The media machers at Davos got together yesterday with three economists to ask what went wrong in financial coverage that did not warn of the crisis.
Like other leaders from other segments of society here in the meeting of the machers, they did not don hairshirts. I believe that will be the worst outcome of this year’s Davos: a failure to take responsibility for the failure of leadership. But blame isn’t the most productive priority. What’s more critical is to ask what to do about the failure.
I wonder what gaps the crisis reveals in journalism. That’s where the discussion finally went yesterday. (Because it was held under the Chatham House rule, I can’t attribute quotes.)
The assembled journalists insisted that the crisis had been reported, that they can point to articles that warned of the insanity. I’m not sure whether that’s an effort at industrial whitewashing: If one reporter gets the story, the entire profession gets credit. But fine, let’s stipulate that the stories were written. But one of the wiser editors said that didn’t do any good because it didn’t make an impact; it didn’t register; it didn’t go mainstream.
So is that what’s missing in journalism: the ability to bang on a story until the world pays attention? Our assumption had been that if it appeared in a major newspaper or magazine, that was the definition of attention. It assumed that the world paid attention to our news. So under this argument, we could be seeing an admission that papers and magazines have lost their juice. But let’s get past that, too. I think there is something to the idea that we aren’t good at driving a story.
In response, I quoted Arianna Huffington telling the same group two years before that journalists have attention deficit disorder and bloggers have obsessive compulsive disorder. Josh Marshall’s key skill is dogging a story until the press and the powerful do pay attention. The press can learn from that.
But then again, as an editor said yesterday, if an editor devotes page one every day to a warning that the sky is falling, no one will listen to him, either.
A well-respected journalist told the group that in economics, there is no objective truth. It’s too complex. So it shouldn’t be declarations of doom that should dominate front pages. It should be questions: How can these companies be this profitable? What is the impact of this much leverage? How can people without income get loans? It the constant poking and prodding we need.
That requires the willingness to be a pain in the ass. We journalists used to pride ourselves on being pains in the asses — or just asses. But now they like to be liked — they think they need to be. They believe that maintaining their connections is their key value. But that compromises their ability to dog.
One of the journalists complained that companies are so opaque they are hard to cover. “There’s not much a journalist can do, or anyone can do, when you don’t know what’s going on.” That’s true. And indeed, I believe the most important reform we need to enact post-crisis is transparency, an ethic and law of openness. But this argument, too, lets the journalists off the hook. It’s our job to find out what people don’t want to tell us. Maybe that is the real definition of reporting. The rest is just information.
An economist that “it’s hard to hold the press to a higher standard than the profession itself.” There was much nodding. But I question that. If we are to be the watchdogs — instead of merely the messengers — then don’t we need to try to know if not more than our subjects than at least enough to know what to dog? I’ve long argued that journalists aren’t experts, they find experts. But maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe news organizations need to hire different kinds of experts. One editor yesterday said he hired a cultural anthropologist who really was ahead in warning about the danger of derivatives because she looked at it through a different lens. An economist talked about hiring psychologists and even scientists and the emerging study of neuroeconomics. Papers have hired economists to cover finance. But papers can’t possibly afford to hire experts and people with different perspectives in every area they cover.
You’ve been waiting for me to bring blogs into this. Here’s my chance: Many of those experts and players are publishing themselves. They are questioning and arguing and so perhaps the key skill journalism needs is to curate that. (I also couldn’t get through a post such as this without saying “curate” at least once.
The risk now, many agreed, is that journalism will – as is its habit – overreact. A journalist I ran into in another session yesterday said she thinks we’re now in a “doom bubble.” American business journalism has been too American with too much reporting – including puffery – on companies and too little reporting on finance, on the markets that have such a profound impact on our lives. There are plenty of lessons to learn from journalism’s failure to warn well enough of the crisis to come. But we can’t stop at that, at incremental change in journalism: a few more of these people, a few more of those headlines, a better job with that kind of story. We need to look at the fundamentals of how news – a large, global, complex, interconnected ecosystem of news – can be and should be made now.
I am thrilled to say that What Would Google Do? is the cover story on BusinessWeek on the newsstand with an excerpt about the Googley car company.
But wait! There’s more!
* Here’s another excerpt at BusinessWeek.com about Googley government.
* Here’s a summary of some of the top laws and lessons from observing Google’s success.
* Here’s a nice slideshow the BW editors made contrasting old ways and Google ways.
* Here’s a podcast with BW’s John Byrne.
But wait! Buy now and you get this free video with BW’s Peter Elstrom:
Here’s a snippet of the Googlemobile excerpt (as today’s 30 days of WWGD?):
* * *
What if just one model from one brand were opened up to collaborative design? I don’t suggest that design should be a democracy. But shouldn’t design at least be a conversation? Designers can put their ideas on the Web. Customers can make suggestions and discuss them. Designers can take the best ideas and adapt them, giving credit where it is due. I don’t imagine customers would collaborate on transmission design—though a few might have good suggestions if given a chance. But they would have a lot to contribute on the passenger compartment, the look of the car, the features, and the options. They could even get involved in economic decisions: Would you be willing to give up power windows if it got you a lower price or a nicer radio? This collaboration would invest customers in the product. It would build excitement. It would get the product talked about on the Web and linked to and boost its popularity in Google searches. The approach could change the relationship of customers to the brand and that would change the brand itself. Imagine that, the collaborative community car: our car.
A car company could take an existing brand and work with the community that already exists around it. Go to Facebook and you’ll find communities of greater or lesser involvement and affection devoted to many car brands. I stopped counting the Facebook groups for BMW when I hit 500—including the “If the BMW M5 was a woman I would marry it” group, with more than 800 members. The online gatherings site Meetup has six clubs where people organize get-togethers for drives in their Beemers. BMW also has an official car club offering 75,000 members rebates on cars and discounts on Brooks Brothers clothes. (Do they see the demographic humor in that?) These are the company’s best customers—its partners. BMW should solicit their help in designing cars, in giving advice to fellow customers (there’s a little of that in the club forums), even in selling cars.
On Facebook, BMW invited customers to color pictures of its car. It’s hard to imagine something more children’s museum-like than a company enticing adults to color cars. But more than 9,000 people submitted their designs in only a few days. What that tells me is not just that they love their BMWs but that they would love BMWs that look different—BMWs that express their muses as well as their libidos.
What an opportunity the industry has to bring humanity and personality back to cars. If so many of us like to express ourselves in blogs, YouTube videos, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and Flickr—if, as Google understands, many of us want to have a strong identity online through self-expression—why wouldn’t we want to express ourselves through our cars? Companies have turned their products into commodities by imposing such sameness on them. I know, it’s about efficiency: four models built under four brands on the same body with the same parts, making them cheaper. But the joy of customizing our own cars was taken away by factory efficiencies and dealer economics: We buy off the lot, not out of the factory, and we buy cars that are often loaded, like cable subscriptions, with things we don’t want.
: And more: Here’s a Q&A with me by Dave Kansas at The Daily Beast.
: A kind reader told me that this story on WWGD? took up a whole page in today’s Volkskrant.
John Gapper in the Financial Times reviewed What Would Google Do? today and argued against my core concept of following Google’s lead. I’d link to the review, but it’s behind the pay wall. Irony #1. Gapper complains about my suggestion that free is a business model (note to Chris Anderson: Hope that Gapper doesn’t review your next book, Free!), saying that advertising won’t replace subscription revenue. That’s a classic view of those who think that old models can be replicated in the new world. The point of the book is that the world has changed fundamentally and old models won’t work anymore. It’s ironic — that’s Irony #2 — that the review came out today, when I attended a panel run by Gapper’s boss, the editor of the FT, here in Davos about peril to the Fourth Estate. The discussion was filled with efforts to replicate old models. I debated the point there and I’d be eager to debate Gapper.
Gapper says that Apple is the company to follow, instead of Google. I don’t argue that quality is always a way to win and Apple wins on quality. Indeed, I make the point in the book. So here’s today’s snippet from my chapter about Apple:
* * *
Is there any entity that is untouched? Is there an anti-Google, one institution that has become successful by violating the rules in this book? I could think of one: Apple.
Consider: Apple flouts Jarvis’ First Law. Hand over control to the customer? You must be joking. Steve Jobs controls all—and we want him to. It is thanks to his brilliant and single-minded vision and grumpy passion for perfection that his products work so well. Microsoft’s products, by contrast, operate as if they were designed by warring committees. Google’s products, though far more functional than Microsoft’s and built with considerable input from users, appear to have been designed by a computer (I await the aesthetic algorithm).
Apple is the opposite of collaborative….
Apple is a cult company and its customers are its best marketers—that much is Googley….
Apple is the farthest thing from transparent. It has sued bloggers for ferreting out and revealing its secrets. Attacking its own fans was unbloggy and uncool, but Apple didn’t care about the bad publicity. It’s Apple.
Apple abhors openness. That’s another reason its products work so well, because it controls what can run on them, how it runs, and how it makes money….
Apple does not think distributed. It makes us come to worship at its altar….
Apple does not manage abundance. It creates scarcity. Witness the fanatics who camped out overnight to get each version of the iPhone….
Free as a business model? The gift economy? Apple is not generous. It charges a premium for its quality….
Apple follows just a few Google rules. Lord knows, it innovates. And nobody’s better at simplifying tasks and design.
How does Apple do it? How does it get away with operating this way even as every other company and industry is forced to redefine itself? It’s just that good. Its vision is that strong and its products even better. I left Apple once, in the 1990s, before Steve Jobs returned to the company, when I suffered through a string of bad laptops. But when I’d had it with Dell, I returned to Apple and now everyone in my family has a Mac (plus one new Dell); we have three iPhones; we have lots of iPods; I lobbied successfully to make Macs the standard in the journalism school where I teach. I’m a believer, a glassy-eyed cultist. But I didn’t write this book about Apple because I believe it is the grand exception. Frank Sinatra was allowed to violate every rule about phrasing because he was Sinatra. Apple can violate the rules of business in the next millennium because it is Apple (and more important, because Jobs is Jobs).
Maybe in some session at Davos or over some dinner table, someone’s discussing substantial ideas and plans for ending the mess. But I haven’t been there. Instead, I was in a CNBC debate this morning as representatives from business, government, markets, and multilaterals were supposed to argue the point. And this most complex of subjects was turned into 2-D cable TV as we in the silent audience were supposed to vote – interactivity’s all the rage, you know – on each of four propositions delivered in about a minute before an irritating clock cut them off. It’s as if we were supposed to say, “Yes, that’s it: Let the stock exchanges take care of it all. Good. Our work here is done. Let’s go skiing.” The snow here is much thicker than the discussion.
We heard protective self-interest, as many of the leaders preemptively argued against what they fear most. Howard Lutkin of Cantor Fitzgerald was the most growly on the point. “Let’s just make banking boring and we’ll go back to a better time, like the 1920s,” he sneered to discussion about regulation. “Boring is good,” said the chairman of Lloyds. It took a long time before we even heard the word transparency as part of a fix and then the representative of corporations snarked that “transparency is OK in principle.” But who’d want to try it in practice?
This was all foreplay. The consummation came when Montek Ahluwalia, a government official in India, listed five reasons why only government can take the lead:
* recapitalizing banks, which only government can do
* fiscal stimulus, which only government can provide
* avoiding protectionism, which only government can have the courage and will to do
* working with the developing world – government again
* cooperating among nations: government.
He pointed out how well India’s regulation and banking systems are working. Government.
Finally, the heads nodded all around, most of them resigned. It’s government’s day. There’s a session here on the the new dawn of government. Even Lutkin knows that’s where it’s headed — his head nodded, too — but he still snapped that once government gets involved in banking, it won’t get out. I wonder why CNBC didn’t start the session with the proposition that governments are in charge now and ask what they should do; it would have saved us and the viewers at home a hot mountain air with little oxygen.
Martin Sorrell made the most important point in the discussion: It’s our money being used now and we must have more of a voice in how it is being used. Someone else pointed out that at least politicians — unlike CEOs or nongovernmental commissioners or market bosses — are answerable to their publics every few years.
And that’s supposed to make us feel better — somebody is in charge now — until we remember everything that government fucked up. It didn’t watch, didn’t regulate, and encouraged the madness. Once disaster came, governments have squandered billions — soon trillions — of our money without goals or accountability, with our money going to dividends and salaries for those who already skimmed too much off the latte that was our economy. Where’s the plan? I haven’t seen it here.
I’m talking with other people who are getting more depressed as the day goes on and here, I think, is why: We are surrounded by the leaders who fucked it up: bankers, marketeers, regulators, and the press. They were in charge. That’s what Davos is: the people in charge. So who’s to say that we’re going to find the answers in Davos? Well, the people in Davos will. But I think the evidence is strong that the answer is not here.
Here’s a second day’s snippet from What Would Google Do? I’m going to jump all around the book, picking bits here and there. Today’s is on advertising. But first, here’s a link to a Newsweek Q&A about WWGD?
* * *
For more than a century, the public face of companies has been their advertising, slogans, brands, and logos. How much better it would be if a company’s public face were that of its public, its satisfied customers who are willing to share their satisfaction, and its employees who have direct relationships with customers. Brands are people.
If that’s the ideal, then here’s the goal: Eliminate advertising. Or at least fire your ad agency. Oh, you won’t get rid of advertising entirely. You should be so lucky. But every time a customer recommends you and your product to a friend is a time when you don’t have to market to that friend. It is possible today to think that one good word can spread as far as an ad would. This scenario is not hypothetical. When I had my problems with Dell, I could see them losing sales as people came to my blog and left comments saying they’d just decided not to buy a Dell, often adding that they’d told their friends their vow as well. There’s no telling how much one pissed-off customer costs you today. The contrary is also true. A happy customer can sell your products. Now that bloggers are praising Dell online, new sales accrue as customers reconsider the company. When Dell started offering discounts to users of Twitter, who passed the word to more users, the company added $500,000 in sales in no time.
The more your customers take ownership of your brand, the less you will spend annoying people with your ads. I can hear your agency: You can’t hand messaging over to the people; they’ll be off-message. Well, tell your agency their message may be off. Your customers have always owned your brand.
Advertising is your last priority, your last resort, an unfortunate byproduct of not having enough friends?.?.?.??yet. Learn this lesson from Google, which spends next to nothing on advertising. It became the fastest growing company in the history of the world without marketing. It grew thanks to its friends, not through ads. In its “10 things Google has found to be true,” the company says its “growth has come not through TV ad campaigns but through word of mouth from one satisfied user to another.” The generation that has that damned “Yahoo-ooo” sound stuck in their heads thanks to untold millions spent on commercials is the same generation that used and spread Google instead, for free.
The crisis the world is suffering through now is a failure of leadership. The leaders of the world are in Davos. If the world is watching what happens here this week, it will be to hear solutions and see responsibility and accountability. I’d say that’s not off to a great start, at least on the latter.
This morning, I started my Davos week with talk of trust. The Edelman Trust Barometer presentation revealed plummeting trust in financial, government, and journalistic institutions: 62% of adults in 20 countries trust companies less than they did a year ago. Trust in government is even lower.
Nonetheless, the first trend I spot here: the rise of government. News reports have been saying that this will be a dialed-down Davos, but I don’t see that; it’s the same Davos with the same pastries and parties. The change I do sense is less of a presence and apparent swagger from business and more from government. “Power has shifted from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue,” said a speaker the Edelman event.
The other obvious trend is America to the woodshed. “America is the new Europe,” Richard Edelman said. In a decade of the survey, they have never seen such a precipitous drop in trust in one category: American business, falling from 58% to 38% in a year, now stands equivalent to France and Germany and under the UK. The least-trusted industries in the U.S.: no surprise — automotive and banking.
In most markets, trust in business remains higher than trust in government, “which is not a good thing for either,” Edelman says. Asked who can fix the economy and prices, government is now clearly the preferred leader, the survey says. The percent who agree that government should impose “stricter regulations and greater control over business across all industry sectors:” 61% in the U.S. up to 84% in France (65% worldwide). The percent who trust business less: 62% worldwide, ranging from 77% in the U.S. down to 49% in India.
The survey reveals a new world spit: optimists in China (where trust in business rose from 54% to 71% in a year), Brazil, India, Indonesia, pessimists in the US, Europe. “The United States picture is really bleak. I can’t put a better face on it,” Edelman said.
Edelman advised companies to make change and not wait for regulation, to recognize mutual social responsibility, and to show “shared sacrifice…. This is not the French Revolution yet but it is certainly not the roaring 2000s,” he said.
His advice on communication: “It can no longer be Moses from the mountaintop.” You have to inform your employees and enable them to blog, for they’ll talk anyway. Communication moves from messaging to informing the conversation, he said. If one can trust companies — only 29% do. Government is worse; only 27% trust what they say.
Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, began the session saying that trust is an issue for the press as well. Edelman found that trust in business magazines and analysts fell from 57% to 44% and from 56% to 47% respectively. Trust in TV news is down from 49% to 36% and in newspaper coverage from 47% to 34%. Stop on that: Two thirds of people don’t trust newspaper articles.
After all this talk about trust, though, breakfast ended up serving spin. An executive of AIG split a very long hair, drawing a distinction between distrust over morals and distrust over competence and he argued that our issue now is the latter. An executive at another company said trust fell from a record high to a record low and he wondered whether business had simply oversold itself. Then there was much discussion of a new concept (or new buzzphrase): “private sector diplomacy.” Isn’t that a fancy way to say PR?
Later: A video of Richard Edelman after the session on trust:
: Crossposted at the Harvard Business Review, where I hope another discussion blooms.
I hope to continue the conversation that went into the book and comes out. So I’ll be putting up 30 days of WWGD? – a snippet a day from all over the book. (There’ll also be a way to read the text in a HarperCollins widget; we’ll be offering a video synopsis, an v-book (e-book with videos); I’ll also put up a free version of WWGD? – The PowerPoint. There’ll be a larger excerpt — two chapters — on Business Week later this week; I’ll link when they’re up.
For the first snippet, there’s no better place to start than the beginning:
* * *
It seems as if no company, executive, or institution truly understands how to survive and prosper in the internet age.
Except Google.
So, faced with most any challenge today, it makes sense to ask: WWGD? What would Google do? In management, commerce, news, media, manufacturing, marketing, service industries, investing, politics, government, and even education and religion, answering that question is a key to navigating a world that has changed radically and forever.
That world is upside-down, inside-out, counterintuitive, and confusing. Who could have imagined that a free classified service could have had a profound and permanent effect on the entire newspaper industry, that kids with cameras and internet connections could gather larger audiences than cable networks could, that loners with keyboards could bring down politicians and companies, and that dropouts could build companies worth billions? They didn’t do it by breaking rules. They operate by new rules of a new age, among them:
• Customers are now in charge. They can be heard around the globe and have an impact on huge institutions in an instant.
• People can find each other anywhere and coalesce around you—or against you.
• The mass market is dead, replaced by the mass of niches.
• “Markets are conversations,” decreed The Cluetrain Manifesto, the seminal work of the internet age, in 2000. That means the key skill in any organization today is no longer marketing but conversing.
• We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance. The control of products or distribution will no longer guarantee a premium and a profit.
• Enabling customers to collaborate with you—in creating, distributing, marketing, and supporting products—is what creates a premium in today’s market.
• The most successful enterprises today are networks—which extract as little value as possible so they can grow as big as possible—and the platforms on which those networks are built.
• Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success. Openness is.
Google’s founders and executives understand the change brought by the internet. That is why they are so successful and powerful, running what The Times of London dubbed “the fastest growing company in the history of the world.” The same is true of a few disruptive capitalists and quasi-capitalists such as Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; Craig Newmark, who calls himself founder and customer service representative—no joke—at craigslist; Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia; Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; and Kevin Rose, creator of Digg. They see a different world than the rest of us and make different decisions as a result, decisions that make no sense under old rules of old industries that are now blown apart thanks to these new ways and new thinkers.
That is why the smart response to all this change is to ask what these disrupters—what Mark, Craig, Jimmy, Jeff, Kevin, and, of course, Google—would do. Google generously shares its own philosophy on its web site, setting out the “10 things Google has found to be true.” They are smart but obvious PowerPoint lines helpful in employee indoctrination (especially necessary when your headcount explodes by 50 percent in a year—to 16,000 at the end of 2007 and to 20,000 before the end of the following year): “Focus on the user and all else will follow,” Google decrees. “It’s best to do one thing really, really well.?.?.?.??Fast is better than slow.?.?.?.??You can make money without doing evil.?.?.?.??There’s always more information out there.?.?.?.??The need for information crosses all borders.?.?.?.” These are useful, but they don’t tell the entire story. There’s more to learn from watching Google.
The question I ask in the title is about thinking in new ways, facing new challenges, solving problems with new solutions, seeing new opportunities, and understanding a different way to look at the structure of the economy and society. I try to see the world as Google sees it, analyzing and deconstructing its success from a distance so we can apply what we learn to our own companies, institutions, and careers. Together, we will reverse-engineer Google. You can bring this same discipline to other competitors, companies, and leaders whose success you find puzzling but admirable. In fact, you must.
Thanks to a commenter, here’s a link to the PDF of a settlement letter between Gatehouse and The New York Times Company over Gatehouse’s inane suit over links. The Times agrees to take down its links and not put up links to content that has a Gatehouse label attached (in the legal wording, a technological solution to prevent copying of its content and RSS feeds). Yet they still agree they can link and deep-link to each other.
I’m glad that this idiocy led to no precedent. Pity, though, that Gatehouse proves to be such a fool.
David Weinberger at Burda’s DLD in Munich says knowledge, as we’ve traditionally known or referred to it, is singlar, binary, simple, scarce, and settled. Those properties of knowledge, he says, are, not by accident, are also the properties of the book. We think with our things. Knowledge, in short, was atoms. So now, we’re digitizing and connecting in an age of abundance. There’s an abundance of good and of crap but, he says, we’re much better at dealing with the abundance of crap. Yes, we filter it, kill it. David says that when there’s an abundance of good, our institutions are not built for it. “Control does not scale,” he says, “except at tremendous human costs.” Damn, he’s good at setting down the clear law. Control does not scale. Next: “The mess is essential.” The mess is the better reflection of who we are. In the era of scarcity, knowledge is limited in the book but online links and the ethic of the link are the means of generosity with abundance.
Want to subsidize news, newspapers, and journalism? I have an idea I could stand behind. But it’s not this: Nicolas Sarkozy has given France’s newspapers a €600million subsidy over three years—including a free subscription for every 18-year-old Frenchman—on top of the €280 per year it gives them now. The U.K. is dancing around the topic of government support for regional papers. And the argument over government bailout of papers is simmering in the U.S.
Danger, danger, Will Robinson. I don’t want government interfering with news and speech (he who giveth may taketh away). And I’m not at all sure that it’s newspapers that should be the beneficiaries of subsidy; they have not given journalism responsible stewardship in the last decade and a half.
But here’s a government subsidy I can get behind: broadband and technology development. An investment there will do more for the future of news than any dollar, euro, or pound given to keep presses rolling.
* If the Obama Administration gets the entire country on broadband, news organizations will have a much larger public to serve online than they have now in print. They will be able to expand coverage through collaboration. They will be free to use rich media for compelling news experiences.
* Advertisers will have no excuse but to go online, when most everyone is there and when it can serve rich media beyond the banner.
* Investment in technology development and entrepreneurship in media—with tax breaks and direct subsidy—will also create rich new experiences and will create jobs, new wealth, and the potential for more export of media as well as demand for better education.
* Tax breaks for the poor to subsidize computer purchases—which are now inexpensive enough to contemplate—will end arguments about the digital divide and will create at least some jobs in the U.S. industry. A goal of 100-percent-connected youth will also improve educational opportunities and, in the long run, reduce the cost of textbooks and curricular materials, as a bonus.
* Providing media and internet literacy education—including not just the consumption but the creation of media—will do more than a year’s newspaper subscription to assure a next generation of discerning news users and citizens.
The net result will be a much healthier news industry built on a new platform in new ways for the future. This is a better investment in an informed society than bailouts, subscriptions—or, for that matter, pothole repairs.
Over the last week, I’ve seen no end of stories about American newspapers printing extra copies for the Obama inauguration. The subtext is rather sad: It takes an unparalleled historic event to put papers in demand again.
Then today, as I walked to the U-Bahn in Munich, I saw and bought a rather remarkable publication: Zeitungszeugen (Newspaper Witness). I figured it was a media review and, as an official wonk, I picked it up. To my surprise, the publication is instead filled with replicas of German papers from February 27, 1933, all about the burning of the Reichstag, including a large Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party paper. It’s a fascinating and disturbing historical collection. But hours later, it turns out that the Bavarian government is suing the British publisher, claiming copyright on Nazi documents and fearing that though educational, the publication could attract neonazis. It banned the publication and ordered it seized. (Can they see the irony in that? Meanwhile, as I write this, I’m watching German TV comic Harald Schmidt — the bizarro David Letterman — and, in honor of the opening of Valkyrie — which I saw last night — his sidekick is dressed as Tom Cruise as Graf von Stauffenberg. Irony around every corner here.)
Well, anyway, Nazi history aside, there’s a good idea here for American papers to use their presses before they disappear. We’ve long been able to order individual reprints for various dates (the desperate birthday present). But if papers are seen more and more with nostalgic affection and interest, why not print them as new publications. I’d start with a collection on the Great Depression.
I am thrilled to say that 
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