already exists. It’s called Google text ads. It’s ad revenue tailored specifically for the Web environment. It works, and it’s already bringing considerable sums in to many Web sites. It lets little guys and big guys play on the same field.

The problem is, it doesn’t bring in as much cash as newspapers want, or have traditionally expected. And of course, from the music companies’ perspective, neither does iTunes.

The news industry knows how to make money online, just like everybody else. It just doesn’t know how to make as much money as it used to offline. Carr’s piece is strangely silent on this obvious observation. For someone who is trying to think out loud about this situation, he is displaying a peculiar blind spot.

Unfortunately, as a result, his musing simply prolongs the day of reckoning for the industry. He continues to hold out hope for some elusive profit-generating magic formula, instead of helping the business face the reality of a new world in which there’s simply far less money to be made.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis’s comment: “The real fallacy in Carr’s delusion is that a news story or an opinion, like a song, is unique—that you can’t get it somewhere else and so you have to buy the original.”

Why second newspapers (used to) matter

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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.