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November 14, 2003

It's just pizza
: The single cushiest assignment I ever got in my allgeged journalism career was finding America's best pizza for People magazine. I traveled coast-to-coast and snarfed and snarfed and finally put the crown on Gino's East in Chicago.
So tonight, for old time's sake, I decided to have Gino's again. I walked many blocks to Gino's only to find some heretic serving thin-crust pizza there. Gino's moved. So I walk well more than a mile to the new Gino's only to find an hour-long line. Wait and hour and then it takes another 45 minutes to get the pizza.
Damn, it's just pizza.
I walked back and came upon Uno's, which I never liked as much. But I sat at the bar and waited a full frigging hour to get a pizza with enough cheese to employ a cardiac unit for a year.
It's just pizza.
I regret not naming New York's John's No. 1.

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Fisking
: David Pryce-Jones skewers Robert Fisk in The Spectator [via Tom Gross].
He gets the definition fisking wrong, I think (isn't it, "Tearing apart the idiocy of another, in the style of tearing apart Robert Fisk"?). He says it means: "The selection of evidence solely in order to bolster preconceptions and prejudices." Well, that's certainly what Fisk does. Maybe that's fiskatology.
No matter. He engages in fisking Fisk and that's fun.

For him, most Americans are ignorant and arrogant, and their leaders mendacious and cynical power maniacs leading everyone to perdition. Everything wrong with the Middle East is particularly their fault....
Most unforgivably, [Americans] are also friends of Israel. Fisk has fits at the very idea of that. All administrations in Washington are bad, but, in the first place, President Bush and his men belong to the ‘failed lunatic Right’ and in the second place they have fallen into the hands of the Jews....
What makes Fisk conspicuous is his self-righteousness. The content and style of his writing proclaim that in his own eyes he is not really a reporter but the repository of truth. Other journalists are not up to their task; they are ‘nasty little puffed-up fantasy colonels’, warmongering collaborators of the wicked American–Israelis. He alone has the calling and the courage to reveal the evil rampant everywhere. Woe, woe, saith the preacher. Fisking is evangelical missionary work....
In this fresh mood of despair, Fisk warned that the United States was going the way of Hitlerism, no less....

Read the whole thing. It's fisktastic.

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Access is down... WBL... Grrrrr.

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What they call interactivity
: I'm now watching a panel on what they call hereabouts interactivity.
It's not what I call interactivity.
They think it's about creating pages with buttons for people to push. Flash! Wow! They look at this medium as the curator of a kids' museum looks at an exhibit: Let's give them buttons to push; let's make things light up; that'll make them happy; that'll involve them. The moderator of the panel calls it "story-telling." She calls it a means for the audience to "learn in a hands-on way." She calls it "news experience." They show us maps that click and let you do a simulation to fix the traffic problem in Seattle.
Pardon me, but that's news as masturbation: the reader goes off in a corner and plays with himself.
I don't call that interactivity.
Interactivity is people interacting with people.
In this new medium that the audience owns, it's about -- pardon me for repeating myself -- the people finally having a voice. It's about us in big media listening.
News is a conversation.
I'm debating whether to say all this and make an ass of myself or just sit here and grumble to you.
Grrrrrrr.

: The MSNBC person showed off big Flash things she called "interactives." A new noun, to me.
She said, "We directly challenge the audiencde to think about an issue."
Man, that's condescending!

: The PBS person, to her credit, said that what's missing is real two-way interactivity. Yea!
She showed off her interactives on -- cliche alert -- fair-trade coffee, asylum, and gentrification.

: What turns these people on is Sim news. It's not real news. It's simulated for your safety.

: This is horse-to-water journalism. They want to get you to drink. But what if we don't want to?

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Tribune on blogs
: My colleage Denise Polverine, editor of Cleveland.com, asked the jackpot question of the Jack Fuller session at Online News. I'm proud to say that she first plugged our hyperlocal blogging efforts and then she asked Fuller about Tribune journalists blogging.
Hems begats haws.
"There are a number of issues," Fuller said. "If you have somebody whose name is part of your newspaper and they blog, unedited, there is a potential quality-control problem." He immediately acknowledged that it's really no different from a correspondent talking on TV -- unedited. If you have a fool reporter, there's a "quality-control problem."
He says there is another issue: economic -- "how the income gets cut up." Well, if a reporter blogs as part of his or her job, that's not an issue. If it's outside, then the reporter will surely not make any money to cut up.
But then he acknowledged: "There is everything right about people at the paper being in more continuous engagement with the audience."
Damn right.
: I just saw that Mary Hodder blogged this on my comments before I could. She says:

I have to say, I don't think he gets it. Blogs are about trying to find as much truth as possible, to be fair and accurate, to get as close to meaningful information as possible, but they are not impartial, and we, the audience are desperate to know what people think, especially those that have developed expertise in a particular area, with access and time (because it's their job..) to things we don't have time for, to hear their comments and to be able to comment back. We, the audience, understand that blogs are partially journalism, but also opinion, constantly iterated, and the usefulness is in this more temporal aspect. ....

Damn right.
News is a conversation.
Let's say that again and etch it in brass:
News is a conversation.

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Jack Fuller at ONA
: Jack Fuller of Tribune company is giving his keynote. He admits that the company has spent $600 million onlline -- net. Yow. Entertainment Weely went through $200 million before it broke even but it's now a $300 million-a-year business. Compare and contrast.
However, they did make 2.75 billion on AOL stock. "Net-net, we're real happy how it all turned out."

: He admits that, at first, "I looked at the new medium and saw the old one. I saw a newspaper -- online." But, of course, that has changed.

: "It's easier to destroy value than to create it with this new medium," he says.
The frictionless transfer of information "creates perfect markets," he says. "... and as any soybean farmer will tell you, you don't want to be in a perfect market."
Yes, that is a moral to this story: News is a commodity.
So we need to ask (me talking, not Jack) whether news is really our business. See this alternative from commenter Hugh MacLeod (which I'll repeat yet again on my panel tomorrow):

Perhaps online newspapers should stop seeing themselves as "things", rather a point on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things. A Joi-Ito-like [Joi being a central weblogger] brain trust, held cohesive by good editor. Some of the cluster will be paid (the journalists), others won't (the audience). But everybody is welcome to contribute, and is kinda working together with the same goal: to create the most vibrant intellectual collective that they can.

: Fuller says "it may have been our biggest mistake to persuade people that everything should be free."
Well, but if what you offer is a commodity....
He says it is demonstrable tha the audience is shifting from ink-on-paper into "the medium where we still have not figured out how to make a lot of money... at least, not with news products."

: "The news that draws a crowd is not the latest in a long and wonderfully written series of articles, lyrically written and wonderfully reported."
Damn right.
"It is sometimes humbling to look at what people actually come to on our sites and compare to what we put on our front pages."
Damn right again.
He says that doesn't mean they are putting the wrong things on the front page but that people come to different media for different things.
He's trying to dodge that ball. Smack.

: He says online proves that "we can reach young people with ... news... If we don't make the news reports too demanding, too difficult."
I'd sure express that differently. But I know what he's trying to say because he just said it a minute ago: Short is good.
I read the Tribune's almost-free youth tab, Red Eye, over lunch and compared it with mothership Tribune. In many cases, the story in the free tab was all we need.
Mothership Tribune had a long story about moving a U-boat inside at a museum. Red Eye told that story in three graphs. That was more than enough; it told me what I want to know.
You see, young people aren't dumb and they're not looking for less-than-difficult news. They're busy. They don't want us to waste their time. If we drone on, we waste their time.
(By the way, Tribune's free tab in Chicago is a helluva lot better than its new equivalent in New York.)

: "My biggest worry is that newspapers as institutions are defensive, perfectionist cultures that don't adapt easily."

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Blog or live?
: Not sure how I'll blog the Online News conference. We shall see.... This is old home week for many; I'm a hermit and never go to conferences so it's less so for me, though I still ran into lots of people I know, which isn't hard in this business.... Right now, I'm sitting next to Mary Hodder from UC Berkeley.... Over there is Shiela Lennon from ProJo.... Saw Vin Crosbie....

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Etch-a-post
: A cool Etch-a-Sketch online thanks to Elf.

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Photographic proof
: There's rickety old Fisk Hall, HQ of the j-school, which probably regrets to this day giving me a degree.

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In Evanston... Wrote posts below on the plane (now if only it had wi-fi).... Going wandering around my alma mater.... Back later.....

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Nonblogroll
: I've decided to start a list of people who should blog but don't -- the nonblogroll. A year ago, that list included Steven Johnson, but then he started blogging. So I thought it was time for a new list. My start:
: Dan Okrent, new public editor of The Times. He says he's not going to but we should talk him into it, for a blog would be a great way to interact with the paper's audience and critics; it would humanize the relationship and diffuse some of the gunpowder. And Dan's a smart guy and a good writer.
: Kurt Andersen, host of Studio 360. I bugged him to blog once. He demured. He needs more bugging.
: Simon Dumenco, now editor of Colors. Even though he denies being a blogger, he is one, at heart.
: Tom Friedman, columnist for The Times. No introduction needed. Sure, he's busy. But there must be a hundred ideas and links each week that don't make it into his column. Share them, Tom.
: Maureen Dowd, columnist for The Times and blog whipping girl. Just because you'd all have so much fun.
: Michael Ledeen, columnist for the National Review. He interacts with bloggers, leaving comments here and on Iranian weblogs. He's controversial. He's interesting.
: John Podhoretz, columnist for the New York Post. He's also very blogsmart and also controversial. I bugged him about blogging in email a few months ago; he said he's busy writing a book. OK, John, when you're done....
: Bill Clinton. The blogging President. He's dying for a bully pulpit and a blog would be perfect.
: Howard Stern. Just the occasional link to something he likes.
Who else? Leave your nominations in the comments. If I agree, I'll add them (because it's my nonblogroll). [I'll put them on the actual 'roll later, when I'm not in Starbucks.]

: UPDATE: Good names coming into the comments. Keep 'em coming.

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Bad ideas
: Yesterday, I never got around to blogging the confluence of bad ideas I saw in the Times: both Tom Friedman and Wesley Clark suggesting that somehow, the solution to tough problems in Iraq -- and Israel -- is to be found in Saudi Arabia. Good God, is that a trap.
Today, John Podhoretz in the Post does a better job than I would have of compiling all the bad ideas being put forward for Iraq:

Wesley Clark, the Democratic presidential candidate, has a plan: The Saudis should go hunting for terrorists while NATO takes over as the military and civilian authority in Iraq.
John Kerry has a plan: The United States should go to the United Nations and get a resolution creating a U.N. military force under American command.
Howard Dean has a plan: "The most important step we can take in Iraq today is to internationalize the forces stationed there, particularly by bringing in Muslim and Arabic-speaking troops," the Democratic front-runner has said.
Dennis Kucinich, a longshot leftist rival of Clark's, has a plan: The United Nations should take over entirely from the United States in Iraq.
These aren't really plans. They're fantasies - fantasies of escape....
And there are fantasists within the administration as well. They think the answer to the current difficulties is to force Iraqis to take on more and more of the security and political management of the country. The Iraqis need to "step up to the plate," as one leading official says. What he means is that we want them to "step up to the plate." The problem is that the baseball stadium isn't quite finished and the ballplayers haven't completed spring training. They need time.
What's needed, on the part of the United States, is a unique combination of attitudes - an urgent calm. We will succeed in Iraq because failure is not an option....

We need to win democracy in the Middle East. We need to defeat terrorism in the Middle East. It's going to take struggle and sacrifice. If we do not succeed, the alternative is continued terrorism and threat right here. So we must succeed. We must have the fortitude to succeed on our own.
There are no easy answers -- or easy outs.

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A guillotine in Picadilly
: Nice and timely lines in today's Times review of Master and Commander:

O you want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? Do you want your children to grow up singing the 'Marseillaise'?" This is Jack Aubrey, commander of H.M.S. Surprise, rousing the patriotism of his men as they prepare to engage a faster, larger French vessel somewhere off the coast of South America....
It is tempting to read some contemporary geopolitical relevance into this film, which appears at a moment when some of the major English-speaking nations are joined in a military alliance against foes we sometimes need to be reminded do not actually include France.

Oh, that's right.

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The value of data
: Howard Stern should put his data base online. It's amazing the data that is collected on his show. This morning, Howard was panting at the news that Paris Hilton had recorded another sex video, this time with Playmate Nicole Lenz. He seemed to remember having her on the show once. Sure enough, the staff came in seconds later with her measurements and the fact that she's a self-proclaimed expert at laying tile -- yes, tile.
In this age, data is valuable and this is great data.

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Traveling a.m. ... Blogging later... At Online News p.m. ...

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Rules of news
: Lost Remote's Steve Safran gives us laws, theories, axioms, and paraodes of news. Selections:

: THE LAW OF BREAKING NEWS
"Breaking news" is usually neither.
: RESTATEMENT OF THE LAW OF BREAKING NEWS, with respect to MURPHY
When there actually is breaking news, it will happen when you are on skeleton staff.
: THE LAW OF NEWS CONSPIRACIES
Those who believe there is a "giant media conspiracy" have never seen three producers try to agree what to get on a pizza.
: COROLLARY TO THE LAW OF NEWS CONSPIRACIES
The media are not right-wing, left-wing, pro-choice, pro-abortion, pro-gun, anti-war or any other such nonsense. We are pro-leaving-work-on-time and very pro-heading-to-the-bar.
THE "BALANCED NEWS" PARADOX
Equally distributed quotes from both sides do not a balanced report make.

[Sorry. Forget the link before. It's here now.]

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