BuzzMachine
by Jeff Jarvis

April 30, 2005

Spreading democracy

: Robert Mayer, the man behind the wonderful Publius Pundit blog on freedom, reports that the Community of Democracies just ended a meeting in Chile and we're both amazed how little this organization -- which should be the real United Nations, the collection of free nations and peoples -- gets coverage in media. He quotes Condi Rice in her speech and I'll do likewise:

Today, all the members of the Community of Democracies declare our deep conviction that freedom is the universal longing of every soul and democracy is the ideal path for every nation.

The past year has brought forth a dramatic shift in the world's political landscape. Since our last meeting in Seoul, we have seen free elections in Afghanistan and in Iraq and in the Palestinian territories. We have witnessed tremendous developments in places like Georgia and Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon.

There comes a time when the spark of freedom flashes in the minds of all oppressed people, and they raise their voices against tyranny. The Community of Democracies must match the bravery of these men and women with the courage of our own convictions. We on the right side of freedom’s divide have an obligation to help those on the wrong side of that divide....

Democratization is, after all, not an event; it is a process. It takes many years, even decades, to realize the full promise of democratic reform. For nearly a century after the founding of the United States, millions of black Americans like me were still condemned to the status below that of full citizenship. When the founding fathers of America said, "we the people," they did not mean me. Many of my ancestors were thought to be only three-fifths of a man. And it is only within my lifetime that the United States has begun to guarantee the right to vote for all of our citizens. And so we know in the United States that this is a long and difficult process. And every nation in this room has experienced moments of tyranny in its history -- some not too long ago.

Today, our citizens share the common bond of having overcome tyranny through all our commitment to freedom and democracy. Now, it is our historic duty to tell the world that tyranny is a crime of man, not a fact of nature. Our goal must always be the elimination of tyranny in our world.

We at the Community of Democracies must use the power of our shared ideals to accelerate democracy’s movement to ever more places around the globe. We must usher in an era of democracy that thinks of tyranny as we thought of slavery today: a moral abomination that could not withstand the natural desire of every human being for a life of liberty and of dignity.

Well said and bravo.

(But by the way, Condi, I can't leave this without adding that this is exactly why it was wrong for your boss to go hand-holding with an oily tyrant.)

This is war

: At long last the ACLU says it may join the fight for the First Amendment and fight the FCC's censorship.

Why don't they just appoint Pat Robertson?

: 1115.org reports that Ted Stevens -- the twit who wants to extend FCC censorship to cable and satellite -- now wants to install one of his aides in one of the empty chairs at the FCC. This is war, people.

Consumer-controlled advertising

: Ross Mayfield (who just raised more money for SocialText... congratulations!) reports that consumer-controlled, sell-side, publisher-driven (whatever the hell we're going to call it) advertising is arriving in France with Les Influencers, which isn't about money changing hands (yet) but is about people recommending what they like. And the brain behind this leaves a comment explaining more and revealing that they're working on the flipside: Demandeurs.net.

What blogs are and are not

: Go read Doc's PowerPoint to Les Blogs on why blogs are not content but are speech and why that matters.

Excuse me, professor, is this jihad on the final?

: The Washington Post reports that terrorism and homeland security are hot on college campuses for both research and teaching. Does anyone yet offer a degree in terrorism? And if so, will that be aimed at preventing and killing it or understanding it?

Fall or liberation?

: I seemed to notice more coverageon the 30th anniversary of the fall/liberation of Vietnam elsewhere than here. Bill Doskoch noticed the same thing. The Guardian on the 30th anniversary; the BBC on the celebrations in Vietnam.

Tagged

: Clay Shirky leads off a new group blog on tagging, which I hope and assume will blossom into a salon on what comes after taxonomy. For example....

: We are tagging not just content but also people... and behaviors... and processes...

If I can be assured that I won't be the victim of spam, impersonation, or privacy violations (big if's), I want to be tagged so that as I go from site to site, I get what I want: Give me my local content, give me the ads I'm interested in, don't tell me what I already know, find me the job I want.... It's not a cookie but a tag I control.

: When I was at the Associated Press for a lunch recently -- among a group of smart execs who will have a big impact on the future of news not just from the wire service but also across the industry and the internet -- we speculated on the need for a content cookie: a tag that travels with content as it is syndicated.

So, for example, a wire story about, say, Apple could travel with meta data that allows the site that uses it to run contextual ads reliably targeted. And as people read and link to that story in a distributed world, it would be good to gather aggregated meta data, to find out how popular it is, who is reading it, and -- most important -- what other topics (and audience) are associated with it. This allows people to find the story more effectively in search engines and such and also educates the content provider to improve future stories.

: At Fred Wilson's Exploding TV lunch a few months ago, we also talked about the need for video (and audio) that is distributed openly (not streamed) via BitTorrent and other means to carry tags and other meta data -- content cookies -- with them so that sponsor who will kill to support this content -- they've wanted to turn the internet into TV from the start -- can measure audience and demographics and serve and target ads (cue the people tags). At the same time, like magnets, the content should attract tags and meta data from the audience and their behaviors (e.g., people filed it under a topic or people like this watched it).

When this happens, the old networks will truly explode, for this allows you to share content and recommend and distribute it more efficiently than any old network can (witness my favorite Jon Stewart example) and it allows creators to be supported.

: AND: I should have added this and in response to a few frightened comments, I will:

Transparency and control are essential to this. I should control my tags and use them at my will; that's part of the point of tagging, after all. So I can tell an online service where I am so I can get local news or weather or business listings; that would be convienient. I can tell Google I want results in English and German because I read both (sort of). I can tell employers about me and have them rush to my door because they need a me. That only works if I control the tagging and the use of it is transparent. The same is true of tagging content: It only works if you can see the tags and add them yourself and swarm around the best ones. Sorry. I should have added that.

April 29, 2005

New voices

: I've been remiss in not linking to the announcement of grants to 10 citizens' media projects from the J-Lab, led by Jan Schaffer. I was on the advisory board and for those 10 spots, we got well more than 200 applications! There are tons of great ideas and pent-up publishing (and broadcasting and blogging) energy and imagination.

Buy me

: New stuff regarding a few ad efforts for blogs:

: Greg Lindsay writes about John Battelle's new venture -- which is revealing itself as slowly as a high-class stripper. It's about acting as an agent to star blogs. With a set of bloggers of a certain size and weight, I think this will work well.

: Meanwhile, Roger L. Simon, Charles Johnson, Winds of Change, and Marc Danziger team up with Tim Oren to start their own ad network. I'm not sure what the ad pitch is for a network of primarily political blogs that tilts strongly starboard but I wish them luck; they'll be stronger together than apart.

: And every blogger's friend, Henry Copeland, keeps adding new blog mininetworks, like this one for food. I can't find the full list; this post comes closest. I think this is the way to go. It's about gathering critical mass for advertisers.

But we're not at critical mass yet. And we need to stop viewing this just from our end of the pipe -- blogs that like each other or want to work together, whether the lists above or Denton's or Calacanis' -- and instead, look at it from the advertisers' end: They want to put together ad hoc networks of blogs that meet their specific goals, which include both targeting and size. We don't have the means to give that to them. All of which leads me to my predictable pitch:

I believe advertising on citizens' media -- not just blogs but also other text, audio, and video content -- will truly explode only when there are more metrics about our medium, more attention to the needs of marketers (e.g., cookies in RSS readers), and an open-source ad call.

Podcasts are dead

: Yes, Paris Hilton killed them. Un-like-bearable.

Local blogging goes primetime

: Rex (see post below) tells us that a Nashville TV station has a very good local blog -- with spiffy local blog aggregation -- by a former waitress who also blogs here.

Nevermind

: Rex has an Emily Littela moment.

Trust is not a calculation

: Michael Zimmer points us to what I think is a fairly hair-brained scheme from Google that reveals its fetishistic prejudice in favor of machines and also its prejudice in favor of big, old media.

The search engine wants to come up with an algorithm to judge trust in news. They already have a trademarked name for it: TrustRank.

But trust is not a calculation, it is a judgment -- a human judgment. If it were a calculation, news organizations -- and politicians and marketers and clergy, for that matter -- surely would have figured this out years ago: Forget the Q rating, here's the T rating. But trust is based on experience and intuition and perspective.

Still, Google trusts machines. Says New Scientist:

Now Google, whose name has become synonymous with internet searching, plans to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly.

The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google's database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.

Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.

I do believe there are ways to capture trust but it is not through such metrics as number of stories, bylines, bureaus (rather than bureaux, he said, Americanesquely), and so on. That's old journalism's scale for trust: bigger = better. This eliminates experts and specialists in this age of niches. It also includes sources that many consider untrustworthy (those who can't stand the BBC on one side or FoxNews on the other).

: I can't find the Google patent (WO 2005/029368) but I find with interest that Google has 462 of them. Are they going to contribute any of them to the world?

: Earlier fretting about Google.

Is Google the trojan horse of the internet? Did it sneak in the gates over the night looking like a toy and turned out to be an army of conquest?

Just asking.

: I'll be eager to see what Battelle has to say about this.

: Much discussion on SlashDot.

: Technorati cosmos on TrustRank (TM).

Touche

: Geoff busts me:

If you're going to bitch about the president playing kissie-face with the nominal leader of Saudi Arabia, then don't go and buy an SUV.

Your jihad news report

: Through my cohort Janice, I find the Global Jihad Monitor from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Freedom spreads

: The Syrians are out of Lebanon and the Lebanese government will hold its election on time, after all. Michael Totten blogs it.

Bush podcasts... sort of

: Andrew Leyden of Penguin Radio created a podcast of Bush's weekly radio addresses.

More jumping back over the shark

: The Methodist Church reverses an earlier decision to defrock a lesbian minister.

American (Ad) Idol

: Craig Newmark has a change-the-rules idea the new Current.TV: Let the audience vote off the worst commercials.

I like that: Sponsors would know the rules when they advertise and would operate under fear of being voted off, so they would improve their commercials.

But it's so, well, negative. How about a more aggressive scheme:

How about having a contest for the best commercials, products, and brands on the network. Make it a game. Hire the Simon Cowell (or Bob Garfield) of the people to slam the spam. Have the sponsors compete for our affection.

Everybody wins:

: Suddenly, consumers have a reason to pay attention to commercials. Wow, that is revolutionary. So if the sponsors have decent commercials, they win.

: The network becomes a better environment for advertising. Advertisers will line up to give them money. The network wins.

: The sponsors improve their commercials and consumers can get rid of the worst of them and encourage better ones. The audience wins.

The audience is in control.

This follows my first law of media (and life): Give people control of media and they will use it. Don't give the people control and you will lose them.

That's all Craig is doing. That's all Craig ever does: He empowers the people. Good thinking, Craig.

: This also deals with a problem of marketing and media in this era when media is paid on performance: That is, if you are a publisher or blogger, you get paid only when the consumer clicks on an ad you run. But if the ad is crappy (or the ad targeting is off) then no one will click and you lose; you used up your space, your ad avail, to no avail.

So what if you got to pick the ad creative you put on your site or network... or recreate it? That scares ad agencies that make money on making that creative. But, hey, it's a new era: You win when you give up control, not keep it. So the wise advertiser and ad agency would take Craig's idea (and my add) and run with it.

[Bad link to Craig fixed. Sorry.]

Can you jump back over the shark?

: I was glad that in his press conference last night, Bush distanced himself from the religious fringe.

THE PRESIDENT: ... The role of religion in our society? I view religion as a personal matter. I think a person ought to be judged on how he or she lives his life, or lives her life. And that's how I've tried to live my life, through example. Faith-based is an important part of my life, individually, but I don't -- I don't ascribe a person's opposing my nominations to an issue of faith.

Q Do you think that's an inappropriate statement? And what I asked is --

THE PRESIDENT: No, I just don't agree with it.

Q You don't agree with it.

THE PRESIDENT: No, I think people oppose my nominees because -- because of judicial philosophy.

Q Sorry, I asked you what you think of the ways faith is being used in our political debates, not just in society --

THE PRESIDENT: No, I know you asked me that. Well, I can only speak to myself, and I am mindful that people in political office should not say to somebody, you're not equally American if you don't happen to agree with my view of religion. As I said, I think faith is a personal issue, and I get great strength from my faith. But I don't condemn somebody in the political process because they may not agree with me on religion.

The great thing about America, David, is that you should be allowed to worship any way you want, and if you choose not to worship, you're equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship. And if you choose to worship, you're equally American if you're a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim. That's the wonderful thing about our country, and that's the way it should be.

Of course, the cynical view is that he gets to come off as more moderate -- on prime-time TV, at least -- and lets others suck--up to the religous right for him. Another cynical view is that the polls indicate that DeLay, Frist, et al went too far and so Bush is reacting to that (but if he were just listening to the polls, he wouldn't have been pushing Social Security so hard). But -- risking an Ollie Volley -- I'll say I think he is more moderate on religion. He has not pushed for regulating speech on cable and satellite and has told parents to use the remote control. He gives this speech to pull back from the right-wing religious shark-jumpers. We can only hope that this is a recognition that they went too far and Bush used this opportunity to say so, to pull back to the middle.

April 28, 2005

Old opinions never die

: This reader once said I was too tough on The Dukes of Hazard.

I think I'm proud of that. No, I know I am.

Talk OD

: Radio ratings in Washington indicate an OD on political talk radio.

Now: YOURadio... Next: OURadio

: Infinity Broadcasting's announcement that it is turning over a transmitter to the people is big, big news: great news, gratifying news, inevitable news. But it's still just one milemarker on the road to the future of citizens' media. And no, kids, we're not there yet.

This is still a big company handing over its time and using the second-person plural: YOURadio.

We'll know we've arrived when the people take over that station for real and change the name to OURadio.

At YOURadio, there are still executives picking what goes onto THEIR air.

At OURadio, WE the audience will pick what goes on OUR radio from what WE the producers make; there will be no difference between audience and producer, there will be no THEM: It's all OURs.

That is where this road is going. And we're still driving.

Still, I'm delighted by YOURadio.

Now we have a newspaper made totally from citizens' content: NorthwestVoice. We will have a radio station made totally from citizens' content: YOURadio.com. We will have a TV network made almost completely from citizens' content: Al Gore's Current.tv. (And last night on MSNBC's Connected, I joked that blog TV is next and when we get there, I said, we'll invite Ron and Monica on.)

But ultimately, they're all still networks. They're all still one-way pipes (but with a new way to dive into the pool that feeds them). They're media.

This is why -- I think -- Doc Searls and David Weinberger and the other visionaries behind this thing we have here refuse to call it media. Doc says it's speech. This, I believe, is why David got cold sweats at becoming part of media at MSNBC (see here and here as well): He said, 'I'm not media, I'm something else.' I call it conversation. (But I also am of the old "media." And I call this new thing "citizens' media" because this is like the English language and "snow:" We don't have as many words for that fozen stuff as the Inuit have. We don't have a word for this thing we're doing. So until sombody invents a new word -- something more sonorous than "blog," please -- I'll keep calling it citizens' media.)

So anyway, we're creating new things:

Google is the new library... and network... and ad agency (see the post below).

Blogs are new newspapers, right?

Podcasts are new radio then.

Vlogs will be the new TV, yes?

But then again, no, they're not. They're none of that. They're new, they're different, and they're not done yet.

And for that matter, old media aren't done yet, either... if they know what's good for them.

So each is trying to figure out the other, how to dance and who's leading -- and that's good. That's what the blog segments on MSNBC are about. That's what YOURadio is about. They are process.

Now having said all that, I'll repeat that YOURadio is big news and good news for a few reasons:

First, it is big media recognizing that it's time to listen -- and do more than listen: Let the people speak. It is big media recognizing the value of citizens' media.

Second, it is an admission that the old, one-size-fits-all, top-down, one-way models of programming are broken and the audience can do it better.

Third, it an admission that the old business models are soon to break and that the people can provide more talent for less than the old talent could. It's nothing less than the economic salvation of old media... if old media is smart enough to financially support citizens' media and not just exploit it.

What's important is that a big media company knew it was time to stick some dynamite up the alimentary canal and push the plunger.

It is the tipping point.

: I've been saying that we're at the tipping point. Glenn Reynolds is tipping, too.

Jay Rosen says:

It has been pointed out that tipping point talk is cheap. But Infinity Broadcasting actually tipped over today.
: See Rex Hammock on top of YOURadio. That's the frequency, Kenneth.

: Now let's tune in for a big, honking reality check from young MasterMaq, whom I last quoted on why he can't stand newspapers. Now here's his reaction to YOURadio:

You'd think I would be excited about the launch of the world's first "all-podcast radio station," but instead I'm disappointed. San Francisco's 1550 KYCY will now become KYOURadio and will feature content submitted by listeners. The problem? It's not podcasting at all:
In part because of licensing requirements, which usually cover only broadcast and streaming, the company has no plans to provide downloadable program archives.
More and more, individuals and organizations are attaching the term "podcast" to their audio endeavours, trying to jump on the bandwagon. This is very clearly one such example, and it's disappointing. KYOURadio is not a podcast radio station - they simply play content submitted by listeners.
He's a tough master, Maq.

Engadget agrees.

: Doc, the original radio geek, geeks out on the signal.

: LATER: Mark Glaser sums up the efforts of new services serving our video (and audio).

There are no free searches

: There is no free lunch. There are no free searches. At least not for media, there aren't.

Media depend on Google. Without the search engine, no one would be found. Without GoogleNews, they'd all get less traffic. Without the ad programs, advertisers wouldn't be advertising on plain old home pages; bloggers owe gratitude to Google for taking the cooties off citizens' media. With the ad programs, big media sites and bloggers alike are getting checks from Google. All that is wonderful.

So is heroin. At first.

Now cautionary notes are being heard here and there:

: Ad Age reports this week (not online, damnit) that Google is beating the big boys:

:Yahoo and Google's total ad revenues this year could rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC -- a stunning achievement for the companies and a watershed moment [read: tipping point -ed] for the Internet as an advertising medium.
In terms of revenue, Google's estimated $3 billion and Yahoo's $2.9 billion compare with $6.2 billion for the big nets' prime time. And their market cap is up with the big boys: Google is No. 2 behind Time Warner; Yahoo is No. five behind Disney and News Corp. as well.
"The results from Google and Yahoo combined with softeness in traditional media, offer the strongest evidence yet of the dramatic changes occurring in the media and marketing landscape," Tony Mastin, analyst at William Blair & Co. wrote.

In terms of measured media spending, the Internet was already bigger than outdoor, TV syndication and national newspapers, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

: Now turn to Simon Waldman, biz brains behind Guardian Online, who adds up Googles plans to serve banners and allow advertisers to pick sites (which means that Google can undersell media sales teams) and sell on CPM (rather than just clicks) and add ads to RSS and ad adds to maps and local... who knows what's next.
You can look at the details of all this activity - the mind-boggling reach of the decentralised network, the efficiency of the (mostly) sales-team-free booking system, the instant creation of a major banner network (just as the market for search starts to plateau, of course) - all of which are exciting./petrifying depending on where you sit.

But the really striking thing here is the pace of it all. Blistering. Fuelled of course by an arms race with Yahoo! that seems to be bringing out the best in both players.

The point is - and let’s be honest here - there is no way that traditional media organisations can compete at this pace. Or even at half this pace. This isn’t an act of self-flagellation, it’s just a matter of fact - for better or for worse....

But if we look around and want to retain our share of readers’ attention and advertisers’ wallets, it’s going to take probably double the effort,imagination and, frankly luck that even the best of us have had over the last five years.

: Now here is Rich Gordan at Poynter looking at the same announcements and worrying:
From Google's perspective, this is a natural evolution of AdSense -- giving its advertisers more flexibility and better results, and allowing the company to sell brand advertising along with the direct-response variety. But if I put my online publisher hat on, I'm not sure I like what I'm hearing.

Most every Web publisher these days has signed on to AdSense because it offers real additional revenue with virtually no effort. But these new initiatives would turn Google into a full-fledged interactive media buying agency -- and enable advertisers to go through Google to place pretty much the same kinds of ads that they now would have to buy directly from a site or from ad networks such as Doubleclick or 24/7 Real Media.

My guess is that many site managers will not want these new kinds of Google ads running on their sites -- but the lure of "easy" revenue (or the fear of losing AdSense money) might cause them to come aboard....

I also think that Google will sell those ads for less than what publishers are selling equivalent ads for -- just as the ad networks already do. Maybe this will be a good thing -- enabling sites to grow ad revenue without having to add salespeople.

But the Trojan horse story does come to mind. Publishers have let AdSense inside the gates. What will Google do now?

: Follow the links in the posts above to many news stories on Google's announcements. Then imagine where Google can go next, challenging not just media but media's challengers: Watch out Monster... eBay... CraigsList....

Now ask whether Google is friend or foe... or both.

The answer, inevitably, must be both: Google helped explode the internet. Without its search, no one would find our content. Without the ads, Google wouldn't make money. But then, that's Google's problem, isn't it? And a not-very-big-problem it is.

It's not a love/hate thing. I love Google; we all should. I don't hate Google. But I think it's time to consider fearing Google. Just to be safe.

So what should media sites be doing? And I don't just mean the big guys. I mean you, humble blogger with your humble ads:

Will Google maximize your value? Will Google undersell you? Is Google being transparent with you and revealing what the ads on your pages are selling for and what share you're getting? Will Google compete with you? Can Google put the stranglehold of a monopoly on you? Should you be making Google bigger or helping to create competitors to Google? Can you afford to? Can you afford not to?

Just asking.

April 27, 2005

Armed blogger

: No, that's not me in the picture at the bottom of the page.

KYOURADIO

: I'm way jazzed about Infinity's radio station by the people: KYOURADIO.com. Will talk about it on MSNBC's Connected at 5p ET. Will write about it later. Tipping point.

Jumping the shark for Jesus (continued)

: Glenn Reynolds gets it right today in his analysis of Bush's falling polls:

Mickey Kaus refers to "the semi-mysterious slump of President Bush in the polls."

I don't think it's much of a mystery, and I agree with Bush pollster Matthew Dowd that it has something to do with Terri Schiavo. ("The country's generally unhappy, and maybe they think the Terri Schiavo case is taking away from things that Congress or Washington ought to be working on.") Only it's broader than that.

The Democrats' weakness is that people worry that they're the party of Jane Fonda. They tried -- but failed miserably -- to convince people otherwise in the last election.

The Republicans' weakness is that people worry that they're the party of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. They tried, successfully, to convince people otherwise in the last election, but they're now acting in ways that are giving those fears new life. Add to this the fact that the war is going well, weakening the national security glue that holds Bush's coalition together, and a drop is natural: People who reluctantly backed Bush because Kerry was just unacceptable on national security are now seeing their worries about domestic issues as more credible.

I think it's more than that religion is a distraction from the nation's business. I think Americans get scared when they confront people who are too religious -- especially when they do that on the other side of the church/state wall. This doesn't mean the Democrats should be godless; they should just be religously moderate (read: sane). In the primaries, we will find odd and new coalitions among conservative Catholics and born-agains pushing the Repubicans further to the religious right. But in the general election, a religious mainstreamer can win over a fringer.

: Earlier Jumping-the-Shark-for-Jesus posts here, here, here, here, here, and here.

: What should Bush do? I'll say it again: Concentrate on energy and health care. Oh, but of course, those are not easy issues for Republicans with big biz interests at stake. So the same advice goes for the Democrats: Concentrate on energy and health care.

To the tune of I Want to Hold Your Hand

: Lots of fun followup to Bush's hand-holding:

: Matt Welch is blushing for us all. Oh, no, his face is red because he's frigging outraged.
: Obernews finds the PC angle, calling Welch vaguely homophobic for criticizing two men for holding hands.
: Justin Logan has a proper and well-put fit over that.
: Here's ThinkProgess' Bush Checklist: Stroll through wildflowers with dictator? Check. Stand up for pro-democracy Saudis? Naw.
: Electablog's OHarmony: the dictator dating service.
: Lew Rockwell notes the White House/Fox News spin: The poor man was just slippin' and slidin' and Bush was making sure he didn't fall.
: Yglesias: "... the whole spectacle of an American President begging the Saudi monarchs to lower oil prices is bizarre and repugnant."
: Here's a photo album of Bush-Saudi romantic moments.
: And don't miss this convenient layout moment from the Dallas Morning News: The Picture next to this headline: "House Bans Gay Unions."

Ratings

: Glenn Reynolds jokes that FoxNews' lead over CNN is declining now that CNN is paying attention to blogs. Well, actually, MSNBC President Rick Kaplan said at a Harvard confab weeks ago that he can track ratings growth in shows to blog diligence. He's not including blogs in his network's shows because he thinks we're cute.

: If that is true, then the CBS Evening News could use some bloggin'. (Last night, by the way, Bob Schieffer marveled at podcasting.)

Chatter

: Virginia Postrel is moderating a panel that includes Bill Keller of the Times and Jacob Weisberg of Slate at UCSB. Can't tell whether it will be aired online. [via Doc]

April 26, 2005

Car stereo help

: I just bought a new car (very boring: replaced my Lexus RX300 with 115k miles with a Toyota Highlander) and I want to get a car stereo that meets these (simple) requirements:

1. It must have an input jack for my iPod, Sirius, etc.

2. It's OK if it has Sirius built in but I'm also fine with keeping that separate so I can carry Sirius back and forth.

3. CD and cassette and playing MP3s would be nice but not necessary.

That's not much. I mainly want that input jack so I can plug any of my gadgets into it.

Advice?

More stereo comments.... I accidentally double posted the car stereo question and both posts got comments so I'm keeping this here because I don't want to lose the advice here. Thanks, all!

Holding hands

: Bush is going to regret this photo.

: UPDATE: Great layout of the picture in a Texas paper.

It takes a village to be a newspaper

: In a wonderful comment under a post below, Bala Pillai of Maylasia.net pointed to an interview that has an eloquent expression of what news should be -- a parallel to Hugh McLeod's oft-quoted (by me) contention that newspapers must stop thinking of themselves as things but as places where people come together to do good things. Bala Pillai:

I remember in my village where I grew up in Malaysia. When there was no media there. When we needed to find out what was happening in the neighboring village. We’d send one of us over. He’d go over. And talk to the headman. Get the party platform from him. And on his way back he'd go have a haircut at that village's barber. And there he'd get the grapevine. And between the two versions he narrates to us...See that was media for us that were news....

See what matters most to the village = media ok the reason is this... media used to be equal to community... because what mattered most to community equaled to the community... and what mattered most = media = community, as time went on, specialists creeped in... And in time the agency phenomena took over. Agency phenomena = agents become principals (another e.g. --> govt servants become masters) and thus media diverged from community. Media no more represented community. Nature abhors these divergences. It pushes towards equilibrium. So there was pressure to have facilities to enable this convergence and thus social software and citizen journalism

Beautifully put.

The star shat in the woods

: PunditGuy is having a proper fit over celebrities discovering the unpaved earth:

Drew Barrymore Quote of the Day: "I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome."

The great American pastime, remixed

: Andrew Sullivan goes to a baseball game:

LOVED IT: I take it all back. The Nationals-Phillies game was great fun at RFK last night. Vile but irresistible hot dogs; a new foodstuff known as dippin' dots; occasional flashes of excitement interrupted by really hot guys with guts spitting into the grass; and, the piece de resistance, Karl Rove down front, chatting on his cell-phone. We had a blast.
Does Karl Rove qualify as a hot guy with a gut spitting?

Exploding TV

: Rafat Ali has the story behind the Open Media Network, another means -- like OurMedia and Brightcove -- to distribute multimedia content without a old, closed network. I downloaded the ap and player (it wouldn't work via Firefox, only IE) and watched my favorite vlog, Rocketboom.

Tipping point... or melting point?

: Just got the Wilson Quarterly with its cover story on "The Collapse of Big Media." Getaloada the intro:

Collapse is not too strong a word to describe what has happened to America's major news media. Stripped of their old economic and technological advantages, befuddled by the changing character of their audiences, and beset by new competitors, they are reeling from the blows recent scandals have dealt to their credibility and presige. Their old authority is one, and with it, perhaps their ability to define for Americans a shared realm of information, ideas and debate."
Youch. That pretty much summarizes the melting point.

: Stats from WQ compliled from many sources:


* Daily newspaper circ from 1990 to 2003: 62.3 to 55.2 million
* Number of daily U.S. papers from 1990 to 2003: 1,611 to 1,456
* By age group, percentage of Americans who read a paper yesterday: 18-29 - 23, 30-49 - 39, 50-64 - 52, 60+ - 60
* Time spent by 8-19 year olds on all media: 6 hours, 21 minutes; time spent on print media: 43 minutes
* Combined viewership of network evening news: 1980 - 52 million, 2004 - 28.8 million
* Median age of network news viewer: 60
* Percentage of people who believe all or most of what's on: network news - 24, CNN - 32, FoxNews - 25, C-Span - 27, PBS NewsHour - 23
: See also Chris Anderson's many stats on the media meltdown here.
* Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
* Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
* Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
* Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
* Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
* Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole
: See tipping-point posts here, here, and here. And much media here.

: And from PaidContent, see links to the Deloitte report on the not-so-bright future of network TV and Mary Meeker's powerpoint on the ad challenges. See this amazing chart from Meeker's presentation. Compare the ad dollars spent per household in each medium and guess where this is going:

meekerchart.jpg

And see this on classifieds in papers vs. eBay (and this doesn't include CraigsList!):
meekerclassified.jpg

(Unfortunately in-)frequently asked questions

: The Media Center -- the real forward thinkers and nudgers in the news business -- asks a few great questions in their latest brief tome (a pdf):

OLD QUESTION: What is the future of newspapers?
REALLY ASKING: Will editors and reporters have jobs in five years?
SHOULD ASK: How is a connected society informed? What’s paper got to do with it? What future are newspapers and TV networks creating? What story do they represent?

OLD QUESTION: What’s the no-kidding business model for newspaper companies?
REALLY ASKING: Do we really trust this Internet thing?
SHOULD ASK: Which business models enabled by the Internet and mobile, digital technologies best serve an informed, connected society? Can news enterprises reimagine their businesses?

OLD QUESTION: How do we make money?
REALLY ASKING: How do we continue doing what we’ve always done, maintain high margins, and control markets?
SHOULD ASK: What are alternatives to the advertising subsidy? What business models can capitalize journalism-based businesses? What is the value proposition for new forms of journalism?

OLD QUESTION: From where will journalism come?
REALLY ASKING: Do we really trust other citizens with journalism?
SHOULD ASK: How will a generation of talented storytellers use multiple forms of media to create and share stories that are relevant to the citizens of an always-on world?

Flying over the shark

: Now everybody's going to have to blog from an airplane to say: wow, you'll never guess where I'm blogging from: an airplane. (See also the airborne email in Meeker's PowerPoint.) And then they'll IM. And then they'll Skype. And then they'll land.

The cup will put you to sleep but the coffee will wake up you

: I missed this before but 601am belatedly wakes me up to the news and I hadn't even noticed because the brown this-cup-is-too-hot-for-human-consumption thing covered them up but Starbucks, ever in search of a new form of cultural pap, is quoting grande celebs (that is, merely medium) on its cups, and some of them include: Al Franken, Goldie Hawn, Ken Auletta, Yo-Yo Ma, Keith Olbermann, Melissa Etheridge , Ken Burns, Jonah Goldberg, Po Bronson, Quincy Jones, Chuck D, Deepak Chopra. Gag me with a double latte.

Noah benShea's quote: "Do not kiss your children so they will kiss you back but so they will kiss their children, and their children’s children." That belongs on a doilie, not a cup.

And Goldberg's: "Everywhere, unthinking mobs of “independent thinkers” wield tired clichés like cudgels, pummeling those who dare question “enlightened” dogma. If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Clichés begin arguments, they don’t settle them." That is here because it wouldn't fit on a Hummer bumpersticker.

Anybody for a new agenda?

: A few polls indicate that Bush hasn't picked the right agendas out of his hat.

: ABC News/Post poll on Social Security:

"Do you approve or disapprove of the way Bush is handling Social Security?"
April '05: Approve - 31 percent, disapprove - 64
Sept. '03: Approve - 43, disapprove - 46
Not a good trend line, eh?

"Would you support or oppose a plan in which people who chose to could invest some of their Social Security contributions in the stock market?"
April '05: Support - 45, oppose - 51
Sept. '03: Support - 64, oppose - 31

"Who[m] do you trust to do a better job handling Social Security: Bush or the Democrats in Congress?"
Bush - 32 percent, Democrats - 50

: ABC News/Post poll on judicial appointments:

"The Senate has confirmed 35 federal appeals court judges nominated by Bush, while Senate Democrats have blocked 10 others. Do you think the Senate Democrats are right or wrong to block these nominations?"
Right: 48 percent, wrong: 36 percent

"Would you support or oppose changing Senate rules to make it easier for the Republicans to confirm Bush's judicial nominees?"
Support: 26 percent, oppose: 66 percent

Try energy policy, George. And health care.

: UPDATE: Ankle Biting Pundits is growling over the polls.

: AND: I repeat my wish for open-source polling.

April 25, 2005

Smart mobs

: Smart mobs are not just some cute cult of the cellphone. They are, indeed, a force. Witness today's NY Times front-page story on the unfortunate anti-Japan mobs in China:

The thousands of people who poured onto the streets of China this month for the anti-Japanese protests that shook Asia were bound by nationalist anger but also by a more mundane fact: they are China's cellphone and computer generation.

For several weeks as the protests grew larger and more unruly, China banned almost all coverage in the state media. It hardly mattered. An underground conversation was raging via e-mail, text message and instant online messaging that inflamed public opinion and served as an organizing tool for protesters.

The underground noise grew so loud that last Friday the Chinese government moved to silence it by banning the use of text messages or e-mail to organize protests. It was part of a broader curb on the anti-Japanese movement but it also seemed the Communist Party had self-interest in mind.

"They are afraid the Chinese people will think, O.K., today we protest Japan; tomorrow, Japan," said an Asian diplomat who has watched the protests closely. "But the day after tomorrow, how about we protest against the government?"

Nondemocratic governments elsewhere are already learning that lesson. Cellphone messaging is an important communications channel in nascent democracy movements in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East. Ukraine's Orange Revolution used online forums and messaging to help topple a corrupt regime.

: Read a great followup to this in the comments: "'A Hundred Cellphones Bloom, and Chinese Take to the Streets' is a great headline for Manhattan, but meaningless in Beijing." From Danwei.org.

The prime directive: Do not lie

: I got pretty shocking email from a journalism student at NYU, who also sent it to Steven Levy at Newsweek. I'll not give the student's name in hopes that he or she will learn the lesson and not be Googled with it forever. But I will quote the email because there is an important lesson here:

Hi, I'm a student of ...

I am writing an article on fact-checking in blogs.

I have two questions.

Recently, sent Gawker.com a fake tip (said I heard Moby say to a little girl, "Don't ever say that Teany [Moby's tea store] is Shitty"). They posted it in their "Reader Sitings" section. I e-mailed them and said it was fake. But they posted no correction and the fake tip is still on their site.

Do you think Gawker should be held responsible for any damages against Moby? Do they have a responsibility to fact-check reader tips, do you think?

Thanks!

I had a very simple response to this student: "You are responsible." Ethically and otherwise.

Gawker puts up notes from readers and clearly labels it: "Sightings are sent in by readers." Any reader with a two-digit IQ and any experience with this medium and the internet knows that readers can publish anything anywhere and so, caveat reader.

If this would-be journalist simply asked Gawker, I'll bet they would have given an answer. Ask me about the comments here or the posts in a forum and I'll tell you quite clearly: Nothing is vetted or edited. That's obvious. But if you were a good reporter, you'd ask the question. And if you did not get an answer, you still should not resort to what you did. You lied.

And that, correspondent, is the most basic journalism lesson you will ever receive. That is your prime directive as a journalist. That is Rule No. 1:

Do not lie.

Trust is our only asset. Truth is its only measure. Ask Jayson Blair.

Do not lie.

As a reporter, would you call the Fire Department with a false alarm just to see how fast they came? If you did, you'd go to jail and deserve it. Would you lie about a stock online to see what happened to its price? If you did, you'd go to jail and get sued and deserve it.

You make it even worse, then, by emailing your lie to two journalists. So you defamed not only Moby but Gawker. In fact, I don't think any harm is done here. But with different players, you could, indeed, do harm to your subjects and your own reputation and the credibility of the journalists you ensare.

You also lied about your own identity: You did not reveal yourself as a would-be journalist. In an age of transparency, that, too, is becoming ethical lapse.

So, dear student, if you were in my class, I'd give you an F on this assignment (at least). I would assign you to apologize to those you tried to smear with your little lie. And I would hope that you would learn the most important lesson in journalism: Telling the truth is hard enough without lying.

(Oh, and by the way, it might help if you copy-edited your emails before sending them.)

: UPDATE: See in the comments, Lockhart Steele, editorial director of Gawker Media, says that they didn't receive notice of the "correction" but have since X'ed it out. The same person hit Lockhart's own Curbed.

Also, I neglected to add the full disclosure that most know but that should have been added specifically to this post: I am friends with Gawker Media and its founder, Nick Denton.

The future of journalism is not its past (continued)

: Tim Porter suggests his fixes for what ails news (see the post below). I'll pull up to higher altitude (and lower oxygen) and suggest these steps:

1. Set a strategic imperative for change. From both the top down and the bottom up, there has to be an agreement -- an urgent passion -- for change: for updating, improving, finding new ways.

2. Listen to the public. Don't just go to another focus group about the paper. Go listen to the people who don't read the paper but want news. Learn how they're getting it now: They no longer have the patience to wait for the news; the news waits for them to search for it, click on it, have it recommended. Ask them about trust and brace yourself. Read Merrill Brown's Carnegie report.

3. Perform a business reality check. Read Tim's post: The solution is still presumed to be adding more bodies. But when revenue is declining, that's obviously not realistic. Classified and retail are in decline; there are new inexpensive and free competitors; audience is declining. So new business models must be invented.

4. Catalogue the opportunities for delivering news. No longer constrained to a printing press and truck route, list all the wonderful new ways that you can deliver news. If you want the public to get its news from you then you'd better give it to them wherever and however they want.

5. Catalogue the opportunities for gathering news. Insert hyperlocal citizens' media spiel here. The public knows more than we ever can. How do we enable them to share that with others -- with content, promotion, training, trust, money?

6. Reinvent the product. After doing that homework, after dynamiting old assumptions, after starting a conversation with the public -- a converstion that should never end -- now, it's time to reinvent the product and the business and the industry of news.

7. Reinvent the relationship with the public. Now you can change the way the public views news. Hugh McLeod said, and I often quote it, that we need to stop thinking of newspapers (and their sites) as things but rather as places where help bring people together.

The future of journalism is not its past

: Tim Porter writes his best post ever -- Jay Rosen beat me to calling it that -- about pathological resistance to change in newsrooms and journalism. It's probably a good portrait of fear of change in any industry undergoing restructuring, only the situation is even tougher in journalism because it is an industry inflated with hubris as well as true principle -- an industry that doesn't even like to think of itself as an industry.

I've spent more than a third of my career trying to bring change to news media and I've been amazed hearing the notion that news should not change. Why not? The world is changing. The public and its needs and wants are changing. The technology is changing. The opportunities are changing. The competition is changing. The economics are changing. Why shouldn't newsrooms change?

As Tim reports, the discussion is usually not about moving forward -- and taking advantage of this change, embracing it -- but, instead, about wanting to move back: back to when there were more people, there was less competition, the insiders had more power, and we had better bars (well, actually, that last one is mine... but it might help with the bad mood Tim finds):

The amount of anger and hostility, of distrust and suspicion, of inertia and ennui that pollutes the journalistic environment in these newsrooms at first surprised me....

It is a venom whose toxicity, fed by the same sort of outwardly-directed anger and suspicion that floods the waning days of all diminishing industries, weakens all hope these reporters and editors and photographers have of imagining a future in which journalism survives but its form is vastly different....

The obdurance and avoidance endemic in newsrooms rests on a bedrock belief that the "problems" at their newspapers are best solved with more bodies or a return to a more "traditional" form of journalism....

In these same newsrooms where the nattering nabobs of nostalgia pine for days of yore, there are also forward-thinking reporters and editors and photographers who envision and are working to create a journalistic future built on new story forms, deeper community connections and more truth-telling and watch-dogging....

We are in a time of great transition in journalism. The tectonics of technology, demographics, economics and lifestyle are disrupting the ground on which newspaper journalism stood for half a century. Survival requires nimbleness, openness and a sense of the possible. The intransigent and the angry and the incurably nostalgic will fall into the cracks....

There's much more. Read it all.

April 24, 2005

News on news

: Pegasus has a good roundup of news on changing news

It's like making a vegetarian the CEO of McDonald's

: The NY Times mag has an interview that's as astonishing as it is amusing with the new Corporation for Public Broadcasting chief executive, Ken Ferree [sent to me by Jonathan Miller]:

What PBS shows do you like?

I'm not much of a TV consumer. I like ''Masterpiece Theater'' and some of the ''Frontline'' shows. I like ''Antiques Roadshow'' and ''Nova.'' I don't know. What's your favorite show?

It would probably be the ''NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.''

Yes, Lehrer is good, but I don't watch a lot of broadcast news. The problem for me is that I do the Internet news stuff all day long, so by the time I get to the Lehrer thing . . . it's slow. I don't always want to sit down and read Shakespeare, and Lehrer is akin to Shakespeare. Sometimes I really just want a People magazine, and often that is in the evening, after a hard day.

For the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, you don't sound like much of a PBS viewer. Perhaps you prefer NPR, which your organization also finances?

No. I do not get a lot of public radio for one simple reason. I commute to work on my motorcycle, and there is no radio access.

TV is good for you. No, really.

: Steven Johnson's new book is about a subject dear to my heart: Everything Bad Is Good For You starts arguing in its subtitle: "How today's popular culture is actually making us smarter." An excerpt appears in this weekend's New York Times Magazine. I got to read a version of the book a few months ago and it's damned good.

In the book, Johnson says that TV -- and other popular culture -- is more complex than it used to be and challenges us to think; it makes us smarter. I'm not sure which way the cause-and-effect really works. I believe that popular culture is just now catching up to us and that is because all our tools of choice -- remote control, cable box, TiVo -- are forcing popular culture to chase us, to get as smart as we are. In any case, TV is getting smarter and both TV and we are smarter than conventional wisdom ever held.

Ever since I was a TV critic starting in the mid-'80s, I've argued that given a chance to watch good shows, we do; that the ratings prove Americans do have good taste; and that TV is only getting better. Steven turns it around and adds one more notch: TV makes us better.

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less.....

... [Y]ou have to avoid the tendency to sentimentalize the past. When people talk about the golden age of television in the early 70's -- invoking shows like ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show'' and ''All in the Family'' -- they forget to mention how awful most television programming was during much of that decade.

Ditto all the slathering over the other alleged Golden Age of the Vaudevillian '50s. TV keeps getting better.
In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not arguing that parents should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse themselves. What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show's violent or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind.
It's all about respect, really: The respect producers have for the audience in producing good shows; the respect commentators have for the public in recognizing that, contrary to popular wisdom, popular taste is good; the respect the audience has for itself.

Then call them the Jersey Giants, damnit

: Well, my state has agreed to spend a fortune to keep the Giants in the Meadowlands.

I say that a condition of the deal must be to change the team's names to the Jersey Giants.

Even the head of the Sports Authority is against the deal:

The opposition was led by George Zoffinger, the Sports Authority's chief executive, who said he wanted to "remain consistent" with his past criticism of a deal he has claimed will cost taxpayers at least $150 million and will force his agency to operate at a deficit.

"My opposition stems from my wife being a social worker and my seeing the things the state needs to spend money on rather than football stadiums," Zoffinger said. "We've worked hard over the past three years to accomplish some financial stability and that is going to be difficult moving forward."

I'm against the deal. But I fear there's no winning now. So we need to get something out of it: Let's make the Giants recognize that they're in New Jersey, not New York. Make them change the name.

Hey, Jersey bloggers, let's swarm 'em. I just sent this email to Acting Gov. Codey, the director of external affairs for the Sports & Exposition Authority, and to my state legislators (find them here):

If you're going to spend millions in taxpayers' money building a new stadium for the Giants, the least you can do is make changing their name to the Jersey Giants a condition of the deal.
Follow the links above and do likewise.

It's all just bits and bandwidth, after all

: Here's the final commodification of telecom:

Skype is soon going to be available on a cell phone. So you'll be able to use the phone company's bandwidth to bypass the phone company's phone fees not only at home but also on the road (and, I assume, on wi-fi enabled mobile phones, you'll even be able to avoid the phone company's bandwidth and data charges). So no transfer of data, of bits of any sort, gets any premium at all. It's all just a commodity, all just bits and bandwidth.

I think I'm going to drive down the way to AT&T's network operations center and take a picture of the giant Golden Boy statue that used to stand by its headquarters before they melt him down.

: Right after I wrote that, I went to my RSS feeds and read Fred Wilson pointing us to a great PowerPoint and two posts from Tom Evslin, the man who probably is responsible for more change in media than anyone in America aside from (1) Craig Newmark and (2) the guy who invented the remote control. Tom was the guy who forced flat-rate pricing for the internet and then he created a company that, to oversimplify, turned VOIP into an industry at ITXC. In other words, he was a guy who helped turn bandwidth into a commodity, took value away from the pipe, and thus transferred value to the bits that travel on that pipe.

His PowerPoint and posts predict that phone calls will become like email -- "free," though email isn't exactly free. Somebody has to pay for the equipment, software, storage, and bandwidth. But once that's done, there is no incremental cost -- and fee and profit -- for the next call.

There's no value in controlling delivery -- not in telecom, not in media.

Undervalued

: My friend Dave Morgan of Tacoda writes a column in ClickZ arguing that we're undervaluing online to advertisers (and I'd add that we haven't even begun to value citizens' media to advertisers):

Publishers must price valuable contextual inventory at what it's worth -- a lot! Great content, loyal audiences, and a strong media brand should command a premium rate. Publishers shouldn't be afraid to ask for it. They must point out to media buyers that online audience numbers and online ad views are real, unlike TV ratings or print circulation, which only measure distribution and have little connection to actual ad views. On that basis, online ad CPMs should be valued at least three times more than their offline counterparts.

Publishers should stop selling out-of-context inventory in ways that devalue their own brands and hurt consumers who are tired of cluttered Web pages with irrelevant ads. They should use the extraordinary array of audience analytics tools and targeting services and learn how to deliver relevant ads in these pages.


April 23, 2005

Tipping point (continued)

: More evidence that we're at the tipping point in media (see earlier posts here and here):

: The Economist marvels at Rupert Murdoch's speech to newspaper editors:

The speech—astonishing not so much for what it said as for who said it—may go down in history as the day that the stodgy newspaper business officially woke up to the new realities of the internet age. Talking at times more like a pony-tailed, new-age technophile than a septuagenarian old-media god-like figure, Mr Murdoch said that news “providers” such as his own organisation had better get web-savvy, stop lecturing their audiences, “become places for conversation” and “destinations” where “bloggers” and “podcasters” congregate to “engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions.” He also criticised editors and reporters who often “think their readers are stupid”.
I, too, said the speech will be seen as a tipping point.

: Ruth sends me a link to George Will's column tomorrow:

If you awake before dawn you probably hear a daily sound that may become as anachronistic as the clatter of horses' hooves on urban cobblestones. The sound is the slap of the morning paper on the sidewalk.

The circulation of daily U.S. newspapers is 55.2 million, down from 62.3 million in 1990. The percentages of adults who say they read a paper "yesterday" are ominous...

Perhaps we are entering what David T.Z. Mindich, formerly of CNN, calls "a post-journalism age."

No, I think we're entering a new journalism age.

: Will quotes the latest issue of the Wilson Quarterly, which I'm headed to a newsstand to buy now. The cover story: The Collapse of Big Media.

Bin Laden = Hitler, 9/11 murderers = SS murderers. Got it so far?

: The other day, I had a proper fit over filmmaker Brian Grazer saying he hoped his upcoming network exploitationfest about the 9/11 terrorist attacks would do for Muslims what Das Boot did for Germans: humanize them. Now Britt Blaser has issued a strange response and I'll get to that in a minute. But first, let's get our analogies straight:

1. Bin Laden is our Hitler: the man who invents, justifies, and orders mass murder and recruits the murderers. Evil.

2. The 9/11 hijackers are his SS concentration-camp killers. Evil.

3. Continuing this analogy, then, Muslims are Germans: just people.

There is no equivalency in this for soldiers. Germans fought in their government's army. The terrorists have no army and no nation and no legitimacy whatsoever. So they should not be treated as soldiers. The only analogy that works for them is members of Charles Manson's death cult; that is why I used Manson in my headline on the earlier post.

Glazer gets it all screwed up thinking that humanizing Muslims has anything to do with humanizing 9/11 terrorists. That would be like saying that we want to make a movie humanizing SS concentration camp commandants to better understand Germans. That is wrong on three counts: First, it wants us to humanize murderers who are, yes, evil, and that would be misguided, pointless, and even dangerous; it tries to give sense to a senseless act, justification to an unjustifiable crime. Second, it judges a culture by its worst, which is unsulting to millions, blaming them all for the sins of a few. Third, this assumes that war criminals are merely soldiers, which they most certainly are not.

Glazer's perspective is, of course, merely the reverse view of the dangerous notion that we need to understand our enemy, the terrorists: Bill Maher's contention that we need to build a Why They Hate Us pavilion.

No, we need to build a memorial to their victims to remember why we hate them. We need to fear them. We need to understand them only insofar as is necessary to defeat them. To humanize them would be insane.

: Now to Britt's strange post:

But Jeff and I have a fundamental disagreement on a core principle. I believe that you can be a warrior and put yourself in harm's way without hating your enemy, but he seems committed to hate and revenge as a result of his near-death experience on 9/11. Every time he touches on his personal experience that day, the bile spills onto the page and, to my gentle sensibilities, poisons the dialogue that is the core of the give-and-take of blogging. Jeff seems to seek out opportunities to pick the scab of his near-death experience. Today's example is his "dread" (Jeff's word) of Brian Grazer's NBC mini-series on 9/11, presenting the viewpoint of the perps, whereby Grazer hopes to portray the Muslims in the way that Das Boot humanized the German U-Boat crews..... [He then quotes the post and continues....]

Jeff, you got the shit scared out of you. It happens. Get over yourself. Please.

9/11 isn't about you, and it's beneath your dignity to take it so personally and viscerally. By over-personalizing your experience, you deprive us of the best of your wonderful gifts, which you bestow so freely when you treat every other subject. We get it that it affected you so personally and strongly. Hatred is a drug that's addictive, energizing and pervasive. The problem with all that testosterone and adrenaline coursing through your system is that you can't fly your plane as well....

Britt, let's go back to the analogy above: Would you tell a survivor of a concentration camp not to hate the commandant? Would you tell a survivor of the killing fields not to hate Pol Pot? Would you tell the child of a 9/11 victim not to hate bin Laden? Would you tell them to just get over themselves?

Would you condescend to them the way you have to me: to say that by disagreeing with Grazer, I'm pouring bile and ruining blogs? I had an opinion about what he said and engaged in a dialogue. You are the one who tries to psychoanalyze and personalize that, to separate it from the substance of the discussion, Britt.

Britt then goes on to give a spiel he tried to give to me at e-Tech a year ago -- and he's no more successful getting me to drink his Kool-Aid now than he was then. Britt was a Vietnam pilot and he likes to talk about the cool and unemotional reserve of a warrior pilot. I wonder whether it's some odd effort to bring together his Vietnam warrior days with his Deaniac peacenik days -- but then, that would be psychoanalyzing him, wouldn't it?

The question we need to ask ourselves is whether we should model our behavior on poorly-trained, superstitious Muslim terrorists or on our own highly trained military aviators? Because hatred and revenge are the M.O. of terrorists, not cool-headed warriors, we lower ourselves to their standards by relying on their fuels of choice: hatred and revenge. I submit that the work we must do is too important to rely on passion as our fuel. Rather, we must adopt the smart attitudes that are effective, rather than the compelling, visceral passions that feel so good.

9/11 was a wake up call to a reality that we've been living in for forty years but have been unable to face. Devolving into ritualized, repetitious rants about how the enemy is evil and that there are no good enemies and no bad friendlies is worse than sophomoric. It's simply ill-informed and stupid and has been proven to be so by so many wars and jihads that to misunderstand those learnings is a conscious choice to embrace the only dark side available to us: ignorance and superstition that's been proven wrong.

Like our own Vietnam vets who've gone back and had tea with their former enemies and shared family photos and wept together, we too will some day sit down with former terrorists and meet the humans within. As will they. It has happened every time, with all the Gooks, Nips, Huns, Slopes and Ragheads that we've ever railed against as we firebombed their homes for no apparent military gain.

Once again, he messes up the analogy: We went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq and now we are sitting down with Afghans and Iraqis to help them build democracies -- but we damned well should not be sitting down with the terrorists in either nation -- including the murdering slime in the post below -- anymore than we should have sat down with the SS after World War II. By this logic, we should have canceled the Nuremberg trials and held an ice cream social: "Whipped cream, Herr Goering? Cherry, Herr Streicher? Please share your feelings, Herr von Rippentrop."

And I most certainly believe that hate is an important weapon. If we let down our guard now and think that the terrorists are merely misunderstood, then we open the door to their next attack on our children.

I'm not a soldier, Britt. Your analogies don't work for me. I'm a civilian. And it was as a civilian on my way to work that I witnessed mass murder that day. So don't tell me I have to follow your orders to be cool under fire. I'm not in your army. Scared? Well, as much as I also bristle at your macho-military attempt to belittle and demean that perfectly sane reaction, I will say that, of course, I was scared and I still am and so should you be, so should America be. Personal? You bet your ass it's personal. But I wasn't talking about that in the post you didn't like. I was talking about the portrayal of mass murderers in network entertainment and wrote my opinion about that. You are the one who tried to make the discussion personal. And I am responding personally: I am insulted by your post.

Spammer

: I just got comment spam from this piece of monkeyshit. Why don't you go and tell him what you think of spammers?

Bastards

: I was passing through the newsstand in Grand Central yesterday just as, on TV sets hanging from the ceiling, FoxNews was showing the video of terrorist bastards shooting down a civilian hellicopter in Iraq and then killing the lone survivor. The place practically stopped. People all around the store just stood and looked up at the screens. Some, like me, just kept shaking their heads.

These are not insurgents. To call them terrorists would be to dignify them. They are murderers.

Mainstreaming media (continued)

: As is his habit, David Weinberger started a fascinating conversation out of his decision to wipe off his TV makeup and leave the set of mainstream media. Here's his original post. Pay special attention to the comments there, including Jay Rosen's nattering dialogue with David. Here's my response to David. And in the comnents here, David responded in turn and here's the juicy bit:

... - It'd be easy to pretend this is a simple situation: Bad MSM, good bloggers. And, frankly, at this point I do believe that the mainstream media's values have been corrupted. So, taken as generalizations, yeah, sure bad MSM, good bloggers. But specific real cases are always complex. We have producers who are terrific people, and who may wish they could do more news and less crap. We have bloggers out to promote the blogosphere but in an environment where we don't get to set the rules. We have the usual melange of human motivation, as Jeff so honestly declares. It's complex, and simple reactions such as "Fuck 'em, I quit" can be betrayals of the complex nature of the situation. I had the flu and was presented with an egregious case of media pandering -- the Jane Fonda spit fest -- so I blurted out that this wasn't for me. I reduced a complex situation to a binary choice. I'm not sorry, but I'm not proud either.
And I said:

David:

I did not address the important issue you raised in your post -- really, at the start of Jay Rosen's socratic badgering of you in the comments there -- and again in your response here. And it's the real issue, of course:

Have "mainstream media's values been corrupted"?

Well, uh, duh, yeah. See Michael Jackson, OJ, cable-news yellfests, witchhunts, local TV pyromania... everybody has a catalogue.

And you are not of mainstream media.

So correct me if I'm wrong, but here's what happened: Touched by those MSM cooties and fearing contamination, you recoiled and shouted inside: "Let me out! Let me out! Before it's too late!"

I, on the other hand, corrupted and cootied since age 17, recognize and live with those issues but find small joy in small change: "Bloggers on TV. Cool!"

The danger for a few of the commenters on your post -- not you, and you specifically pushed this notion aside -- is that they would reject mainstream media out of hand and wholly, throwing out the value of journalism along with its present-day folly.

The danger for me is that I ignore and add to the corruption: I answer the question, "What's the blogosphere saying about Michael Jackson, Jeff?" and I take small -- but still too much -- pride in quoting you, as it so happens, asking: "How do the journalists there -- people who got into the business because they are committed to an informed democracy -- feel about this outlandish pandering?" Oh, I asked the question. I even told the folks in little boxes on the screen with me that you were talking about us. But I didn't answer your question.

So that's the danger: corruption and cooties extend into our new and virginal not-a-medium-and-we-still-don't-know-what-to-call-what-ever-it-is: Bloggers, too, end up exhibiting the values of Michael-Jacksoned mainstream media. Let us out! Before it's too late!

But, of course, as you well recognize, there is also an opportunity: Bridging the gap, the separation (Jay Rosen's word), that has grown between the press and the public it serves. I believe blogs are the agent of that change, the bridge that can bring the press back to its public. And I believe they can do that best when they are heard. And that's why I find small joy in the MSNBC segments and CNN segments and Business Week cover story: Citizens speak. For only 90 seconds, perhaps. On an often-odd list of topics that MSM still picks and agendas it still sets. With all the odd hoo-ha of TV and slick publishing. But in still small voices, they speak. And that's good.

But let me make clear who wins in that exchange:

Blogs don't need mainstream media.

Mainstream media needs blogs.

April 22, 2005

Jumping the shark elephant (continued)

: John Podhoretz comes as close as I can imagine someone in the New York Post coming to confessing that the Republicans have crossed a few lines and gotten themselves into a political twist:

Ever since the Terry Schiavo controversy took its unexpected turn against the Right in polls — I say "unexpected" because major Democratic politicians acted as though they thought the issue would benefit the GOP when it was taken up in Congress back in February — Republicans are privately worried that they're losing touch with the American people.

The president's decision to focus the first months of his second term on Social Security reform seems to have backfired, with the public reacting skeptically and nervously about any change to the national pension system. And the media assault on House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is beginning to pay off, in part because DeLay's undeniable tactical brilliance as a legislator is matched only by his advanced case of foot-in-mouth disease....

Add to this a 1,000-point decline in the stock market occasioned in part by rising oil prices and fears of inflation, and you might say that this is the spring of Republican discontent.

There's a lot of dark talk in Republican and conservative circles about the mainstream media — about the one-sidedness of the coverage of current political issues and how the American people are being manipulated, especially on the Terri Schiavo matter.

No question about it, the media are on the prowl against the GOP — but there's something unseemly about the right-wing whining.

This is why I like Podhoretz: He calls bullshit, even sometimes when it's his party's bullshit.

Vote for Tony

: I agree with every word of Tom Friedman's column endorsing Tony Blair... and I laughed at this:

Remember, in the darkest hours of the Iraq drama, when things were looking disastrous (and there have been many such hours), Mr. Bush could always count on the embrace of his own party and the U.S. conservative media machine and think tanks.

Tony Blair, by contrast, dined alone. He had no real support group to fall back on. I'm not even sure his wife supported him on the Iraq war. (I know the feeling!)

Mainstreaming media

: David Weinberger -- one of the five smartest and most decent people I've met in blogs (go ahead and guess the other four) -- fired himself from the (unpaid) blog gig on MSNBC after they suggested he should find mainstream blog reaction to that rude and ridiculous phooey ptooey into Jane Fonda's face. Go read his tale here and then Ed Cone's reaction and return and I'll tell you mine:

I like working with MSNBC on the blog segments, but I do it under different circumstances:

First, I've done TV, back in the days when I was a TV critic and I was called on to give views from the mountaintop on such profound topics as whither Cosby or whether Leno. So I've already made a fool of myself and experienced the hoo-ha of it all and that strange wave of sweaty embarrassment that comes over you when the lights go off.

Second, I'm already mediaman (by day and blogboy by night). I sold out to the man at age 17 -- and became the man sometime in my 30s -- and so I'm all too accustomed to the means and modes of mainstream media.

Third, because I work only a few miles from, as they say, MSNBC World Headquarters in beautiful downtown Secaucus, New Jersey, I've been in the studio many times and I've gotten to know and like the producers on Connected, the show that does most of the blog segments. Sharon Newman, the exec producer, is great: a pro's pro who's decisive and supportive and fun (when she speaks into my ear after a segment and tells me I done good when I fear I just went over the top, it makes everything OK). Her team of hard-working producers is wonderful to work with. The daytime booking boss, Mike Tanaka, was a dorm neighbor in college. Our worldwide blog friend Joe Trippi is involved. Cohost Monica Crowley has been warm and welcoming. And Ron Reagan called me Blog Daddy. So I have a direct connection you just don't get when you only stare into a black eye.

I have not yet had a case where they tried to get me to say something with which I would be uncomfortable -- and if they had, I wouldn't have done it. I ask what stories they are working on for the show to see whether I can find related blog comment (and sometimes, that yields more than one blog segment), but I often go in a different direction. A few times, they asked me whether I could find blog comment on a story they were working on, I said I couldn't, and they were fine with it. Once, though, I pooh-poohed their suggestion and I was wrong: The second time they wanted me to find Terry Schiavo blog links, I rolled my eyes and sighed and said that I was sure I couldn't because the first time I'd tried, all I saw was blog prayers (an oxymoron, to be sure). But then I looked for Schaivo discussion and I found I was way off: There was a flood of comment from many perspectives. By the fourth or fifth time I did Schiavo links, though, I will also confess that we were well into OD territory.

David objects to being asked to find mainstream bloggers from column-A and column-B -- as is the cable news habit -- on a mainstream topic. I understand that.

But I have found that I have been able to leave the mainstream often. In the midst of the pretty-much-endless fawnfest over Pope Benedict XVI, I was glad to be able to quote from Andrew Sullivan's fears and trepidations at length. I have said more than once that blogs do not give the attention to Michael Jackson that TV news does and in one case -- when MSNBC and other cable networks put up clocks waiting for Jackson to arrive in court -- I quoted none other than David Weinberger expressing disgust at this and said that the hosts and I were at fault in this OD. I've talked about Maylasian blog pioneer Jeff Ooi's and Bahraini bloggers' problems with authorities. I've had plenty of bloggers I've quoted, apparently out of nowhere, who've email me and asked where the hell I found them (that's my secret). I've quoted mainstream bloggers here and there but most of the time, I've tried to find new voices I hadn't read before.

So why do I do this? Well, so far, it ain't for the money (zilch). Instead, I do it for:

1. Ego. I'll admit it. I like being on TV.

2. New voices. I'm not sure I deserve credit for this -- even though she has given me some -- but I quoted LaShawn Barber -- even though she and I disagree about many or most topics -- and she has ended up on MSNBC often. I got Kathy Shaidle in on the pope segment the other night. It's good to see big media finally listen to the voices of new people. And I measure diversty not by gender or race but by the freshness of the perspective.

3. Promoting blogs. Triumphalist that I am, I'm glad to see big media include citizens' media. And on MSNBC, vs. CNN, they have bloggers quoting bloggers.

4. Learning. I am learning a helluva about TV. As anyone who has watched any of my segments can attest, I have a lot more to learn. But I've gotten more comfortable staring into that black eye and telling a story. And I'm still jazzed that I got to broadcast from my den on my blogcam.

Could the segments be better? Of course. Are there issues? Yes, there are: As I mentioned once, they had a blogger on during the Schaivo story who went off a deepend and started talking about how Terry talked when they took the tubes out (and they didn't have a means of either making sure the guy wouldn't go wacky or issuing a caveat when he did... welcome to open TV). Would I chose every topic I report on? No, but neither would I have chosen many of the stories I had to write for newspapers or magazines (but in blogs, I get to chose every story I mention -- and I'm spoiled now).

Having said all that, I absolutely understand David's discomfort and support his decision (as he supports mine to be on the segments). Everytime I drive to the MSNBC studio, I drive by the Channel 9 studios where, when I was a critic, I walked off a tacky talk show because I was uncomfortasble.

David's perspective is an important lesson for any mainstream media outlet trying to find ways to work with citizen journalists: One perspective, one mindset, one medium does not automatically and easily fit the other's mold.

But I am disappointed with a few of the comments under David's post, thwapping a rubber hammer under the kneecap to kick big, bad mainstream media for being big and bad.

I give points to MSNBC for recognizing and listening to and promoting blogs -- and bloggers -- and I look forward to seeing more of this on other networks and channels and shows in other publications. Every first step will be imperfect, but it's a first step toward opening media to new voices.