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December 07, 2003

Angels in America
: I just saw the first half of Angels in America; I hope you did, too. It is brilliant and beautiful and wrenching and painful.
By now, we have all been touched by this horrid disease; we measure degrees of separation from the virus and its toll.
What Angels does so well is confess to the ugliness of death. Death is not proud. It is not glorious. Death is death.
Early in this epidemic, I watched my closest friend die this death. Angels brought back all the terrifying mystery, all the anger, all the mistakes, all the regrets, all the pain, honestly, brilliantly.
Thank goodness that HBO will rerun it a hundred times. No excuses. Watch.

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Treo buddies
: Jenny posts what she has on her Treo 600.

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The pot calling the kettle metal
: It's so nice when you see people you don't much like fighting among themselves. Here's anti-American correspondent John Pilger complaining about BBC General Director Greg Dyke blasting U.S. media for its allegedly pro-war coverage... because Pilger says the BBC was too pro-war. Irony as thick as clotted cream, that.

Greg Dyke, the BBC's director general, has attacked American television reporting of Iraq. "For any news organisation to act as a cheerleader for government is to undermine your credibility," he said. "They should be... balancing their coverage, not banging the drum for one side or the other."...
Did Dyke say all this with a straight face? Let's look at what research shows about the BBC's reporting of Iraq. Media Tenor, the non-partisan, Bonn-based media research organisation, has examined the Iraq war reporting of some of the world's leading broadcasters, including the US networks and the BBC. It concentrated on the coverage of opposition to the war.
The second-worst case of denying access to anti-war voices was ABC in the United States, which allowed them a mere 7 per cent of its overall coverage. The worst case was the BBC, which gave just 2 per cent of its coverage to opposition views - views that represented those of the majority of the British people. A separate study by Cardiff University came to the same conclusion. The BBC, it said, had "displayed the most pro-war agenda of any [British] broadcaster".

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More labels
: Juan Cole takes time off from finding every negative link on Iraq news that he can find and publicizes more labels for government factions on Iraq. Have at them...

I was on an Iraq panel at MIT on Friday with Ivo Daalder, co-author of the just-published America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. I found his views of how the policy in Iraq has developed very interesting, and I think I contributed something, too.
He distinguishes between the "Democratic Imperialists" (Wolfowitz and many of the Neocons) and the American nationalists (Cheney and Rumsfeld), and sees them as opposing one another.

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Micropayment, macropain
: At Friday's MIT Media Lab meeting for some New York media types, Dan Ariely of the Media Lab and the Sloan business school gave a great presentation of his research on micropayments. I can't summarize it fairly; I'll just say that if you're a media company looking at charging for content online, you should hire Ariely to consult; if you're Clay Shirky or Rafat Ali, you should buy the guy lunch.
Ariely said first that the gap between zero and any price is gigantic. They offered fancy chocolates to students for 14 cents each and Hirshey's kisses for 1 cent each; 80 percent chose the fancy chocolates. When they lowered the price to zero, 80 percent chose the kisses. It's the money; it's also the hassle; it's the pain of payment. Ariely has been measuring that pain.
They then ran an experiment giving students $10 and telling them they had to stare at a screen for 45 minutes or buy content on various models: subscription; prepayment; micropayment. The results: They consumed 10 times more content on subscription basis than by micropayment. "The pain of payment has an unbelievably large effect," Ariely said. But when asked what method they preferred -- specifically, what method would yield the highest quality content for them -- the subjects said micropayment. So business-model as they do, not as they say.

More from MIT
: A few other random notes from the MIT meeting:
: MIT and others are starting to analyze personality and opinion based on writing and a weblog is a good sample. What a great blog tool: Analyze my blog and analyze me. Analyze my blog and really make good Amazon recommendations. Analyze my blog and recommend friends. My blog is my avatar. My blog is an expression of the essential me.
: Esther Dyson mentioned the latest thing in search: social search. Eurekster looks at what your friends search for.
: I am dying for the passive friends network (and Technorati is a credible start): To whom do I link? What are their connections? What are my connections? The problem is separating positive links from negative, perhaps even grading the quality of links. I don't want to spam my friends to enter networks. I'm already in networks; I want systems that measure and map that.
: The man next to me from New York Times said that when he and his wife were going on vacation, they kept searching on destinations to their dissatisfaction. So his wife started searches with "we stayed at...." and they found great recommendations.
: Walter Bender of MIT and Dan Gruhl, graduate now at IBM, said they independently did research on buzz on music online and they each found that online buzz presaged retail sales -- up and down -- by two weeks. We are influencers influencing buyers.
: Gruhl said a third of the Web is porn and half the remainder is copies of other pages, leaving one third as the meat on the bone.
: The Media Lab is working hard on something called Common Sense -- the collection of the common-sense knowledge we all assume but computers don't know -- to help organize the Web and knowledge, better than the semantic web can (that is, without all the effort).
I do like these events; they're cardiovascular work for the imagination.

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More protest in Iran
: Blog Iran points us to a Reuters report of protest in Iran:

Around 1,000 pro-reform students rallied in the Iranian capital Sunday calling for freedom of speech and the release of political prisoners, witnesses said.
The protesters in Tehran chanted "Free all political prisoners" and "Death to despotism" on the annual Student Day, which marks the death of three students during a protest against then U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon's Iran visit in 1953.

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It is personal
: Journalism is getting personal.
I don't mean personal as in long zoom shots of naked celebrities.
I don't mean personal as in columnists using the first person a lot and telling us all about their lives (please, no, not that again!).
I don't mean personal as in throwing barbs and insults at individuals.
I mean personal as in knowing the person who writes and knowing the person who reads. Personal as in having a conversation. Personal because -- repeat after me -- news is a conversation.

: Note the reaction to a post I wrote about potty parity for women in New York. I'll admit I posted it mainly for the punchline. But the comments went wild. Why? Because this little bit of information touched people's everyday lives. It's personal. That makes it news. Compare that with other front-page news that day that did not get such reaction.
Now see blogger Lisa Williams' reaction to what might seem like an odd post in my weblog, which is usually devoted to media, news, and politics [my emphasis]:

But if you really look at a site like Buzzmachine or Instapundit you will find that they include lots of topics that stray far afield from political punditry or media criticism. In fact, the closer you look the stranger it is to say that "this is a politics blog" or "this is a media criticism blog." Why would a media criticism blog like Buzzmachine contain a post on potty-parity, or a technology blog like Doc Searls' also contain so much about politics? Yet as we look at them these "unrelated" topics don't seem to take away from the strength of the blog -- they add to it.
Being human is not off-topic.
Blogs give you an opportunity to challenge this limited idea of what is important and to say, The rest of my life is important too. I am not a brain in a jar that emits 700 word screeds....
I also suspect that the general tendency of bloggers towards including personal commentary and "off topic" adventures makes the blogosphere a more polite place than either the mass media or Usenet.

: Right! Now look again at Dan Okrent's surprisingly personal self-categorizing introduction to his constituency in the audience of The New York Times. See also the reaction to it in my comments. Dan says he doesn't go to the movies much and this leads to a discussion about it: Poor Dan... odd Dan... maybe Dan watches videos. This isn't celebrity; Dan's no star. This is about a constituency (nee audience) craving a conversation with someone who represents them (which is, after all, what every reporter is supposed to do, right?). Dan's essay got instant good reviews in blogs: See Roger Simon and Josh Chavetz and Tim Porter.

: This personal thing can go too far (see Bob Greene, Maureen Dowd, many a small-town columnist, and any local TV news person dieting for sweeps). What we're interested in, media people, is not your lives; like Dan, you're not celebrities. What we are interested in is your perspective, your bias, your baggage, your candor, your humanity. If you're going to represent us in finding, reporting, and selecting the news -- if you're going to ask questions on our behalf -- then we want to know who you are and what you're about so we can better judge what you say. That's part of the age of transparency. That's part of the conversation that is news.

: And it so happens that a weblog is an incredibly effective vehicle for getting to know someone -- not the only one, but a good one. Hell, I've gotten to know myself better here. Before your eyes, I turned from a pacifist into a supporter of military action to defend against and defeat terrorism and -- as Okrent said well today -- I, too believe that it is "inconsistent for those who advocate human rights to oppose all American military action." You shouldn't give a damn what I think except insofar as it colors my view of news on war; you have a right to know what's behind the links and blathering I give you.
So Jay Rosen et al -- and I -- are still right to push Okrent to blog, for a blog will beat even his great introductory paragraph. A blog establishes a relationship with his constituency. And that, too, would set an example for other Timesmen and other journalists to realize their role in this new world of news.
News is personal. News is a relationship. News is a conversation.

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Photo gallery advice
: Zeyad just got his camera. Now I want to give him advice on an easy, free place to post his online gallery. Suggestions, please...

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F
: John Kerry uses the f word:

"I voted for what I thought was best for the country. Did I expect Howard Dean to go off to the left and say, 'I'm against everything'? Sure. Did I expect George Bush to f - - - it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did," Kerry told the youth-oriented magazine [Rolling Stone, that is].

: Drezner has a Kerry meltdown watch with more from Marshall and Kaus.

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Our man in Havana
: Dan Okrent has an impressive debut as the public editor of The Times today, merely introducing himself and his job.

Reporters and editors (the thickness of their skin measurable in microns, the length of their memories in elephant years) will resent the public second-guessing. The people who run the newspaper may find themselves wondering how they might get away with firing me before my 18-month term is up. Too many combatants in the culture wars, loath to tolerate interpretations other than their own, will dismiss what I say except when it serves their ideological interests.
But those are their problems, not mine. My only concern in this adventure is dispassionate evaluation; my only colleagues are readers who turn to The Times for their news, expect it to be fair, honest and complete, and are willing to trust another such reader — me — as their surrogate.

But even more intriguing, Okrent introduces himself and his viewpoint--his biases, his prejudices, call it what you will:

By upbringing and habit, I'm a registered Democrat, but notably to the right of my fellow Democrats on Manhattan's Upper West Side. When you turn to the paper's designated opinion pages tomorrow, draw a line from The Times's editorials on the left side to William Safire's column over on the right: you could place me just about at the halfway point. But on some issues I veer from the noncommittal middle. I'm an absolutist on free trade and free speech, and a supporter of gay rights and abortion rights who thinks that the late Cardinal John O'Connor was a great man. I believe it's unbecoming for the well off to whine about high taxes, and inconsistent for those who advocate human rights to oppose all American military action. I'd rather spend my weekends exterminating rats in the tunnels below Penn Station than read a book by either Bill O'Reilly or Michael Moore. I go to a lot of concerts. I hardly ever go to the movies. I've hated the Yankees since I was 6.

: Now that got me to wondering why every journalist shouldn't have a public paragraph such as that. I was raised in this business in the belief that we never said such things; we wouldn't reveal our votes or parties or belief or grudges because that would be bias; that wouldn't be objectivity.
But not revealing them is a lie of omission.
In this new, transparent world, it is better to be transparent. I've been learning that even now, even here on this blog, where I've found it better to reveal more and let you judge what you think of what I think.
All the more reason for reporters to blog, eh?

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