No blogging; flying to London tonight.
Archive for April, 2006
In the air, off the air
Sunday, April 30th, 2006Digg the propped drop
Sunday, April 30th, 2006Waaa-waaa-waaa
Sunday, April 30th, 2006David Shribman, editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, tells his fellow newspapers editors to quit whining.
: Later: John Robinson, the now famously forward-thinking editor in Greensboro, says Shribman expains why he skipped the editors’ convention.
But from my reading of the reports that have come out of the convention, it was more of the same….But it’s not what I need. About every presentation described in the daily ASNE reports, I already felt I knew.
As an editor who wants journalism to endure, I need to learn about participatory journalism, about breaking out of silos and about passing along authority and control. I need to listen to futurists, to specialists and to readers talk about what I’m missing — in their habits, in their communication, in their lives. I need to hear about teenagers and college students discuss connection — to their friends, to their communities and to their interests — and why newspapers aren’t a part of it.
How about a conversation about exploding the newsroom, realigning beats behind community priorities, and being the community? (Thanks, Tim.) Maybe a session on all the newest technological innovations. I know that hundreds of sites are dedicated to just that, but for a techno-idiot, it’s hard for me to separate the hype from the reality, the 8-track from the cassette. What about the methods of casting off the moorings of traditional commodity content, and how to manage the repercussions?
Perhaps that happened in Seattle, and it didn’t make the daily reports. Perhaps it happened in the hallways and the bars. If so, I’m sorry I missed it.
Because that’s what I need.
What Robinson calls for next is the unconference. Yes, we need a national Norgs meeting, a session whose mission is to reform news. Shall we?
Shot by al-Qaeda
Sunday, April 30th, 2006The Times of London carries an excerpt from a most dramatic account by BBC correspondent Frank Gardner of his shooting by al-Qaeda thugs in Saudi Arabia.
“No! Don’t do this!†I shouted instinctively in Arabic.He pulled out a long-barrelled pistol. Oh my God, I thought, this cannot be happening.
I ran for my life, sprinting away from our van and into the deeply conservative quarter of Al-Suwaidi. There was a loud crack behind me and I felt something sting my shoulder. I didn’t know it then but the bullet passed clean through, hitting the shoulder bone on the way….
Instead of the neatly arranged headdresses with a sharp crease in the middle worn by ordinary urban Saudis, these men wore theirs wound tightly round their foreheads like a bandage. It was the isaaba, the dress worn by jihadi fighters who consider they are about to go into battle, the same style worn by the 9/11 suicidal hijackers in their video testimonies and by Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the July 7 London bombers, in his posthumously released video warning to the West.
I realised then that I was doomed. These men were no casual, have-a-go amateurs; they were the real thing, a hardcore Al-Qaeda terror cell bent on attacking their government, killing westerners and “cleansing the Arabian peninsula of infidelsâ€.
In that instant I glimpsed faces driven by pure hatred and fanaticism. I pleaded with them in Arabic, as so many hostages have done in Iraq, while they held a brief discussion as to what to do with me. It did not take long. They responded to my pleas by opening fire once more….
For the past few years I had tried hard to explain the complexities of the Middle East and the thinking behind the Al-Qaeda phenomenon to western and international audiences. And this was my reward? A bunch of bullets in the guts from men who had convinced themselves they were killing in the cause of Islam. It just did not seem right….
Who killed the critics?
Saturday, April 29th, 2006Who needs critics anymore? Wall Street Journal movie critic Joe Morgenstern bemoans the state of his world today, when he sees a report that studios are releasing more movies without showing them to critics. That could be because there are more bad movies today. But no, it really illustrates a fundamental shift in the dynamics of pop culture thanks to the internet. The Being-Reasonable bloggers write at Forbes.com:
The tactic of skipping advance screenings is taking hold now because the dynamics of movie marketing and pre-release publicity have changed. Like other professional arbiters of taste, movie reviewers just don’t matter quite as much as they used to. Once upon a time, they were the point of origin for popular opinion. In an age of ratings Web sites and consumer-generated content, they are just one voice of many.
Pop-cultural criticism is, if not doomed, on a severe decline for a few reasons:
The first is that we are all now critics. You no longer have to wait for the friend you trust — who, I’ve long said, is the best critic for you — to see a movie, you can now find friends online or watch the aggregate opinions of people online or go write a review yourself. And it’s not just movies, of course. Amazon’s audience is everybody’s critic for everybody’s product. (Who needs Consumer Reports is another question we may be asking eventually.)
The second is that in the failing economics of big, old media, critics are dispensible.
And there’s this: As media explodes with more and more choice, one critic or one publication simply can’t keep up with it all. That was efficient when you had one-screen theaters and three TV channels and no internet and no tools that let anyone create media.
I shocked Howard Kurtz when I suggested that newspapers could get rid of their own critics and help their audiences share their own opinions instead.
If I launched Entertainment Weekly today, I hope I’d have the sense not to propose starting a magazine by hiring a bunch of critics. Oh, I might have a few of them, if they’re really worth reading. But I’d turn Entertainment Weekly into Entertainment Whenever, an online event that brings together opinions on entertainment, big and small, from anywhere, and I’d use technology to help you find the critics you trust.
The truth is that criticism isn’t dying. It’s opening up now that everyone is a critic.
Two steps backward
Saturday, April 29th, 2006Microsoft is offering a means to read newspapers designed as newspapers on computers. Why? There are other methods of doing this now and I find them all not only awkward and unsatisfying but wrongheaded. Why not design the next frontier for the sharing of news that takes advantage of all the new opportunities technology permits — linking, conversation, multimedia, search, selectivity, depth, currency? Oh, yeah, it was already invented. It’s the web. The only reasons to do this are to feed editorial ego, to think you’re maintaining editorial control, to try to dupe advertisers into thinking this the same as putting an ad in print, and to grasp desperately onto a past that is disappearing. (Full disclosure: The Times is Microsoft’s first user; I consult for the company at About.com.)
United 93
Friday, April 28th, 2006United 93 dredged my anger and hate about September 11, the silt of my soul that is never far below the surface.
I wasn’t sure whether I should see the movie. Some of you who have come to this page more recently and find mostly blathering about media may not know that I started this blog after September 11, because I was there. It’s personal for every one of us. For me, the memories and emotions are inseparable. Before I went into the theater, I even made sure to take my heart pill, because fear triggers my arrhythmia. I really wasn’t sure I could take it.
The planes hitting their targets one more time hit me as those scenes always do, except these images usually are not part of a drama; they are the drama. The sound and sight of the people on this plane calling home to tell their families goodbye was so sad and so close to home it was about unbearable; as I’ve told you before, since September 11, my children still no longer let me leave the home without saying that they love me and hearing me say it to them.
But the movie starts and ends not with the victims but with the criminals who committed these murders, praying to a God who surely must disown them or there is no God. They are the objects of my anger and hate.
The meme running through many of the reviews of United 93 is that it is carefully made, but the critics wonder why it was made. Let Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek speak for most of the critics (and more eloquently than many of them):
I’ve never had a more excruciating moviegoing experience in my life, and as brilliantly crafted — and as adamantly unexploitive — as the picture is, it still leaves you wondering why it was made in the first place….But I went into “United 93″ with a feeling of dread, and ultimately, I’m not sure Greengrass did much more than pluck at that dread with dogged, if scrupulous, persistence. I walked out of “United 93″ feeling bereft and despondent; my stomach muscles had tensed into a seemingly immovable knot. But the picture didn’t make me feel anything I hadn’t fully expected to feel.
Yes. The movie is meticulously and masterfully made. The performances — including especially those from the people in the FAA and military control rooms who play themselves — are incredible. The entire effort is restrained, respectable, and respectful. It tries hard not to tell you what to feel because it doesn’t have to. And I can’t tell you whether you should go because only you know whether you could or should bear it. Nor can I tell you why director and writer Paul Greengrass made this film.
All I can tell you is my reaction, beyond that dread and sorrow and admiration for the heroism and humanity of the victims. I felt the anger and hate again. This is a movie about a crime, a mass murder, a Godless sin.
But not according to The New York Times. In a parody of Times reviews, Manohla Dargis — who also doesn’t know why the film was made — finds, or rather injects, a political agenda:
“United 93″ is a sober reminder of the breakdown in leadership on the morning of Sept. 11. Unlike Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” the film doesn’t get into the whereabouts of the president that day, or why Osama bin Laden ordered the attack; its focus is purposely narrow. But that narrow focus, along with the lack of fully realized characters, and the absence of any historical or political context, raises the question of why, notwithstanding the usual (if shaky) commercial imperative, this particular movie was made. To jolt us out of complacency? Remind us of those who died? Unite us, as even the film’s title seems to urge? Entertain us?To be honest, I haven’t a clue. I didn’t need a studio movie to remind me of the humanity of the thousands who were murdered that day or the thousands who have died in the wars waged in their name.
No, I don’t think it is a “sober reminder of the breakdown in leadership.” I think it is quite clearly a sobering reminder of a crime perpetrated against thousands of innocent people by deluded fanatics.
And so perhaps we do need that reminder.
As I went into the theater to buy my ticket, I heard two young women talking about what to see.
“United 93,” said one, “that’s the one about the terrorists who take over the jet.”
Her friend replies, “You know I don’t like action pictures.”
“It’s not really scary,” says the first.
It’s just another thriller to them, about a story apparently forgotten.
Yes, perhaps we need to be reminded of the anger and the hate. We need to be reminded to be scared.
The BCC as a new network
Friday, April 28th, 2006In followup discussions and interviews about the BBC’s bold plans to reinvent itself, the one question I keep getting asked that I didn’t address in my post is:
What is the proper role for the BBC as a tax-supported public trust? Should it compete with commercial ventures online? That is what Rupert Murdoch has been asking (read: complaining about). I have two answers:
First, I think it would be foolhardy for the industry to try to throttle development and innovation at the BBC. Because of its position and generous tax funding, it’s true that the BBC can afford to do what other companies cannot. But that is also a reason to let them, to see what they develop and to copy the successes and avoid the failures. It is open-source product development for media — and media need it. I’d say that’s one way to put tax dollars pounds stirling to work for you. And trying to kill the BBC by stopping it from experimenting and growing is a horrid waste of those tax monies.
Second, I think the BBC should have a different relationship with the media outlets formerly known as its competitors: The BBC should be linking to and promoting the best not just from the BCC and now from citizens’ media but also from other media. Why shouldn’t the BBC, as a public trust, point to and thus send traffic to and help support and encourage the best from Sky or the Guardian or Washington Post? That, I believe, will be the role of the new network. More on that later.
: BTW, I should add that I don’t support the notion of tax-supported and thus government-certified news. I think it’s quite dangerous. But given the BBC’s position, I’d say if it really wants to reinvent itself, it should reinvent its role in media and its notion of the network.
Radio silence
Friday, April 28th, 2006The host for many blogs, including this one, suffered a DOS attack. Thus the silence.
Can’t have enough sunlight
Thursday, April 27th, 2006The Sunlight Foundation has launched with many efforts to use the power of the internet and us to bring more sunlight to government. Micah Sifry, who helped launch this with Andrew Rasiej, explains it better than I can. Sunlight already helped with the start of Congresspedia; it is making sunshine grants, and — my favorite — is assigning armies of citizens to report on Congressional earmarks and giving tutorials to citizen journalists on how to dig the dirt. Let the citizen watchdogging of government explode.
The fight for net neutrality
Thursday, April 27th, 2006Matt at SaveTheInternet posts an update:
Ok, so the vote on the Markey amendment to protect the internet has happened, and it was voted down, 34-22. That is a big deal. It’s too bad we lost the vote, but we expected that loss. What we did not expected was the narrow margin. By way of comparison, the subcommittee vote was 23-8, which means we should have gotten blown out of the water. We did not. All four targeted Dems by McJoan on Daily Kos flipped to our side, and many of the Congressmen both for and against this campaign mentioned the blogs and angry constituents.There’s a white hot firestorm on the issue on Capitol Hill. No one wants to see the telcos make a radical change to the internet and screw this medium up, except, well, the telcos. And now members of Congress are listening to us. The telcos have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and many years lobbying for their position; we launched four days ago, and have closed a lot of ground. Over the next few months, as the public wakes up, we’ll close the rest of it.
Throw the blog at them
Thursday, April 27th, 2006The Media Bloggers Association has issued its first legal alert to let us all know about a blogger under attack in a suit. Lance Dutson, who blogs at Maine Web Report, has been slapped with a federal suit by an ad agency handling the state’s tourism business.
Here’s Dutson’s report and summary. Here is the PDF of the suit against him. Of course, I can’t vouch for any facts in the case. But one of the agency’s allegations is that “Dutson also claimed, falsely, that WKPA is ‘pissing away’ Maine tax money. ”
Well, I woud hope that we would always be protected from challenging government spending. “Pissing away” is a value judgment any taxpayer should be able to make.
The Agency is also claiming copyright infringement because Dutson put up an ad the agency made that he says mistakenly displayed the phone number for a sex line (and, indeed, the number does offer new friends, and I don’t meen moose). I would hope, too, that we woud always have the right of fair comment on anything produced with our tax dollars.
It is gratifying that the MBA is there to offer support to legally beseiged bloggers. Without fear of the support bloggers can muster, the rich and powerful will try to use their money and the courts to harass citizen journalists.
Mind you, this case is not just about journalism but also citizenry: We must always have the right and even duty to watch and question our government. Contractors acting as agents of government should come under the same scrutiny as government.
I hope that not just bloggers but also journalists and other groups will investigate this case and come to the defense of the right of this blogger and all of us to watch and question government.
: Also, a reminder: Eric Robinson at the Media Law Research Center is keeping a list of legal action against bloggers.
