Edward J Delaney

The Last Post... here

2009-09-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

I've moved on to a new venture. Today I launched DocumentaryTech, which I created and will edit, but will work with in association with a number of people, including Kurt Lancaster of the University of Northern Arizona, David Tames of Mass. College of Art, Brynmore Williams of GlobalPost.com, and others. It won't be opinion, but rather interviews and articles (with video) on people making documentaries and how they do it. Check it out if you can!

On to a new venture...

2009-08-02T06:25:00.000-07:00

In the last year I've generated something like 60,000 words on this blog, and I look at it as a book of short essays, now completed. After a year of posting some general thoughts on new media, I'll be shifting to a new blog that will be sponsored by several organizations, and will focus more directly on the technology and techniques of storytelling. I'm hoping to launch by September 1. For those who might be interested, I'll update here with a post...

Will a libel suit against Alaskan blogger lead to new standards for citizen journalism?

2009-07-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

I’m not a political partisan, by any means, but the announcement today by the FBI saying that Sarah Palin is not under investigation for any wrongdoing – a highly unusual announcement – is an interesting aspect of the rise of bloggers and citizen journalists.
After Palin’s surprise announcement that she was stepping down as governor of Alaska, much speculation swirled, although a decade ago that speculation would have swirled within the walls of newsrooms with efforts to substantiate.
But an Alaskan blogger named Shannyn Moore (“Just a Girl from Homer,” is her slogan, a far cry from “All The News That’s Fit To Print”) has gone online claiming Palin was being investigated by the FBI for embezzlement and tax evasion. How the news cycle was affected by one apparent amateur deciding to launch that kind of bomb is an indicator of the troubles that come with the shift from professional media to the era of “news blogging.”
Palin was slammed in the fall as a woman without much of a resume, but the fact remains she had been elected governor by Alaskan voters. But Moore’s “About” section of her blog is an exercise in nontransparency, only mentioning she “got fired from radio” (never mentioning for whom she worked, or what news she ever covered) and that she has a radio show on a local channel (but below that is a reader comment from August 2008 saying, “I miss Shannyn’s show so much. Will she be back on the air anytime in the near future?”).
Ah, but that’s me being too “Old Media,” thinking education, experience or credentials might mean something, or be a springboard to how seriously we might take this person.
And in a nod to New Media, I’d agree that if the facts are incontrovertible, then the source’s nonprofessionalism isn’t a factor: The New York Times hasn’t cornered the market on verifiable facts (although they do seem to have an awful lot of them!).
If the Times ran such an item, the lawsuit would undoubtedly come. But here’s an obscure blogger armed with only what appears to be a weak resume and sketchy experience – and likely little in the way of recoverable assets worthy of a libel suit – whom Palin has said she will go ahead and sue anyway. I'd guess Moore is more than surprised.
Martha R. Gore, writing for Examiner.com, wonders, “If Sarah Palin decides to go ahead with a defamation suit against blogger Shannyn Moore, who wrote that the Governor resigned because she was under criminal investigation, it may give others who have been defamed the courage to go after other bloggers who can be accused of ‘malice’ in creating unfounded rumors about them on the Internet.”
But the measurable damage to Palin, if Moore's accusations prove untrue, is made much stronger by the willingness of more established media to even quote people like Moore (using the now-ubiquitous "reportedly," aka "I have no idea if these statements are true"). From KTUU-TV's website: Moore writes for Huffington Post and has been interviewed by MSNBC and other national media outlets.
"Sarah Palin is a coward and a bully," said Moore. "What kind of politician attacks an ordinary American on the Fourth of July, speaking her mind? What's wrong with her? The First Amendment was designed to protect people like me from people like her." Beyond that fact that the first sentence in that quote is the kind of amateurish nonsequiter even a decent editor would catch, Moore may want to consider a brush-up on her Media Law. Stating that someone is under investigation for wrongdoing by the FBI isn't an "opinion."
The blogging world has always been fast and loose below that first tier; I think what emboldens so many of them is probably embodied in Moore’s situation: Either nobody much pays attention to you and you get to feeling as if you can ignore journalistic quality, legal caution and common sense; or, like her, she will accept the double edge of both being the potential target of a libel suit, being discredited by the FBI, and being famous. It’s something like being on one of those “Real Housewives” shows, where the cost of being on TV never seems to inhibit the rush of being on TV. Just as these reality show people humiliate and shame themselves just to have their faces on the tube and make a few dollars, stopping some bloggers by appealing to professionalism and legality may hold little sway. As much as Moore’s apparently massive journalistic error may be something traditional media would be appalled by, and which journalism educators would use as an object lesson, I’m afraid it’s exactly the kind of fame-whoring payoff that will somehow make more people like herself think this kind of work is in any way acceptable. For Perez Hilton, the cost of his blogging antics was getting his lights punched out by a guy named Will.I.Am. For Moore, it may be a financially crippling lawsuit from Palin and her supporters (remember, as neither an elected official nor a candidate, Palin can legally accept help from anyone on this - I'm doubtful, conversely, that anyone will be lining up to throw money into Moore's defense).
As someone who is not much of a Palin fan, I'm not offended on her behalf. But I am offended if it turns out this was a blogger who had no qualms about making such a serious accusation. And I'm sure a lot of non-Republicans will watch with interest to see if the lawsuit is filed, and if it will be successful. The question of whether this will serve as a cautionary tale that can create a new standard for accuracy in citizen journalism remains to be seen.

Two pieces of writing making points about free content

2009-07-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

I'm synthesizing two very interesting pieces of writing today, but of which I presume to be paid work, and which take opposite sides on the debate.
In my soggy New Yorker that came through the mail slot at the height of today’s thunderstorm is a piece by the highly-paid Malcolm Gladwell challenging Chris Anderson’s notion that “information wants to be free in the same way water wants to run down hill… things made of information are losing value.” And the piece is free here.
That’s bad news for an information-based economy; it’s worse for the notion of professional journalism.
By late afternoon, and the skies turning gray, I was sent a link from a friend with a piece in Gawker.com by Hamilton Nolan entitled “Let's Screw Up the Entire Internet to Save Newspapers.” Nolan, who I’m less certain wrote the piece for pay, and certainly not at New Yorker rates, makes the case that ideas such as Judge (and author) Richard Posner’s idea of making linking a copyright infringement, or Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Connie Schultz’s idea of legislating a 24-hour embargo on content before it can be linked “The idea that it's worth crippling the entire free flow of information on the internet in order to add to the bottom line of newspaper companies is prima facie idiotic,” Nolan writes. And in writing, he makes the point indirectly: His writing, as a commodity, just isn’t close to Gladwell’s; his argumentation is worse. He’s just spinning an angry riff that could not have taken long to write. Gladwell’s prose speaks of deliberation and thought. It's the difference between grilling a hamburger and creating a dish at a Michelin three-star restaurant. Yeah, they're both cooking... but not really...
And as a commodity, good content isn’t cheap to make. If talented people can’t earn a wage on their content, they find other things to do. Amateurs and hobbyists fill that vacuum, and as much as a once-in-a-blue-moon talent rises from that crowd, usually it doesn’t (the latest internet-to-book sensation is the blog Look at This Fucking Hipster, which tells you way too much about the state of the book industry).
Nolan sees the Posner and Schultz ideas as insidious ways to feed corporate interests; I see newspapers (having toiled at several of them) from cubicle level – already-not-well-paid professionals doing good work under tough conditions and worrying about how to support their families.)
Information may want to be free, but work such as Gladwell’s runs uphill. Where Nolan’s piece is just a blast from a laptop, a rainy afternoon considering what a writer like Gladwell has to say is a intellectual experience, which I want more of.
The notion of linking only has validity if there’s something good to link to: Something substantive, meaningful and important (and sometimes just entertaining). Information sought out, hard-won, well rendered. If there isn’t a way of compensating talent for work, then the new “free” journalism comes at a larger cost.
In the end, the "newspaper," (by which I really mean an organization that gathers and reports news, and puts it out in print or online) is still where all the news is. TV, YouTube, personal blogs and other amateurish efforts simply won't replicate the work of professionals.

Addendum: Here's a piece, also from Gawker, about Andrew Sullivan wanting to write for free. But he's being paid. But he'd do it anyway. Weird.

Citizen journalism, from the banal to the uplifting

2009-06-22T05:12:00.000-07:00

Two very different examples of citizen journalism emerged over the weekend that work as a good reminder of both how meaningless and how crystallizing citizen-produced journalism can be.
The Sunday New York Times ran a gushing piece "On the party circuit, with clicks as currency," about a spunky young lady from Omaha uses a blog to get herself into the party scene in The Hamptons, using unpaid employees who seem thrilled just to be in the same room with Kelly Klein (ex-wife of Calvin Klein). These citizen journalists get to dress up, cruise around in a Range Rover (even though the site's creator, 26-year-old Rachel Hruska says the site only broke even for the first time last month) and live rent-free in the Hamptons beach house of a "friend" of Ms. Hruska.
It's everything that the worst of citizen journalism has to offer: banality, opportunism and a possible payoff that seems mostly self-serving (getting invited to the right parties with the right people). I think of the line from the Ron Howard movie "The Paper" in which the crusty editor (Robert Duvall) reminds the social-climbing managing editor (Glenn Close) that "the people we cover, we move in their world, but it's their world."
As The Times rolls out nonsense, YouTube has a video that may change the world in some way, the shooting in Iran of a girl identified as 26-year-old Neda Soltan who dies on the street as the camcorder documents it. Stalin once said "One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic." In statistic-driven journalism ("60 killed in car bombing in Baghdad"), it's all from afar; here, Neda is being called "The Face of the Revolution." The response to this video has rattled across the world. The unidentified citizen journalist who recorded this is likely not particularly skilled or experienced as a journalist, but the moment carries its own power (and note there is actually more than one video of Neda's death, as there are four versions of another iconic photo, the man in Tiananmen Square blocking a row of tanks - the other video I saw actually has the person's finger on the lens). And the citizen journalist was on the streets in the midst of the event, not holing up in a borrowed summer house and the cabin of a Range Rover, looking for the next party. And Time Magazine, sticking stubbornly to that stodgy old-media model of actually confirming facts, noted Sunday in its cutline that Neda was "allegedly" shot - exactly the kind of sober cautiousness that citizen journalists often ridicule. (If this event turns out to be staged, that will be another cautionary tale about the efficacy of citizen journalism...)
But the indication is that this was a real event, caught in all its rawness. So, as the bad kind of self-referential, me-me-me citizen journalism gives journalism a bad (or at least diminished) rep, one video clip shot handheld and uploaded to the mostly idiotic YouTube has a chance to help determine history.

Should J-schools teach entrepreneurship?

2009-06-08T13:06:00.000-07:00

It's the time of year where I'm sitting writing letters of recommendation and looking over the resumes newly graduated students have asked me to review. And one irony of teaching college journalism these days is that for all the attention given to how newspapers and local TV are "dying," and passe, most of the students I know are applying for jobs at... newspapers and affiliate TV.
The reason is fairly simple: Because despite the talk of the new models, newspapers and affiliate TV are the largest companies in a given region producing journalism, and are the places where a new hire can at least potentially have a salary, benefits and two weeks of vacation. These old-media organizations already have established audiences. Beyond that, the new J-grads can potentially enter a work environment that is somewhat delineated, with clearer responsibilities and some notion of mentorship. Many of these grads have at least rudimentary new-media skills, but they're trying to sell those skills to the old media (and one thing that's much clearer is that rudimentary skills in shooting and editing video, or coding in HTML, or doing slide shows, are skills every twentysomething journalism grad has to have - that's no longer a clear edge).
What none of them appear to be doing is viewing themselves as free agents who will have to build individual journalistic brands, become experts in some topic or area, figure out how to amass audience, then figure out how to monetize the audience's attention. They don't appear to be moving into the new-media model of self-creation.
But that is largely what being in new media involves. It requires these small operators to carry the dual roles of journalist and business person. It requires much work before a dollar is ever turned and many dead ends.
The question of journalism curriculum is evolving as quickly as the business itself. If successful journalism will require its practitioners to determine their own business models, should business courses, particularly in entrepreneurship, be an essential part of journalism curriculum?
Some of that would involve identifying the basics of the market and its needs: What kind of journalism does my community lack or need, and how do my skills potentially enable that?
Part of it is marketing: If I correctly perceive audience, how do I quantify that and make it available to advertisers? Or how do I write a grant that proves that nonproft funding will truly serve a public need?
Then you’re on to accounting: What outlay can I make for the equipment necessary to do this job (for even basic work, can I afford the $5,000 to $10,000 for good equipment? Will my $150 Flip camera and laptop be capable of producing the quality work I need to do to look professional?) What salary should I be paying myself? When does the time come to bring on employees? Can I afford the $450 a month for individual health coverage?
That last question leads to management: Do I have any ability to manage employees? Do I want to? Can I provide them with guidance and development? Should I then create a corporation or foundation?
And once you’re done with all that, the biggest question of all: Are my skills and talents sufficiently developed that I can do all this without the ongoing mentorship large media companies have traditionally provided?
I don’t know how much journalism students would enjoy taking business courses, but some exposure to entrepreneurship at least sensitizes them to the changing media world. It makes them aware that if they’re quick to dismiss established old media, or more likely can't crack them for a job, then they will need to be conceiving and executing news ideas, models and breakthroughs.
For those students just out of school and applying to old media, the prospects are not encouraging. Especially with the economy down and ad revenue depressed, few papers and affiliates are doing much hiring of entry level (our program's top graduate from 2008 told me he applied for a job so low-paying he wondered if he could afford it, even living with his parents; no need to worry, since the job went to a 12-year veteran journalist who was relocating from California to New Hampshire for the job).
So with little or no preparation in how to start or run a small business, many of these better and more motivated grads will become "accidental entrepreneurs," starting their own news organizations and probably holding other McJobs to fund their journalistic passions. As the model changes, the curriculum at the schools they attended might have to as well.

Further thinking on paid content

2009-06-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

I've written a piece that's posted on today's Nieman Journalism Lab site about the Newport Daily News and its decision to charge for online content.
Because the Lab site draws people who are interested and committed to the new online model of journalism, the comments have been a little chippy, if not plain nasty. The notion that the News will surely fail at its mission seems part of it; an anger about what they're doing in Newport is part of it as well.
But, when you look at the plight of small-town papers across the country, it's a fact they have to do something, even if with limited staffs and resources.
But going down to Newport and chatting with the folks at the News, as I did last week, left me with an impression not of resistance or naivete to new models but rather a simple pragmatisim about how you run a business right now. To wit:
1) Online isn't making small newspapers any money. The News will charge $345 a year for online only. That is clearly a good bit of money to charge, and the News may realize little revenue from it. If they don't, is it a failure? After all, newspapers aren't making any money giving away content. Television from its earliest days gave away content, but it was the ad dynamic that made it work. Advertisers clearly don't believe their ads are effective on online newspapers. But in a town like Newport and many towns across the country, small businesses still advertise in the newspaper because they don't have the equipment or employees to maintain their own websites. So if the News makes very little money on its new online plan, it's really no substantive loss.
And remember that while big newspapers like the Boston Globe or New York Times are building audience that has no geographical limit, and might attract large-scale advertisers, small papers like the News are unlikely to draw much audience beyond Newport County - having print circulation of 12,000 in a county of an estimated 35,000 households, which is a pretty good penetration rate these days.
2) Online isn't working as a promotional or selling tool for the print product, but so far is funded by the print business it threatens to drive into extinction. It's such a parent-child relationship. Old Dad hands the teenager the car keys and cash so the teenager can go out with like-minded, parentally funded teenagers and bemoan what a out-of-touch loser Dad is. If having a really great online product brought value and revenue to your print product, that's a good reason to have a site. But the News clearly has come to believe a free-online site is simply creating a cheaper competitor for its own moneymaking products. It doesn't work in any other line of business, does it? If a restaurant gives away free food out front but makes you pay only if you come in and sit down, people won't come in and sit down. Ten years ago, most newspaper websites were seen as promotional vehicles for the print product. Now, most organizations seem to be holding on and hoping the advertisers show up (Later this week I'm covering the Advertising 2.0 conference in New York. Of the many speakers and panels, none addresses news websites as part of the new configuration).
3) If the paid-content model doesn't draw customers but the newspaper holds steady with circulation, that may be a win. For people who mostly get news online, it can be a shock to pick up a paper and open it. There's still a lot of advertising, or at least far more than online. Magazines still feature glossy page after glossy page. There is money being made, although less. And factor in some part of the public, such as myself, who more often reads the news online simply because of the convenience of having it right there on my screen. If the newspaper I read most suddenly stopped making it that easy for me, I might buy the print version more -often: Maybe just Sunday, maybe a few days a week. It depends on what I think I'm missing. For a smaller newspaper that sells local stuff and very little national/world, it's an interesting risk. If small newspapers simply stopped putting out their news free on websites, what would happen? If unpaid bloggers could fill the vacuum, a newspaper would want to do a little self-examination.
4) Newspaper people have families and bills - why wouldn't they stay where the profits are? Why wouldn't they do what they can to keep profits steadier? Look at the Time Magazine piece this week on what happens if journalism fails, and it is just another confirmation that nobody has the alternative yet. For, say, college professors sitting at a safe distance, this can all seem very easy. Try wondering if you can pay your child's tuition. If the "business" model of universities failed, some people might stay on to teach for free, but a lot would go looking for work that paid the rent.
5) No one who loves journalism should be so gleeful about the business problems of the papers. One of the great things about my travels for the Nieman Journalism Lab is to meet so many people who are both forward-thinking about online but appreciate the fact that newspapers have value, or are at least vessels of something with that value. The old polarity of New-Media screamers railing to get online its due respect is outmoded. We get it, the horseless carriage is here to stay! The real question is, how do you keep talented, serious journalists in positions in which they can afford to do top-notch work? I suspect if the online model comes along, the people at the News will gladly retire their presses, but for now they are doing what they clearly feel they have to do (a favorite movie line from Barcelona in which Fred the Navy officer tells cousin Ted that on a ship "We work in all four dimensions, and if we screw up, it can get very wet...")
Unpaid journalism is, in essence, a hobby. Some hobbysists are very passionate and skilled. But the ethos of the professional in large part comes with the notion that their work and talent has a hard value. Even the most "successful" online news sites have few employees, low salaries, transient staffs and the inability to fund long sustained examinations of difficult topics. Talking Points Memo's Polk Award for the retired-generals story was encouraging, but for a very long time top newspapers have invested in such enterprise constantly. One of the reasons web journalism stays so embedded in celebrities and entertainment is because those people are dying for attention; such stories can be gotten fairly easily from the publicists and managers paid to get them in the news. Try digging through the corruption of state governments filled with people who devote themselves to obscuring, lying and hiding their antics and really think about whether unpaid journalists can keep on keeping on only on principle.
6) Maybe the right model just isn't here yet. Don't forget that today's teenagers see email as tragically unhip. Facebook now has its own official deathwatch. Texting, Twittering and such devices as the the Kindle and other electronic readers may be places it can all go. At the lab, Zach and Josh's series on the New York Times R&D people show that just as you're getting settled into this way of doing, somebody's already come up with the next way.

Does writing for free hurt writing for pay?

2009-06-05T10:25:00.001-07:00

Interestingly, this space, the only place I write for free, is the one that is also the least read.
That's something I always knew, but it comes to mind having just read Jeffrey Seglin's piece "Blockheads Writing For Free" in TrueSlant.com. He says, basically, that the more we write for free, the more we devalue all writing. The title is a play on the famous Samuel Johnson line that "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
Indeed, in the current year, I've made good money writing. I've co-authored a book with a big-league ballplayer, I've optioned a 1996 short story from The Atlantic Monthly and been paid to write a screenplay from it. I write and shoot video for good pay at the Nieman Journalism Lab, and I get dribs and drabs of royalties from past works. As a documentary filmmaker, I've paid off the cost of my last project and actually turned a profit through a combination of grants and generously-paid campus screenings from Massachusetts to North Carolina. Until I began writing this blog (and this is the 59th post) I hadn't written for free since graduate school.
Seglin notes that "There’s a larger argument against writing for free, of course. It goes like this: Your work has value. If you start giving it away for free, then it diminishes that value and makes it harder for others to charge for their work as well."
The New Yorker arrived today, and I took a rainy-day lunch break reading through it. One cartoon has a woman at a cocktail party leaning in toward another, saying "It turns out everyone here is self-published."
Being "self-published," aka "vanity published," was once a term of embarrassment, not of liberation. If blogs are the future, it is with the reality that bad writers can publish as easily as good, the ill-informed occupy as much or more of the blogosphere as the well-informed, and the reader is left to sort it out.
I'd like to think that this writing I do here is for the pleasure of writing, but that any value it has comes from my credentials as a (regularly) paid writer. There are others who would think differently, and who therefore make livings in ways other than writing.
But, as Seglin warns journalism students, "For fledging or established writers, the temptations are great. You get your words out there – perhaps as an opinion column in an alternative weekly. Or you start a blog and pray that you’ll be the next Julie Powell, whose blog project turns into a book and ultimately into a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep. (I haven’t done the math, but the odds of any blogger making a livable wage off of a blog, let alone strike it rich, are likely as slim as going from a star shooter on the neighborhood court to the NBA.)"
But, he notes, in essence, it's bad writers who can't get paid to write who most loudly proclaim the wonders of the web. "If you decide to or agree to write for free, you go into that relationship knowing precisely that 'free' is the 'new revenue model' to which you agreed," he says.
Of course the most devalued of all such commodities, is straight opinion. It was a classic exercise in scarcity that a newspaper would only choose a handful of its very best writers to opine in its pages (at the best pay scale). Everyone else had to do it around the proverbial water cooler. So with blogs, suddenly everyone could opinionate for free and have some larger channel (although audiences mostly remain in the water-cooler range).
On the other hand, there's still a dearth of writing that's based on heavy reporting and then given away. It's much less rare to find someone doing journalist heavy lifting then putting it out gratis. Somewhere in the middle, I'd guess, is people sharing "experiential" accounts - a travel writer, a restaurant reviewer or a book blogger, who are writing about something they've done that has taken time and effort (of course small-city newspapers could always get travel freelance pieces for low money).
Write for free, because it's a place to simply share, unimpeded and unfiltered? It's a temptation. But what should not drive the issue is the work of bad writers using self-publishing to make the case that everything, in the end, is of equal value. That is Seglin's point, because if everything is of equal value, all is of diminished value.

The Creative Culture Meets Undercapitalized Journalism

2009-05-29T10:27:00.000-07:00

In Richard Florida’s 2003 book “The Rise of the Creative Class,” he explored how a new culture was rising, in which younger people more readily defined themselves as “creatives,” and gravitated toward places where a supposed creative culture was afoot. People chose to live in places where this culture existed, rather than move places for the traditional reasons – a job or family connections.
While I am clearly working with a skewed sample, teaching journalism and creative writing, I’ve observed the shift among my students, many of whom graduated to what may be bleak employment prospects.
And as someone who writes fiction, does small films and has for two decades written nonfiction that at least seeks to be artistic, I can attest to the fact that for some, creativity is not a lifestyle choice, but at its depths who we are.
But I can recall in my own year of graduation how so many of my closest friends were excitedly running off to New York to take jobs in Big Eight consulting firms, stock brokerages and other corporate slots. And indeed, these years later, these friends have become CEOs, or top people at top companies, and live in places I could only imagine.
Back then, I don’t recall anyone leaving college to start bands, write novels or be actors. In fact, when after graduate school I did finally choose to go into journalism instead of my other possible route – advertising – it was as if I were pulling a scam. On its face, it was a business (wage, medical, pension), but in its practice, it at least could make use of some creative ability. To weave a sublime sentence into a plane-crash story was to potentially touch people as much as literature. To speak to the human condition in a series about minimum-wage workers was a privelege.
In the 1980s, when I was in my mid-twenties and a reporter at The Denver Post, the guys who sat on either side of me were sixtyish, crew-cut, bow-tie-wearing military veterans who scoffed at the idea of writing “creatively” – even though they did so on a daily basis and I learned a lot about writing from them. Journalism had a different kind of draw for others – sort of adventure tourism. Another older hand, Kit Miniclier, had for years been the AP’s Sub-Saharan Africa correspondent (“There I was on the Congo, going upriver with my guide, Mbulu…”). Tony Suau, who had just departed with a photojournalism Pulitzer in hand, became something of a near-death junkie doing high-risk assignments for the Black Star Agency. Even the late, legendary Judy Brimberg, then in her sixties, still was the tough “girl reporter” right out of Central Casting.
But creativity?
I hear about creativity more frequently these days as a statement rather than a passion, as a suit of clothes rather than a core value. I’m not completely sure that’s a bad thing. This particular suit of clothes is a bit threadbare, simple and often worn on many consecutive days. It is a suit of some modesty in approaching the world. It speaks toward at least some outward concern, even if the work itself may be self-indulgent, because the practice of any kind of art is more likely to stumble across illumination than most kinds of commerce. A lot of those creative-class people aren’t actually talented, but they are often willing audiences to those who are. To be of the creative class is to sit over coffee talking about books or film or art.
So these droves of journalism grads from colleges all over the country, seeking outlet, wanting be creative. And they’re meeting a world in which journalism is being de-corporatized, sent back to the masses, and thrown up for complete retooling.
Will the unemployed or underemployed masses of the new creative class find sustenance in a new type of journalism (and not the snarky only-child condescension of sites like Gawker)? Will a future revival of “Rent” recast the nouveau Bohemians as bloggers and citizen journalists and low-budget documentarians capturing the world on a Flip and a Mac?
I think to a degree, some quarters of journalism will become not unlike others creative pursuits – acting, novel-writing, art – in that for many it will be a twenty-something dabbling before moving on to paid work. Like those arts, a few will rise, Josh-Marshall-like (his Talking Points Memo being an amazing story of individual journalistic achievement) to fame and fortune.
And in the end, some will stay not because of fame and fortune, but simply the need to do the work. The lack of lucrative pay may be the true measure of who the real journalists are, why they are, and if they can still influence the world.

Social media, coming and going

2009-05-26T16:59:00.000-07:00

It’s interesting that as socialmedia.com proclaims “The Facebook death watch has begun,” The New York Times today internally announced its first social-media editor, Jennifer Preston.
One thing about cutting-edgers is that they’re always proclaiming things to be “dead.” Newspapers are dead! Journalism is dead! Books are dead! Vinyl albums are dead! Fountain pens are dead! Acoustic guitars are dead!
Proclamations as these are the refuge of the oversimplifier, but they speak of one’s apparent trendiness, forward thinking, or augury. So any death watches seem to bring with them the notion of wanting to be the first to have said it, a self-presumed act of prescience.
But the notion that Facebook will die follows the example of AOL. Like any trend, it has its own predictable arc. Phase One is made up of early adopters who want to be the first to do something new. They trumpet its virtues, and that very presumed exclusivity draws more people in. Phase Two: Something that's often logically unsensible becomes “cool” – today’s college students are as likely to laugh at their adolescent texting (as they drive!) or Tweeting now as others do about their obsessive late-1990s IMing. I remember a student a decade ago telling me how kids in the dorm would sit IMing each other when they could have talked to each other across the hallway.
Then, Phase Three: To repeat an oft-repeated Yogi Berra-ism about a trendy Manhattan restaurant, “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s always too crowded.” The early adopters begin to search for the new trend; never do they seek something as provably effective as something that's been around for a while.
Everybody still dreaming of dot-com glory seems to be trying to cook up the new Facebook, and the fact that Facebook is truthfully a site overrun now by middle-aged people means something will surely give. The idea of “friends” on Facebook is an exercise in impersonality, like seeing "reality" on "reality television," as if having a queue of hundreds of little mug shots speaks in any ways to one’s social prowess. On something built on trend rather than tradition, the “centre cannot hold,” to accurately quote Yeats (OK, he's actually dead!).
With the Times’ decision, the question seems to be whether the newspaper is seeking social connectivity out of sheer desperation or whether they believe the Times can act as something of a social hub. I spoke a few months ago with the publisher of Seattle’s Crosscut.com as they moved from a not-so-successful for-profit approach to a nonprofit model. An integral part of the model was not just to seek paying “members,” as public television does, but to be an ongoing organizer of social events for those members – concerts, wine-and-cheese parties, art exhibits – and build the notion of being a “Crosscut person” as much as another company we know has built itself with the “I’m a Mac” identity game.
The notion of the New York Times becoming a social outlet can be foreboding – witness Gawker’s takedown of the Times’ wedding announcements, in which is scores them with points for having attended Ivy schools or having a number at the end of your name (“Chauncey Goodspeed IV graduated from Princeton...”) and you’ll see how that one can go.
Beyond that, the social media concept is not limited to journalistic enterprises. Maybe I’m defining my social connections through hobbies and sports (where there has always seemed to be greater affinity) or by ownership of commodities ranging from a type of car to a trendy electronic gadget.
“We all need to figure this out together,” says the memo from the Times' deputy managing editor/digital Jon Landman. Indeed, by the time that happens, there is likely to be a new iteration.

Is Journalism a Car Wash or a Novel?

2009-05-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

There’s a much-talked-about opinion piece being linked around the web – including here – by the scholar Robert G. Picard, provocatively entitled “Why Journalists Deserve Low Pay.” The essay is in the Christian Science Monitor, adapted from a lecture Picard delivered at Oxford.
In essence, what he says is that journalists don’t possess a specific valuable body of knowledge (such as a doctor or lawyer might), but rather perform the task of conveying such knowledge from one group to another, sources to audience. That was traditionally a function of the journalist’s ability to get to information (through attending news events and interviewing sources) and to deliver it (through the printing presses or television transmitters that were beyond the means of individuals). Now that new media technology has allowed non-professionals to very easily access information and deliver it, the value of the service the journalist performs is greatly devalued.
Picard ominously notes that unless journalism finds a new level of value for its services, journalists’ ability to make a living will plummet.
I agree, but I disagree. On one level, he’s right. The basic business model holds that to be successful, one must produce goods for a cost that is less than what he can sell it for. Secondly, a consumer has to value the product at the price, for a variety of reasons.
Think of car washes. I just returned from running my car through a car wash for $8. Even though it’s a beautiful spring day, and I’m free until I help my son videotape a concert tonight (side note regarding technology – it’s a man conducting a “fauxharmonic orchestra” with a Wii device… here’s the Boston Globe piece on that), and there’s a hose lying in the driveway four feet from the car, I’ve expended $8 in the belief that the 20 minutes I spend writing this piece, or reading "Olive Kitteridge," has more value to me than the same spent time washing the car. Washing a car is a low-skill task; it does not require deep and special knowledge. But by the same token, the car wash has specialized equipment that does a job that would take me 20 minutes in five.
So on some level, I’ve spent $8 to have a job done that I could easily do myself, in the belief I’d rather do something else.
So to some degree, the value professional journalists rate is directly tied to the effort and quality citizen journalists would expend doing the same job for free. Many citizen journalists do the job for free for some other value they derive: A sense of civic engagement, the notion of making a difference, or the ego value of having people pay attention to you. My neighbor does not come across the street to wash my car or shovel snow from my walk, even though he can do the same job, because there’s no real innate value to him (although I can’t help but repeat a line from Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon” when he notes that when a neighbor plows his walk without being asked, “it’s how Lutherans establish their dominance.”)
But the key words above are “the same job.” The notion that an amateur can deliver news as well as a pro devalues the pro. And the follow-up question is what journalists can do to add to their value.
Now I shift to another comparison: A novel.
Anybody can write a novel. Get a cheap typewriter from eBay and a ream of paper at Staples, and have at it. Few can actually get to the point of being published, and fewer still of deriving any real income directly from the work. But there are no technological or logistic hurdles that keep people from succeeding.
What keeps people from succeeding relates to skill, a specialized body of knowledge, and unique insight. When I read “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz, I get a very unique and meaningful take on the human condition that can’t be replicated. But, as counterpoint, as much as I value that novel, 999 of 1,000 people I come across today will have never heard of it, or have an desire to read it. They value a clean car more than an informed mind.
So the question is whether what journalists do is closer to washing cars or writing novels.
Technology has made it more like a car wash. An example is video-production skills. A decade ago, that stuff was fairly hard to do. You needed to understand a lot of technology and have certain honed skills that were difficult to acquire. You also needed access to expensive equipment. Now, anybody can afford a Flip Mino, and edit on a laptop. Because of that, the value of those skills plummet. The movement on a lot of journalism education is toward teaching skills, but as J-Incubator founder Dan Sinker at Columbia College noted when I interviewed him for the Nieman Journalism Lab, the people making administrative decisions don’t fully realize how ridiculously easy the tasks have become. The skills of shooting and editing video could be taught to an entry-level journalist in a one-week boot-camp setting.
So we return to the question of the value of journalism.
Think of the world as a story, which of course it is. Think of how as a journalist one takes a small piece of that story and tells it with virtuosity. Reporting a crime is more than dumping the contents of a police report online. Crime is a story of human passion and motivation, of cause and effect, and of morality and justice. It also requires the reporter to develop a knowledge base and to share that. For example, when a 19-year-old in Barrington, R.I. plea-bargains in a boating death in which he killed his friend by drunkenly driving the boat over the kid as he swam, my question is whether the 2.5-to-5-year sentence is a lot or a little. The reporter’s experiential knowledge will help determine of that’s a story and help find the sources who can speak to that. The reporter’s task of getting good quotes and knowing them when he or she hears them (the proverbial “quote bell” going off in the head) can be artistic, and the act of getting the quote at all is an act requiring psychological skill.
One of the great journalists I worked with in Denver, two-time Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter Lou Kilzer, had a philosophy degree from Yale, and it showed: His ability to reason through, induce from and correlate tremendous rafts of information was remarkable.
The problem is, because so many newspapers were car washes for so long, there are a lot of people who never really took the skills to where they could have gone. The rise of the one-newspaper town helped solidify a sense of complacency.
(And, the formula is deeply dependent on the consumer's placing of value on the product. If a person values "American Idol" more than an understanding about what's happening to the economy or environment, the question of value shifts. One possibly positive outcome of the tough next few years in the economy is people may re-value the brand of journalism that determines where our tax money goes, how our military operates or what our financial community is putting its funds into. But it will also take highly skilled people to take on those stories to derive compensation.)
So, like the practice of art and literature, there will likely be a rising stratification of value. For every 10 million would-be actors trudging through LA with head shots in hand, there’s one Tom Hanks. For every 10 million weekend basketball players, there’s one Iverson. I think that the success stories in the future of journalism go back to the basic skills of observation, reasoning, analysis and perspective. And I guess if anybody can possess a skill, such as washing a car, it must not really be much of a skill.

The rise of documentaries and the decline of newspaper series

2009-05-18T18:19:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago, making a documentary film was to go through a bottleneck. On the thick end were all the would-be filmmakers trying to hustle funding to support their project. Beyond the logistics and the equipment, film and processing was the primary cost. A can of black-and-white 16 millimeter film costs about $100 for about 15 minutes’ of film, then processing duping and effects – labs might charge $10 to $20 for a single cross dissolve. Presuming a general rule of thumb that less than a fifth of your footage would make the final edit, and presuming a feature-length work, and presuming that capturing sound was its own complicated process, you’d be talking tens of thousands of dollars to make it properly, not even including man-hours. And after that, where was audience? TV channels were limited, only a smattering of art cinemas showed documentaries, and projection equipment was costly in itself. Cost was high, audience low. If you could get through that bottleneck, the competition was markedly lower for completed, quality docs.
At the same time, say in the mid-to-late-1980s when I was working at newspapers in Colorado, the newspaper series was in full flourish. In cities like Denver and Colorado Springs, where there was a population boom, the paper was filled with ads for real estate and cars, and classified revenue was a money pipe, challenged only by weekly shoppers whose rates weren’t exceptionally lower.
The series was not only a way of doing quality journalism, it was a way of filling open pages. The Los Angeles Times, back in those days when Sunday advertising was so lucrative that the Sunday Times was nicknamed “The Whale,” the paper was loaded with series and lengthy one-day pieces. New Journalism, the art of bringing novelistic devices to journalistic material, wasn’t fully possible without space.
I remember a piece I wrote on supercomputers that ran eight days and must have approached 500 column inches, a short book. Another piece I did was a stand-alone section chronicling a year at The Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind. That written piece was about 30,000 words. In that one, I worked with an exceptional photographer who put in enough time to shoot something a couple of hundred rolls of film (expensive, to a degree, but remember that a roll of 36 frames would give you a second and a half of motion picture).
I was, like some of the more passionate among us, compensated in a way for that writing, which was the gift of space. But I, like other colleagues, largely worked on such pieces on our own time, squeezing the work around other duties (I was at that time a columnist putting out three to four pieces a week). We did it, I sincerely believe, for the challenge and pride of good work.
With the thinness of papers these days, it’s no surprise series are largely disappeared. The long Sunday piece is largely extinct. Despite the bottomless nature of a website, they haven’t transferred to the web.
But at the same time, documentary filmmaking is on a breathtaking rise.
To define terms, a video is not in itself a documentary. I saw something on vimeo entitled “A documentary film of where I live,” in which the “filmmaker” uses a Flip camera to pan the room and shoot some too-close footage her husband’s face. The title, as best I can tell, was not meant as a joke.
To me, a documentary is the equivalent of a short story or novel. Anybody can crank out 3,000 words, but only one could write “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” or "Araby." Fewer can sit and write 100,000 words, because fewer have the sustained attention span or energy to complete a novel manuscript, however horrid it might be when finished. But if you have a typewriter and a pile of paper, you’re equipped. MacBook Pros aren’t a necessary tool of the prose writer.
A documentary is something with a sustained story or argument, done both artfully and factually, and for someone’s benefit. (Having just viewed a number of films at a local documentary film fest, I’m more and more convinced the ideal length of a “full-length” doc is 45-60 minutes, rather than the 75-100 that replicates feature-film length, but that’s another post). Like a newspaper series, a documentary is a thorough examination of a subject, and often on that's newsworthy. It's an exchange of ideas, or its a look inside a world.
Fewer people can do that, but now, as with writing, it’s about ability and not about wealth. Very inexpensive cameras are producing ridiculously sharp video. And the second part of that is that even a lower-end camera (or an outdated one) is going to get perfectly good footage for where most docs are headed – web viewers.
Like books, docs of narrow subject can happily connect with narrow audiences (the doc “Helvetica” is my oft-repeated example – a full-length film about a typeface). With lower-cost equipment, they can be made for less and less. And with web platforms, they have a place to be seen (look at the New York Times’ “T Magazine” films, or The Washington Post’s “onBeing” project, or "Us Now," a British doc about collaboration and crowdsourcing that is free on Vimeo).
As I write this, I’m downloading onto this Mac Season 2 of “This American Life,” a TV show that’s really a great example of documentary film work. Six gig, seventeen dollars, and six half-hour episodes, which I’m most likely to watch on my iPod Touch while pedaling an exercise bike at the gym. Or on a flight or a commuter train into Manhattan. I know that when documentary filmmakers begin their work, they imagine the big screen, and they still get that thrill at a film festival. But it’s web distribution, I think, that will really establish the doc as a form.

The big Kindle and how it may revolutionize textbook sales

2009-05-06T12:36:00.000-07:00

While I’ve never been a defender of the prices publishers charge for textbooks, I have tried, at times, to give my students facts about why books I assign to our classes can run from $80 to $150 apiece.
The reason is not the cost of printing the books, it’s the waste – or perhaps the better word is redundancy – that occurs in a business that premises itself on two weeks of active selling a year.
Think about it – the typical textbook is a sought-after commodity for roughly two weeks of every 52: The first week of fall semester and the first week of spring. They sell or they don’t. If I order 25 books and only 8 students enroll in my class, those additional 17 books are sitting in our bookstore, and therefore not for sale at any other college bookstore. If you pay the cost to box and ship 25 pounds of books and they arrive at another college’s bookstore a week later, they’re likely to languish.
Today Amazon unveiled the Kindle DX – it has a larger screen than the current Kindle 2 (which I have and love to use). It appears that textbooks are a primary market.
Can this potentially lead to a life without students walking around campus with massive spine-crushing backpacks loaded with books? Could they be able to carry a Kindle DX (list price around $500) for four years and pay a $10 or $20 download fee for their texts?
One interesting side question is whether that will lead to professors assigning more textbooks. It’s funny how technology works, attempting to solve one reality, and creating a new one.
Such as an iteration of a sad new trend I see over and over: The advent of the 8 gigabyte flash drive has led to students essentially carrying their entire academic careers on a piece of plastic in their pockets. The problem is, students are awfully good at losing small pocket items. To see the look on the face of a student who just misplaced a memory stick containing every paper and shred of research they’ve accumulated since freshman year is to see the face of despair itself.
Imagine a student misplacing a $500 Kindle with $800 of textbooks on it.
But Amazon hopes the Kindle DX will be the iPod of textbooks, the device that has more cache than its basic description. They want it to be a trend item.
So where does this go? I think the primary movement will need to come from the publishers. Students are notoriously unsentimental about their textbooks, so the standard notion of paper and ink having some primal value is likely not a factor in this market. As we see the Kindle DX emerge in May, we’ll see if the options to use them exist by September.

Imagining the world without the Globe

2009-04-30T09:01:00.001-07:00

They were ever the picture of propriety and elitism, esconced in their fortress by the Southeast Expressway, as full in their self-confidence as the first-line schools that had produced them. There was a distance from the old paper that had, years before, been made up mostly of local guys who’d decided newspapering was at least somewhat more fun than the oppression of a financial house or a law firm.
In later years, The Boston Globe threatened to become a snuffy collection of constituencies, and often people who had begun to see themselves as more important than the news they covered. Part of it was from being more educated, and the paper taking on an air of exclusivity not unlike the colleges across the Charles. They didn’t live in split levels in Dorchester anymore, as their blue-collar predecessors had fifty years ago; with the notion of big-city newspapers as financial instruments, so came the notion of big-city journalists as upper-middle-class beings, house-shopping in Needham and Dover and all the places with the right schools and the right kinds of people.
On my occasional visits to the Globe newsroom, I never got past the feeling of having walked into a large insurance company. Out West, at least newsrooms had some pop to them. Here, I felt in the Realm of the Overly Serious. These were people who had arrived, and had no plans to leave.
Now, the people at the Globe seem the picture of shambled affluence, suddenly begging us to take up their cause. It’s a shock, seeing it. As the paper begins ticking away at what may be (or may not be) its last 24 hours in business, it can be safe to say that the place will never be quite the same. Its columnists and editors cannot decree from the monolithic pages of what seemed an unassailable reality, the broad sheet of the morning Globe; the beneficiaries of the presumed lifetime sinecures, and the certitude it bred, may be trying to figure out what the hell to do next.
The shock is in the collective shrug of the shoulders most of the city is giving them. Life without the Globe unthinkable? Apparently not so. Their rally at Fanieul Hall attracted mostly those with a stake in the proceedings – the employees themselves. The petition drive ended up with many an important person, such at the Congressman who represents the district in which the Globe operates, begging off.
My sense is that as the people at the Globe watched the spiral of the newspaper business, they thought that was other peoples’ problem. They were big; it was the newspapers that got small.
So the notion that Saturday will dawn rainy and Globeless seems at its face a comeuppance of mammoth proportion. The glee among some who have watched the Globe inexorably infuse its journalism with political correctness and snobbishness is likely a short-termed bit of fun. The idea that a city like Boston, with its deep webs of political and social intrigue and malfeasance, will work better without a major newspaper, is foolishness. The center will not hold.
“Newspapers are dead” seems the victory cry of people without a better plan. But even as newspapers crumble, the replacements that are springing up in Denver and New York and Seattle are simply returns to the newspapers that existed before the financial world made them darlings. Low-paid, short-staffed, more focused on the plight not of people a station below them but of people just like them. The journalists of the next 20 years are likely not to live among the doctors and lawyers in the leafy ‘burbs, but among the artists and musicians and community volunteers and soup-kitchen managers who they always claimed they cared about. Maybe that’s not the worst thing.
But a well-funded newspaper can chase leads into many dark alleys, something television news and blogging has never come close to doing. And a Globe press card is an entree to many places that others aren't welcome to tread.
If the worst is averted, they will awaken on a Saturday morning with less. They, like everyone else in the business, as well as most people in the world, will have to begin thinking of a future with diminished possibilities, shifting perspective, and a steeping of a newfound, or rediscvered humility I wonder if too many journalists lost in the big years.

Crowdsourcing the Craigslist Killer

2009-04-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

The line between professional journalism and amateur contributors was, at one time, inviolable. The pros did the work, and the non-pros acted either as sources or customers. The closest one came to audience contribution in Old Media were Letters to the Editor. While having a letter published in The New York Times was notable, it really didn’t mean you’d been “published” in The New York Times.
Crowdsourcing is part of the New Media order. Amateurs contribute material, usually for no pay but for the honor or thrill of having their work noted – “America’s Funniest Home Videos” was an early such example. But the downside of crowdsourcing is that by not being paid, amateurs remain amateurs and merely do work that makes the pros money.
But with the Web, cheap video equipment and a less-capitalized news industry, crowdsourcing blurs that line between the pro and the amateur.
As Boston’s “Craigslist Killer” is apparently brought to justice today in Boston, it’s notable that both the Globe’s Boston.com and the Bostonherald.com sites are reaching out to amateurs to write for them.
“Do you know Markoff?” Boston.com asks, with a box for commentary.
“Tell us your story of Philip Markoff,” the Herald pitches.
It’s interesting because each appears to be an interview request masquerading as an opportunity to publish. Whether the result is quotes dropped into a story – as if the reporter has found and interviewed the source – or whether the sites “curate” responses, it’s an example of the shift in which what it means to be a journalists remains in transition.
In the end, the term "Craigslist Killer" is weirdly apropos in an age in which websites are taking over some functions of established journalism.

By way of update, here are some of the posts coming back on these requests:

Dear HERALD ...I met Philip online through my craigslist ad for doing charity work at the homeless shelter I run. He is a nice good decent boy. He did take an unusual interest in the hookers and battered women who found their way to the shelter but he made many friends. Women disappeared shortly after he came, but I believe he was helping them find homes in the upscale community of quincy. I would bet my life on his innocence. he's a GOOD boy. thank you

I remember meeting Philip when we were competing in Miramar to see who was the best pilot. He was teamed up with Slider and he told me I could be his wingman. But then Goose got killed and I bailed out of the fight with the Russians but came back... No, wait - that wasn't me... that was Top Gun. I don't know Philip...

This article (?) is called trolling. Herald, you have stooped to a new low: though, if given time, I'm sure you could come up with even a lower low. With this request you have just put yourselves in the same category as the National Inquirer. I presume we'll be seeing headlines of Elvis @ some truck stop in Georgia or alien babies born to humans. Remember folks, when/if the Globe goes bye bye, THIS (the Herald) is all we'll have left. Do you really trust their reporting so much that you don't want/need something to compare against? With articles like this one, it won't be very long before the Herald will be gone as well.Be careful what you wish for.

Ah, the readers have spoken...

The discourse of the comment section

2009-04-15T06:05:00.000-07:00

A few mornings ago, on the Nieman Journalism Lab site at Harvard, we posted a piece by blogger Martin Langeveld on his assessment of how much of newspaper reading is done online. His calculation: 3 percent. “Print is still king,” Martin declared. Almost immediately, in our office in Walter Lippmann House, my colleague Zach Seward was at his calculator, trying to recrunch Martin’s numbers (I might add that the three bloggers the Lab employs – Martin, Tim Windsor and Matthew Ingram, are completely autonomous, putting out their thoughts on new media as they wish). At his desk, Lab Director Josh Benton likewise tried to follow Martin’s arguments. Within an hour, both Josh and Zach had posted comments taking issue with a few of Martin’s presumptions. Within an hour, there were several dozen reader comments. This morning, I see that number is approaching a hundred. The comments were often lengthy, usually thoughtful and mostly respectful to Martin, if not his premise.
A week ago, a piece ran in Boston Magazine regarding Boston Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia, a lengthy article by a writer named Tommy Craggs. The piece, among other things, quoted Dustin as saying his hometown, Woodland, California, is “a dump.”
I take greater-than-average interest in Dustin these days, since I’m the co-author of his book, “Born to Play,” which will be published this July by Simon & Schuster. And notwithstanding that during the dozens of hours of interviews I did with him, no negative mention of Woodland ever came up (quite the opposite; he spoke with great fondness about many friends and experiences there), within an hour of the story going up on the magazine’s website, the comments on the piece numbered in the dozens, and virtually all the commentors were not from Boston, where the magazine circulates, but rather from Woodland. Dustin is “dead to me,” said one Woodlander. Another suggested he was molested as a child. And others used profanities and imagery that I shall not repeat. A few days later, a 48-year-old Woodland man was arrested for threatening by phone to kill Pedroia’s parents.
Welcome, my friends, to the glory and shame of reader comments.
The comments on Martin’s post are not only excellent, they’ve made what began as one man’s take into a layered, expert and well-debated media piece. To not read the comments is to miss much of what’s important. And notably, Martin engaged in the debate, far from the old-media monolithic tradition.
But the comments on the Dustin Pedroia piece are a case study in ugliness. It is not “crowdsourcing,” as Jeff Howe as coined it, but rather “mobsourcing,” with one aspersion building on the next, and a sense of mounting frenzy. Maybe that’s good – a communal venting – and maybe it’s not – can’t say for sure the arrested man was duly emboldened by the comments on a magazine piece – but it’s all worth thinking about.
In the end, the comments to Martin’s piece represent the audience the Lab intends: People engaged in journalism, thinking about new media.
The crowd commenting on the Boston piece is for the most part external to Boston Magazine’s audience… obviously, Bostonians.
And the question in my mind is whether the structure is something that may evolve itself. Reader comments began as an adjunct, tucked at the bottom of the piece. Whether some enterprising new media types may rethink, harness and repurpose such contributions may be a worthy hope.

Further thinking about The Kindle 2

2009-03-25T06:52:00.000-07:00

At the Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference that went on over the weekend, my Nieman Journalism Lab colleague Joshua Benton made a comment that showed how differently we think about the Kindle electronic reader, and how he and I may represent different markets and sensibilities about that new device.
Josh said, in essence, the Kindle won't be successful until it can surf the web and do email.
Josh and I are separated in age by about 15 years, but that may not be the primary reason we see the Kindle differently. But for whatever reason, I found myself disagreeing. In fact, it's because it can't do those things that I'm becoming more attached to my Kindle.
The world since the web has become an information intensive place, and it has also become a place where movement through such information is quick, constant and high energy. At times, that movement can give me the sensation of being nearly overcaffeinated, a kind of buzzing headrush in which I've made a flurry of active decisions that move me through information in roughly the trajectory of a bee among the blooms.
The Kindle forces me back to the passive, as a book would. My straight-line movement re-establishes itself; when I'm sitting with the Kindle, it creates a "near-book experience" of not having other choices, or staying with the text, of letting the writer bring me through information as he or she has so carefully constructed it. I'm reading "The Forever War" by Dexter Filkins, a New York Times correspondent (and former Nieman Fellow) and there is something about not having the easy ability to check email that has allowed me to honor this writing in the way it should be - it's an amazing book, but one to be read with full engagement.
So in a way, the Kindle is a retro device, creating an experience but changing some of the terms - for example, I've decided to buy the new $35 Cheever biography in hardcover (I was a little irritated to discover the Kindle download is priced at $19.98, rather than the usual $9.99, and I think that's a mistake), but I keep meaning to get to the bookstore, and have not yet.
For Josh, the idea Kindle device is his iPhone, and he mentioned in his remarks that he believes that's where Kindle's future lies. But as someone who needs at times to break the connection with the web, and recuse myself from the always-open marketplace of the web, it has its place.
I think for people who still buy newspapers, the effect is much the same. A web-proofed reading device may be the stuff of impending antiquity, but one that may do more service to certain acts of reading.

The notion of an informed populace

2009-03-23T08:08:00.000-07:00

I was looking over a website devoted to posting old snapshots from the 1930s and 1940s, and I came across the one above. "Battery Park Bum, 1941." A man who is apparently what was once referred to as a “bum” looks out at a distance, grizzled and thin, the face careworn and defeated. And what’s in his pocket? A newspaper.
Because, it seems, there was a time when any civilized person remained somewhat in touch with the world by knowing what was happening in that world.
As newspapers teeter, and some collapse, it is telling that surveys increasingly show people opinionating that without a newspaper, their communities would not change significantly.
Meanwhile, in Boston, the state has backed off its plan to hike Mass Turnpike tolls significantly after an uproar spurred by, you guessed it, coverage in newspapers.
Would local bloggers be enough to serve the watchdog role in small cities and in towns? In nearby Barrington, RI, the citizenry is up in arms after receiving significantly raised tax assessments – my sense is that they feel caught by surprise. The local newspaper has had to cut staff and the sense of things is the citizens are saying “How did I not hear about this?” Without reporters to get the basics, word doesn’t wander down to the counter at the local coffee shop. The people who say they don’t need the newspaper because they “hear things” around town don’t realize how a newspaper they don’t even buy serves them.
Add to that the fact that communities are less tightly knitted, and that people who own houses in a given suburb may see themselves as “citizens” of a larger urban area, and the need to know seems far less compelling. The news of the local newspaper – about high school sports or the obits or any of those things important to a lifelong member of the community is of virtually no importance to the person who bought a house in town a year ago and commutes to work in the nearby city.
So in time, the only relevant locals news becomes those things of interest to you as an individual – your tax assessment, trash pickup times, the lunch menu at your kid’s elementary school. So the notion of a newspaper as both a device of information and community connectivity diminish. The notion of caring about people in one's community just because falls by the wayside.
The newspaper in that photo of the Battery Park bum may have been fished out of the trash can, but nonetheless, it was still a prize, something to be carried and valued, something that helped keep him human even in this picture of isolation.

Giving audience the ads they want

2009-03-19T10:46:00.000-07:00

One of the pleasures of magazine reading can be the advertising. While newspaper ads have traditionally been, because of the relative low-res quality, more about prices and purchase points, magazines have always been able to use ads that were something of a viewing experience: artfully shot and designed, often evoking stories beyond the selling pitch. The ad artists of the last 50 years – Avedon, George Lois, David Ogilvy – gave images or told stories people wanted to hear.
But magazines have been as hamstrung as newspapers in attempting to convey first-rate ad content. Bandwidth and resolution has often left online ads as cheesy as a 1990s video game.
Here, though, is piece about new ad platforms that may help.
While newspaper classified advertising has all but been overtaken by craigslist, eBay and others, the ability to pair with sharp ad content may be something of a salvation. But that means advertisers will need to rethink how they do what they do.
I’m currently working on a documentary film about advertising, and while the focus is less on the business of advertising than of the craft, it’s still interesting to hear from the ad people as to where they see it going.
First, the ads, more than ever, have to be a self-contained viewing experience, that gets traffic and becomes, as Henry Jenkins' C3 group at MIT calls it, “spreadable. I think of this campaign, “My Big Ball,” as being such. These ads have the feel of weird little short films. The Apple “Mac and PC” ads have done their job similarly.
Second, the advertisers will align with sites likely to bring them traffic. If you never thought of newspapers being social media, then perhaps rethink. The online publication will further have a look and feel of one, and the ads will follow.
Third, ads have to cease being an impediment to where I’m heading. If I click for a story and am subjected to the ad before I get there. Even a fun ad like “Mac/PC” will seem an unwanted side trip if I’ve clicked on a story I want to read or view.
Fourth, sponsorship of certain content may position advertisers as patrons, and therefore set up a more positive experience. The much-talked-about “onBeing” project The Washington Post did lacked something that might have been nice: A corporate sponsorship.
The key is remembering that audiences actually like ads, when those ads create a notion of lifestyle or point of view they hold. Television has done better maintaining that relationship. The fact that online newspapers and magazines are often devoid of ads means not that readers have been gratefully shielded, but rather that they’re not getting the kinds of ads they want.

The one man band and the first violinist

2009-03-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

There’s a great post on Poynter.org today discussing the pros and cons of backpack journalism. The section “Backpacking or backsliding” seems, to me, to set up the notions that backpack journalism is something you do before you become successful. The one-man-band model is at odds with the notion of a first violinist. In truth, I would like to see both models succeed.
In my time doing documentary film and being around filmmakers, I see some definitive contrasts between writers and directors. Call it the snipers vs. the generals. In many ways, writers – novelists, in particular – are the snipers. Sitting alone in a tree, singling out one target, and using a carefully honed skill to make an impact, usually in a single line of fire. Directors – primarily of feature films – are the generals: Not actually engaging in the fighting themselves, but ordering or coordinating a number of people who carry out discrete tasks. The cannonade is both a distant thunder but of devastating effect.
In my film-festival rounds, I’ve seen my share of such producers and directors. They can’t shoot, edit or write, but they are often adept at managing those who can. The only problem can come when they only think they can manage, or that having larger numbers of underlings somehow becomes testament to their importance. They “own” the production without having any one skill.
On the other hand, there are those, and I may be one of them, who wants to do every part of the task. I want to light, mike, shoot, interview, edit and add artistic value. Am I equally, or sufficiently, adept at all these? Definitely not. But it is such an enjoyable process, I still want to do that.
But for a certain type of personality, package of talent, or predisposition, backpack journalism is the way to go. It speaks of autonomy and “artistic” control, of one can ascribe that word to matters journalistic. Not exactly a sniper, but maybe able to bring multiple elements to bear.
And, beyond that, the technology simply allows it. The gadgets are all so damn simple these days. When photographic greats like Cartier-Bresson walked the earth, the skill was in everything from metering with your brain, to feel-focusing, to developing and printing. Now, with any decent digital camera, it sets your exposure, locks in focus and produces an instant digital image. Video cameras are nearly the same now – not foolproof, but a sight better than spending a day shooting in 16mm and then finding out after dropping a load on developing that a simple but essential setting was wrong. Video editing is more and more a breeze - Chroma-keying, for example, is as elemental on Final Cut Pro as dragging a file into a folder. All of this enhances the opportunity to get past the technology and concentrate on the story.
There has never been a better time to control all aspects of the product, when the equipment makes it so simple. When I was a roving regional columnist in Colorado 20 years ago, I figured out that management would fund more road trips if I took pictures myself: For the price of one, I wrote the story, took and developed and printed the photos, and never created the tension that sometimes happens when a writer and photographer have different visions of the same reality. The economic model makes even more sense now for a better chance at something akin to a profit. If I can produce a film for $5,000 by doing it all myself, as opoosed to hiring four or five people and having the cost rise to $25,000, how does that not make sense, for an individual or a news organization.
By the same token, asking one person to do many things can do much to damp a singular talent. My Creative Nonfiction class is reading the great writer Joan Didion right now; while he imagery is photographic, I can't imagine burdening her with a camera. And would technical considerations sufficiently close down the channels of observation and perception that has made her a giant?
The answer to the question, of course, is that both models can work.

Sizing up the Kindle 2

2009-02-26T05:25:00.000-08:00

The Kindle 2 arrived in the mail yesterday, a lovely and unexpected gift from Jenn. It had been ordered some time ago, but was arriving as the first wave of the product’s release. On the Nieman Journalism Lab site, Josh Benton and others had been hashing out the relative merits of the Kindle – Josh predicted it would fail, and some of the reader responses on this otherwise smart and polite Nieman Lab site bordered on violent. Who knew a little reading device could create such vitriol?
In January, I’d visited the E-Ink facility in Cambridge to interview Russ Wilcox, CEO of the company that produces the “electronic paper display” for these devices. The conversation revolved around the future innovations to be expected. The piece and accompanying video I did for the Nieman Lab are here.
I’d not given a lot of thought to purchasing such a device myself, but last night I downloaded my first book, which was mostly symbolic – for 99 cents, the first tome in my reader was Joyce’s Ulysses, which I’ve read many times. It just felt appropriate. The second book, the one I wanted to read, was “The Boat,” a highly regarded collection of stories by Nam Le. It was nearly impossible to download by wireless, apparently because of high traffic as people attempted to put their freshly opened devices to work. I ended up ordering the book on the Amazon website, then in short order the download rained down, from some geosynchronous literature-spewing satellite lurking above in the dark sky.
You could make a drinking game out of how many times someone says, as they receive an Academy Award, “Wow, this thing is heaver than I thought!” The Kindle, conversely, is a lot smaller than I’d expected. The actual reading surface roughly the size of one of those crumbling, yellow-paged Penguin paperbacks from the 1970s that occupy the tops of my many bookshelves. The size of the device itself is more like a slim hardcover. While it would be nice of e-paper could be a bit whiter, the text is easy enough to read. I realized as well that with the leather cover that comes with it, I can mount a small booklight and have it work better than with the double-leaf of a real book, in which I'm constantly shifting the beam. I foresee much e-book reading on the deck when the weather warms and the twilights bring us outside.
But what struck me as I began “The Boat” as my first journey through an e-book is how it is, through technology, a return to a simplicity, simpler even than a hardbound book. The work is read in strict linearity. Riffling ahead takes some effort. Although the bottom of the display shows a progress bar – 2 percent read, 4 percent, and so on – the nature of this device asks you only to consider the words laid out before you.
All of the more plastic elements – size, weight, shape, ergonomics – are as advertised, but what I realize is that the Kindle is not the electronic version of a book, but rather the electronic version of a scroll, bringing the reader back to some very basic actions – or inactions. I noted in the reader comments on Josh’s Niemanlab post that some of the more enthusiastic owners of Kindles were people in the 60s and 70s. It makes perfect sense to me now.
When email first became a reality back in the mid-1990s, I initially celebrated the fact that younger people, so ear-welded to their telephones, had suddenly become writers again. Even though emailing has given way to texting and both have their fractured, evolved language, I no longer have students asking me for extensions on their papers because they’re slow typers. The effect is layered. They write, but the writing denigrates to the kind of blipping staccato of the thumb-founded missive. So be it.
So in the same way, I wonder what the potential use of e-books will do to the act of reading. I hear that colleges may look to equip their students with e-readers as a cheaper alternative to textbooks (The textbook publishers may likely drive this, because nothing is more unprofitable than a pile of $150 textbooks sitting in the college bookstore, not to be bought because the class has been cancelled, and unable to be sent to another college before it’s too late).
Could e-books reconnect people to reading through the fact that despite its technical trappings, it returns to the simplicity of the act? Or will future e-readers bring forth the bells and whistles that make reading already seem, to many, an anachronism?
For now, the Kindle is an exercise in simplicity.

Stolen bikes and social networking

2009-02-18T18:07:00.000-08:00

When I was a boy, my friends and I used to overcome the oppressive walk to school by riding our bicycles to the neighborhood filling station a block from school, and ditch the wheels in the weeds behind the station before dashing the last leg to the Holy Name schoolyard.
It was a good system, until we returned one day to find all of our bicycles gone. The long walk home was made all the more epic by the fact that we’d each have to tell our parents we had let our bikes get clipped. It wasn’t pretty.
The next day, we “put out the word.” We’re talking 1967 here. The Word meant spreading news of our victimhood to every kid we knew, hoping someone might spot one or another of our Schwinns (because in the USA in 1967, there was no bike but a Schwinn). As much as we imagined the neighborhood buzzing about the heist of five or six bicycles, and the culprit being flushed out from sheer fear and embarrassment, no word trickled back to us. We sat on our front steps, wondering who could get away with such a demented act.
Eventually, the crime of the decade was solved when the crusty old filling station owner, Mr. Merritt, stood silent as we bought our eight-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola from the old “Coke machine,” said machine being an ice-water-filled, top-opening box in which you had to put 15 cents into the old man's palm and then go get the bottle under his narrow gaze. The front of the machine said “Ice Cold.”
Old Merritt grunted, “Been looking for your bicycles?”
We turned, aghast.
“Yes…”
“I put them in here.”
The bikes were in the rear of his grease pit, lined up in the weak light. He said he’d brought them in so we’d learn a lesson about leaving our bikes where they could be stolen. We might have argued that no one had stolen them, other than the old bastard trying to teach us this apparent lesson. But we were nine, and remained mute. In those days, talking back to an elder would more often than not result in a whack across the back of the head.
On the other hand, the man had taken our bikes, and all our parents went to his station to get gas and have their cars repaired. Maybe he was feeling the sweat of unanticipated consequences.
So why am I reminded?
The news from California is that Lance Armstrong’s bicycle has been stolen. And it isn’t a Schwinn. Lance, beginning his 2009 comeback in the Tour of California, had his one-of-a-kind, $10,000 time-trial bike, a Trek 1274, lifted from a van Wednesday, along with three road-race bikes belonging to his teammates.
What’s interesting about the story is the way the crime may have been solved, because it involves Facebook.
Not long after the theft, a Facebook page called “"1 Million Citizens Looking for Lance Armstrong’s Stolen Bike" appeared. Nine hundred people had already enlisted. The search was set up by Rob Quigley, who works in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s communications office.
By Thursday, as reported in the Associated Press, “a local resident brought the custom bike, worth about $10,000, to police headquarters Wednesday morning.”
Does Facebook deserve credit?
Hard to say.
But it seems that the idea of social networking as a place in which people of very narrow demographics can be alerted quite quickly to matters of interest – and I don’t mean the typical college nonsense that populates Facebook and makes every college foible the stuff of legend – could well have contributed.
In some ways, Facebook and other such sites seem to contribute to what I might paraphrase not as the Unexamined Life, but rather the Narrowcasted Life. In bike-crazy California, it makes perfect sense that the search could have been so surgically assembled that the culprit, seeing nothing but bad vibes, walks that featherweight, carbon-fiber bike into the cop shop, happy to rid himself of the hassle. Anyone he would have wanted to show the bike off to was now aware it was stolen goods.
But: Is the world becoming sliced down to innumerable narrow-band existences where on a single day, Lance’s bike is the biggest news, or Paris’s birthday party, or Mickey Rourke’s Chihuahua is the single biggest event.
One of the worst ways it has happened of late is in the detestable Juicy Campus website, which finally died a timely death. The anonymous, vicious posts only served to create a stink in one’s own lap; it also furthered the notion of how horrid people can be when they know they can be unaccountable. But Juicy Campus was simply Facebook re-purposed, a slight variation on a theme. It was news in its most base form, the kind that editors would have not let through. It was the obsessions and resentments of people occupying small footprints. As the oft-repeated “Pothole Paradox” states, the pothole in front of your house is the biggest news there is, if not to the neighbors three houses away.
Has the Global Village collapsed back down to a village built mostly from the on-top-of-each-other resentments of a too-crowded world? Maybe. But in the same way that in 1967 the news radiated among a geographical space a few blocks across, in 2009 it seeps into the social aquifer in a way far less obvious. Good news: Lance got his bike back. Bad news: Big Brother lives.

The Web, Innovation and Ownership

2009-02-05T18:02:00.000-08:00

On May 29, 2008, The New York Times’ website launched “The Conversation,” which announced it as “The first in a series of conversations between Times columnists David Brooks and Gail Collins. In this one, they debate the primary rules and which party’s approach to the nomination process works best.”
I wasn’t totally sure how I felt about this, mainly because it so blatantly copied Slate.com’s conversations, which often featured Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick conversing with a variety of other writers.
The Slate conversations, which are epistolary and opened with breezy chat that seemed completely different, read like this sample from 2007:

Dear Walter,

Welcome back to this, the best part of having the best job in the world. Can this possibly be our sixth year doing an end-of-the-Supreme-Court's-term analysis? Good grief. I think that makes it our constitutional iron anniversary. Will Monday morning find you back at Sutton's Drugstore? Or will you be joining me on Maryland Ave., where the press corps increasingly obsesses over grumpy dissenters who keep reading things aloud from the bench?

Meaning, it read like an email.
Here is a Gail Collins's opening from 2008:

Gail Collins: David, I spent the long weekend in the country. The foliage was great, but I really hated the way the deer kept posting “Obama is a terrorist” signs on the bushes they haven’t already eaten. The chipmunks are spray-painting “McCain is Old” over everything they can reach, but since that’s only about six inches from the ground, the effect is less devastating.
Isn’t it amazing that people are still so obsessed with the election? True, there’s less than three weeks to go. But in most places, a sudden economic meltdown would trump the traditional democratic process. I mean, it’s not like we’re having a coup. Right?

Too close, in my estimation. It irritates me every time I read it, because it seems to make no effort to conform it to whatever specific voices the writers Collins and Brooks might normally have. They're simply Lithwicking. But then I thought, How do I know Lithwick came up with this? I credit her with it simply because it's where I first became aware of this type of approach.
Which leads to a question: What is originality? And is its definition changing in the face of such widespread communication?
I came home yesterday and Jenn had the television on, watching John Cleese appear on The Bonnie Fuller Show. I vaguely know who Bonnie Fuller is, but the setting was all-too-familiar: Host behind a desk with hands gripping index cards; a band leader with whom to share witty repartee. Then there was the video call to the host’s mother, a seemingly nice but not-altogether-sentient elderly woman who got some yucks for her Midwestern not-too-impressed demeanor. Hey, didn’t Letterman start that, with his Indiana-based Mom? But then again, doesn’t Letterman’s set simply replicate Carson and Allen and Paar?
The point is, true originality is rare, and true creativity is quickly mimicked. Collins and Brooks of The Times are less guilty of creative rip-off than of seeing a good thing they can mimic. But is this the new wave? I can sense oncoming “conversations” in too many small-town websites:

Bob,

Coming home from bowling tonight and heading the liquor store, and thinking about that town council vote on the easement for the new town gravel pit. Like, they sure get crazy about this down at the coffee shop, don’t they?

But am I simply not understanding that in the Wild West Web, the laws of originality have been suspended, and that all ideas or conceits are open-source? I judge the success of The Times’ “Conversation” on the reader comments. In today’s, in which the columnists dialogue about whether Obama’s honeymoon is over, there are 119 comments, many of which have taken up the style of The Conversation itself:

David, David. Is this the same funny guy I heard at Amherst College? Anyway, and I never thought I’d say this, but, if this is Puritanism, bring it on! This is about expertise, but also about some minimal ethical standards and sense of equity. Isn’t it enough to learn that $500k is what the receptionists make on Wall Street?

Ah, well… these pithy exchanges might catch on, and in some ways bringing journalistic conversation to the faux-camaraderie of the coffee shop may be just the thing to humanize a bit. But I wish the Times had simply found a small tweak that would have created something fully their own.

Building up, scaling down, and meeting in the middle, and finding the right staffing size

2009-01-14T18:33:00.000-08:00

The news from Seattle is interesting. The Post-Intelligencer looks as if it’s going down for the count, up for sale with a 60-day window, then possibly looking at a web-only future with huge staff cuts. Meanwhile, in the same city, Crosscut.com signed papers last month to move to nonprofit status and it’s looking to build its microstaff into something larger.
A blog post this week by Seth Godin posits that “Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction.” He suggests that newspapers (or those news operations that have traditionally operated as newspapers) can succeed on three elements: investigative, local news, and political coverage in that locale. Dump the sports, fluffy features, comics and everything else.
In a sense, that’s what Crosscut is doing. Publisher David Brewster, whom I interviewed for an upcoming post at Nieman Journalism Lab (I’ll break down the business model there), is starting with a full-time staff of three (less really) and a number of freelancers and contributors, trying to cover Seattle. Bradley, who founded Seattle Weekly three decades ago, uses the phrase “garage media” to describe these kinds of ventures popping up on small scale.
At the P-I, with a news staff of 200, surviving with a staff of 60 – 20 times the size of Crosscut.com – would seem sheer carnage. That many journalists turned out into a horrible job market would be distressing.
But what comes then? Is Seattle, despite the shadow of The Times (with its own troubles), prime to support smaller, sharper, more motivated, more mobile operations? And in cities such as Seattle, will there be a balancing in which in a decade it will be amazing to think that newspapers had staffs numbering in the hundreds?
I think of Joan Didion’s long-ago and brilliant essay in her book “The White Album,” in which she wrote of the mansions of Newport, R.I., just down the road from where I write. The Breakers and Marble House and The Elms are amazing places to tour, amazing because they're so stunningly far beyond our notions of “homes.” Didion, nearly 40 years ago, wrote that they weren’t homes at all. She said that like the factories and railroads and shipping that created the wealth for these men, their homes were factories that cranked out lifestyle:
"The mechanics of such houses take precedence over all desires or inclinations; neither for great passions nor for morning whims can the factory be shut down, can production -- of luncheons, of masked balls, of marrons glacés -- be slowed…"
I think of that towering New York Times building just erected in Manhattan, or the Boston Globe hulking by the Southeast Expressway; these places were massive factories of news, with assembly lines not only to churn out ink on paper, but production lines in which obits, city council news and police blotters, and trend pieces and club listings and sports columns, are packed and stacked for a world that now lives on the internet; half-ton pallets groaning under the weight of an abstract load - information - which now flies weightlessly in the ether in which these very words have been set free.
I wonder if those vast newspaper buildings will eventually inspire the same incredulity of Newport’s stunningly overrealized “summer cottages.”
It’s not as if it’s all going back to cave painting. The models will come, and like Ted Turner with cable, someone’s going to get the lightbulb. Will it be, in a larger city like Seattle, a table of 10? Of 30? Of 70? And will they be organized in that pseudo-military-industrial way of modern news staffs with its layers of generals and commanders and lieutenants? Or will it be like knighthood, the looser array of “free lances” that birthed that term of journalism? In fact, I wonder if the ideal local news operation will not be in a building at all, but rather as nodes on a network, individual reporters and writers marshaled from a control center that might be like the small room in which I sit, writing on a small computer.

Follows a casualty of the shrinking business

2009-01-12T05:27:00.000-08:00

In my town, Bristol, R.I., we have a good little weekly newspaper, The Phoenix. It always endeared me for its longtime use of several 19th-century conventions: the period at the end of its name –Bristol Phœnix. – and its lack of periods in courtesy titles – Mr John Smith.
The Phoenix has always done what most good weeklies have done – walk that tightrope between community service and commerce. The owners walk down Hope Street more than likely to bump into both the people who fund them and the people on whom they report. The paper has staffed itself with a combination of long-term management, including upper management from the family that owns it, and younger reporters, a fair number who have come out of my classroom.
And like new reporters at most weeklies, my former students have found that the news business is both competitive and cooperative. Reporters from competing news organizations who cover the same news events often horse-trade tips, private phone numbers and even background information, with the premise being it’s better to give a little to get a little than to be completely shut out of stories.
I can recall as a young reporter at The Denver Post having competing reporters pump me for information. The rule of thumb seemed to be that you tried not to give much to a reporter at The Rocky Mountain News, our direct competition, but it was less egregious to help out a television or radio reporter. But the rule of thumb was also that if you gave them something, then they owed you something back. I always recall the hapless news crews from Channel 2 in Denver straggling onto a news scene as everyone else packed up to leave, begging for any help they could get. They weren’t ever going to save my bacon on any other day. We all ignored them as the beggars they were. But the reporters at Channels 4 or 9 might hit you for a detail they missed, then share something back later to square the deal.
In this competitive/cooperative relationship, you also covered yourself by monitoring everything the competition did. Televisions hung in clusters all over The Post newsroom, with all the local channels going; someone kept an ear to the main news radio stations. And occasionally, when the copy boys were tied up, the night city editor would send me or another newer staffer to the loading dock of The Rocky to buy the first copies of the paper coming off the presses. Back in the newsroom, we’d rip through looking for anything we’d missed. Over at the Rocky, they were doing the same thing with our first edition.
That is all changing, everywhere. The Rocky Mountain News is on the chopping block right now, possibly to be closed. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was Friday put up for sale with a near-impossible window of 60 days. At the end of that, it may be done.
Locally, The Providence Journal has cut back drastically on its town coverage, and television stations are strapped. The Phoenix seems to be hanging in there, but the effect is nonetheless felt. In one instance, it’s a follow-up of a local story for which I have yet to find completion. Without a group of reporters pushing, prodding and sometimes sharing, a lot goes through the cracks.
On Dec. 23, the headline in the Phoenix was that a blind man had been hit by a speeding car, and that his life was likely saved when his guide dog pulled him away. A woman in a station wagon who’d hit him never even stopped.
Over the next few weeks I looked, with curiosity, for a follow-up story. Had the driver been caught? Was there any discussion in the town council or police about the rather dangerous stretch of road where this man had been hit? How was he doing?
It occurs to me that follow-up is a prime casualty of the economic changes in the business, and that part of the reason these kinds of stories have died off is not only because of reduced staffing, but because less and less competitive pressure or competitive cooperation is keeping these stories going after the initial event takes place. They’re the least absolute, and because so many reporters work in a vacuum, rather than in a group covering a story, they’re fully on their own.
Solutions? These kinds of stories may be the kind best suited for citizen journalists. Having some local people who can help round out the news could potentially support, rather than erode, the value of the local news source. While The Phoenix will always staff town council, they have less ability to do what my old city editor, Jim Bishop, used to advocate – go out to the neighborhoods and see how decisions made by local government affect the people.
I mentioned in an earlier post the growing notion of “curation.” Could a weekly like The Phoenix begin to redefine itself not only as a source of news but as a curator of community information coming from a variety of sources? Would readers move from what seems their primary contribution - reader comments - to something a bit more substantive?
It seems that 2009 will be a hell year for newspapers, as the economy plunges. Newspapers that may have otherwise clung to standard practices may have to make it up now as they go along. Other sources may come forward. But I think that as this new year winds out, we’ll know less about the results and aftermaths of the news we’re still able to get.

Ringing in the new, with the old

2009-01-02T09:11:00.000-08:00

Howie Carr, the muckraking columnist for The Boston Herald, published a piece today called “Can you spare a dime in '09?” It is, in essence, a step-by-step how-to for the dime droppers whom he has cultivated as a rich source of information on political corruption. The column, which, among other things, asks his informants to send information by snail mail so as not to be traced, also yields at the end a real-time story of political malfeasance that Carr apparently did on New Years Eve after the receipt of just such a paper missive. He was able to use The Herald’s database of state payrolls to get right to work. His column names no names yet, as he says he will next confirm the names. I found it interesting in a lot of ways related to where the business may head in 2009, in what is more than likely going to be a tumultuous year for newspapers. Carr is not a perfect example of this, because he’s had a well-paid radio gig at WRKO in Boston since 1994. But here’s where it may be going for journalists in the coming year, and how Carr, a columnist at a traditional blue-collar tabloid, is doing it:
1) Pay greater attention to personal branding. There was a time when to work in a perceived lifetime appointment with an established newspaper meant that the brand that mattered was the paper itself. While it is not news that many newspaper people eventually chafed at those restraints – think of the 1960s with Gay Talese walking out of The New York Times or Tom Wolfe leaving the New York Herald Tribune, each to engage in groundbreaking forms of journalism newspapers could not fully support – the difference now is that no one knows how seaworthy the big ship is at this point. The fact is, as the people at The Rocky Mountain News know all to well, you can be cut loose in a minute if it benefited the owners. As they say on a sinking ship, Every Man For Himself. As Howie Carr has largely made a career of uncovering Massachusetts state corruption, people working in traditional media now will need to figure out what they do that would give them a name in and of itself, without the name of a big-media organization behind it. Even in something as component as sportswriting, the successful new-media practitioners are people like Bill James, who specializes in statistical data, and more importantly his analysis of it. If newspapers continue their slide at least for now, having a personal name brand people will seek out is crucial. I have a friend who is considering publishing a book despite the objections of his bosses at a metro paper. My question is, if he passes on the book and the paper lays him off in six months, how will he look back on that missed opportunity? Secondly, I’d wonder why any newspaper bosses, if they’re looking at the ledgers, still feel OK about impeding that kind of personal enterprise.
2) Find scarce information among the abundance. This goes toward the notions continually put out by Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center at Harvard, which says newspapers were “designed for a world of scarcity, and they’re now living in a world of abundance, a place where content is infinitely reproducable at low or no cost, and where anyone can create content." Opinion, he notes, is most abundant, and therefore dropping in monetary value. Note that Carr, though a columnist, has not made his name in opinion but in disclosure. The notion of scarcity is manifold. For example, I think of my long-ago days as a young reporter covering the planning-and-zoning board of El Paso County, in the 1980s, when a building boom was on that would determine the future of the city of Colorado Springs. The meetings were boring, epic and largely unscripted; to know what had happened on an issue important to you meant you either went to the meeting and sat for many hours waiting for a ten-minute discussion, or you read it in the newspaper story I wrote. These days, El Paso County Planning Board meetings are webcasted live; the minutes of such a meeting can be posted to the minute, and the participants in the decisions – developers, lawyers and bankers – can post the information on their own websites, or send e-updates to interested parties. Much information is no longer scarce. The other kind of information that has been traditionally scarce is information that people don’t want to let out. Howie Carr specializes in finding exactly that. A decade ago, he’d have had to fight his way through a gantlet of bureaucrats intent on blocking him to get to the incriminating records; now it’s mostly available in database - but a database can also be the best place to hide something. He’s shifted from being a person who unearths such facts to someone who can see the larger connections. And, he still gets the letters, which goes to my next point.
3) Become a curator. There’s your word for 2009. I’ve seen Mindy McAdams use it in her Teaching Online Journalism blog, quoting Jeff Jarvis’s use of it, and it seems to be rising elsewhere. In essence, it’s the notion of “sorting, choosing and displaying.” It means overseeing a somewhat larger operation, it means managing information, and it means seeing oneself as something of a protector of that information. Carr has been curating for years, assembling a community of dimedroppers, accepting and storing their tips, creating his own collection, and deciding what should be on display. And just as a museum curator might have back storerooms filled with artifacts to brought out from time to time, so does Carr: Some of his best columns are when he trots out for further scrutiny old stories, often just for entertainment, often to punctuate in some new corruption the longstanding culture. I see Thomas Friedman having established much of his career on this sort of curation, first as an expert on The Middle East, and more recently as someone studying sustainability. Curation also adds presige: Having your art exhibited by The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is more meaningful than in the lobby of the public library branch in your neighborhood. Curation means, in essence, being the standardbearer in the exhibition of certain artifacts, in this case, information. And Carr may have a banner year: As Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick announces a $1 billion revenue shortfall for the state, tales of political financial corruption are not just entertainment, but rather part of a policy debate.
4) Engage in one’s own community. Carr’s columns produce some of the longest commentary strings of any local media, and when one reads the comments one has the sense of a small but clearly established community. Carr is loved by some, loathed by others, and exasperated by many more, and I sense reading the volleys between his commentors that they’ve made that string a bit of a clubhouse. Boston Globe columnists Yvonne Abraham wrote recently of the horrors of commenters, and isn’t completely wrong. But beyond the fact that she seems to have just come across this phenomenon, and that she’s informing her readers of content within her own organization's website, she also has not seemed to have deeply examined the larger reality. It seems to me that the worst of the commenters are people who are railing against the deaf ears of big media. I am a reader of both The Globe and The Herald, but also know from being in the community for most of my life that The Globe is often looked at as elitist, condescending and not always open to its readers view - a classic one-way downward communication pattern. My sense of the nastiness of commenters is that they are most engaged when they are most outraged. Again, this is where Carr's radio experience helps him: Talk radio is largely premised on audience comment, and Carr allows his listeners to skewer and roast him, laughing the whole way. The result seems to be the audience tones down a bit, and it becomes part of the total package people seek out.
5) Know that the new can exist with the old. For all the changes in the way he does things, Carr is in today’s column unabashedly clear that he still does one main the thing the good, old-fashioned way. He still knows the dime droppers are an essential, if not anachronistic, part of his trade. By the way, the last time a phone actually call cost a dime in these parts? 1992.

Why so many journalism majors?

2008-12-16T06:39:00.000-08:00

In my years of teaching I’ve learned some basic truths about why people become journalism majors. Sometimes it’s that they can’t do math; sometimes they migrate in on the notion that it’s an easy major. Which it is, as long as you’re not trying to do good journalism.
The article on the growing numbers of journalism majors nationwide, which originated at The Albany Times Union and was linked through Jim Romenesko’s blog at Poynter, shows a growing number of J-majors at a time when the J-job market has badly stagnated. At my own school, last year’s top J-grad remains jobless; the two I consider this year’s best seniors will likewise have a tough time. And for anyone below that, I wonder if they even presume to get a real job in media.
Journalism classes should be very difficult to fail, but very hard to get an A in, in my opinion. When you’re a bottom-feeder, handing in anything at all sentient should get you your D-; but those who really want to know what it takes to get a job these days shouldn’t get the easy approbation of an A without understanding it comes with an asterisk: A*, meaning, this is no guarantee of anything anymore. Not a job at a weekly paper, not at a small local television station, not with some modestly funded web outfit. The notion that threshold skills bring threshold employability is a casualty of the crisis in the business.
But in my alternate reality as a novelist, I teach as well in the creative-writing department, and it’s been a long-standing understanding that 99 percent of the students before us will never, ever, publish a thing: Never a single short story or poem or essay, much less a book. That’s the market. And it’s a rare student who doesn’t write only about himself or herself, never daring to see the world from another perspective, or trying to crawl inside someone else’s skin. Those who do might have a chance at real success. So what does a creative-writing course of study offer? Better writing skills, better reading and analytical skills, and a sustained examination of human nature. We hope that will help.
Over in our theater department, I’m not aware of a single grad, ever, who has ever become a successful actor, because there are barely any actors who become successful actors.
I wonder whether journalism education is heading that way. I wonder whether what seems an increasingly self-absorbed culture of post-adolescence really wants to do what I think of as real journalism, which is exploring something important outside yourself. If you walk around my campus and eavesdrop on students walking with their cell-phones, which is easy to do as they bark into them, you’ll learn quickly there is little introspection and far less external curiosity: Most chats around here seem to be along the lines of “I got so wasted last night.” I wonder what the obssession with drinking is supposed to be insulating these children from as billions of people suffer around the world in real terms. I sometimes wonder if many of my fellow professors are the greatest enablers, so worried about whether the students like them that they cannot bring themselves to challenge the self-assured post-high-school assumptions about the world ("Why do I need to take core history? It's not like history is something I'll ever use in the real world!"). So many students I see in class spend multiples more time immersed in Facebook than ever expressing interest in something bigger than themselves.
But the numbers of journalism students grow, a number heightened by the influx of people who seem most interested in blogging as a way of posting (and boasting) about yourself, rather than about any real intellectual inquiry or desire to learn about the human condition; I see a generation who were inspired to journalism not by Woodward and Bernstein but by the “Sex and the City” girl sitting crosslegged on her bed writing about her romantic life, or the girls on “The Hills” working in “journalism” by going to Teen Vogue parties.
Few, if any, of the students read The New York Times, on paper or online.
Few follow any news on television.
Few respond to daily news unless it is reduced to something YouTubish, such as a guy throwing his shoes at The President of The United States.
Many profess interest in buzzword issues such as poverty, or sustainability, or the war in Iraq, but most don’t gather the elemental knowledge required for a thoughtful conversation.
The biggest cohort of male students seem to want to be sportswriters, with its inherent promise of free seats at big games. Most want to go directly to major-league sports – the idea of covering a good high-school game is either boring, or beneath them. But when I brought in a real sportswriter to class last year, and he talked about his real daily workflow covering the Boston Red Sox, they quickly got bored. Sounded like too much work.
I worry the new journalism rubric is the inanity of things like Gawker. If anyone ever read the New York Times Magazine piece by Emily Gould, her version of journalism is like a whining child. It's truly frightening.
But, it’s always been a truth that the vast majority of journalism majors will never become journalists, and a good many journalists will never have been journalism majors. It takes something deeper than that, something I think is more and more scarce in the legions of journalism majors filling the nation’s classroom. More journalism majors than ever, caring less about the world than ever?
Given that journalism is, less and less, becoming a viable profession, the nature of J-school is going to shift, with fewer hard expectations (such as knowing how to cover a town council meeting for your first job at the weekly newspaper) and more about entertaining the students or letting them "express" themselves. I worry that the evolution of that kind will create a greater disconnect between the profession, and those who purport to teach the skills of that profession.

Backpack journalism on the cheap

2008-12-13T10:42:00.000-08:00

When I did my 2007 documentary film on the author Andre Dubus, I invested substantially in equipment with which to shoot it. It filled the car and took a while to set up, but I got happy results with that technology, which was built around the JVC HD100u ProHD camera.
But for smaller jobs, and web-based work, I’ve slowly assembled a smaller, lighter kit that seems to work quite well for those uses, allows me to carry it on a train or subway, and is getting results that approach the far more expensive setup, as long as you're not projecting on a theater-sized screen.
After visiting NBC digital journalist Mara Schiavocampo in New York on behalf of the Nieman Journalism Lab to discuss her kit (I’ll have a piece running on niemanlab.org), which runs 30 pounds and costs about $10,000, I got thinking about this. With this setup she prepares reports for both the web and for broadcast. Her work has to be able to appear on a Post-It Note-sized online video player, and at other times on a 60-inch 1080p flatscreen. For most of us, that is not the case.
I’m one of those who thinks that the increasingly ubiquitous Flip Camera is being completely overhyped: fine for quick bits, but the simple fact that Flips (or Aipteks or the growing number of pocket cameras) don’t allow for quality sound recording, nor lights, nor particularly sharp zooms, means you're on the borderline of amateurism when you're using it. I wrote on the low expectations The Flip sets up here.
I suspect smaller news sites can get by on much less, in terms of weight and cost. So, here’s an alternate backpack that I’ve found to be effective:
1) A Canon Vixia HV20 single chip camcorder (these and the newer HV30 can be had for under $800. It also shoots stills with an 8-gigabyte memory card. It shoots 1080i and had has a “kind of” 24p capability that involves a far more involved workflow. Manual controls are not easy to access, but you need to learn them, and override some of the built-in controls, to get decent results (again, The Flip doesn't even have menus, leaving an ignorance-is-bliss coziness to using it).
2) A Canon Dm-50 camera-mount microphone ($150) that mounts in the hot shoe and is far superior than the tiny onboard mic embedded in the top of the camcorder.
3) A Sony XLR lavalier microphone (about $200) with an XLR cable ($30) and a simple XLR adapter ($20)
4) A camera-mount VidLed LED light ($275). I use an orange gel taped on it to warm the light.
5) A Canon add-on wide and lens adapter ($150) and telephoto lens adapter ($100)
6) For multiple mic input, a BeachTek DXA-2s XLR adapter.
7) Sharper Image noise-cancelling headphones ($50), which do a lot to isolate sound quality. They're foldable, which saves space in the bag, but take AAA batteries.
8) No-name brand tripod and monopod ($25 each)
So, for about $1,650 I have a simple kit that works at nearly the quality of the more expensive setup at NBC. Throw in a $1,000 iBook with a copy of Final Cut Express for $200, and for under $3,000 you’re nearly good to go…
I am hoping to explore the setups of working journalists like Schiavocampo, but those working in print- and web-based environments, rather than broadcast. I want to see how little or how much equipment people are packing to get good results. Watch niemanlab.org for those.

Considering the backpack model

2008-12-10T04:34:00.000-08:00

I went down to New York Friday to interview Mara Schiavocampo, digital journalist for NBC. The discussion was primarily about her equipment and workflow, and we’ll be posting a fairly substantial piece on that at the Nieman Journalism Lab. I’m doing a written piece and a short video.
But it also got me thinking about the debate on whether journalists should be asked to do so much – writing, shooting and editing video, doing multimedia pieces, and doing audio or podcasts, and as with most such questions, there’s no absolute.
On one hand, the technology is becoming cheaper and more transparent at a staggering rate. Whereas ten years ago, shooting broadcast-quality video was a demanding undertaking, with many ways you could easily botch the job, that’s much less true now. An array of consumer camcorders shoot in HD, have auto exposure and autofocus modes that almost always work perfectly well. A camera such as the Canon HV30 or its tapeless sibling, the HG10, work quite well right out of the box.
Editing takes a little bit of a learning curve, but for the kinds of simple sequences you see in most news video, you’re only scratching the top layer of what programs like Avid and Final Cut can do. Put it on a tripod and you’re actually 90 percent home. Getting audio can be reduced to a few simple rules: Use a good mike, find a quiet place away from crowd noise and traffic, and always remember air conditioners make really annoying noises.
That’s all good news, because it brings even digital journalists back to the essence of what we do: Reporting and storytelling.
So the question is, should one person do all the various tasks a digital journalist such as Schiavocampo does? That might depend on a few factors:
1) Do you travel? Knowing one person can bring back the work it used to take two to do. Flights, hotel rooms, meals – if you can’t do your own video you’ve now doubled the cost of and assignment at a time when news organizations are desperately looking to cut costs.
2) Does the story lend itself more to ideas or visuals? A “backpack journalist” who’s primarily a writer is a different animal than one who’s primarily a photojournalist or videographer. Few stories have the kind of balance between text and video that would require superior skills on each side of that. If you are skilled at both, you’re a commodity.
3) What are the deadlines? Some of the digital journalists at small newspapers find that the real problem comes not gathering the material, but coming back on deadline and being expected to churn stories out on several platforms. I’ve always flet that the model may become in-house editors who can do a lot to speed workflow. And, of course, people who do features have a bit more time for writing, thinking and allowing for the dreaded video compression.
4) Is working in video potentially a spur to your writing? The visual eye needed for shooting video might actually make the writing a bit more concrete. Shooting video doesn’t necessarily diminish the quality of your writing, even as multitasking creates its challenges.
5) Do you believe in it? An obvious but essential question. The web is littered with bad video that lends nothing to the proceedings, often done by writers who have had video responsibilities foisted upon them. It ends up often being a single clip of a talking head, something not all that useful. Remember, those who forsake text, reading the piece is faster than watching a video of someone saying the same thing.
6) The last part is, is your talent in one area exceptional? When I read, say a New Yorker piece, I am fully engaged in the writing. I could not give a damn whether David Remnick, Malcolm Gladwell or Jane Kramer can shoot video, and I almost think it would be sacrilegious to hand them a Flip camera and ask them to grab video. If you are bringing real value to your publication as a writer, don’t weight it down with other responsibilities. Same for investigative reporting and other high-skill areas.
I can’t say whether the back-journalist model will become widespread, but it seems obvious that it works from a cost perspective. From a technology perspective it increasingly makes sense. But it’s from a tradition perspective that it may become stalled.

Can real journalism really be outsourced?

2008-12-01T04:50:00.000-08:00

Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column yesterday was not nearly as tongue-in-cheek as I wish it were. She tells the story of James MacPherson and his two-year-old web publication, Pasadena Now. Much of the work for that publication is done by workers in India, many of whom don’t even consider themselves journalists.
MacPherson, to quote Dowd, “fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.”
Meanwhile, in my own journalism classes, I’ve noticed certain trends. Students seem to try, whenever possible, to conduct interviews by email – even the phone seems too intimate for some of them. They do research on Google, rarely moving down past the first half-dozen results. They take lots of photos in their lives, but not when operating journalistically. And when they do, it’s rarely anything more than mug shots (and their subjects seem inevitably to strike those Facebook-faux celebrity poses they’ve done a thousand times before.) I ask them to shoot video, but most don’t, despite the ease of it. The most advanced cameras students use now are Canon HG10s - the kind Dads buy to shoot birthday parties – a far cry from the challenge of working competently in film in decades past. And since many of them can barely stand to read, they attach to such new media bromides as "stories on the wbe should not exceed 600 words," which makes anything beyond surface reporting impossible (try telling the story of the Walter Reed Medical Center scandal that way).
I have spent the Fall 2008 semester worrying about how they will be employable as others of their professors nearly gleefully predict the death of newspapers from their comfy faculty offices. “Citizen Journalism” seems of greatest appeal to those who don’t have to pay their bills by doing actual journalism – professors, people with gainfully employed spouses, people who get fat book deals for having provocatively predicted the end of print.
And now I see seven people out of work as MacPherson and his wife make journalists of people 8,000 miles away.
If it works, it’s because of the decline of journalism that has happened at the hands of its own practitioners.
Journalism is still, to me, about getting beyond the obvious. Great journalism is about going there, seeing it with a sharp eye, hearing it with a practiced ear, and making sense of it with a greater intelligence, intuition and determination.
Professionalism is about being better. If you’re simply sitting in your office doing phone and email interviews, it doesn’t matter whether you’re 80 yards or 8,000 miles from the story.
Seeing oneself as a journalist goes beyond thinking you assemble calendars and town-council agendas for a living. Every community has a story, and when journalists are perceptive enough to understand and tell that story, the community is served. The story of a community is one with a thousand connectors, nearly imperceptible shifts, and of complex characters and plots. Telling the story well can change the world.
Outsourcing seems to be coming strong. And, I suppose, why shouldn’t a well-educated person in India be able to copy edit stories, code pages or write headlines? Why shouldn’t a distant person be able to pull information off other sources to put together an events calendar? But with MacPherson and his Pasadena Now, I wonder the converse: If you can a have a staff half a world away covering your town as well as your staff, does that not say something about how far short the vision has fallen for what a news organization actually does?

David Carr and the Circuit City analog

2008-11-17T10:15:00.000-08:00

David Carr’s missive in The New York Times today about how newspapers are pulling a “Circuit City” – getting rid of their most valuable people “in the name of debt service” – is another of what I find common-sense outcries that may be largely dismissed by a lot of New Media people simply because it emanated from a newspaper. But the comparison to the now-bankrupted Circuit City, which attempted to reduce costs by cutting loose its most seasoned salespeople, gets toward a crucial thought: That be it a car salesman, stockbroker or newspaper, the product is “branded, reliable information” above all.
Do I want to see “Synecdoche New York”? I go to Manohla Dhargis in The Times and Wesley Morris in The Boston Globe, a habit borne out of geography, but then I go to the L.A. Times, a habit picked up in my ability to surf the web. I could likewise find reviews in college online news sites, which are equally free of cost, but the problem is no one has built a brand that combines institutional prestige with individual talent.
The challenge for the future will be to maintain brand value, even as it’s harder to see how brand value is preserving profitability. But, as Carr points out, the response by newspapers is woefully shortsighted for so many reasons:
- Forget about being able to put the pieces together based on years of observation, experience and inquiry. A longtime city hall reporter is essentially a Ph.D in his or her subject area, not just a stenographer to record meetings. But by buying out older hands (leaving a generation of journalists who came of age with Woodward and Bernstein to figure out how to age without a clear career path) and plugging in low-waged J-grads simply denigrates the brand. I’ve known so many journalists who've gotten much of their self-identity from the organization to which they have been attached professionally, subsuming personal success to the Big Ship; it’s hard to imagine that they may eventually mention they worked for The Boston Globe or Chicago Tribune or Los Angeles Times and have that be as meaningless to people as saying you worked for The Studebaker Corporation, or RKO Pictures, or the Digital Equipment Corporation, all prestigious in their day.
- The business model strikes me as cashing out, rather than as any intelligent plan for the future. It seems that so many newspapers have lost any sense of who they’re supposed to be; rather than finding (as David Talbot said in his Speech at The Nieman Foundation in September) an area in which they could be viewed not as local experts but as worldwide go-to sources (The L.A. Times should or could be the imdb.com/Rotten Tomatoes/Variety of the web age; the New York Times the financial and cultural voice; The Boston Globe the voice of higher education, the sciences and intellectual inquiry. But none have grabbed such preeminence in the areas they should cover best, still trying to be all things to all people).
- Branding requires individual talent to maintain its brands, and individual talent requires branding to give it exposure. Many a blogger knows the feeling of few readers, even if said blogger has become accustomed to being paid well by Old Media for his or her talents. Attach the same quality work to a quality brand, and each fuels the other. Forgive me for going on about The New Yorker, but any examination of its history or current situation shows how much it thrived on finding great talent, which made great talent want to be in its pages (editorializing here, The New Yorker has really lost the currency it once enjoyed in its fiction pages, not only because fiction as an art is less current but because it has under Remnick sought to be something of a cultural repository. As Remnick has thrived with fact and fallen with fiction, Tina Brown in my opinion fell with fact - too much celebrity suck-up - and thrived with fiction... so much of what went into its fiction pages then were as incendiary as its ballyhooed covers).
The one place Carr may be a degree off is in his Circuit City comparison. For it to be airtight, Circuit City would be in bankruptcy now because it decided five years ago to make its products free of charge. Otherwise, though, Carr is absolutely right, but by the same token is as much at a loss as anyone to figure out how to get people to pay when they don’t feel the need to any more. Sadly or not, I read, considered and recommended his piece not after reading him in The Times’ $1.50 print edition, but on the costless online platform.

Citizen Journalism: The Tom Sawyering of America?

2008-11-10T07:03:00.000-08:00

Having just spent Saturday at The Nieman Foundation’s 70th Convocation, and having heard speaker after speaker ponder the question of how to compete with people willing to do the work for free, I cannot help but come back to a few notions about what’s happening on that front and how it is likely to shake out.
Call it the “Tom Sawyering of America,” in homage to the great Mark Twain story, “Tom Sawyer and The Fence.”
For decades, the news media had become a rising force in American life, a phenomenon more accelerated with the rise of celebrity journalists in the last half-century. News organizations were often monolithic in their affect, filled with self-regard and often imperial in their self-styled pedigree.
Because of the flood of graduates from the nation’s journalism schools (particularly after Watergate and canonization of Woodward and Bernstein through their portrayal by the two biggest box-office stars of the day) journalism jobs were hard to get, and when you got them they didn’t pay well. Lots of people were on the outside looking in, and unlike other kinds of professions there was one significant problem: It just didn’t seem that hard.
In my classes I’ve often thrown this statement: “Brain surgery sounds hard, and it is; journalism doesn’t sound that hard, but it’s a lot harder than it sounds.”
So, with the internet came hundreds and then thousands of would-be journalists who bypassed the pearly gates to professional journalism and began posting their own stuff.
The first targets were, of course, columnists.
Having been a columnist at one point in my life, I am well aware of its challenges and its opportunities, as well as how people often fool themselves into thinking that because they wrote it, it’s good. Having your picture and name printed three times a week in the paper, just like they do with important people, led to a lot of weak, ill-thought-out material flowing outwards. While top columnists earn their bread by coming up with a constancy of thought-provoking material, rafts of others simply plied their craft by stating the obvious.
And because many columnists never left their desks to do their jobs, many amateurs saw that a) they could do the same sort of work in their own homes; and b) their opinions and perceptions were often as good, if not better than, the “professionals.”
It served the ago, believing one had something as useful to say as well-paid opinionators.
Pretty soon, the web was awash with opinions. Virtually all of them depended on what Nicholas Lemann calls “The bedrock of reported facts” still purveyed by so-called Old Media.
So the next target became the facts.
Citizen journalists became fixtures at town council meetings, school board hearings and press conferences. At this years Democratic National Convention, there were 15,000 people carrying journalists’ credentials, and many of them were the bloggers, tapping away at their keyboards and gathering in passels throughout the city’s hotel lobbies and Starbucks, churning away.
Reporting the facts did two things that goes toward the reason one becomes a journalist: It allowed amateurs to occupy spaces not normally open to them. One of the joys of journalism is to go places and see things.
The second thing it did was create a sense of self-importance. You went from being some city council crank fighting for the public-comment mike to being someone who was “reporting.” It was a raison d’etre, even without the pay.
Like Tom Sawyer, the established media had kept outsiders on the outside for so long, someone had some to the conclusion journalism was fun enough to do for free.
So when the chance arrived, everybody started painting the fence. Citizen journalism is the community theater of news, lots of people enjoying that small wash of spotlight.
I can’t help but wonder if it will last.
First off, people who do stuff for free need to get some benefit. Be it a sense of stature in their towns or relief from what may be a workaday life, the pseudojournalistic role suits them.
At least for a while.
As the last five years saw the rise of the citizen journalist, I suspect the next five will see dwindling numbers.
One reason is the economic downturn; I believe all of us will find our daily worklives even more demanding. That goes both for the bloggers and their readers. Although there are some who may be YouTubing their way to Bethlehem, hard economic times are often a strong cure for idle pastimes.
One reason is supply against demand; it’s extremely difficult keeping up with even the really good blogs – most of whom enjoy some sort of association with a known brand (Andrew Sullivan and The Atlantic, to name one).
But the biggest reason will be as with the whitewashers of Tom Sawyer – pretty soon, you figure out it’s a hard job. And soon after that you wonder why you’d be putting in so much time on a non-paying proposition.
Add to that some coming trends – such as citizen journalists being sued for libel, or simply being called out, or the growing flood of information on the web – and you’re going to see a lot of people coming to the conclusion that all the effort has little payoff.

The Five-Piece Orchestra, or, How Low Can You Go?

2008-11-02T19:05:00.000-08:00

Driving through Virginia and listening to "Prairie Home Companion" and a humorous bit by Garrison Keiller about the so-called "nuclear orchestra," a five-piece string ensemble that did a remarkable job of playing pieces meant for a full symphony orchestra, which then became the crux of the joke, but may be an analog to what is happening in journalism.
Keillor started the bit by noting the expense of employing a hundred musicians, and how in these tough financial times one must think of paring down. Each time he bemoaned the cost of a full orchestra, the string quintet would almost make you believe he was right.
"Think of it as an outline," Keillor said, noting that such ornamental elements as percussion and woodwinds really weren't necessary.
Further, he said, the five member sof the nuclear orchestra preferred The Four Seasons, fine meals, a pre-show massage and a private jet. And it still comes out cheaper, he said.
At the same time, the debate goes on about what newspapers should be, and it's amazing to consider the number of gainfully employed people who have (thankfully) been allowed to ply very narrow areas of interest. Critics are but one example. I once met a guy who said he was the rock critic for The Boston Globe; apparently that was his full-time gig, not just a happy adjunct to a larger title. I remember our fasion critic Jan at The Denver Post, and often wondered as she flew to the spring shows in Paris and Milan whether she was really providing something to the good folk of Colorado that they couldn't get in Vogue.
As newspapers cut down their staffs, part of the question is how they may come to resemble a nuclear orchestra, finding a way to get some approximation of the job done at significantly lower staffing. In a metro newspaper, what would the five pieces be? Cops, City Hall, Courts, State government, and a general-assignment reporter thrown in to leap on the day's special? Such a model would depend on bloggers, tipsters, crowdsourcers and technology. Would a five-person paper be able to hit the main doings in a city of, say, moderate size?
In this five-piece ensemble, sports would be conceded to either espn.com or to local volunteers for high-school coverage. Columnists and editorial writers would be gone, overwhelmed at the gate by the hordes of bloggers - as Nicholas Lemann said on NPR's "On Point" show last week, "real reporters still need to create a bedrock of facts," but paid-for opinion is a bearish sell-off market at this point. The arts would find their way to the 'net and the narrowcasting of certain interests: From Michiko Kakutani to bookslut.com. From Ebert to Rotten Tomatoes' many non-newpsaper critics. And the petty-cash box would be well-stocked with coin in order to dole out lots of little payments to those people out there who contributed in small measure.
In some ways, the nuclear newsroom could work, not on the public-utility model of one large newspaper servicing all the needs of a geographical community, but rather as small bands of people creating a financial model that could work. For example, could Colorado Springs, Colo., support ten or a dozen such five-piece ensembles, each working to not only cover some chunk of the news but to do so at a living wage?
The buyouts currently ravaging the industry may simply be a reconfiguration of the model, in which brontosauri such as The Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times give way an assortment of web-based predators who vie for reader attention.
Too small to actually work? Likely so. But listening to a five-piece string ensemble perform Beethoven's Ninth, it's more than surprising how good they could make it sound, with the right talent.

Big Pictures Made Small

2008-10-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, thumbing through the Sept. 22 Sports Illustrated’s article on the end of Yankee Stadium, and thinking about the fact that the web has made photographs much less than what they used to be…
Holding a two-page spread of a game at Yankee Stadium in the 1950s, and thinking hi-def is back… in paper and ink.
Wondering why even as computer screens become larger and larger, why photos on websites remain tiny…
When Sports Illustrated launched in August of 1954 with a Kodachrome shot of the Milwaukee Braves’ Eddie Mathews caught in mid-swing under the arc lights (the bat is a blur, but it is still, for that era, a demonstration of new technology – a color photo at night under stadium lights!) on its cover, it was essentially trying to be the LIFE magazine of sports. Big artful photographs were harder to reproduce then, with color photos needing six weeks’ lead time for press, so the magazine used more expansive articles to support their mission. The fact that a magazine with the word “Illustrated” in its title also became synonymous with fine writing is testament to the vision.
But sitting with the magazine in a waiting room, I could not help ponder why online news outlets have remained so steadfastly committed to undersized photos.
A decade ago, it was a bandwidth issue. Load times for even modestly sized photos was an issue, especially for dial-up. But whereas the web should provide for a deep well of possibilities, few sites offer me much of an option to make a photo large and really appreciate it.
SI’s “Vault” archive plays pictures in one-size-fits-all uniformity, with no options. Each photo will fit the smallest screen but not be enhanced by the largest. I suspect many photos featured are chosen for their medium-shot feel; the Yankee Stadium picture I mentioned earlier is, in its two-page-spread splendor, something to be examined bit by bit rather than taken as a whole.
At some dailies and weeklies, photos are routinely made so small that in group photos, it’s nearly impossible to make out the faces. And slideshows tend to be imposed upon by the technology.
Somewhere down the road, this will have to change greatly. Programs will make it easier to pull up images that can be examined in full. Looking at Gaugin’s masterly
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, which is in its original at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts a 13-foot-by-6-foot marvel, one can adequately wonder if it can ever be done justice as a 300-pixel Google image. The same might be asked on behalf of the still photographers out there doing great work. Small pictures seem not a function of technology, but rather a function of habit.

Newsroom Utopianism in the New Media Age

2008-10-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I miss the newsroom, but most times not that much. When I was a reporter for various papers, my favorite part was getting out of the newsroom, and I tried to stay out in the field as much as I possibly could. As much as I loved journalism, I was never fond of the kind of newsroom culture in which patent rudeness, that holdover from the days of poorly educated “newsmen” who were not much of a cut above the blue-collar tradesmen they fancied themselves as resembling, still reigned. Profanity, insulting behavior and a general kind of affected worldliness have been part of the culture of newspapers that is different from lots of other kinds of workplaces. Not that I was so offended by it; it just got dull and tiring.
Journalists have often worn their rudeness as some self-styled badge of courage or (God forbid) honor. I remember when I was living in Atlanta in the 1980s, a friend of mine – a very sweet-dispositioned kindergarten teacher – asked me how one would send along a news item to a local newspaper, for her first try had not succeeded. Her school was having a charity event; she had called the newsroom of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The woman who picked up the phone – whoever she was, for she didn’t identify herself – gave my friend five seconds to start to explain why she was calling before cutting her off.
“Forget it,” the woman at the paper said. “That stuff’s a real snore.” Then she hung up.
Translation for non-journalists: I'm important, I'm busy, I'm better than you. You Suck, but don't forget to buy your Journal-Constitution.
A few years later, I worked at a small (now defunct) daily in Florida. I worked for a mostly insane city editor who was obsessed with the idea that everyone in the place was trying to cheat him out of his seven-a-half daily hours of servitude. If you went to the rest room, you’d invariably find your phone ringing; rushing to pick it up, you’d then find the voice was of the city editor – no more than fifteen feet away at his own desk.
“How long are you going to take in there?” he’d ask, his voice quivering with rage. After all, I was making $280 a week.
“You’re timing me?” I once shot back, and then spent the rest of the day wondering if I’d be fired, for he threatened everyone in the newsroom with being fired at least once a week. Loyalty was sought and found wanting.
Then, a few years after that, I found myself at the Colorado Springs Gazette, working for city editor Jim Bishop. Jim was warm, friendly and polite in his inimitable Texas way. He was a pleasure to work for, and very much the exception, which is why I worked for the Gazette for more years than I otherwise would have. When Jim left to return home to Texas and edit the Victoria Advocate, I saw the handwriting and left for academia and freelancing a few months later, missing what friends who remained called "the Era of Darkness."
At The Denver Post, I worked for Metro Editor Tom Patterson and his Assistant Metro Editor Chuck Buxton, who assembled a wonderful array of people, many of whom remain great friends to this day. When Tom moved on the The Chicago Tribune (and Chuck to the Press-Democrat in California) the newsroom culture changed nearly overnight, and exodus began even before Times Mirror sold the paper to Dean Singleton. The Patterson era had turned out to be all too fleeting.
I've wondered at times whether people in newsrooms thought that they somehow had to be that way. There was a lot of false bravado, a lot of laughable overreaching, a lot of foolish pecking orders. As I talk to friends leaving newspapers these days for one reason or another, they often mention the culture of the newsroom as something they’re happy to exit.
Over the years, by comparison, I’ve contributed to The Atlantic Monthly, and it was always a treat to come up to their offices at 77 North Washington Street in Boston to visit with the editors.
From the first step inside those massive brass doors the place hummed with genteel industry, in a way that I don’t think can be simply explained by their monthly, rather than daily, deadlines. It was simply a place where intelligence and courtesy had been made part of the furnishings. People who worked at The Atlantic tended to stay on decades, and I believe the nature of the workplace factored in very greatly.
So the question I posit is this: Can a more decent newsroom culture help journalism in these difficult times?
In his brilliantly simple assessment of the economics of newspapers, Vin Crosbie talks of simple supply and demand, that news is a commodity, and the current state of affairs leaves too much supply and a geometrically fragmented demand, with newspapers trying to be a be-all to diverse audiences.
And if information is the commodity, then the most valuable commodities are those from the best producers. People will pay $1,700 for a Thomas Moser chair even though a somewhat similar chair sells at Wal-Mart for under $30. The value is in the craftsmanship, and price rises parabolically for the finest of craftsmanship.
As news becomes ever more the buyer’s market, the journalism that will survive is that in which talented people do inspired work for compensation that fits within the means of the news organization.
I have to wonder whether the rise of new media organizations may take into account the “lifestyle” choice would-be journalists might make, perhaps choosing to work for less money if there is some notion of a decency that often does not seem to exist anymore (a friend of mine, having taken a buyout after many years at a Great Metropolitan Newspaper, spent his last day in daily journalism working 15 hours on a breaking story and then getting crapped on by some night-city-desk weasel who didn’t like his lede... at some places they give out gold watches, not just as incentive to the retiree, but as a sign to those remaining of the value of loyalty).
Should some news organizations take the non-profit route, they may want to consider the atmosphere of so many excellent non-profit organizations – people working for very little in a place they value being part of. If news goes toward the piecework rubric in which employees get paid per thousand pageviews rather than by hours on a timecard, keeping people feeling valued may mitigate the stress of uncertain wages. And if it goes toward a more individualist landscape, then many may flourish in journalism freed of the small-mindedness of so many newsroom cultures.
Newsroom utopianism, indeed. But for a lot of people, the struggles, pressures and demands of any profession can be mitigated in some ways by being able to stand the place where you work.

Bad video is not better than no video

2008-10-13T08:03:00.000-07:00

A former student of mine checked in last week about his career in journalism. He works for a small-town newspaper owned by a chain that primarily owns small-town papers. He said this:
Recently (newspaper chain) has implemented this "for the web" mandatory
content, so they have us making weekly videos and "daily web updates"
as if we are daily papers. Sometimes it's fun, most times frustrating
because the low rate of pay we receive against the high expectations and
ridiculous hours.
He closed by saying that “I chose this profession, so who am I to complain?” But the larger point is this: He’s shooting video with a cheap camera, and no one has trained him to shoot video, nor to edit it.
In their inimitable way, newspapers have decided to push their journo-serfs to shoot video without them having learned how to do it properly. The result: Amateurish stuff that further erodes newspapers’ franchise.
The mark of a professional journalist has always been to be a better observer, analyst, writer and investigator than an untrained observer. Turning to newspapers rather than other media is to benefit from the thoughtfulness that should be a hallmark. From its care with words and language, to the effort to always get the appropriate facts, the newspaper should be intelligent.
But to see the number of newspaper websites festooned with weak video – shaky handheld shots, zooms racking in and out, sound often no more than echo – tells us that what newspapers do is really no better than what the average middle-schooler could do.
That may come both from a) the news organizations’ desperate attempts to find magic bullets to grow web readership, combined with an unwillingness to spend money on significant equipment or training (a note to anyone using the Flip camera: Never use the zoom, which isn’t really a zoom and creates bad images), and b) the unwillingness of a lot of journalists to take very seriously the need to shoot good video. A lot of mid-career people who’ve spent decades honing their writing and reporting skills object to being put in a position of having to be instant videographers; a lot of photographers who have for years sniffed at videographers are now asked to be videographers.
If bad video is going to make a news organization look amateurish, and thereby denigrate by association the rest of its content, it might make sense to go easy on posting video. Bad video isn’t a cure for the exodus of readers, and if the video work being put out screams of mediocrity, then you have to wonder if it hurts the overall product.

Bad video is not better than no video

2008-10-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

A former student of mine checked in last week about his career in journalism. He works for a small-town newspaper owned by a chain that primarily owns small-town papers. He said this:
Recently (newspaper chain) has implemented this "for the web" mandatory
content, so they have us making weekly videos and "daily web updates"
as if we are daily papers. Sometimes it's fun, most times frustrating
because the low rate of pay we receive against the high expectations and
ridiculous hours.
He closed by saying that “I chose this profession, so who am I to complain?” But the larger point is this: He’s shooting video with a cheap camera, and no one has trained him to shoot video, nor to edit it.
In their inimitable way, newspapers have decided to push their journo-serfs to shoot video without them having learned how to do it properly. The result: Amateurish stuff that further erodes newspapers’ franchise.
The Flip Video camera, a handheld device that shoots shaky video with poor sound, pixellates badly when displayed any bigger than YouTube size, and breaks up video with its "digital zoom" (which is not a zoom in any true sense), a rash of horrendous video now appears on news websites across the country, even though the quality is little better than the birthday party video Dad shot. The attractiveness of The Flip is in that it requires zero training. Problem is, most video from it looks like that.
The mark of a professional journalist has always been to be a better observer, analyst, writer and investigator than an untrained observer. Turning to newspapers rather than other media is to benefit from the thoughtfulness that should be a hallmark. From its care with words and language, to the effort to always get the appropriate facts, the newspaper should be intelligent.
But to see the number of newspaper websites festooned with weak video – shaky handheld shots, zooms racking in and out, sound often no more than echo – tells us that what newspapers do is really no better than what the average middle-schooler could do.
That may come both from a) the news organizations’ desperate attempts to find magic bullets to grow web readership, combined with an unwillingness to spend money on significant equipment or training (a note to anyone using the Flip camera: Never use the zoom, which isn’t really a zoom and creates bad images), and b) the unwillingness of a lot of journalists to take very seriously the need to shoot good video. A lot of mid-career people who’ve spent decades honing their writing and reporting skills object to being put in a position of having to be instant videographers; a lot of photographers who have for years sniffed at videographers are now asked to be videographers.
If bad video is going to make a news organization look amateurish, and thereby denigrate by association the rest of its content, it might make sense to go easy on posting video. Bad video isn’t a cure for the exodus of readers, and if the video work being put out screams of mediocrity, then it hurts the overall product.

The News Anti-Cycle

2008-10-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago when I was working as a reporter at The Denver Post, the place was in the old building at the corner of Fifteenth and California Street, a building long demolished to make way for the Denver Convention Center. It faced Fifteenth, and along the California side were plate-glass windows through which the presses were visible, and outside which late at night the Post delivery trucks would line up in all directions, waiting for the piles of papers to be slung on the trucks to begin their long journeys across the “Rocky Mountain Empire,” a phrase made common by the famous 19th-century owner of the paper, Harry Heye Tammen.
If you wanted to feel like a newspaper reporter, this was the place: Come out the employees’ entrance onto the sidewalk and see to the left the pounding presses, to the right the drivers, smoking and playing cards as the first editions were stacked and strung.
And on some of these nights, as a young newsroom serf, I was sent hurrying down the street to the loading dock of the arch-rival Rocky Mountain News, where I paid in quarters for a stack of fresh-off-the-press Rockies as soon as they came down from their press room. That’s when I broke into a run.
I’d sprint the three blocks back to the Post, take the stairs up to the newsroom two at a time, and at the night city editor’s desk we’d all rip through the Rocky looking for anything they had that we didn’t. When we knew which stories we had to chase, we went to the phones and began calling people, rousting more than a few out of bed to answer our urgent questions. Conversely, those sources learned that it was better to let us know earlier than to have to do an 11:30 p.m. interview.
And as I’d run back to my newspaper, I’d more often than not see a Rocky counterpart running back from our loading dock. Once or twice we exchanged a smile – it was a crazy business to be in!
All that, of course, is gone. Printing facilities now are most often sited at the edge of town (such as The Post’s at the I-25/I-70 “Mousetrap”) and no one needs to cadge papers off a pressman. Now, it’s the competitor’s website you monitor, and it’s not a once-every-twenty-four-hours occurrence. Looking on Google Map Street View, I can see a Hyatt sign where I used to look out the window from my desk.
The pressures in the business are more enormous than ever. Even weeklies are running a 24/7 news cycle. And in cities in which there is still competition, it’s fierce.
In New York City today, the NYPD lieutenant who ordered the Tasering of a mentally-ill naked man perched on a ten-foot-high ledge – which resulted in the man lnding on his head and dying – killed himself. Michael Pigott, a veteran of the force, went into a locker room at the police facility at 6 a.m. and shot himself to death, leaving a note expressing his regret for the order and the fears the case would destroy his family.
To occasionally click the websites of the big New York papers and watch the story first blip on each website, then grow and mature, and then by 4 pm be swept low by the advances of tonight’s Vice-Presidential debates was to bear witness to how transitory all news has become, and to be aware of the way news organizations must contantly work with an eye to what the competition, just, or is just about to, report. In a time when downsizing creates leaner staffs to do it, it is not the day-long build-up I knew, with the day rising like a crescendo toward those final deadlines, but rather a constant blare, no moment to rest or disconnect, no opportunity to fully think through the work.
The news cycle implies ebb and flow, surge and recession. There is no cycle, unless such cycles are timed in seconds.
I wonder as I graze the news whether I really will know the truest story, in the way Hemingway spoke of true stories. Two men, rising for a day that their lives have relentlessly moved toward, one ranting and pacing and slipping by the moment from the hug of his anti-psychotics, another leaving his wife and children in Sayville and driving to the station, a man certain of his own command of the situations that will confront him. Will anyone have time to write it for me?
It’s a service to the readers to move news as fast as it happens, but it also requires the leadership, intelligence and circumspection of good leadership to step back and not be lost in the crackle of a media world in which everything is only Now.

What bloggers are doing to columnists

2008-09-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

As someone who was a newspaper columnist in a much earlier part of my life, I've learned to have opinions - three or four a week, at least. Like radio-talk-show hosts who need to effuse about some problem on a daily basis, and turn everything into an outrage, columny is a job better suited to those for whom a strong opinion is natural.
But in my time in newspapers, it was often not the case that the best potential columnists became columnists at all. Opinioned combative people in print are often just the same in person; newspaper editors didn't always take kindly to that. So what I observed was that those who "earned" the columnist's landscape did so by having been good soldiers, waited their turn, and gotten the support of the right people. And sometimes, columns were awarded for having done other, unrelated things really well: Covering city hall. Running the copy desk. When New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal was forced to give up the reins, he was handed a column, "On My Mind," which the lamented Spy Magazine dubbed "Out Of My Mind." It just wasn't his bag.
And, conversely, such columnists often turned out to be agreeable, nonconfrontational, and obvious. They often as well weren't saying much that people weren't saying in the supermarket, the corner bar or the dining-room table. But the difference was the columnists got paid for it.
What a position, having a voice at a publication that dominated a town, a city, a state or nation! To weigh in with the weight of a monolithic news company behind you made you a player in a community. Question was whether you had much to say.
Here are some column headlines from the last week:
Feds should have regulated banks better.
It's the average person who really gets hurt. in this.
CEO's of failed firms don't deserve parachutes.
Saying the obvious may serve a purpose: One of my editors said that doing so was a legitimizing, crystallizing act - that the readers felt backed up, acknowledged.
But in the age of blogging, the reader can just write it herself. I read so many paid columnists who seem to be saying nothing more learned or well-put than some amateurs out there.
The future of news organizations seem to me, if nothing else, to be heading toward something of a shedding of paid opinion. Like any product in high supply, prices tend to go down. And for those who are trying to make a mark, more will be required. The news columnist of the future will likely engender qualities that, while not new, will be more required.
1) Does the columnist have an inside or voluminous knowledge the average opinionator does not? Will McDonough, the late sports columnist of The Boston Globe, seemed to know more about what was going on in the sports world than the people purportedly running the sports. The man was not the most graceful writer, but he seemed nearly prescient. That has value, and it comes from hard work and a talent for sourcing. You can't write columns like that without getting out of the office.
2) Is the columnist a superb wordsmith? The turn of phrase and the odd angle of approach is the premium here. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times has made a career of it. When uses the term "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits" to describe the Hillary Clinton faction, or mocks John Edwards as attempting to be "oncologically correct" in his claims to only have cheated on his wife when she was in remission, she is gilding the notions in a way unique to her. Like David Sedaris or Jerry Seinfeld, you pay for her power of witty observation.
3) Is the columnist a bomb-thrower? Indeed, waiting for the next outrageous thing one might say is what keeps some readers coming back. Columnists as these walk a line that's always one slip-up away from oblivion. I think of movie columnist Rex Reed as someone who has made a career of this: "Speed Racer makes you want to never see a movie again as long as you live," is the kind of hyperbolic statement more and more employed by radio hosts.
It's often been said that columnists are a prime draw for newspapers, but it's also worth observing that columnists, once in, rarely exit, unless by job change or outrageous screw-up. What that means for most is a Supreme Court-like lifetime sinecure of opinionating, nearly always without consequence. You build up a following based on people getting used to you, and by not pressing the limits you assure your own survival.
But now, the voices are everywhere. Blogging, internet publications and webcasting have revealed a truth - a lot of people have more to say, and can say it better, than a whole lot of local columnists (and editorial writers).
I wonder, then, if opinion will be a first battleground conceded to the nonprofessionals. And I wonder whether news organizations will work hard to bring in outside voices in a meaningful, continuous way. Sometimes that voice finds it way through. I think of a columnist for The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan, who has gained something of a following writing as sort of a dissenting opinion about women, careers and parenting, complicated by what Salon.com calls her "happy hipocrisy," the certitude of a wealthy stay-at-home mother telling women of less means how they're not thinking and doing right. Women seem to read her to be righteously pissed off.
But in a tighter business model, opinion may become superfluous, and professional organizations may slim down to the essential newsgathering for which citizen journalists and bloggers have neither the time nor inclination. It won't be a matter of stifling voices, it will just be a matter of not wanting to pay for them anymore. That's just my (free) opinion.

Why don't so many newspaper editors get multiplatform?

2008-09-27T05:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended a speech by Salon.com founder David Talbot, a man who left his position as features editor at The San Francisco Examiner in 1995 to start something then-unheard-of: An online magazine. While the word "magazine" was later dropped from its description, the site has thrived now for more than a decade.
In his speech at The Nieman Foundation at Harvard, Talbot described newspaper editors as having a mentality of "someone running a public utility... you have this big monopoly" in which you begin to think everyone has to come to you to do business.
On the rainy drive home, I heard some local media news that was not unrelated: Sean McAdam, the Providence Journal's superb baseball writer, has just jumped to the Boston Herald. McAdam had, in his 23 years at The Journal, made himself into a star, a fine writer and a deeply knowledgeable baseball man. He'd also become well-known all over New England and beyond not because of his writing at the ProJo (the circulation of which covers the Rhode-Island city-state and a lick or two of nearby Massachusetts) but because of his appearances on Boston sports-radio powerhouse WEEI. For anyone who imagined The Journal a Triple-A farm-team kind of newspaper, McAdam brought big-league game; for listeners who heard him seated beside Globe and Herald writers, it made complete sense he belonged there.
In television shows like "Around the Horn," newspaper sports writers and columnists sit in front of glass partitions emblazoned with their paper's name, lending credibilty, knowledge and often bombast to the air, while promoting their home publications. When a paper gets its writer in such rarefied company, it should rejoice for the publicity it brings.
Instead, the Providence Journal pulled McAdam off the air. "A top editor," according to the local alternative weekly, The Providence Phoenix, had decided it was a conflict.
As the Journal's circulation and revenue has spiraled downward, and another round of buyouts just took place, the newspaper has apparently decided that this now-common practice of sports writers going on the air was some sort of conflict of interest - something the LA Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, among others, aren't apparently worried about. In fact, it's a way of keeping talent at the traditionally low rate of pay newspapers offer. I'd guess McAdam was probably pulling in 80 grand or a bit more at The ProJo, then making upwards of the same amount through these outside appearances. Cut a family man, or woman's, pay suddenly and significantly, and see how they react. Nothing about what McAdam was doing had changed in years, apparently only management's view of it.
I go back to Talbot's "public utility" analogy. Rather than encouraging valuable exposure of a newspaper's true assets - its stable of talent - newspaper editors often limit these opportunities. Rather than rejoice in its exposure on television, radio, the web (through espn.com, say) and potentially in books, the utility-management model fails to embrace the new-media landscape. Yes, a reporter making a book out of information for which he was paid by the paper to gather benefits the reporter, but it's a way of keeping talent who otherwise might walk. (Bob Woodward?) Journal reporter G. Wayne Miller has cranked out books for years based on his Journal reporting, something former editor Joel Rawson seemed not to mind at all. Miller's website says he's working on a documentary film project now, so the Journal's policy seems all the more confusing. Radio and web work seem to worry editors far more than something in more-familiar print, or in somewhat-obscure documentary form (although on the other hand, I've heard of some Journal reporters who've been obstructed from pursuing some outside projects).
The Boston Globe pulled a similar move a few years ago, for different reasons - but with the same MO: An editor decides he's going to throw his weight around at a time when the dominance of his publication in the local media market has begun to wane. The difference was that right or wrong, some Globe writers were perceived by management as making reckless comments on-air, which might have injured the Globe brand. Sean McAdam has never come close to being controversial, or allowed himself to be attached to it, and in fact on the air is able to offer far deeper-reaching commentary on the sport and its nuances than he ever can in the ever-tightening columns of the ProJo.
The Boston Herald, just as an interesting example, has benefitted from the multi-platform approach. Columnist Howie Carr has remained with The Herald while for years hosting an afternoon talk-radio show on WRKO; its crime reporter Michelle McPhee has a show on a rival radio station WTKK. Both expand their income while often plugging their newspapers and its content.
The Providence Journal's owner, Belo, also let one of its most talented Dallas Morning News employees walk - David Leeson, its Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and digital-media innovator, is out. At a time when his approach to photojournalism and video might have been an object form of leadership at the DMN, the converse has happned - and when your stars leave, eveybody gets nervous.
Where does it all go? The sad reality in another decade may be the opposite: Once powerful newspapers paying fees to radio and web stars to write a piece for print. As with the gaslight business, some public utilities find their monopoly just doesn't last.

Who does want news on the phone?

2008-09-24T15:24:00.000-07:00

The Twitter phenomenon is one of those things that reminds me of the great Joan Didion story about the late years of Howard Hughes, who in his madness hired a Las Vegas barber to be on call 24/7 in case Hughes needed a haircut. Hughes never did, but every once in a while, Eddie Alexander would get late night calls from a reedy voice at the other end of the line:
“Just checking, Eddie,” the voice would say, making sure he was there if he needed him.
The idea of getting news on your cellphone seems in ways as intrusive as a telemarketer. And for the most part it seems to go against how fast-moving important news moves.
Today, for example, John McCain announced he was suspending campaigning to deal with the financial crisis (or “attempting to delay the debate,” as The New York Times said in an early version of their web headline).
That’s what people were talking about where I was, and it’s interesting to listen to how word-of-mouth moves. The bearer of news, good or bad, plays a social function that creates, even in the telling of one person, a community of two. Transmission can be commiseration, or delight; it can also be the jazzed excitement: “Hey, Heath Ledger died!” is news that has little direct impact on either sender or receiver, but still allows human commerce. Absorbing longer complex pieces of news may be a more intellectual exercise, but blurting out news, which is a Twitter function, is purely emotional.
But phone news seems to take the flesh and blood away from such pronouncements. Even the town crier’s “All is Well!” had a social component.
I occasionally check a score on espn.com, but I think I’d find unbearable its Gamecast function, which both give you instant information, but abstracts the beloved event to something thoroughly boring.
So, once the novelty wears off, what kind of news will play on the phone (given even that phones, these days, are computers and televisions shrunk to hand size). Stock reports? Traffic bulletins? Weather reports?
It will be interesting if the possibility of news-by-phone reaches the level some enthuse about. Just because I can get endless phone beeps giving me each new blip of news, doesn’t mean I’ll want it. But if the technology can find its niches, it could well be a nice narrowcasting tool.

Packing Books

2008-09-17T19:08:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure this afternoon of meeting Kathy Quinn, the widow of the late, great Anthony Quinn, the two-time Oscar-winning actor, whose role as the washed-up boxer “Mountain” Rivera in the classic “Requiem For A Heavyweight” remains my favorite.
Mrs. Quinn shared the fact that her late husband, who passed in 2001, had not only been a poet, painter and diarist, but that he had amassed a library of 8,000 books. I could only shamefacedly admit I’d only 1,200 books to my name.
Twelve hundred books! What was on my mind?
We’ve just moved recently to a new home by the water with significantly less shelf space than we’d had before, a circumstance that forced me to sift through my many book, box them, and then wonder – as we unloaded from the truck about 40 boxes of books – why I go on with this.
To any bibliophile, it’s simple: You can scan your wall of books and pull from it anything you want. Last night, for no apparent reason, it was Bruce Duffy’s masterful 1987 novel “The World As I Found It,” which tracks the lives of Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. Great reading, unexpectedly.
Random Access Memory, in pulped paper and deep inks. Terabytes of printed words, at an arm’s length. The personal library, in Quinn’s time a mark of man’s well-read intellect, seems now as weighty as Marley’s chains, dragged ghostly up the stairs, the burden of life.
Except for the nearly erotic feel of fingertips on well-hewn paper. The rising perfume of well-made ink. The surprising crack of a book not opened in a decade, born again as a virgin, to be re-read.
My books weigh me, their heavyweight’s slow dilberation now scarred and circumspect in the face of lighter and quicker opponents.
Why do I drag them about? If I bought a Sony Reader I could have the whole of those words tucked within its plastic confines, ready. But the riffle of well-made pages is to me like the rustle of high reeds in a summer wind, beyond description completely emotional. The weight of the wonderful words holds my house to its foundation.

Going back to the future, or ahead with the past, with the Associated Press

2008-09-11T07:35:00.000-07:00

When Horace Greeley began his New York Tribune in 1841, three years before Morse sent his first fortuitous message (“What Hath God Wrought?” – something newspaper people are saying these days about the internet), and a good five years or more before newspapers bought in on any level, he was producing a newspaper that has odd similarities to web journalism.
First, he wrote and wrote, using his quill pen to create something that, in words and intention, was not dissimilar to a blog. The Tribune was filled with very essayish pieces about life, politics, and culture, mostly by Greeley. Early newspapers were very much an enterprise dominated by the ethos and sensibility of a single dominating figure.
Second, Greeley employed a small number of contributors in those days to help create original content. It would be notable, eventually, where some of those contributors – Twain, Thoreau, Marx, and Engels – went in the world.
And lastly, he “linked” readers to news produced by other organizations. In that pre-copyright-era wilderness, he received the papers from London and Paris as well as other US cities, and simply reset their stories in his type.
In the always-competitive news business, reporters from the various New York papers would hire rowboats to get them out to the arriving ships, to grab the newest newspapers and quickly get them into print on the streets of Manhattan.
But the new media of his era quickly changed that. By the mid-1840s, newspapers, by paying the princely sums that a telegraph message cost, could have news wired from elsewhere in the country (and eventually from Europe). And with everyone paying individually (and heavily) for the same news, the economic model was oppressive.
In 1846, Greeley and many of his fiercest competitors created the Harbor News Association, later the Associated Press. Early on, before the transatlantic cable, the service had a bureau in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where newspapers could be gotten from ships still headed on to New York, and their contents wired ahead.
This arrangement allowed competing news organizations to get breaking news at a cost that could be afforded. And it worked quite well until the last five years.
Yesterday (that famous news-lede word that used to shout of currency but now likewise shouts of staleness), The Star Ledger published an edition with no AP copy. Other news organizations are openly wondering why they pay millions to have AP when the same information is available to be linked on sites such as MSN, Yahoo and Google. Suddenly, the nature of print news has met the realities of online news use.
The AP, like the print media it primarily serves, will clearly reconfigure over the next decade. Its place as the original “news aggregator” is as threatened as that of UPI, which has nearly died off as its primary clientele – evening newspapers – got squeezed out by the evening television news. And if newspapers are failing to the remain the single portal for most text-driven news, the AP will need to sell its wares quite differently.
This all also seems to further solidify the notion of newspapers, even big ones, returning to their roots as purveyors of mainly local news. When I was a reporter at The Denver Post, I remember the AP teletype machine pounding out dispatches on that green-and-white-barred computer paper. A few years later, the wire scrolled in green letters down our black computer screens. And right now, writing in black on white on a titanium Macbook, I can click on the just-posted news that Kim Jong Il had a stroke. And, having found that on the way to checking my email on MSN, I didn’t have to read my local paper to get it. But here where I live, I still need my Bristol Phoenix to get my Bristol News.

Why is that news organizations never seem to return reporter calls?

2008-09-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

Romonesko’s Poynter blog had an interesting story about the Star-Ledger of New Jersey going a day with no Associated Press copy at all. Apparently, this was done in some sort of protest about AP’s higher rates, but the article, which originated in Editor & Publisher, had this line:
Editor Jim Willse did not return calls seeking comment.
How many times have you seen that? The situation, in which journalists who make a living based on other people’s willingness to stand up and be heard, blow off any opportunities to explain themselves.
Editor & Publisher is hardly a tabloid. But over the years, I’ve always been amazed at how, in nearly knee-jerk fashion, management of newspapers refuse to expose themselves to any questions.
- “A spokeswoman for The Sun-Sentinel did not return calls seeking comment.” (New York Times, 9/8/08)
- “Mr Burge (editor of the Australian Financial Review) did not return Media's calls yesterday.” (Australian Media, 9/11/08)
- “A Daily News spokeswoman did not return a call seeking comment.” (New York Post, 8/28/08)
So what’s the deal? Is is that newspaper editors are so media savvy they know that actually speaking to reporters like themselves is often disastrous? Or is that the people who “buy ink by the barrel,” as the saying goes, don’t like the turnabout? Or is there a haughtiness to those people at newspapers who, so often, stand in judgment of others but don’t feel the desire to be judged themselves?
It seems to me that news organizations have a significant responsibility to be transparent and open to questions. It seems troubling that editors who (as I saw in many a newsroom) who are more than willing to demand their reporters “just get the damned quote,” are so quote-averse themselves?
It seems to me that Willse could have done himself and his newspaper a service by not only answering E&P’s calls, but maybe even putting out a more elaborated thought on the AP matter, perhaps even by a blog. Contrary to Mies Van Der Rohe, More is often More. I won’t call it hypocritical, but perhaps the word is “ironic?”

Tom Brady, His Knee, and a Case Study in New Media

2008-09-08T06:24:00.000-07:00

The narrative of sports is built on linear structure. Whether it be the play, the game, the season or the history, sports are built on a quaint 19th-century convention – the slowly unfolding story.
New Media has taken that certitude away from journalism, asking it not to work on the unfolding chronicle but on nearly instantaneous answers – whether they’re accurate or not.
Yesterday, when in the first quarter of the New England Patriots-Kansas City Chiefs game quarterback Tom Brady left the field hobbling after taking a hit to the knee, the main question of the game became not who would win, but to what extent Brady’s knee was damaged, which had ramifications for the entire 2008 season.
I was watching the game with a special interest despite them opening against a weak opponent, not only because I’ve followed the Patriots since my family had Patriots season tickets at such venues as Boston College and Harvard Stadium, but also because my son’s former college coach is now with the Chiefs, and one each of his Georgia Tech teammates was playing for each team (My son is now in Vermont, working as an artist and designer; funny to see the different interests moving in their own directions).
So, in front of the flatscreen, I did see the injury as it happened. But it nearly didn't matter - which is Lesson Number One of New Media: that events, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five, “time has become unstuck.” If I hadn’t seen the event, I could have seen it in replay again and again, on television and then on YouTube, where some enterprising amateurs had already converted it from their DVD-Rs; within moments the news was popping up on media platforms worldwide (as a New Media-age person, I was of course, watching the game while writing on my laptop).
With the game unfolding, I began a search for information – fitting, as a user that the recent Pew Center report’s definition calls a “media integrator,” assembling my own report through a variety of sources.
Lesson Number Two: New Media has only furthered the television-driven perception that everything can be learned on demand. Of course, even Brady himself didn’t know how badly he was hurt; within that first triage, team doctors and trainers were likely prodding that knee and listening to Brady describe what hurt. But within roughly thirty minutes, the first “diagnosis” I saw moved onto the web.
Boston Herald football beat writer John Tomase had posted on The Herald’s “Point After” blog a piece in which “knee-injury expert” Will Carroll (a blogger, not a doctor) posited that the injury was to the posterior cruciate ligament, based on having seen the hit on television.
That’s Lesson Number Three: Getting it wrong (or at least not provably right) seems a casualty of such instant assessment. This morning, radio station WEEI is reporting (in a text report not much different from a newspaper website's) that it’s the anterior cruciate ligament, the difference of one word and a dozen games: A PCL injury might have sidelined Brady for a three weeks; an ACL likely ends his season.
But I don’t fault Tomase: He is, after all, writing for the Herald blog, and that platform has a nearly fetishist interest in currency. Tomase got in hot water last season for his part in Spygate, but in this case he was a reporter who a) had a list of contacts that included an “injury expert,” b) was in contact with that expert within minutes, and c) had a post out there before the ice in Brady’s knee had even started melting. The apparent fact that the report was highly speculative and apparently not in the end accurate is not, in many instances, a in of the blog form. The sin may lie with those of us in the audience conditioned to value instant news over correct news.

I’m a Mac and You’re a PC – Luddites, Print Dinosaurs, False Prophets, and New Media

2008-09-04T19:31:00.001-07:00

On August 7, 2006, Nicolas Lemann published a piece in The New Yorker under the heading “The Wayward Press” (a "department" first made famous in that magazine’s pages by the estimable A.J. Liebling) which was called “Amateur Hour.” The piece, a rather damning appraisal of the state of internet journalism, said that while New Media was a “huge tent” for everything from big media to latter-day pamphleteers, it was also distinguished primarily by a kind of “I’m Hip, You’re Square” sensibility in which the advocates of New Media came on like the kids in my elementary-school class whose parents were the first to let them wear bell-bottoms. Lemann, who (importantly) is the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, could not have made this point any better than he did by simply duplicating the transcript of an interview between John Markoff, a technology reporter at The New York Times, and Jeff Jarvis, a professor at City University’s new journalism program:
I duplicate that duplication here:
MARKOFF: 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.
JARVIS: Pardon me for interrupting, but that made no frigging sense whatsoever. Can you parse that for me, Mr. Markoff? Or do you need an editor to speak sense? How do new standards “destroy” old standards? Something won’t become a “standard” unless it is accepted by someone in power—the publishers or the audiences. This isn’t a game of PacMan.
MARKOFF: 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.
JARVIS: The reference is as old-farty and out-of-date as the sentiment. It’s clear that Markoff isn’t reading weblogs and doesn’t know what’s there.
Hey, fool, that’s your audience talking there. You should want to listen to what they have to say. You are, after all, spending your living writing for them. If you were a reporter worth a damn, you’d care to know what the marketplace cares about. But, no, you’re the mighty NYT guy. You don’t need no stinking audience. You don’t need ears. You only need a mouth.
At that point I had never heard of Jarvis, but it rang of the then-new commercials for Apple, the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” bits that seemed, more than anything, to divide computer purchasing choices not by objective usefulness of a tool, but rather the “Hip/Square” rubric. John Hodgman played the stuffy PC, while Justin Long was the hoodie-clad, buttery-toned Mac.
But, as Slate.com’s ad critic Seth Stevenson puts it,
The ads pose a seemingly obvious question—would you rather be the laid-back young dude or the portly old dweeb?—but I found myself consistently giving the "wrong" answer: I'd much sooner associate myself with Hodgman than with Long.
The Lemann piece had me siding with Markoff in the same way: Although I am both a print and a digital journalist, a writer of books and a writer of blogs, the seeming cool-kid arrogance of Jarvis (who may well have been caught in a bad moment; I’ve never met the man) was off-putting. But more importantly, it seemed to me that while Markoff was seeming to ponder where it all goes, Jarvis was playing the wild-eyed sandwich-boarded hippie with the “End Is Near” emblazoned front and back.
Lemann’s piece crystallized for me the unnecessary polarization of New vs. Old Media. I am someone who still derives great pleasure from a beautiful cloth-bound book that has held up over fifty years, but who also downloads award-winning short films on iTunes. But, sadly, people on both sides of that equation seem constantly to try to make me choose sides, as if I should.
The Luddites – those British textile workers of the early 1800s who sought to forestall the future by destroying the looms – are not unlike some of those old-school journalists who apparently still deny the Internet is for real. Print dinosaurs must certainly still roam the earth, but not in my neighborhood. I wonder if they really exist to any degree. Meanwhile, the New Media fashionistas wear their devotion to the Web like a set of clothes that will look embarrassing in the family album a decade or two from now. It seems more about being cool than being journalistically forward-thinking.
It seems to me, again and again, that the argument is as hollow as that of whether CDs are better than vinyl, or whether DVDs beat VHS tapes. In other words, those are all transmission, rather than content issues. It's the music that counts. Why it would be that sound, accurate responsible journalism would be any different as text or images online than on an ink-stamped sheet of paper seems to be derailing the whole discussion of how journalism – the profession – can remain vital and of service to society. The web, to me, is more likely to become a sensible, flexible venue for all manner of good work, rather than the answer in and of itself. When Horace Greeley was rolling out sheets of his failed Log Cabin from a lower-Manhattan cellar, his “new medium” was something he thought would change the world. It probably didn’t, but it probably helped. That’s just the manner of the way things find their center. Irony as it is, the very piece from which this piece emanates – Lemann’s “Amateur Hour,” could have been just as comfortable as a longer and more thoughtful blog post as it was in the pages of The New Yorker – except The New Yorker still pays a buck a word.

The Triangle of Dissemination, or, The Terraces of News

2008-09-04T14:10:00.001-07:00

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Purgatory is represented by Seven Terraces of sketchy behavior, a mountain to be climbed in order to find redemption; Hell is represented conversely as a nine-level vortex leading at its very bottom to Lucifer himself. Triangles, with their neat geometrics, lend themselves to all manner of elucidation. Those of us in journalism, of course, were raised on the inverted pyramid, a classic form that has found new currency as journalistic writing moves itself to the web.
As I read about the 15,000 accredited journalists attending the Democratic National Convention last week, it occurred to me that this throng was peopled by all manner of reporter. The range included those committed to “microblogging,” usually in the form of Twitter, sending out those burps of information nearly instantaneously, and on the other end the book authors, trying to find the long view just as Theodore H. White, Timothy Crouse, Richard Ben Cramer and Joe McGinniss have done in past election years. And there were the filmmakers there, next to the video crews, trying to find a yarn as the documentarian (and NBC producer) Andrea Pelosi did in “Journeys With George” in 2000.
And, if we agree that the web is not a medium, but multimedia, we see how there is room at the table for each of these.
So with apologies to Dante, my mountain is a spired peak, a Matterhorn of media, in which the uppermost heights are occupied by the most spindly of news vehicles, those which are premised on the twin characteristics of extreme brevity and extreme currency. A Tweet is only of value (just as a one-line radio bulletin is) if:
a) the news is seconds old;
b) the news is shocking, surprising or unexpected; and possibly
c) the communicator has some particular provenance or perspective.
Fast, brief news: Palin is the vice-presidential designee. Heath Ledger has fatally overdosed. The Sox have traded Ramirez.
This is not new. I recall being a 10-year-old somehow caught up in the unfolding of the “Prague Spring” of ’68 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia – I don’t know why, except that it was an era in which all things seemed comfortably etched in black and white. I recall sitting by a whistling AM radio hearing three words: Dubcek is dead. As in, abandon all hope. I did not have the ability to understand more nuanced things, just that this leader, this man standing up to the Soviet monolith, had been snuffed out – even though he had not been. The radio reports were wrong. Dubcek lived on until 1992. But the news, false as it was, felt electrifying, even as I did not truly understand the moment.
Twitter has the feel of a text message but is being claimed, by some, for news transmission. New form, old dynamic: I recall reading of that April 1865 night in The New York Tribune newsroom as the first Morse-code transmissions came through of Lincoln’s death. I recall standing in newsrooms of my younger days as Associated Press “flash bulletins” came in one-sentence increments. It plays on human nature, the desire to know important things as soon as possible.
But nearly all my examples involve death, the most dramatic of human situations. Almost anything else loses the knife’s edge of that upper triangle (“Obama is eating a grilled-cheese sandwich!”). That’s where Twitter is failing, and threatening to become insufferable. And, no matter how incredible the news, within moments we ask, "What happened? Where? How? Why?"
So we begin to move to more elaborated regions. A more detailed news story requires much less time sensitivity; a book is premised on having almost none. At the bottom of the mountain, the foothills that support the soaring peak, are the longest pieces, meant to impart a fullness of knowledge, not playing to the buzz of a breaking story.
At the bottom of the mountain, time moves more slowly (if anyone remembers Alan Lightman's wonderful short novel "Einstein's Dreams," this may remind in an opposite way). The writer at the footland is letting currency give way to rumination, worrying less about being the first and more about finding as close to full understanding as might be possible.
Books remain wonderfully versatile media objects; it's still a book if it's presented as a long pdf, in my opinion.
Would I read a 50,000-word book online? That depends on the device. I wouldn’t sit at my desk reading it on my big screen, and probably not on an iPod. But the polarity of the “big/small” media landscape is giving way to intermediary options: A Kindle or Sony Reader might be just fine.
It also depends on if it's a good book...
The beauty of New Media is that all of these kinds of work find their place. I see some new-media sages (visionaries or snake-oil salesmen, depending on their pitch and your perspective) seem to lean heavily toward promoting those things that can only be done on the web. But one of the most promising aspects is to shift all the good things about books, newspaper and magazines over to the electronic environment. The mountain of information is to be welcomed, to paraphrase Edmund Hillary, “because it’s there.”

Where Do New Videos and Documentary Films Converge? Part 4

2008-08-28T14:50:00.000-07:00

One of the most popular films I recommend to the students in my classes is called “Gunner Palace,” a raucous film by Michael Tucker. Conversely, the film was first recommended to me by a student, in 2005.
The subtitle to “Gunner Palace” is “Some War Stories Will Never Make The Nightly News.” In other words, Tucker is creating something that is sort of an anti-nightly-news product. But the question is, Why?
In the film (quoting the “Gunner Palace” website),
Filmmaker Michael Tucker, who lived with 2/3 Field Artillery, a.k.a. "The Gunners" for two months, captures the lives and humanity of these soldiers whose barracks are the bombed-out pleasure palace of Uday Hussein (nicknamed Gunner Palace), situated in the heart of the most volatile section of Baghdad. With total access to all operations and activities, Tucker's insider footage provides a rare look at the day-to-day lives of these soldiers on the ground -- whether swimming in Uday's pool and playing golf on his putting green or executing raids on suspected terrorists, enduring roadside bombs, mortar attacks, RPGs and snipers.
The obvious reason, quickly discarded, is simply length. Yes, the film allows the soldiers to speak at length, to rap and sing and play. But what it does is leave out all the usual clichés of video news:
- There is no specific time sensitivity. The film was made in 2003 but holds up on viewing five years later;
- The big topic, “What do you think of the war?” is only dealt with obliquely. The young men of The Gunners tell more micro stories about themselves, which in turn deeply shades our understanding of the macro. They swim in Uday’s pool, and they raid insurgent strongholds, and they listen the bombs exploding out in the Baghdad night. Yet they drink Snapple because alcohol isn’t allowed, and they freak when they see a rat in their room.
- The film at first blush feels expository, yet a narrative gathers. The young men flesh themselves out; Pvt. Stuart Wilf (who now occupies his spot on imdb.com) is at first funny, then annoying, just like your high-school buddy who ended up joining the army. Others play out the frustration of trying to train Iraqis to defend their own country. In the end, it’s about not being sure why you’re there or whether it was worth it, but it does not end with an on-camera reporter downspeaking in full foreign-correspondent regalia, reminding us that the media are the real stars of this show (Lara Logan appears ready for a VH1 reality show).
So really, it’s about story. That which is layered rather than direct. That which is accumulative rather than summarizing. But the true accomplishment of “Gunner Palace” is feeling as if you’re seeing the story no one else got.
In that respect, Tucker is akin to Ernie Pyle, the great Scripps correspondent of the Second World War. His classic “The Death of Captain Waskow” could be at home in this film, and perhaps, like Dexter Filkin's powerful piece in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "My Long War," it works deeply on the tone shift from exuberant life to confused death. Pyle always had the GI’s full name and home town, and he actually listened to them. In a great entry in the GP website’s blog, Tucker calls it “Jackass Goes To War,” which in many ways wasn’t that much different than Pyle, who chronicled very young men in a very harsh war.
I’d love to see New Media video bridge the abyss between news video, and what is often its overblown ponderous drama, with longer pieces that allow a story to find itself. Unlike television with its 18-minute summary of everything important in the world, online documentary news pieces can stretch the boundaries.

Email interviews: Another symptom of the New Media Age?

2008-08-22T05:17:00.000-07:00

Last year, I published a lengthy piece in The Atlantic Monthly on the nation’s top graduate creative-writing programs, and recently I heard from The Atlantic’s PR guy, saying a student from The University of Arkansas’s student newspaper wanted to interview me about my inclusion of Arkansas’s program as one of the most innovative in the nation.
I emailed the student with my phone number and told her when she could call me. Instead, I received an email back with a list of questions.
I wrote and linked her to an interview I did for The Atlantic’s website, explaining how I did the lists in the piece, and said that she could phone me for whatever else she needed.
She wrote to say she’d just use information from that existing interview.
So: Never any human contact, never any give-and-take that interviewing spurs. Welcome to the age of cut-and-paste journalism. I sense many young reporters, including those in my classes, are essentially sending email questionnaires out and then simply lifting the answers into their own pieces.
On one hand, this method of reporting lessens the chance of being misquoted, particularly by an inexperienced reporter. And it allows the source to think over and shape the answers.
The problems are that some people, such as myself, might not be willing to sit and write long answers. And secondly, it allows the source to think over and shape the answers. Bring in the spin, throw out the spontaneity.
I just wonder what opportunities are lost by not communicating humanly with the source. I always tell my students a truism my old city editor shared with me: A 10-minute phone interview is a long interview; a 10-minute face-to-face interview is a short interview. He believed reporters always needed to get to the source and look him/her in the eyes.
With “email interviewing,” there’s no opportunity to let a conversation go where it goes. No dropped bombs, no off-the-cuff colorful quotes, and most importantly, no whispered asides or off-the-record tips. Email interviewing may lead to more work that, while accurate in a word-for-word way, misses the whole point.

News Users: Parsing The Pew Center’s Report on Media

2008-08-19T08:41:00.000-07:00

The 129-page report released Sunday by The Pew Center on news-consumption habits of the American public is an interesting hybrid, packing the statistical punch of a well-researched project with the use of simplifying concepts and accompanying catchphrases one might find in a self-help book (and I don’t mean that in a bad way: In a way, the report is a self-help book).
The report, dryly entitled “New Consumption and Believability Study,” identifies such demographic types as “News Grazers,” “Net Newsers,” “Integrators” and “The Disengaged” (which, strikingly, accounts for only 14 percent, to my surprise).
Some highlights:
- The number of people using the web for news on a daily basis has grown from 18 to 25 percent.
- The number of 18-to-24-year-olds who go “newsless” on a daily basis has risen from 25 percent to 34 percent in the last decade.
- Fifty-one percent of those cohort say they check news “from time to time” during the day, rather than at a habitual time (these, the Pew Report deems “News Grazers).”
The term “Integrators” holds the most interest to me. It’s an approach to thinking about how people “assemble” news through a period of time.
Back in the 1990s, the feminist and media theorist Camille Paglia said that the biggest difference between people born before 1950 and after 1950 is that the latter group was far more adept at absorbing multiple media streams simultaneously. As an example, last night I had the Red Sox-Orioles on the TV with the sound down (glancing up to catch bits and pieces), was listening to music on the stereo, and was reading a book – a very natural state of being. My parents’ generation would use the media sequentially, and the idea of doing what I do would rattle them.
Moving forward to the internet era, there seems in my observation a new modus: People multitasking without seeming to be sufficiently engaged in any of them. Rather than grazers, I’d call them “fly-overs.” The TV is on, but nothing is absorbed; the cell phone “tweets” endlessly with its nothingness; the radio plays emptily.
But where Paglia spoke of simultaneous but discrete use of media streams, the notion of Integration, as I understand the Pew Report’s definition of that, says that this type of media user takes parts of all media and assembles into one’s own package, a kind of perceptive singularity.
Example: The Pew Report notes that more people are using search engines as a news source. It seems to me that this is often a follow to having seen or heard a short news item. The cycle might be as follows: In my car, I hear a 5-second news item of interest to me. I arrive at my computer and check what I perceive as the best in-depth news source, probably an online newspaper. Having not found the item of sufficient depth or clarity for my needs, I then Google keywords that give me not only links to current coverage, but backgrounders with which I can fill out the story.
It’s a new way of following news, underlined by a Pew finding that 84 percent of 18-to-24 years olds “come upon” news while on the web looking for something else, which in my mind is a key finding. The obvious example is the headlines that greet anyone looking to use their Hotmail account. It behooves news organizations to reconsider how they are packaging and promoting themselves, and how they appeal to the important demographic of Integrators, who tend to be more active using news media as well as more affluent. It will require a tremendous amount of counter-intuition that has often seemed lacking in the upper echelons of the newspaper business for more than a decade now.

The Hyperbole of Unmediated Media

2008-08-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

I am preparing to take on a class of 11 students, in advanced news writing and reporting, and for the first time in my 18 years of teaching, my opening speech will change.
Even a year ago, I was still saying this:
If you do all the things I need for you to do in this class, and you do them well, you’ll get a job.
And it’s always been true. In a given class of a dozen, I tend to have, give or take, three excellent students, three who are bright and could go either way, three who are a bit challenged but with hard work can get it, and three who don’t, and never will, give a crap.
Out of that group, in a given year, three or four rise to the level I think makes them employable. And year after year, my perceptions were confirmed as these students went out into the world. I have former students who’ve gone on to The Associated Press, Providence Journal, ESPN, all the Boston and Providence television stations. Year after year, The Bristol Phoenix, the very fine local weekly in the town in which I live and teach, has hired our graduates.
So: This year.
The speech this year will be not unlike the one I give in my creative-writing classes (I am a joint appointment between the two departments at my university). In essence, I say, the chances of doing this for a living are slim, there only for the best of the best. I say that a student who wants to study how to write novels needs to be aware that the chances of making a living doing that is slim. Over in our theater department, as at theater departments across the country, students put their all into their acting, but the number who become professional actors is almost, as the mathematicians say, statistically insignificant.
I tell the creative-writing students this: If you’re looking for a job, study business. But the study of writing will make you a better thinker, communicator and observer of human nature than you would otherwise be.
This year, I’m telling my journalism students the same.
Across the hall, I have some colleagues who, in their flush of excitement about New Media, are proclaiming the era of “Citizen Journalism.” The students seem enthused until I explain, truthfully, that Citizen Journalism is often a euphemism for “work for free.”
But it’s the hype of unmediated media, the notion of being able to communicate without the gatekeepers they view as obstructers rather than legitimizers, that seems to be driving so much professional journalism into the void.
In the world of fiction writing, it’s called “vanity publishing,” and there is almost not a lower category of literature. By not putting your work through the hopper of publishing houses, the presumption is there is no imprimatur at all. While there are examples of successful self-publishing (Alice in Wnderland may be the best known), people win the lottery all the time, relatively speaking.
The converse, of course, is the unmediated-media bastion YouTube, where everything gets posted with virtually no gatekeeping (other than, apparently, pornography) and then the success of a posting is a function of hits accrued and linking forwarded. It seems, to be sure, freeing. But in the end, human nature can’t help but assert itself – most people crave being members of exclusive clubs, so many of the unmediated media (Gawker,, for one) become as catty as the most stuffy New York publishing house.
And one some level, the web does not allow for thoughtful distinction yet.
Example: In my writing classes, I have had, on dozens of occasions, students who hand in term papers with every single footnote cites Wikipedia (even though my syllabus says that’s not acceptable). As a variation on the “It’s in the newspaper, it must be true,” imagine the idea that Wikipedia is an unassailable font of knowledge.
So, does the future lead to a bunch of “Citizen Journalists” working for nothing and living in their parents’ basement? Is serious work going to be lost in the soup of everybody with a keyboard blah blah blahing at increasingly shrill tones?
The answer is no, but I believe that mediated communication is heading toward a massive shift. The economic models clearly are not working, and in the future, the “free” press as defined by one that makes a profit is headed toward being a free press that depends on subsidization in the name of the public good.

Where do video news features and documentary films converge? Part III

2008-08-13T05:57:00.000-07:00

One of the more encouraging aspects of the evolution of newspapers into online media outlets is the willingness (or desperation) that has led to all kinds of experimentation with video.
While at newspapers across the country, old hands at times tend to be combative about taking on new technology – reporters argue they’re not photographers; photographers that they’re not videographers – some are embracing the technology to try new and innovative approaches.
On The Denver Post website’s Videos section is a 2-minute, 21-second piece entitled “Purple Heart Ceremony,” shot and edited by Post photographer Lyn Alweis, who I knew when I worked at the Post years ago (link is at bottom of this post). From what I can tell, virtually all the video pieces in The Post’s “MediaCenter” section are in fact shot by Alweis (which I suspect may say something about the rest of The Post photographic staff’s interest in New Media).
The piece, about the posthumous awarding of the Purple Heart to Sgt. James Dean Hon, who served in Vietnam, is not only nicely done, but it sheds all the conventions of what we might call news video to become a rather sublime little documentary piece.
First, there’s no narration. The standard television approach of having the reporter as the first visual (and therefore the star of the show), usually intoning in the traditional “downspeak” meant to give a tone of gravitas, is done away with. Instead, it begins with a more cinematic approach, a wide shot of the a buttermilk sky over the Colorado State Capitol, as the disembodied voice of the speaker Francisco Elizalde of The Military Order of the Purple Heart is laid in, then leads to quick cuts of the proceedings.
Second, unlike a news video, which seems rarely to allow a story to unfold without insistent VO, this piece captures a small moment in a way that pauses to take note of many details. It keeps the participants, particularly Hon’s parents, front and center. It is the video version of a well-done picture story, and it has a hint of cinema verite, letting the event unfold absent any stand-up interviewing.
While the piece does not have the quirkiness or personal stamp I feel is a defining element of so many documentaries, it does have a freshness of something for which overediting has not robbed it of a level of personal filmmaking, as on television.
You could very definitely call this piece a very short documentary film, given that it is more akin to the shorts one might see in a film festival than on the six o’clock news. And the fact that the work comes from someone raised on picture stories and photo essays, one of the finest journalistic forms as far as I’m concerned, means that for a journalist like Alweis it’s a rather natural progression. I think of some of the best photo essayists ¬ –William Albert Allard, Sebastiao Salgado and Mary Ellen Mark come to mind – and believe that in another time, they might have done wonderful documentary work. Because each of these people is a committed individual artist, they would likely not have been at all comfortable with then-standard documentary practice of a director, photographer and sound person as minimal crew. That’s what’s different now with digital technology, that someone such as Alweis is working with about the same “equipment heaviness” as when shooting stills.
What I also noticed about the Alweis piece is that, just as on so many newspaper websites, the video is virtually buried. Most newspaper websites continue to try to be newspapers, the online version of paper and ink in which moving pictures or audio pieces tend to seem appendages, not quite managed, as if the print sensibility of the editors just can’t fathom where to put it. The Post videos are given thumbnails so small as to be nearly indistinguishable.
It is at this place that a worthy discussion might happen at online newspapers. Are they truly bound by the old conventions, in which pieces must conform to a set upper length limit? Will readers/viewers look to online newspapers as a place to see longer works (and conversely, will online newspapers become a place where documentary filmmakers might find some home for their pieces)?

Link to Alweis piece: http://videocenter.denverpost.com/services/link/bcpid1504364485/bclid1419798684/bctid1717896023

Online newspapers are the worst advertisements for themselves, or, Think like Kerouac

2008-08-12T05:45:00.000-07:00

If you want to feel as if there are only four or five stories of any merit going on in your community, online newspapers seem to be creating that perception nearly perfectly.
Most newspaper websites seem to have settled on a page that lists only the top handful of stories, with little regard for the notion of what a newspaper was meant to be – rich with detail, comprehensive in its scope. My local newspaper, The Providence Journal, which generally has about three or four news stories represented on its from page, with a “see more stories” bug that takes you to as unadorned a list as you might want to see. The Boston Herald some months ago went to a new, airy and colorful design that unfortunately cuts back significantly on the number of entry points available to a reader. And The Denver Post online product, also an airy and open design, likewise gives short shrift to what might come after the handful of stories deemed most important.
In essence, they are looking more like television.
The much-documented effect television has had to condition the public into believing that all a city’s news can be read in 12 neat minutes a night has now infected the newspaper business, to its own detriment.
A newspaper tells a story of a community, unabridged. When one takes a paper-and-ink paper in hand, one might not get to all the items, but the notion is one of depth and nuance, of a place teeming with happenstance and event. The typical online newspaper is feeding the opposite notion.
The New York Times and The Boston Globe do better, but The Globe in particular tends to do this by sacrificing looks for lists. It’s text-heavy, and past a third of the way down, it’s list heavy, each section shown as only the heds of the stories. None of the traditional attracting elements – subheds, photos, cuts – are there.
Some of the problem, I believe, is in failing to break from traditional newspaper mindsets.
I remember when the publishing program PageMaker was first rolled out by Aldus. I began teaching it somewhere in the mid-1990s, and while it made intuitive sense to me, the students had an awful time with it. What I came to realize is that the program had been designed to emulate cut-and-paste, which the students had never done. I spent one class having them lay out a page with scissors and paste pots, and Pagemaker suddenly became more understandable.
Now look at the difference between a blog and a typical online newspaper. Blogs scroll down nearly endlessly. Online newspapers tend to still think in “sections,” keeping its front page rather short and then asking readers to click into succeeding sections (most of which seem nearly an afterthought).
I’d like to see online papers free themselves from old mindsets, and produce a document less like a sectioned broadsheet with clear bottom boundaries, and more like a traditional scroll, rolling as far as the reader's interest takes it. The online newspaper as inverted pyramid, if you will.
When Jack Kerouc wrote the draft of “On The Road” on a paper scroll (actually 10 12-foot-long rolls of teletype paper Scotch-taped together), he was on some level breaking himself of the notion that a novel is a succession of 300-word pages, fed into a typewriter one by one, and rather one flowing narrative. In essence, Kerouac predicted the Word file, in which we who write books work more like Kerouac than other writers of his time.
An online newspaper can, literally, plumb its depths. Stories, pictures and videos can roll downward at great length, all re-establishing what seems to be a lost notion: That there’s lots to tell.

I've Never Read So Many Newspapers, I've Never Read So Few

2008-08-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

Just after sunrise each weekday morning, I stop in at the little store around the corner to grab my coffee for the ride to work, and to grab a newspaper. Each day, I contend with the question of 1) whether I want to buy a newspaper, and 2) which one(s) I’ll choose. The fact that I am a former newspaper guy who has been teaching journalism for some years makes me somewhat different from the so-called “average reader,” but the series of decisions I make in that little store tend to be, I would think, somewhat indicative of what the world is doing when it comes to the choice.
Each day, nearly without fail, I read the following “newspapers”: The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Providence Journal, The New York Daily News, The New York Post, and The Washington Post. Sometimes, for old-times’ sake, I check in at newspapers at which I was a staffer – The Denver Post, The Colorado Springs Gazette. Because I have friends from the newspaper days I like to keep up with, I check in frequently at The Arkansas Democrat (for the columns of my old friend Jay “Sweet Tea” Grelen) and The Victoria (Texas) Advocate (for the columns of the best editor for whom I ever worked, now-columnist Jim Bishop). If I’m in the mood, I might read some others, depending on the news of the day. In a given day, I might return to these newspaper websites every three or four hours, checking in on what’s new. News junkie that I am, I cannot deny the buzz that comes from following a story as it unfolds.
And newspapers are dying because?
Because most days, I spend between 50 cents and $1.50 for newspapers, but get far more product than that.
The paradox of newspapering is that there is, like myself, a rather intense readership who is not making them any money. And this phenomenon is measurable: Page views by discrete readers show that these “dying” news organizations are getting unprecedented attention.
And a new rating system is going toward what may be a more accurate representation, which is time spent on the site.
So, what’s gone wrong?
There’s no doubt that the downturn of newspaper ad revenue is a response to the greed of newspapers over the last twenty years. I can make my case, but a far better person to do so (although he does not use the word “greed”) is the great John Carroll, former Los Angeles Times editor, in this speech to the students at the University of Kentucky (Carroll also edited the Lexington Herald-Leader and Baltimore Sun). From the mid-1970s until the late 1990s, there were perfect conditions for newspapers to gouge on advertising: Where in the early Seventies, for example, no fewer than five Boston dailies competed not only for news but for advertising, there was something akin to a free market. The Providence Journal had a virtual monopoly on advertising for forty years. It was easy, as with the sub-prime loan holders of the last decade, to think it would all just keep going on.
It has not.
Some questions I ask myself as a reader/consumer go toward the very things that are damaging the business:

1) Why should I pay? If my supermarket was giving food out for nothing, why would I want to suddenly start paying? In the 1990s, most newspapers were looking at their websites as nothing more than promotional devices, mostly in an attempt to snag younger readers. But the fact is that newspapers have now conditioned readers to the notion of getting news for nothing. Tough turning that around.
2) Why am I giving a newspaper personal information? Whether it be my address, credit card numbers, or demographics, many newspapers found it easy to betray readers by taking that information as their own. After I used my credit card to search a local newspaper’s archives (a privilege for which they charged me and required me to fill out an extensive application), I was suddenly inundated with calls trying to get me to subscribe.
3) Why aren’t newspapers finding a model of payment that works for me? One element of that is security: I might have paid for The New York Times Select if I could have gone through Paypal, and if I could have paid month-to-month until I was convinced that it was a worthwhile price point. Instead, The Times exhibited the kind of off-putting hubris that made me say, “Forget it.” I like Maureen Dowd, but I can also live without her. In the current marketplace of ideas, there are a lot of people who have interesting things to say.
4) Are online newspapers designed to make you think they have fewer stories? Viewing the typical online newspaper is like only getting to see what’s above the fold, and then having to actually make efforts to find more. Not unexpectedly, The Times does the best job of doing what all newspapers should, which is letting me know there is depth to the product.
5) Why do newspapers lack personality? Because news staffs have become stagnant. A friend at a Massachusetts newspaper tells me they haven’t been able to make a new hire in three years. To which I respond: You’re doing yourselves in. Organizations without new infusions of blood become stale. The readers know it.
6) Am I finding news in newspapers I can’t find elsewhere? The answer of course is yes, but it seems that that leads to the L-word. Local news gets me to view local online newspapers. And it’s amazing, reading my local paper (The Providence Journal) how they can deaden what I might have first thought was interesting.

Solutions, then? There are no easy ones. But as a guy spending unprecedented time (and pleasure) reading more newspapers than I’ve ever read before, I keep wondering why people keep telling me the news business is dead…

Many Online Newspapers Have All But Shut Themselves Off From Tips

2008-08-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

The evolving Clark Rockefeller Case has been a classic journalistic yarn, something being made whole by the succession of people who stand in witness to a young man who apparently turned into a fraud (at the least) and possibly a multiple murderer.
So many elements of the story have come from those most necessary of sources, the call-ins. They’re people who, having some flash of insight or some recollection, contact a reporter to help the story move. As a reporter, I had more than one of these turn into a great story.
Which is why it’s so ironic that newspapers, so strapped and plunging, seem to have all but shut themselves off from such tipsters by their use of the most dehumanizing technology. This realization came to me recently when I tried to touch base with an old friend who works at such a dying newspaper. I felt like Houdini in his séance, trying to reach The Other Side.
Try phoning a newspaper these days, and imagine doing so with the Story Of The Year. Triage is now performed by an automated answering system which all but completely bars you from speaking to a human being – although the greater irony is that potential advertisers don’t have much better luck trying to hand their money to this supposedly strapped enterprise (My organization tried to place an ad in The New York Times' educational-careers section. No one ever got back to us on our email or voicemail).
Trying to drop the proverbial dime online is equally frustrating. The “Contact Us” links may as well read “Don’t Contact Us.” And while many online newspapers allow for reader comments, I’d be surprised if anyone things the newspaper staff presumes to lower themselves to reading them.
Such a damned shame, but perhaps relating what blogger Andy Dickinson correctly points out: “Arrogance is the cancer of mainstream journalism.”
A great contrast is between The Boston Herald, which has email addresses of reporters below stories, and The Boston Globe, which seems to have no such easy access. But a cursory investigation of larger newspapers' online presence seem to indicate that The Globe's is the more common model. While sorting through the scads of useless tips and crank calls can be a chore, it seemed even a decade ago to be a common daily process.
I can only imagine myself as the person wanting to call in and confess a Crime of the Century to a reporter. Son of Sam trying to contact Jimmy Breslin and being put on hold. Deep Throat endlessly clicking through the virtual labyrinth. If today's news organizations are claiming to want to engage with the community around them, making it easier for the public to feed them the manna of news tips might be a useful start.

Where Do News Videos and Documentary Films Converge? Part 2

2008-08-07T10:36:00.000-07:00

“Film,” the medium and not the technology, has always had something of an elitist ring to it, even when it came to nonfiction subjects. Documentary filmmakers I know often reject the notion they’re journalists, just as some people I know who’ve produced nonfiction books would prefer the term “author” to reporter.”
To be sure, the filmmaking corps has always kept narrow by economic lines. Example: 2,000 feet of 35mm color reversal film – about 55 minutes - costs about $3,250 with processing. Sound must be captured separately and synced in. Emulsion film requires great care and cost in lighting it; copies of any kind – interpositives, answer prints, exhibition copies – come at great cost.
In the 1980s I was a graduate student at Boston University who would have loved to have made a documentary film, even one under five minutes in length. But this was an economic non-possibility, simply because of film-stock costs. Borrowing someone’s spring-driven wind-up 16mm Bolex camera was never a big issue. It was the film itself that did you in.
In the meantime, TV newsphotographers were blasting away with videotape, at that time an equally expensive proposition because of the cot of the cameras, $100,000 at the least. The video was awful compared to film, but it served news well, needing no processing and less edit time. Filmmakers saw no advantage in video until well into the 1990s when the first wave of affordable, decently sharp video emerged.
In 1997, the Canon XL1 hit the market. It was a “3-chip” camera, meaning it used separate sensors to take measurement of red, green and blue, and it was recording on digital rather than analog (magnetic) tape such as High-8. The original XL1 cost about $5,000; Sony, Panasonic and others were offering similar products, and a documentary film revolution was underway.
Given the lowering of the cost and the converging media, documentary filmmakers seemed to distinguish themselves not by the physical properties of the medium but rather by intent. I’ve found several compelling differences:
1) Narrowness and depth of subject matter. Documentaries increasingly plumb more and more narrow topics, a narrowness made even more possible by the lower cost of production. To make a $300,000 documentary with a narrow but enthusiastic potential audience is foolish, but if the same film can be made for $25,000, it could make some profit. At the Rhode Island International Film Festival this week, some long-form documentaries include an 88-minute piece on Sargent Shriver, founder of the Peace Crops, a 70-minute piece on the artist Billy Apple, and a 78-minute project on NASA launching a high-altitude telescope with weather balloons. Each sounds fascinating, but less likely to have mainstream impact.
2) Personal Signature. This has become a strong part of current documentary filmmaking. Michael Moore was the person who really created the filmmaker-as-star approach. “Roger & Me” and “Bowling for Columbine” were both topics right out of the evening news (layoffs at GM in Flint, Mich.; the Columbine massacre and the resulting debate on gun control), but they became successful specifically because of Moore’s clownish persona. A more recent film, “Supersize Me,” strikes me as the second-unit version of same. But with a deeply personal voice or presence, the filmmaker clearly signals the work as being by an individual, rather than by a news organization. It can be overdone. Watching the late Sydney Pollack’s Sketches of Frank Gehry, I was amused at the fact that director Pollack had a full film crew shooting Pollack shooting Gehry with a little Sony hand-held Mini-DV camera. It seemed to connote some making of one’s documentary bones to do so.
3) Quirkiness. Documentary filmmaking has become a place of entertaining ideosyncracy, in which the filmmaker can move out of the constraints of institutional journalism and the sometimes bloodless voice that accompanies it. For example, the one-hour pieces you’ll see on “Biography” or MYV’s“Behind The Music” is television journalism, while Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man” is much more a film, with pleasing oddities and a level of unpredictability.
The Last aspect, in my mind, is voice and narrative structure. I’ll return to these on a new post.

Where do video news features and documentary films converge? Part I of several

2008-08-06T11:27:00.000-07:00

PROVIDENCE - The Rhode Island International Film Festival is underway here, with an opening night of 10 short dramatic films, at least half of which are likely to be Academy Award contenders in the short film category. Opening Night has become a bustling event. About 2,000 people were in attendance to see the shorts program at The Providence Peforming Arts Center, and streets normally quiet in the summer lull were busy again. I always find it amusing to see the streets of Providence filled with younger souls proudly wearing their bright-orange RIIFF lanyards with the block-lettered “Filmmaker” on the dangling credential, as meaningful in that culture as a caste mark. As if the kid taking their order down at the Union Station pub cares a whit.
But it leads to the essential question, I think, of what it means to be a filmmaker, or not be one, in a new Media age, especially when it comes to nonfiction.
The attention now of the RIIFF and has turned to the documentaries; while most of the dramatic shorts of Opening Night were shot on 35mm film, virtually every documentary has been shot in either HD or HDV formats.
So the foundation of the presumed difference between a “documentary film” and a “video,” which is the difference of emulsion film and analog tape, and consequently the difference between light front-projected one a screen or light back-projected in a tube display, no longer has any real technological meaning.
Length is one of the obvious differences, then, from what one might call film. The outer limit of something we think of as video tends to go not far beyond 30 minutes, usually no more than 20 – the television magazine shows perhaps being the best example. It seems from my perusal of the RIIFF program that the documentary short is quickly becoming a thing of the past, and perhaps not happily.
Filmmakers who do documentaries have to be painfully aware of where their work will be seen, and the feature-length theatrical release remains, even in this age of changing media, the Holy Grail (see my August 2 post on the new Werner Herzog film). But, of course, it’s the rarity of such events that feed those very dreams. The theater documentaries I’ve seen of late are either by established feature directors (Sydney Pollack’s Sketches of Frank Gehry or Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke) or from big studios (March of the Penguins was a National Geographic/Warner partnership with a budget estimated at $4 to $5 million). While a few surprises come along from time to time (Born Into Brothels and Jesus Camp come to mind), these are probably just enough to keep the dream alive.
The notion of shooting a short documentary and placing it directly onto the web (even if it is a not-for-profit project) has the same pejorative tang as “straight-to-DVD” has for the feature filmmakers. Some documentaries seem to disappear completely after a film festival run. The Death of Kevin Carter, the story of New York Times photographer Carter, who killed himself not long after his controversial Pulitzer-Prize-winning photograph, is something I’d love to see. It was an Academy Award nominee, but its website shows the last scheduled screening being more than 18 months ago, and that a DVD version is not available.
So, over several posts in the next few days, I want to explore some of the essential differences I see between what these self-described “filmmakers” do as compared to the “journalists” working in virtually the same medium. In some ways, I see significant differences; in others it seems overblown and adhering to old models. In the age of such rapid convergence, it will be an evolving process.

Is the Newspaper the New Vinyl Album?

2008-08-05T13:44:00.000-07:00

I remember when I finally tossed the wretched collection of scratched-up vinyl I’d been carrying and expanding since my college days. Done, finally, once I had finally come to the conclusion this was a dead channel. CDs were new and such a seeming leap forward, why would anyone stay with the old grooved disk?
Of course twenty years later the vinyl album is in Renaissance. Dressed with a hip retro name – “Analog” – they’re suddenly being touted as the medium of the musical purists. CD’s, once sold to us the next big thing, are now dismissed by audiophiles as musically inferior, digitally compressed so as to manufacture a cold and clinical version of the music we love. Vinyl is "Warm and organic." Artists are releasing their work on vinyl, to feed the needs of “real” music purists. Go figure.
The newspaper, meanwhile, is in the same mode of mass abandonment as the album twenty years before. “The Newspaper is Dead” has that same ominous ring as the “God is Dead” bumper stickers of the late 1960s. And possibly for the wrong reasons.
The newspaper buyouts of the last few years have made plain the reality of so many newspapers: They they are peopled with fifty-and-sixty-somethings who have brought to the news the same pseudoparental sense of dismissiveness and irritability that younger people – be they readers or children – are made crazy by. The opportunities for young journalists to enter decently paying newspaper jobs has become so bottlenecked that newsrooms have long since begun to resemble insurance offices. It may be unavoidable, but the top-heaviness is exactly what has, in the news sense, made the American newspaper a wobbly, unsurefooted beast.
The answer is not to become Gawker or Smoking Gun. But the fact is that no one I know under the age of 30 – even journalism students – ever drops fifty cents for a newspaper.
The cycle seems to be headed, for newspapers (and by that I do mean the paper-and-ink instrument, and not the newsgathering organizations). I also wonder whether near-extinction will be the very think to create the requisite interest in newspapers that will cause them, like albums, to become a small but interesting niche of the business. It's likely to lose much of the feel we know now, what I paraphrase Tom Wolfe as calling "The Ponderous Journalistic Cud," and it may be thinner, less committed to "All the news..." and ironically, a possible promotional gimmick for online media, as we all first thought newspaper websites would be for the newspaper.
Trends are interesting that way. Vinyl lives, and whether some printed form of news survives twenty years from now may be a matter of the same fickle fate.

The New Media, The New Evil, and the Banality of Our Instantaneous Communication

2008-08-03T14:51:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times Magazine piece on so-called "trollers" by Mattathias Schwartz really opens a worthy discussion about the true evil that comes from any technological advancement. Social networking is such an idealistic term, so much nicer and more euphemistic than "sociopathic networking," but the story of these idle youth, empowered by the anonymity that comes from being able to harass from behind the electronic shroud, really speaks of something disturbing and awful - exactly the encouragement they need. The accompanying photo of "Weev" (note the carefully placed mask behind him from the film "V is for Vendetta," a perfect piece of stage decoration) makes me think of the famous term coined by the German-Jewish philosopher-social critic-journalist Hannah Arendt, in covering the 1963 Adolph Eichmann war crime trials for The New Yorker. The shock for Arendt was not the intellectual foundation of the evil, but rather that there really wasn't one. People just went along with so much for so many stupid reasons. It was no more than, as she said, "The Banality of Evil."
The article discusses a group of trollers who harassed the parents of teenage suicide victim for a year and half - just because it was funny. They hacked the dead boy's MySpace page to leave cruel messages and images, they emailed the parents saying they were the boy's ghost. They didn't know the boy, or his parents. They had simply selected their victims because it would amuse them.
Such is the banality of evil on this thing we call New Media. Cheap, instantaneous, worldwide communication, combined with a world (or at least nation) of teenagers who seem not to have gotten enough attention in their formative years.
In Conan O'Brien's absolutely hilarious commencement speech to the Harvard class of 2000, he shared outtakes of the commencement speech he would have given in 1985, had he been allowed:

I believe that one day a high-speed network of interconnected computers will spring up worldwide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chitchat and pornography...

The other article in the same Sunday Times Magazine was about the breakdown of order and courtesy on California's freeways, in the person of so-called "sidezoomers" who impose upon the rest of us, the socially responsible (or socially indoctrinated) "line-uppers." You know what the author is talking about - those people who drive up the exit lane then suddenly merge left at the head of the backed-up line of cars.
While these two pieces aren't overtly linked, they could well be. I make the case that in the microcelebritized world we increasingly occupy, it pits a cadre of Web-based sidezoomers who communicate to break their own apparent boredom against those line-uppers who still believe in this young medium as a place for social contribution, enlightened discourse and human connection. Instead, it's packs of banally evil children such as Weev, looking for something to do on a Saturday night, gaining consensus through the same sort of group approval of the so-called "Good Germans." That grinning, banal boy whose image is above these words tells us this is, like truth and accuracy, an ideal.

Werner Herzog, Personal Digital Filmmaking, and Whether Penguins Really Lose Their Minds

2008-08-02T19:29:00.001-07:00

On a recent Saturday on which the temperatures hit 96 in the late afternoon and the humidity blanketed everything with a truculent glaze, we snuck up to The Avon Cinema, that little art house just beyond the gates of Brown University, to see anything they were playing, as long as the air conditioning was on. And fortuitously, what we found was a film about another extreme - Antarctica - by a filmmaker who revels in extremes, Werner Herzog.
Encounters At The End of The World has that ominous multiplicity of meaning we’ve come to expect of Herzog, whose last documentary, Grizzly Man, rang similarly with many meanings. The director journeyed literally to polar opposites, but yet to places very much the same.
Herzog, in these films about people who have stripped away artifice and possession to encounter extreme ways of living, and thinking. In the same manner, Herzog, as a filmmaker, seems to have discarded the trappings and gadgets of Big Film as a man seeking survival casts off all that weighs him down.
Herzog, in this film works as one of a two-man crew. He is director, but he is interviewer (or perhaps better put, interlocutor) and sound man, holding the microphone blimp at the edges of the frame. His cinematographer, Peter Zeitlinger (who also did Grizzly Man) works with a tripod-mounted HDCam. That’s basically it. Two men, traversing long distances, to find conversation with people living in remote places.
The director, his voice as always filled with tragic portent, finds a scientist who studies penguins “who has been with the penguins so long he does not like to talk anymore.” Herzog teases from him a few scraps of gentle observation, then blurts out in that gravelly Teutonic voice, “But is it not true that the penguins lose their minds?” In fact, Herzog mentions penguins more than once with great sarcasm, a pretty direct hit on the buttery smoothness of the $4 million March of the Penguins.
That we could sit in a theater, even one as artsy as The Avon, and watch his film, is object proof of the falling away of so many conventions. Not shot on film (although transferred to 35 for theater exhibition), not using a giant crew and rafts of equipment, not scripted so carefully as to excise every blurt and aside, it’s actually a film that could find its place as easily on the web, or on an iPod. It reminds me in some ways of a newspaper series, with a grouping of focal points that build to the larger truth. Loose in any sort of plot or movement, it weaves almost as a series of set pieces. Easily broken into chapters, not unlike a so-called “novel in stories” like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a book that is not far away from the emotional landscape explored by Herzog.
And, I suspect, this film was made inexpensively. There’s not much in the way of polish or the sort of digital airbrushing postproduction often brings.
I like the notion that the paradox of work like this is that it has never been so near and so far for a journalist to emulate. So near, in terms of accessibility of technology, yet so distant in that odd, cerebral, obsessive and quirky vision Herzog, still evolving and innovating at the age of 65.

"The Times Were Never So Bad" to screen at UNCW Writers' Week, November 2008

2008-08-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

My documentary film "The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus," is slated for a screening at "Writers' Week" at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.

Thinking Backwards: Blog Architecture and The Art of Retroactive Storytelling

2008-08-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

Think of the way people read a blog as if they were picking up a novel, opening to the last chapter, and reading backwards, chapter by chapter, to the front of the book.
Because the typical blog is on some level an intellectual flow, it builds upon itself in a manner that often makes top-to-bottom reading less productive, or at least less clarified.
Those of us who have reported for newspapers know well that odd backing-into to facts. You’re covering an event that has spanned multiple news cycles. Your report is going to have the freshest of the news, and upon that you begin that retroactive storytelling that is the art of newspapering, adding background fact and nuance in a way that informs that first burst of information in your lead. As many an editor said in those print days, “Write it for the guy who just moved to town yesterday.”
But the essential difference is that yesterday’s newspaper is in the trash. In a blog, and increasingly in the realm of online newspapers, it’s no more than a scroll or a click to rewind.
Oddly, blogs resemble the early newspapers in the manner in which they assemble discussions, speak from a deeply personal voice, and don't presume such things as prestige or permanance. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune was in many ways a daily digest of the man’s obsessions, philosophies and grudges. We, readers, catch the train and ride it as far as it goes (or at least as far as the scenery remains interesting). But the beauty of Greeley, and of the best of the newspaper columnists, and the best of the online journalists, is the evolving ethos of these intellects as they work out their positions.
So how does one read backwards? When one is raised in a linear tradition, one doesn’t as much as a new generation of readers learn that process, of backtracking down to beginnings. In some ways, it’s not all that different from following a story in the newspapers. The New Media generation is about spiderwebs rather than straight lines. It may account for their distractedness; they may see us as locked into anachronistic, slavish turning of pages.
But here is a pleasure of linear consumption: Of a story building as the sheaf of pages between the thumb and forefinger becomes thinner, that physical sensation of knowing somethimg has to happen because there's hardly any paper left in our pincers. Does someone raised on the web understand that?
If you’ve had the experience of watching someone text message (in the car in the lane next to you on 95 North, perhaps) you know that modes of communication go ever shorter, ever more fragmented, and ever more piecemeal. The question is whether the news business will need to further adapt products to reading patterns. Will it evolve to a point where reading frontwards is an odd and anachronistic process? Is nonlinear storytelling something that must be grappled with?

Digital Media, The Journalist, and The Artist

2008-08-01T15:30:00.000-07:00

My true beginning as a filmmaking journalist began at the precise moment when my rising discretionary income intersected with the cost at which I could reasonably acquire equipment that was of sufficient quality. Both were a long time in coming. The drop in the cost of technology was far steeper than the rise in my income.
This fortuitous event took place in early 2006, when I purchased a JVC gy-HD100u ProHD camcorder, and began shooting interviews that would lead to my completing my documentary “The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus.”
The race forward of technology, and the resulting depreciation of the technology that accompanies it, has become nothing short of breathtaking. In 2002, my department acquired, for approximately $4,500, a Canon XL1s mini-DV camcorder, the first of the cameras that brought video to a point where you didn’t have to be a television station to get decent pictures. But it was still video, clearly, with all the pejorative weight that carried. Real documentaries were shot in film; those that did not rapidly dated themselves.
By 2006, when I was beginning a sabbatical and contemplating shooting a documentary (something I’d been interested in doing as early as in graduate school, but which I could not afford), I was shown some footage from a new HDV camera. I was knocked over by the sudden jump in quality. HDV had bridged a huge gap. HD was, and in most instances is, beyond the budget of the individual journalist. That is about to change, but I’ll return to that later.
The technology of HDV is ingenious. Where true HD cameras shoot successive frames in high resolution, HDV uses what is called Group of Pictures technology. Simply put, the camera shoots a full shot of the scene, then over the next few frames only registers what is changes from the first picture. Cameras can have long-frame GOP (the first imprint followed by 14 of these intermediate frames) or short-frame GOP (one and five). The latter of these are more expensive higher quality. That’s what my JVC uses; the camera cost me roughly $5,500. And while it has its compromises, the price was a revelation compared to what “true HD” cameras were running for – even just two years ago, $30,000 and up was the standard.
I found that for documentary work, at least the kind I was doing, the camera was wonderful. I was doing a project that mainly consisted of sit-down interviews with a number of well-known writers about Andre Dubus, a “writer’s writer” whose life had taken more than one tragic turn. Because there was little movement – really just the movements of mouths and eyes – the short-frame GOP was more than able to capture what I needed (the place where HDV breaks down is movement that asks too much of the GOP technology - fast panning, action scenes, quickly changing light). When kept in the limits of the exposure, it looked great.
Suddenly, I was working in a new medium, with all the challenges that come from that. But it was also a more intimate medium by virtue of the technology. From the start, I’d set out to work alone. Because I didn’t need a separate sound person (the audio captured on tape is crisp and clear with the lavalier microphone I used), and because the lights I used were light, low-heat LED panels (www.flolight.com) that were inexpensive and easy to carry and set up, I was able to cart all my gear on a single luggage carrier, set up for the shoot in under twenty minutes, and break down in ten. I was able to sit by the camera (glancing occasionally to check sound level and focus) and do the same thing I’d always done as a print journalist: Have a one-to-one conversation. More than one of my interview subjects was surprised not to see a crew enter the room, and interestingly, some of them seemed momentarily less enthused – my one-man show did not smack of big-time. I’d add that the substance of the conversations seemed to turn it back in the right direction. The same as happened in the course of my current documentary project, in which I am examining the advertising industry: http://www.edwardjdelaney.com/NewFilm.html
Digital technology allows for all kinds of intimate projects. I point to one I have been intrigued by, the 2005 documentary “Mondovino” by Jonathan Nossiter. Done with a two-man crew (Nossiter and a cameraman) and shot on a quality Mini-DV camera (the Sony PD-150, handheld). The film, about small winemakers in Italy and France battling “Big Wine” as exemplified by the Robert Mondavi empire, is rife with rack focusing, wobbly shots and constant cutaways to the dogs and cats that inhabit these quaint estates. It has a charm that comes from that roughness. It claims a $400,000 budget but I suspect the bulk of that was for travel, lodging and payment of people who worked on it (editor, cameraman). And based on the limited theater release but distribution on Netflix and Amazon, I suspect it’s made its money back.
“Mondovino” is a great example of the kind of narrowcasting for which Digital Media allows. While the film doesn’t have strong geographical pull, it lands among those wine enthusiasts who care deeply about the tradition of winemaking. It seems not have lost much currency in the three years since release. It frankly plays better on smaller screens than larger, because of the motion issues, and it seems to have moved in its market through much word of mouth.
The New York Times recently ran an interesting piece about direct distribution, focusing on another wine film called “Bottle Shock” - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/movies/30self.html?ref=movies . It will be interesting see if it gains traction as it attempts to do direct DVD sales.
For the artist, the opportunity for digital filmmaking has opened up a new perspective among the old movie-business crowd. “Too much product,” as if there can truly be such a thing. A lot of good little films are fighting each other for any attention at all, even on DVD. But I believe that will lead to a new economy in the business, one in which people realize films can be shot with fewer people at lower cost than ever before. The old “club” that was defined by money and technology is still valid, but it is more specifically in the special-effects world of “Dark Knight” and “Wall-E.” But for good old human stories, the price tag is plummeting. I point to two recent HD films, “Starting Out In The Evening” and “The Visitor,” as great examples.
The two films, coincidentally or ironically, are about aging men. One is an elderly novelist (Frank Langella in “Starting Out”) and one about a college professor (Richard Jenkins in “The Visitor.”) In each case, the scenes are carefully lighted and the movements slowed to work within the limitations of the HD format. But I would guess, after seeing each in the art cinema up the street, that fewer than 5 percent of those in the audience would ever guess these movies were shot on video.
Promising times. New possibilities. And another apparent change coming.
Last year, a company called Red Digital Cinema introduced its Red One, a so-called 4k camera. In essence, the horizontal lines of video determine its clarity and resolution. Standard video has 480 lines. HD runs at either 720 or 1080, creating a momentous leap in quality. A 4k camera means it has 4,000 lines. There have been a variety of 4k’s out for a few years now – Viper and Panavision Genesis – but those have cost $125,000 or more. And now the shocker: Red is introducing a 3k camera for under $3,000 in 2009. Stay tuned.

Is Anyone Really Out There? New Media, The Art of Conversation, and the Primordial Ooze

2008-08-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

New Media, if you believe the more optimistic of perspectives, represents a beautiful democratization of communication. No longer is the transmission of message to audience dependent on the judgmental mediator, the gatekeeper who decides what flows to the readership (or viewership) and what doesn’t.
But that notion of gatekeeper-as-opponent misses, in some ways, the fundamental function of mass media, which is to select from all that’s out there the best work worthy of dissemination.
Many forms of media have long been a stacked deck. Filmmaking, for one. To make a film that looked even marginally professional cost staggering amounts of money. Newspapers, for another: Paper and ink and printing presses meant that only those with sufficient capital could enjoy the benefits of freedom of the press. The converse, of course, was that if someone had invested that kind of money in the venture, they had better be sure it would gain both readers and advertisers.
When I was a young reporter for The Denver Post, the newspaper was still at its old building at Fifteenth and California, now the site of the Convention Center. I loved that place. In the front lobby were the paper’s Pulitzer Prizes, a daily reminder upon entering the building of the standards within. Along the California Street side of the building, the wall was of glass and behind it were the long rows of presses, churning, industrious. When I worked a late shift and came out of the building at midnight or 1 a.m., the drunks from the bars would often be standing there, looking through that glass, mesmerized by the actions of the machinery.
On the front of the building along the top pf the first-story ledge was a long tin façade that had on it these words: “‘Tis a Privilege to Live in Colorado!”
The words were attributed to the famous owner of the Post during the early part of the century, Henry Heye Tammen. But some other words often attributed, circa 1916, were these: “A dogfight on Champa Street is more important to our readers than a war in Europe.”
The Tammen, all news was local. And news, truth be told, had to entertain; Tammen spoke of “the flamboyant circus of journalism.” To him, a newspaper was a medium of performance, on some level. And all of us, to quote Shakespeare, the players.
He had the money, so he decided what we got for news. Fifty years ago, in television, only three networks (four if you count the ill-fated Dumont system) had the funding to operate; everyone got to choose one of three things to watch at any moment. As we move toward web-based broadcasting, the choices are (nearly literally) infinite.
But nothing good ever seems to be on.
The circus of journalism, once safely tucked at the edge of town under that massive canvas big top, has become a landscape of street performers on every corner, vying for our attention. The economics allow nearly all to participate. Which brings the media of visual moving images to more and more resemble something close to my heart: The act of writing.
Literature was, and is, phenomenally democratic. It began always with a writer, who could work perfectly credibly with nothing more than an old manual typewriter and a stack of paper. Unlike a traditional filmmaker, who would need a $1 million Panavision Anamorphic camera and another half-million of film stock to create a media object comparable to what we would see in a theater, there was no real threshold below which one could not produce a great book. And having that book printed was, comparatively, cheap.
What you needed to succeed was talent.
Now the doors are thrown open. For virtually no cost I can write and share it with the world. But by the same token, no one may particularly be listening.
The challenge of anyone who chooses to enter the realm of New Media, be it individual or organization, will find themselves in this primordial ooze of the web, only the fittest and strongest crawling from the morass to actually flourish. And while on one hand there is freedom in being able to present to an audience with no intermediaries, no gatekeepers and no staggering financial obstacles, it was to gain the approval of the gatekeepers and intermediaries that actually was part of the success.
In 1994 I had my first short published in The Atlantic Monthly, then (and perhaps still) considered one of the two premier places to publish short fiction (The New Yorker remains the other). The story went on then to be chosen for that 1995’s O. Henry Prize collection (Anchor Books) and Best American Short Stories (Houghton Mifflin).
My work would never have gotten the wide readership without having to prove myself to these intermediaries. It was they who possessed the long-achieved reputation that served as a legitimizing force. And because each of these organizations was in a profit-making venture, I shared in that. I made more money on royalties for that story alone (and the film option that came out of it) than for the total advance on my first book.
The point, I suppose, is that the New Media is organizing itself. Bit by bit, we who had once entered this Wild West of a medium now can begin to see whose reputations have struck, and stuck; which sites have the prestige and perhaps money to make themselves matter, and which have the accumulated goodwill that comes with succeeding on this new proving ground.
Think of being in a room, at a gathering. The most basic human act is that of communication – conversation. No one is barred from doing so, no one need pay to speak. You merely need someone to listen, and not walk away. It is up to you to hold the listener's interest and to give them something they want to hear.

“Microcelebrity,” The Journalism Student, and the Diminishing Reality of the Larger Reality

2008-07-31T16:49:00.000-07:00

The coining of new words is always a fortuitous event. Be it new slang, a pet name, or a carefully wrought touchstone meant to invoke a larger truth, it involves new currency in the world of words. More often than not, it also is a galvanization of a general but fuzzy truth that has hung in the air as the humidity hangs around me this July night. A new word is the strike of a match in heavy air.
And so it was with great glee that I first heard the word “Microcelebrity,” apparently first coined by Terri Senft, a lecturer at The University of East London. It was, from the start, brilliant, a single word to describe a larger truth.
The phenomenon of being extremely well known not to millions but to a small group — a thousand people, or maybe only a few dozen...
I’d been aware of the apparent growing phenomenon of the student party, in which the gathered masses alternately swig from their drinks and extend their digital cameras at arm’s length to record the moment. One of my students wrote a piece for class in which she explored the Facebook phenomenon of self-picture-taking, in fact finding one young lady in our midst who had posted more than 2,000 photos of herself, mostly at parties, mostly drinking, and in at least a dozen occasions throwing up on herself.
Senft’s phrase brought it all together. Of Course! Microcelebrity! Just as the paparazzi captures those endless photos of the stars – Macrocelebrities, if you will, a kind of amplification of the old superlative of Celebrity – running drunk from nightclubs with hands extended, although in these the hand blocks the camera rather than holding it, capturing the image rather than impeding it.
But as I watch my students arrive to class, gigantic sunglasses on their faces like gladiator shields, cell phones ear-welded to their heads and cutting them from the reality around them, they are simply enacting the values around them.
The Web, and more specifically Facebook (and the very name, brilliantly, tells us what to expect) is the medium upon which they enact their microcelebriety. They release news about themselves. They publish photos. The content is not really thought, the content is simply them. All are to be observed, the stars of one’s own tiny version of Entertainment Tonight.
So: How does this begin to transform our student journalists?
It begins with their view of the media, and TV in particular, one in which the deliverer of the news is the attraction rather than the news itself.
It bleeds to the web, where it seems that we all – and I include myself in this moment – offer our small scraps to the world.
And sometimes it works. I am a reader, both in print and on the web, and I have marveled at small insights from some distant blogger.
For those of us attempting to prepare the next generation of journalists, however, it is a challenge. It is so when no reality outside of oneself seems as inherently interesting as one’s own mundane experiences, chronicled and stored, seemingly forever, on the Web.
But like anything else, the era of Microcelebrity may somehow come to seem quaint and dated. “I remember the Oughts” on MTV; a bunch of thirtysomethings laughing at how they wore huge sunglasses and Uggs and spent all day on their Facebook pages.
So what is to come of such fleeting attention? Our 15 nanoseconds of fame?
Ultimately, I think, we’ll find out the basic reality: That most people, God Bless them, really aren’t that interesting. That insight and intelligence may again carry the day. That the world matters. That the next wave may laugh at the current wave for the self-absorption and trivial obsessions in the face of a troubled world. Journalism is about getting outside yourself, and understanding larger truths. I optimistically believe it will resolve.

Where Are We Going?

2008-07-31T15:45:00.001-07:00

I’ve had the pleasure, more than once, to stand before this great work by Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? The painting is in the Impressionism Room of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; there is on those occasions when one enters that space the hushed reverence that accompanies not just seeing the image in all its glory, but being connected to an object physically connected to the artist himself. There is only one painting; unlike the work of photographers and writers, any duplication of it is simply not the true experience. It is only duplication, and no more. When one stands before this painting, or the Van Goghs and Matisses nearby, or the Georgia O’Keeffes upstairs, one can lean in and see the lines of the very brush strokes that the painter committed in that magic moment of creation.

It comes to mind for two reasons as I write this: First, that painting is the antithesis of our New-Media age. It is a medium where the object occupies a space that the viewer must come to, while New Media, such as this very post, occupies all spaces.

Secondly, and more directly, it is the title of this work seems so apt in the current journalistic climate. It is about tradition, identity and forward movement. As I write, the local newspaper - The Providence Journal - has announced it will again, for the third time in a decade, reduce its staff significantly. And as a person who grew up in its circulation area, I might initially feel the pang of someone witnessing a formerly unshakable institution prone and gored. And while that may be true, it is worthy of some thought.

When I was in graduate school at Boston University in the early 1980s, I bought the newspapers, daily. I worked as a bartender in a dive near campus, and one fond memory was after closing the place at 2 am, I’d walk to the Store 24 at Commonwealth and Harvard and buy a quart of ice cream and the early editions of the two local newspapers, to take home and ingest in those hours in which I finally decompressed from the evening’s rush. One paper was The Boston Globe. The other, more importantly here, was The Boston Record American Herald Traveler.

That paper was an amalgam, briefly, of four once-strong evening newspapers. At the dawn of the 1950s, these late-afternoon papers dominated the market, with the Globe actually bottom-feeding on some level by attracting morning readers. But then came TV. And one by one, each of these newspapers shook and sank. By 1968, my Dad always brought home the Record-American, a tabloid best used for its wonderful sports pages, while the Herald-Traveler (which we did not buy) competed with it for the dwindling evening crowd. It was not that newspapers had somehow ceased to matter, it was that a new medium had split the audience.

But as journalists, we can hardly say it was a bad thing. Newspapers chugged along in their ponderous 24-hour news cycle; TV gave us immediacy without the detail. Newspapers responded to it by delivering what they were best at: Elaboration. Detail. Nuance. This, I would hold, was a good thing.

It is, then, where we came from. And if my motif can continue, then it seems that the seconf query posed by the Guaguin painting - Who Are We? - seems most disturbing. Journalism seems to have lost its own sense of relevancy. What has been, and will continue to be, a crucial service to an open society - information, analysis, criticism - seems to be daily impugned.

It’s a shame. The fact is, journalism is a profession, one defined by skill, conventions and standards. The movement in some quarters to so-called “Citizen Journalism” in fact degrades the profession. As i say to my student son the first day of each journlaism class, “Performing brain surgery sounds hard, and it is. Journalism doesn’t sound that hard, but it’s a lot harder than it sounds.

I do not go to have my teeth fixed by a “Citizen Dentist,” nor do I deposit my money with a “Citizen Banker.” The word “Citizen” in “Citizen Journalism” is really synonomous with “Amateur,” in the way “Community Theater” is an assortment or well-meaning, and occasionally talented, performers. But who “We” are remains professionals. I don’t expect my doctor to work for free.

And, finally, Gauguin’s last question. Where are we going?

I pose to my students basic truth: I have never in my life read so many papers a day, and yet so few. Most days I buy the paper-and-ink version of either the Times or the Globe, but every day I read The Providence Journal, Washington Post, Boston Herald, New York Daily News, New York Post and Los Angeles Times, an experience for which I pay nothing. I often return to these each day - on the day I am writing this, I’ve refreshed more than dozen times to see if the Red Sox had indeed traded Manny Ramirez.

I also note that which each of these “newspapers,” more aptly called “news companies” these days, I happily click whatever video, slide shows or audio interest me.

I just don’t pay, and that seems the essential crux of the so-called freefalling news industry.

But I would. I won’t put my credit card online. I won’t pay hundreds a year for a product until I believe I can’t get it for nothing. And I am, even as a man born in the print era, engaging more with the news through the day.

I believe journalism will still be a place for true professionals. I also believe journalism will sort itself in that way. The amateurs can have at it, but I need to know what I’m getting is valid, factual and straight.

I am less believer in the package than the content. I’m happy to read on the web, except when I’m laying on the couch, when my new issue of The New Yorker holds some pleasure. And, always, a book is a singularly engaging experience - literature, to quote the old saying, is our news of the world.

Convergence holds that all the media are coming together; where are we going when so much effort is expended on delineating the differences?