BuzzMachine
by Jeff Jarvis

June 30, 2005

Dell hell: Deus ex machina

: So the wonderful guys at EVDOinfo snuck me a new driver, due out next week, to make my high-speed Verizon card work on the newest Macs (thanks, Mike!). I went back to CompUSA (no, I don't have that much spare time; I was next door working at a Borders while I wait to pick up my son at computer camp) and installed the driver with great help from the Apple rep in the store (thanks, Bruce), who said if this worked, it would help him sell more Powerbooks. It works! There I was, connected to high-speed cellular from the store.

I swear to God at that very moment, my cell phone rang and it was a customer service person from Dell. She was calling because of the email I sent to her chief marketing officer and vice president of US Dell. She told me she'd read the emails -- and blog posts -- and get back to me. And that's fine.

But what a criminal shame that it took sending an email to the head of Dell U.S. (not that he has his email address online; I guessed it: Dell puts an underscore between the first and last names of employees) to get the first and only attempt to solve my problems.

It didn't come because they noticed I had to send the machine back and get most it replaced and send them scores of emails and wait forever to get any service and still did not have a working machine.

It didn't come because they monitored what their customers are saying online.

It came because a VP didn't want to be bothered and so they have this chain of complaint, standard.

I told the nice lady that I was in the store right then getting ready to buy an Apple.

Divine intervention may well get me out of Dell hell. But it wasn't from Dell. It was from Mike and Bruce.

Money, meet mouth

: There is a crapsquall brewing over Time Inc.'s decision (underplayed on their own site) to hand over reporter's notes in the Plame case to the court. See Tom Watson and Chris Geidner and Staci Kramer's thoughtful post here.

I want to add one thing: When I saw a picture of Time reporter Matthew Cooper with his wife, Mandy Grunwald (whom I met maybe once when I was at Time Inc.) and child, I thought of my own scene at the hearth and wondered: Would I have the courage to go to jail to protect a source? After watching Oz (not meant flippantly), I honestly wonder. I support the war in Iraq, but when I see pictures of the violence there or the fatherless families back home, I also have to wonder whether I would have the courage to go or, worse, to allow my son to. The only honest answer is that I don't know.

Did Time cave or did Time try to protect its reporter? I have no idea.

Last night, I got email from a show to come on and talk about this and I said I couldn't because, now that I'm working as a consultant for The Times, I think I'm in a conflict of interest. I'm also in a conflict of opinion; I don't know what I think about shield laws now. This is what I said to the show's producer:

I firmly believe that anyone and everyone can do journalism; I am a blog triumphalist, a proponent of citizens' media. So there should not be a special privilege for people who are somehow officially accredited as journalists -- not only because that excludes citizens who do journalism but also because it puts those credentialed at risk of having their credentials pulled by authorities. We do not want to find ourselves in that position.

Should there be a privilege? When everyone has it, there is also the danger that someone will claim privilege to hide criminal behavior: Someone will claim via a blog that they are doing journalism and have privilege and thus refuse to reveal a source of what they wrote in civil or criminal matters.

This had led many to say that privilege should not extend to criminal activities: that it is an obligation of citizens who know of criminal activity to reveal that. If that were the standard, then Miller would still not have privilege.

Frankly, I'm not sure where I come down. Ying-yangs:

I do believe in the necessity of privilege to enable the watchdogging of the powerful.

At the same time, I think we have grossly abused confidential sources in media and perhaps ruined privilege in the process.

I do think that if journalists have privilege then all citizens have privilege when they practice journalism, which now anyone can do: Anyone can publish.

I also believe there need to be limits -- for example, regarding criminal activity. But then that, too, defangs privilege.

So the long and the short of it is is... and this is rare for a blogger or a TV guest to say: I don't know.

As Groucho used to say...

: There has been a rousing discussion on the Media Bloggers Association's listserv about whether the MBA should have a code of ethics and standards and such. Well, actually, the discussion started with what kind of code it should be to get a committee going on the task. I entered the word "whether" into the discussion.

I said I didn't think we should have a code, echoing what I'd said in reaction to Bayosphere's pledge here and here. I believe codes are for institutions that have lost their humanity while blogs are human and trust here is measured every day by everyone with whom we interact. And I don't want to see blogs turn into institutions and closed societies. I also agree with Fred Wilson that lists of the Top N this or Top N that are silly in a medium where the meat's in the middle, where everyone determines their own Top N lists and where the top for everybody becomes merely a least common denominator. (I will confess to coveting Technoratijuice but rationalize faw egotism in that case because that it's about links rather than lists and it enables the conversation; this is also why I enjoyed blogebrity skewering the lists and those on them by creating one with no rationale except random ego tweaking; and this is why I didn't link to another Top list that just came out).

I also want to say that I wasn't crazy about the discussion occurring on a listserv rather than on the open web. Ditto some great discussions that have occurred out of a few Harvard confabs. Listservs (let alone ones from Harvard...) are closed conversations themselves and I think we get the wisdom of the crowds (and the lack thereof in isolated cases) when discussions are held in public.

Well, today Corante's Dana Blankenhorn took the MBA discussion public with a bang -- a bang on my head.

I figure a group like the MBA could at least enforce simple rules by creating valuable member benefits and kicking out those who refuse to conform, following some objective process.

But that’s not how it’s going down, mainly due to one person, Jeff Jarvis (right).

Jarvis wants no standards, and certainly no policing. Might as well disband the committee.

“Why pledge to be honest? Only if you're assumed to be dishonest.
Used car salesmen should take the pledge. My blog friends do not need to.”

No objective measures of ethics, thus anything goes. Want to lie, misrepresent, ignore facts, engage in personal destruction for the sheer fun-raising hell of it? Heck, there’s no such thing as truth. We define what’s truth based on who yells the loudest.

Well, pardon my language but bullshit. There’s a fine line between libertarian and anarchist, and Jeff Jarvis just crossed it.

And on... and on... Go read the rest there.

Since this is in public, where it should be, I'll quote (obnoxiously) from my own emails that said why I think we need to look at the world differently. (I'll leave it to others to quote their on views on their own blogs.)

It may be contrarian of me, but I will argue that we should not adopt a code of ethics and standards. That is for institutions to declare because they lose touch with their publics. Weblogs are, in the end, people and, as in our everyday lives, we exhibit our ethics and standards without swearing to codes.

I have my pesonal code of ethics. You have yours. They probably all boil down to this: Be honest. But we shouldn't have to pledge to be honest; that should be assumed. Or to put it another way: If you have to pledge to be honest, then you have a problem.

I do not think we should mimic the trade groups of media; we are something new and different and need to explore new ways....


This is also about educating the world -- particularly the world of big media -- about weblogs: that a parody NYTimes correction site from Bob Cox is news/commentary/journalism just as is an interview on Pressthink just as is an editing of the best of big media on Winds of Change... and that the voice of one citizen speaking -- which is what a weblog is -- is just as valuable in the public discourse as the voice of the guy who owns the printing press. In the end, it is up to the person on the other end of conversation, formerly known as the reader, to judge the credibility and ethics of any of us: Trust is in the eye of the beholder. It always has been, only journalists forgot that as they thought they could control this aspect of the relationship with the public as they controlled others: They wrote codes of ethics and decided what's ethical and what's trustworthy. Or they thought they did. I hope we can start to show how we have a new relationship with our publics....


[In response to an email about how bloggers and journalists do different things:] I disagree that "the rules and expectations are different for each." We are all bloggers and there is not blanket rule about what a blogger -- or a journalist -- is and isn't and I wouldn't like to see one. Bloggers do journalism. Journalists do blogging. To make a sharp line is to start excluding people and their activities and voices. That is antithetical to blogging, in my view....


This is also about educating the world -- particularly the world of big media -- about weblogs: that a parody NYTimes correction site from Bob Cox is news/commentary/journalism just as is an interview on Pressthink just as is an editing of the best of big media on Winds of Change... and that the voice of one citizen speaking -- which is what a weblog is -- is just as valuable in the public discourse as the voice of the guy who owns the printing press. In the end, it is up to the person on the other end of conversation, formerly known as the reader, to judge the credibility and ethics of any of us: Trust is in the eye of the beholder. It always has been, only journalists forgot that as they thought they could control this aspect of the relationship with the public as they controlled others: They wrote codes of ethics and decided what's ethical and what's trustworthy. Or they thought they did. I hope we can start to show how we have a new relationship with our publics.

This is about more than a bit of high-school hallway snarking (though, as one unnamed member said in email to me: at least high school had girls!). This is about more than what this organization should be about. It's about what blogging is.

I have to constantly kick myself to stop thinking of blogging in big-media terms, to stop judging it by the top of the power law and in silly lists, to stop assuming that bloggers want to do what media does, to stop thinking that blogging has to be media, to stop thinking of blogs as publications and remember that they are people.

I keep trying to hear Doc Searls and David Weinberger in my ear as they insist that this isn't a medium and it's not content. It's new.

I don't want to see blogging turn into just another old media institution. But I don't think it can. It is that new.

So perhaps I'm the odd one out. Scratch the perhaps. I am an odd one out, but just one of many. That's why I blog.

As I said in an earlier post on all this, perhaps the real lesson for me is that I'm not a joiner: Let those who want to start their societies start them and I should stay out of the way and drift from this conversation to that one, the social nomad.

Is the blogosphere a society of joiners or a vast plain of nomads? That's the real question, isn't it?

The pity in not joining would be that there is strength in numbers when it comes to support, education, defense, lobbying, selling and, besides, blog confabs are a lot of fun. So I still ask: Do we need codes and standards to have that?

Apple heaven?

: So I just went into a CompUSA to see whether a Powerbook would work with my Verizon Novatel V620 EVDO card. The nice man let me install the helpful ap from EVDOinfo. But when I put the card in, the Mac doesn't recognize it, doesn't ask me to configure it, only lets me power it down. Any help? For the want of a card, heaven is mine, sayeth the Jobs. A nice commenter told me the guys here are experts, so I emailed them as well (imposing to ask for free advice).

: I just got a most generous dose of help from the folks linked above who run the incredibly helpful (am I gushing?) EVDOinfo. Bottom line: In a week, they should have something that will work better on the lastest OS X. Thanks, guys.

Guten tag

: Sean Bonner's Metblogs just added one of my favorite cities: Berlin.

Dell hell, neverending

: OK, I'm going to the Apple store and putting in my EVDO card and if it works, I'm walking out with a real computer.

After four days, I still have not heard from the reputed supervisor who Sunday said I'd get a new disk drive but still, after three emails from me, has not followed through to get it to me. The wireless networking is now completely schizo: it thinks it's not working when it is and is working when it's not. And this morning, I woke up to another blue screen of death, a fine way to start the day.

I just sent this email to Michael George, chief marketing office and vice president for US consumer business:

Mr. George:

Since you are in charge of both marketing and Dell's U.S. operation, I think you would find it instructive to look at your own files to see how I am being handled by your company after having just bought a machine -- my third and last Dell -- that is broken in innumerable ways.

I am writing about this on my weblog in detail and you are losing customers by the day... including me. I am going to the Apple store in one hour. You may go read what I've written here. But first, I urge you to read what consumers say in the comments there. And before that, again, please read your own customer service email trail first and tell me whether this represents the best of the Dell brand.

In its first two weeks of use, this machine has so far gotten a new motherboard... cpu... memory... keyboard... wireless networking... and case. The disk drive is so bad it won't even run your diagnostic. The wireless networking still does not work. The machine goes to the blue screen of death frequently. The keyboard is still faulty.

I paid for both at-home service and complete care but have received neither. Your at-home care is a fraud; your own person has said in writing that the technician would arrive without parts sufficient to fix the machine. Complete care? The machine is clearly a lemon under federal warranty statutes and regulations and you'd be better off just to replace it. If it just burned up -- which it has come close to doing -- you'd send me a new one. But instead, your people put me through service hell. And I am left unable to do my work because I have an unreliable Dell computer.

The email trail is positively frightening. Your people don't even pay sufficient attention to get my name right. Sunday, a reputed supervisor told me I needed a new disk drive but I cannot get them to reply to three emails to follow through and get me that.

My readers on my weblog have been very helpful. They have said I was an idiot to buy Dell and its service plan and that I should get an Apple as soon as possible.

The last straw: Four days without a response from your alleged supervisor about a disk drive and one more blue screen of death today as the machine can't figure out whether its wireless is on or off.

This machine is a lemon. Your at-home and complete care service is a fraud. Your customer service is appalling. Your product is dreadful. Your brand is mud.

But at least perhaps you can learn from the experience.

Sincerely,

Jeff Jarvis

I also just noticed that Dell has a chief ethics officer. So I forwarded the note to him.

: And here's a new one: Now the machine doesn't recognize that it has Bluetooth. Somebody shoot this poor animal and put it out of its misery!

June 29, 2005

Catching up

: The web has always been about sharing and creation. It has always been the medium of the people, with big companies horning in. Now a bunch of big companies -- with John Markoff reporting -- are just catching up to this notion and they think it's new. No, only their realization is new.

Indeed, the abundance of user-generated content - which includes online games, desktop video and citizen journalism sites - is reshaping the debate over file sharing. Many Internet industry executives think it poses a new kind of threat to Hollywood, the recording industry and other purveyors of proprietary content: not piracy of their work, but a compelling alternative.

The new services offer a bottom-up creative process that is shifting the flow of information away from a one-way broadcast or publishing model, giving rise to a wave of new business ventures and touching off a scramble by media and technology companies to respond.

"Sharing will be everywhere," said Jeff Weiner, a Yahoo senior vice president in charge of the company's search services. "It's the next chapter of the World Wide Web."

With all due respect, Jeff, that's a load of Yahooie. Maybe that's the next chapter for Yahoo but the internet from its very first day about about sharing links and content and conversation and ideas and about connecting people so they can share all that. Wake up and smell the web, man.

Hell, even AOL knew this. Three years ago, at Foursquare, I asked Jonathan Miller how much time his users spent on user-created content and he said 60-70 percent of the time. I use that slide in my blog-boy speech (available for hire -advt.) to say that the people value the content the people create. Only now are media learning to value it. Witness this very story.

Markoff goes on:

Many Internet developers think that the Internet's new phase will shift power away from old-line media and software companies while rapidly bringing about an age of computerized "augmentation" by blending the skills of tens of thousands of individuals.
But what do you think Google is? It is the collected wisdom of millions of individuals. What do you think blogs are? Yup, the aggregated wisdom of millions more. Flickr, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and other functional innovations are merely ways to further explore and enable that potential.

I'm glad the true essence of the internet is getting recognized. And at least it's ahead of Marshall column, below.

Look beyond the headlines, continued

: In today's Times, John Burns and Edward Wong write a piece reported by Iraqi reporters under the headline Some Iraqis Optimistic About Sovereignty. I think I'm seeing a trend here, following Jennifer Eccleston's story on CNN last night finding the progress that is occurring in Iraq. But just as in that story, they could not report good news as balance to all the bad -- or as an attempt to find the clearer picture of what is happening -- without throwing in more bad.

Here is Burns' lead:

When Shaker Assal was approached in his butcher's shop on Tuesday and asked what he thought about life in Iraq a year after it resumed formal sovereignty, he responded with a blast of invective as heated as the sunbaked sidewalks in his Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliya.
But read down six paragraphs and you'll find this:
But in an informal survey of opinions across Baghdad conducted on Tuesday by Iraqi reporters on the staff of The New York Times, the butcher's outburst was a relatively rare case of untempered hostility for the Americans and the Iraqi governments they have worked with in the past year....
And read down two graphs more:
But perhaps more striking, considering the huge gap between the hopes stirred when American troops captured Baghdad in April 2003 and the grim realities now, were the number of Iraqis who expressed a more patient view. Among those people, the disappointments and privations have been offset by an appreciation of both the progress toward supplanting the dictatorship of Mr. Hussein with a nascent democratic system and the need for American troops to remain here in sufficient numbers to allow the system to mature.
And if that was the essence of the story, why wasn't it the lead?

Take these two episodes together with Bush's speech last night (which I didn't get to watch live thanks to a business call; I read it in the paper this morning) and we continue to see that the war at home is a war of PR. Now I know that many couldn't stand when I cast the Bush execution of his policy and the Downing Street Memo in the light of PR. Fine. But the impression of the war in Iraq -- the bad news and good news, the perception of progress or lack of progress, the enmity or optimism of the Iraqis themselves -- obviously has a very direct impact on the support for the war here, witness the polls, and thus the execution of it in Iraq. What we see in these two stories is an inability to report progress -- which itself is a form of balance to all the car-bombing stories -- without balancing the balancing with more dark clouds. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Living in the past

: Marshall Loeb just wrote a blog-belittling column at Marketwatch. I have some personal history on this with Marshall, who's a very nice guy, and so let me start there. We worked together years ago at Time Inc.

Didn't hear from Marshall for years upon years. But a few weeks ago, he found himself on a panel about blogging at some press association or another and so he called me to find out what this blogging this is all about. He said he didn't know a thing. I filled him in as best I could in 20 minutes as I dashed from meeting to meeting in New York. Apparently, I was bad salesman now Marsh delivers his blog broadside, a bit late to the party:

Blogging can be both a cost-effective and time-efficient way of connecting with people, providing many benefits that can enrich your life.

Some of the benefits are:

* Creating a family network of blogs to keep yourselves updated on the goings-on of your far-away relatives.
* Turning blogs into scrapbooks where you can upload and post digital photos. This saves you the cost of getting film processed, and sharing your blog with others is free.
* Encouraging your young children to create a blog that keeps track of their daily activities and chores. Also, your new college-bound kids can keep blogs so that you won't feel like they're so far away.

So those are the benefits of blogs: quaint personal, family gimmicks. But dangers lurk there.
But not everything is perfect, and here are some warnings about blogs:

* Don't trust everything you read in blogs. While more and more news organizations and companies are creating blogs of their own, many blogs are filled with false information.
* Never keep a blog in which you trash the company you work for or your boss. Also, never put your company's sensitive or inside information in your blog. There have already been cases in which people have been fired for blogging about their employers. It might be tempting to use a blog to vent your work-related frustrations, but it could come back to haunt you.
* Don't give out too much personal information in your blog. Even using your real name, rather than a pseudonym, puts you at risk. We live in an age of identity theft and you don't want to unwittingly give thieves a road map to your personal records or financial information.

Well, thanks. Next, can you tell us how to get rid of that dangnabbed flashing 12 on our VCRs?

Marshall was, by the way, the executive at Time Inc. who first rejected my proposal for Entertainment Weekly -- six years before it ended up launching. As the head of magazine development, he parrotted the words of Henry Grunwald, then editor-in-chief of Time Inc., saying that such a magazine about the full range of entertainment could not possibly succeed because people who watch TV do not read. Ahem.

June 28, 2005

Look beyond the headlines

: On tonight's Anderson Cooper 360, he urged us to "look beyond the headlines" and you will see that "some things have improved on the ground in Iraq." Well, yes, considering that the headlines are all bad, you'd have to look beyond them. He hands over to CNN's Jennifer Eccleston for "that side of the story."


JENNIFER ECCLESTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The big day has arrived for Piras Odisho and ---. Despite the daily disruptions to life in Baghdad, a rising number of young couples like them are taking the plunge.

PIRAS ODISHO, GROOM (translator): Life must go on. There must be marriages and happiness.

ECCLESTON: Marriages are up 30 percent since Saddam's overthrow and the judge signing their wedding contract thinks he knows why.

GHANI AL-ISAA, JUDGE (translator): There is an increase since the income of all sectors of Iraqi people has gone up.

ECCLESTON: Measuring Iraq's economic health is not an exact science, but those in work, like the 350 judges trained in the past two years, are better paid, thanks to U.S. subsidies.

The Iraqi dinar holds its value. Gone is the rampant inflation of the '90's. There are more goods in the shops, in part, thanks to low import duties and a thriving black market.

It's estimated that there's five times more traffic on Baghdad's roads than there was pre-war and then, there is, what some call, the freedom index. In January, nearly 60 percent of Iraqis voted, choosing from a wide variety of parties. The assembly they voted for is meeting and is beginning to frame a new constitution for Iraq and 25 Sunni delegates are participating.

Internet cafes, unknown under Saddam, have sprung up in Baghdad. There are more than three million telephone subscribers, compared to fewer than a million before the war and many of them are on cell phones. Some 170 independent newspapers and magazines offer competing opinions and there are 80 commercial radio stations.

Wealthier Iraqis have satellite dishes and watch channels from around the world, a luxury unthinkable three years ago. Much of the country away from the Sunni dominated north and west is not racked by sectarian violence and some 150,000 Iraqi security forces are trained, equipped, and playing a larger role in battling the insurgents.

Well, bravo, at long last, major media concedes that the agenda it has set in Iraq -- of unrelenting doom -- has another side. But they can't leave it at that. She returns to say:
Now, despite the undeniable progress in Iraq, one year after the handover of sovereignty, the grinding violence, the lack of personal security, the hardships of day-to-day living, not enough power, not enough water, inadequate sanitation, this limits most Iraqis ability to believe their governments and American assertion that life is indeed improving...
Yes, we couldn't just balance months of dire coverage with a moment's good news without returning to the dire.

Faith in the White House

: I happened by the religious PAX tv tonight -- for some odd reason, it's channel 3 on my cable system -- and they're broadcasting the most incredible hagiography I've ever seen: George W. Bush: Faith in the White House. I wish I had the energy to live blog the thing but I'm too damned drunk on demon rum.

Bad taste on bad taste

: I was nonplussed (yes, it's possible) when I listened to this week's On The Media and heard a parody of cable networks devoting themselves to missing white women. In a bit borrowed from thePoorMan.net, they create a new network called Where the White Women At. Now that would have been funny after the attack of bridevision but right now when the missing white woman of the week is a teenager presumed murdered on an island... well, this was in uncharacterically bad taste, I'd say.

Googlewood

: Google put up its new video service but I'm not on it. As soon as they announced they were taking submissions weeks ago, I put up a vlog just to see how it worked. Now Google's video service and player are up but I can't find it. No idea why: Not up to Google's high standards ("Love ya, babe, but your dialogue needs some work")... pissed off Google... need a new agent. Doing the latest new ego search, it did find two videos that mentioned me... but those videos, from PBS, are not available, only searchable. Drat. And I was so ready for my close-up.

Dell hell, continued: Self-service

: So Dell knows that my hard drive is broken but after two days, I still haven't received a reply to the latest email, in which they said they'd set up a service call to get it replaced, whatever that means.

I was thinking about this service process, in which Dell and other computer makers make us suffer through service with them. They take some S&M glee in making us wait on hold and talk to their people for hours (costing them money, by the way).

In what other consumer product or service do we have to have such a role in service?

When my car breaks, I drop it off and tell them what's wrong and leave. They fix it. They verify it's fixed. They don't make me get into the greasepit with them.

When my electricity goes fritz at home, I call in the electrician and tell him what's wrong and he fixes it and tests it and I pay him and thank him. I don't have to hang out with him and hand him wirestrippers.

But with computers, we are expected to suffer through the process; we aren't allowed to say, "Just fix it: The machine you made is broken so fix it and make sure it's fixed."

Why the hell do we tolerate this?

Film at 11... and 12... and 1... and 2...

: Every TV news outlets played and replayed the tapes of the BTK killer coldly recounting his crimes yesterday. I watched it on MSNBC. After I left there last night, I listened to it in my car (via Sirius) on Fox and CNN, where Anderson Cooper devoted his entire show to the confession, saying that we would learn something.

But would we? What do we learn from the sick and evil?

I had the same reaction when I first watched Oz and as a result gave it a bad review in TV Guide... though I confess that I did end up watching the series, became riveted by it, couldn't stay away.

Not to trivialize them by comparison, but we do the same with the perpetrators of massive crimes.

What is it about watching the worst in us? Is it merely sensationalistic voyeurism? Is is relief that we're sane? Is it bad taste?

So I'm not sure what I think of last night's instant obsession with the BTK video. I certainly don't think it was educational. I did think there was something wrong about intruding on this last moment of truth for the victims and their families. I was a little bit ashamed of us all for showing and watching the tapes. But I can't help but be chilled by the dead-cold soul of this man.

Did I listen to his words passively as producers packed them into the shows I tuned into? Yes.

Did I understand the judgment that went into playing these sickly compelling scenes? Of course. I'm a tab editor myself. I preach "impact."

But here's the new question: In a new world of get-the-news-I-want-when-I-want-it, would I have clicked on a link to watch the confession if I knew what I would hear? No, I don't know why I would have.

So when we become our own editors and producers and pick the news we really want instead of the news others think we want, will we still be voyeurs? Or will we reveal the tabloid editors and producers to have been right about us all along? Who will end up having better or more sensational news judgment: the people or the press?

June 27, 2005

We're forever blowing....

: What do these two headlines have in common?

: Google passes $300 per share.

: $60.54 per barrel.

Ecstasy, that's what.

: Oh, and add this: three bedrooms for $2.5 mil.

Do not build it. Not there.

: Both The New York Times and the New York Post editorialized on the fight over the International Freedom Center and Drawing Center at Ground Zero. Of course, they don't agree. But they both show what a mistake it was for Gov. Pataki to put himself -- and all of us -- in this most uncomfortable position:

When you put these opportunities to speak at such a place you will, of course, have controversy that can offend some. And if you try to stop that controversy, you will be accused of censorship.

That is why it should not be built. Not there. Let the discussion and disagreement and controversy and art occur elsewhere. Let the memorial happen there.

Says The Times:

Gov. George Pataki's decision to side with increasingly vocal critics of the cultural plans for the World Trade Center site is not surprising, but it is alarming. The governor has been deeply and rightly sensitive to the concerns of the families of the victims of 9/11. Like all of us, he honors their loss and their grief. But by bowing to some of the survivors' growing hostility to any version of 9/11 except their own, Mr. Pataki is doing a disservice to history and to the very idea of freedom.
That's practically nasty to the families. It also assumes that this is an issue for the families only. It's not.
The protesters - and the governor - seem to have little faith in the emotional power of the memorial to the victims, which will be the central focus of ground zero, emotionally, politically and architecturally.
This almost puts them at war: the memorial overshadowing the centers.
But it is meant to remember something more than a day of tragedy. It's meant to remember the lives of those who died there, lives that were rich, complex and politically and culturally divided.

What those lives stand for now is American freedom, in its full implication and all its contradictions.

Loaded word, "contradictions." Yes, that's exactly what the IFC sought to examine. It seeks to probe controversy. Not there. The Times calls that censorship. Not if it is moved elsewhere, it's not.

The Post says:

Gov. Pataki — despite his assurances to the contrary Friday, and despite what some newspaper editorialists may choose to believe — couldn't keep "Piss Flag" out of the Drawing Center even if he wanted to, even if he were still in office.

Defenders of trash, and compliant judges, would surely block any effort to "censor" works.

Similarly, "scholars" like, say, Ward Churchill — the nut who compared World Trade Center workers to Nazis — won't be easily stopped from gaining a forum at the International Freedom Center (IFC), also planned for the site.

Maybe these cynical showmen deserve that forum.

Click Here!

But not at Ground Zero.

The Post calls for "banning" the groups. No. They should merely be moved. The Post says they should move themselves:
Citing "inevitable tensions," a statement from the center said: "The dilemmas raised by this juxtaposition are challenging . . . Clearly, the Drawing Center, like any other cultural institution, has a responsibility to its mission."

Actually, we couldn't agree more.

Which is why, if these two groups had decency, they'd bow out on their own.

Clearly, they wouldn't want to compromise their independence. Nor lead the governor, and the public, to think they could meet his requirements and still carry out their missions faithfully.

Again, the only solution is for these groups to locate off-site.

Yes.

***cialis***

: I had to put "cialis" in my comment-spam filter to stay ahead of the swine. But, of course, this is stopping people from putting up legitimate words. I should fix that. But I'm kind of enjoying the discovery. First, they couldn't say "socialism" and thought I was trying to turn that into a dirty word. Now it's "specialist." Can we ask the makers of performance-enhancing drugs to please come up with names whose order of letters does not appear elsewhere in the English language?

Finite

: It's inside media-baseball, but go read David Carr's hilariously snarky column today about former Conde Nast President Steve Florio's unbook. Great lead line, calling Florio "a knockabout guy from Jamaica, Queens, blessed with a very finite set of skills - a knack for selling advertising pages and a facility for slicing the conversational baloney..."

: Oh, how I wish a birdie would put Florio's entire proposal online or ship it to someone who would.

On the air

: Barring dead celebs, I'll be on MSNBC's Connected today in the 5p hour doing the regular blog segment (Tony is exec-producing the show for two weeks). Will be talking about blog reaction to the Supreme Court decisions, the Iran election, and LBJ and the internet (below). Please leave any tips and links in the comments.

: LATER: Ian Schwartz has the video.

We win

: The Supreme Court rules that 10 commandment displays that tried to sell them violated the separation of church and state, but displays attempting to present religion as part of history are OK. Oh, some will be up in arms, but this appears to be a good ruling that, though fuzzy, stops government from selling religion without banning religion.

Quotes:

Eugene Volokh says: "I have often heard it said that the Ten Commandments are an important part of the foundation of American law, and I think that's true to a point. But here's a quick question for you: How many of the Ten Commandments are actually implemented as legally binding obligations under modern American law? (To avoid confusion, let's focus on the list in Exodus, chapter 20, King James Version, available here.)
It turns out that the answer today is pretty much three, #6 [that is, don't kill], #8 [don't steal], \and #9 [don't lie]."
Coveting thy neighbor's house is, after all, the basis of the housing bubble.

And John Podhoretz at National Review reflects the confusion about the fuzziness of the ruling:
"Why didn't the Supremes just say you could display the 10 Cs on Monday, Wed, and alternate Fridays, but not on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Or that they could be viewed inside government buildings, but only on the walls of bathrooms and in janitors' closets? Has anybody ever advanced this radical opinion -- that the five justices in question may be intelligent and thoughtful people individually, but that together they form one blithering idiot?"

We lose

: Grokster loses. Thus so do toolmakers and enablers of any sort ... which, after all, is the very definition of the internet. The decision is terribly out of sync with the future.

: Susan Crawford, who knows whereof she blogs, is awaiting the decisions to say more but offers this:

And the content industry's victory in Grokster means that inducement is officially recognized as part of contributory infringement. I'm hopeful that the test for inducement is straightforward enough that technology innovators have some certainty.

: The Wall St. Journal has a panel of legal brains discussing the import; free linkn here. Q&A with background here.

: Scotusblog has great ongoing discussion of both cases.

: Ernie Miller is way on top of the news here. Copyfight will, of course, be on top of the case.

The exploding newsroom

: The Lenslinger contemplates the future -- in a week or two -- when everyone in a newsroom has a camera and a pencil: Specialties merge, egos deflate.

Now, Young Broadcasting, KRON’s owner, is announcing that another of their stations, WKRN of Nashville, is jumping aboard the solo train. Not only that, WKRN is doing it NOW. Having already purchased 30 Sony Z1 cameras (at a mere 3 pounds apiece) along with 16 Dell laptop editors, KRN management announced an eight week training course that will transform 13 traditional news crews into 30 video journalists....

Jill Reporter-Bunny might shoot her own stuff, but chances are Chet Graytemples won’t pack his own lens when he saunters off the set long enough for a series shoot.

If he does, then that would be a revolution, one in which the star-making nature of your local news factory might indeed crumble. Imagine a TV newsroom where even the top anchor schleps gear, thus tarnishing the artifice of suave superiority inherent in the dapper newsreader model. While that’s not likely to happen, one aspect of the changing times does excite me: the gradual transformation of local correspondents from overdressed poseurs to blue-collar news gatherers.

A pixel is worth...

: A pretty blogroll.

Dell hell, still burning

: Now it's my hard drive that is so flawed I can't Ghost it and the diagnostic Dell wants me run on it won't even bother to run. So let's add up the tally: motherboard... CPU.... memory.... wireless network.... battery.... keyboard.... case.... hard drive. What's left? The Dell logo? No, that's broken, too.

Home service? Complete care? Complete crap. Earlier rants here; follow the links. Went to the Apple store today with my son. If I can prove that my EVDO Verizon card will work (so I can avoid it not working and having to pay a 10 percent restocking fee), I may well follow the light.

I just got more Dellspeak: "Ms. Kolar," says the Delly, still refusing to pay sufficient attention to get my name right -- or thinking he is being cute to find some way to insult me, "I am a Supervisor at Dell and I am concerned with the problems you are having with your computer and wish to resolve them very soon." Boilerplate babble; seen it in every email. So sincere. "In order to resolve the issue that you are facing, we need to setup a service to replace the hard drive of your system." Notice they're not telling me when they are going to ship me a hard drive or a computer or a refund. No, that will take more hours' of email back and forth with somebody else on the next shift. "Please try and understand that as per Dells policy, we can not provide you with a system exchange. System warranty is there for such failures only." Well, look at the list of everything that has gone wrong with this so-called system. I'd call that failure. But Dell won't... not yet. "After a period of thorough troubleshooting, either over the phone or through email, when a Dell technician determines that it is necessary to replace a defective hardware component." I just gave the guy exactly what he asked for: the results of his diagnostic. But, no, they have to slog me through the mud a little longer. "At that point, a replacement is dispatched or the system is taken into the depot for repairing." And what about the AT-HOME REPAIR I'm paying for? Not mentioned. "And this system is still in a repairable state, so system exchange is not a possibility at the present stage." Repairable? Says who? They've replaced damned near everything you can and it still doesn't work. I don't call that repairable. "While I say this, I don't mean that even if the system is not repaired to your satisfaction, we cannot replace it. We can exchange the system, but only after exploiting all the possible avenues of repairing." Like buying a Mac? Infriggingcredible.

Dell sucks. Dell lies. Don't buy Dell. Sell Dell.

June 26, 2005

Do not build it. Not there.

: TakeBacktheMemorial.com reports receiving more than 1,000 signatures from 9/11 family members and 18,000 signatures total in its petition not to build the International Freedom Center and Drawing Center at Ground Zero. Earlier post here.

Supporting news

: The latest Pew Research Center survey on the press is out. Kit Seelye's take from The Times:

The latest survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has found overwhelming American dissatisfaction with the news media, with a rising number of people saying that the press is "too critical of America."

And while Democrats have generally been more supportive of the press than Republicans, the survey found a marked increase in the number of Democrats who say reporters are too soft on the Bush administration....

"Republicans increasingly express the view that the press is excessively critical of the United States," the survey said, with 67 percent agreeing with that statement, compared with 42 percent in July 2002.

About one-quarter of Democrats say the press is too critical, the same level as three years ago.

Any good will that the press earned after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, appears to have eroded.

In November 2001, 69 percent of all respondents said that the press stood up for America. Only 17 percent found it too critical. At the same time, 60 percent said the press did a good job of protecting democracy while only 19 percent said it was hurting democracy.

Now, only 47 percent say the press protects democracy and 33 percent say it hurts.
But the Pew Research report says it's not all bad:
Yet despite these criticisms, most Americans continue to say that they like mainstream news outlets. By wide margins, more Americans give favorable than unfavorable ratings to their daily newspaper (80%-20%), local TV news (79%-21%), and cable TV news networks (79%-21%), among those able to rate these organizations. The margin is only slightly smaller for network TV news (75%-25%).

In fact, the favorable ratings for most categories of news organizations surpass positive ratings for President Bush and major political institutions ­ the Supreme Court, Congress, and the two major political parties.

Now that's a case of damning with faint praise if I've ever heard it....

pew1.gifBut here's the really bad news: The public believes the press less and less:

The gap is most striking between the public's evaluations of the credibility, and favorability, of their daily newspapers. The percentage saying they can believe most of what they read in their daily newspaper dropped from 84% in 1985 to 54% in 2004. But the number expressing a favorable opinion of their daily newspaper, based on those familiar enough to give a rating, declined just eight points over the same period (from 88% to 80%).
And, not surprisingly, younger Americans are getting more of their news from the internet:
One-in-four (24%) list the internet as a main source of news. Roughly the same number (23%) say they go online for news every day, up from 15% in 2000; the percentage checking the web for news at least once a week has grown from 33% to 44% over the same time period.

While online news consumption is highest among young people (those under age 30), it is not an activity that is limited to the very young. Three-in-ten Americans ages 30-49 cite the internet as a main source of news....

Fully 62% of internet news consumers say they read the websites of local or national newspapers....

People who read the newspaper online have a far less favorable opinion of network and local TV news programming than do people who read the print version, and also have a somewhat less favorable view of the daily newspaper they are most familiar with. But consumers of online newspapers feel far more favorably toward large nationally influential newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Lots more interesting stats there.

Speaking of supporting news

: Newsweek reports on codpiece snuggies.

Blogging pays

: Romenesko makes $152,163. And yes, it is a blog, albeit a self-loathing blog. [via Reynolds]

Have at me, Apple cultists

: OK, I'm so disgusted with Dell I am thinking of switching to Apple. Mind you, the entire reason I left Apple in the '90s was its very sucky laptops. But Apple has changed, eh? So have at me. Why should I?

I've also been thinking that someone should start the Lexus of laptop companies: I would pay more if I actually believed that I would get quality, albeit expensive, service, as I did with my trusty RX300.

: NEXT question: Anybody using a Mac Powerbook and the Verizon EVDO highspeed wireless card?

Sorry, Al Gore... LBJ invented the internet

: This week's On The Media has tape from the speech Lyndon Johnson gave when he signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and here's the amazing part: Like a science-fiction author, he invented the internet long before it is what we know today. Listen:

I believe the time has come to stake another claim in the name of all the people, stake a claim based upon the combined resources of communications. I believe the time has come to enlist the computer and the satellite, as well as television and radio, and to enlist them in the cause of education....

So I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge-not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and of storing information that the individual can rise.

Think of the lives that this would change:
--the student in a small college could tap the resources of a great university....
--the country doctor getting help from a distant laboratory or a teaching hospital;
--a scholar in Atlanta might draw instantly on a library in New York;
--a famous teacher could reach with ideas and inspirations into some far-off classroom, so that no child need be neglected. Eventually, I think this electronic knowledge bank could be as valuable as the Federal Reserve Bank.

And such a system could involve other nations, too--it could involve them in a partnership to share knowledge and to thus enrich all mankind.

A wild and visionary idea? Not at all. Yesterday's strangest dreams are today's headlines and change is getting swifter every moment.

I have already asked my advisers to begin to explore the possibility of a network for knowledge--and then to draw up a suggested blueprint for it.

Just do not build it!

: With short-sighted attempts to distract from the 9/11 memorial with cultural institutions, Gov. Pataki has only built himself a political hole deeper than the empty crater at the World Trade Center.

Pataki and his cohorts are now offending absolutely everyone possible.

The only solution, the only way out, is to do what the families and I have been saying:

Do not build it. Not there.

After the New York Daily News revealed yesterday that the Drawing Center is equally offensive to the International Freedom Center next door, Pataki tried to backpedal. He said he didn't want either to be "offensive." But, of course, that offended those who are putting together the exhibits and who now cry free speech. I'll fly my free-speech flag next to any other, but this is not about free speech -- at least, it wasn't until Pataki stuck his foot in his mouth. It is about the memorial. And so Pataki also offended the families for not going far enough, for not stopping these mistakes.

Pataki can't win -- because he's a loser.

Gov. George E. Pataki delivered an ultimatum to two important cultural players at ground zero yesterday, demanding "an absolute guarantee" that they would not mount exhibitions that could offend 9/11 families and pilgrims to a proposed memorial nearby.
Now that's absurd on its face: One cannot give an "absolute guarantee" of offending no one in an age of offense. So right there you see how hopeless his predicament is, a predicament he made for himself when he took over Ground Zero and tried to please everyone, pleasing no one.

The Times can't even try to be subtle about his vice:

Treading warily into the nexus of art and politics, the First Amendment and the symbolism of the twin towers site, Mr. Pataki made the demand after learning that one of the groups, the Drawing Center, has featured some politically themed and controversial artwork in its shows. A current display at its SoHo gallery, for instance, appears to make light of President Bush's description of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the Axis of Evil.

While saying that he respected artistic expression, Mr. Pataki invoked the solemnity of past battlegrounds in promising to preserve the hallowed ground in Lower Manhattan and ensure that no one will come away feeling offended by the reborn site.

"I view that memorial site as sacred grounds, akin to the beaches of Normandy or Pearl Harbor, and we will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom, or denigrates the sacrifice or courage that the heroes showed on Sept. 11," Mr. Pataki told reporters in Albany.

So don't build it, Governor. It is in your power, if you'd just realize that.
Referring to the two cultural groups, he continued, "They have to do that, or they will not be at the memorial site - to the extent that I have the ability to do that." As governor, Mr. Pataki appoints members to oversight boards for ground zero's redevelopment, and after more than a decade in office, he almost certainly has the allies and the clout to change course and block cultural institutions from the site.
There. The Times says it in front of the world: You have the power, Governor. But do you have the leadership and courage to make a decision?

The Times goes on to show the fix he's in: "Mr. Pataki's demand, which was denounced by several arts groups and Democrats as a violation of free speech..." Once given the opportunity to speak, taking it away is a most unfortunate position to put yourself in. Oh, yes, people who use this opportunity to speak offense over the graves of the innocents and heroes of that day are offensive themselves, but Pataki will not have that defense. He will be the man who cut off their speech. Or he will be the man who invited it: "At the same time, several relatives of Sept. 11 victims have complained increasingly about the location at the memorial site of the proposed cultural center for the two groups...."

So who's going to decide what's offensive, Governor? You want that job? I don't think so.

And you'll get no help from your even less testosterone rich colleague, Mayor Bloomberg:

At his own news conference yesterday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appeared to wrestle with his own sense of obligation to the site, to the governor and to First Amendment principles.

"The problem is, of course, that you can probably not find any reputable cultural institution any place in the world where some of what they display or do would be appropriate there, but not appropriate at this site," he said. "And so the balance has got to be, and the challenge for the curators is going to be: given the context of where these cultural institutions are, what's appropriate here?"

Listen to yourselves, gentlemen. You have no way out except to say:

Do not build it. Not there.

You should have said that immediately. Now you can suggest that they build it somewhere else and you'll still find them yelling at you. But better that than leaving as your legacy for generations to come the most tangible memorial to political compromise ever built.

: In the Daily News, Pataki tried to sound tough but his words only gloss over indecision:

We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom or denigrates the sacrifice and courage that the heroes showed on Sept. 11....

Sure, there can be debate. But I don't want that debate to be occurring at Ground Zero.

If you don't want debate then, indeed, you don't want speech. But what do you expect when you ask in the crew you did to build these centers?

Once again, Governor, you do not want to find yourself editing the the discussion to make sure it's not debate, not offensive.

I said the same thing to Debra Burlingame, who, bless her, brought this to our attention: There is no point in trying to unstack the committees or edit their content. The only point at Ground Zero is the memorial.

: The New York Post sees through the efforts at tough talk:

Shame on Pataki.

If ever there was a time for him to stand up and do the right thing for New York, yesterday was it.

As always, his rhetoric yesterday sounded tough.

: But enough rhetoric.

: Here is my suggestion for what to do, Governor: Go use some political capital, if you have any left, to get a rich friend and benefactor to donate space for each center somewhere else in New York. Take the government and government funds out of this. You can say that this is best because there must be no distraction from the memorial at the World Trade Center. You can say (if you are good at keeping a straight face, which you are) that you wanted to find a new home for the centers with new funds to depoliticize them. You can say (with pure sincerity) that we must do nothing to stand in the way of the memory of that day.

That's what you should do, Governor.

: And you, dear readers, can join the thousands at TakeBackTheMemorial.com who have signed the petition telling the governor:

Do not build it. Not there.

Dell still sucks. Dell still lies.

: Well, my Dell hell continues. The machine's networking just goes off on its own; the green connection light goes off and the machine either turns off or does not recognize its networking (while other machines in the room work fine). I even got a new wireless router to make sure there was no problem on that end. Other machines: fine. Dell machine: sucks.

The machine then freezes and gives me the blue screen of death, which I never once had with my Sony Viao's -- which is what I will buy as soon as I get a refund for this piece of crap.

The keyboard still does not work.

And I'm getting email from Dell people who clearly are not paying attention. "Dear Mr. Langley," said one. I corrected them and said the name's Jarvis. The response: "Dear Ms. Kolar."

It'd be funny if it were SO DAMNED IRRITATING.

The issue here remains: Dell sold me "at-home service." They sold me a high-end warranty. They sold me "complete care" promising to replace this machine if I lit it on fire... which is very tempting, believe me.

But they take their sweet fucking time sending me email that doesn't give me the confidence that they even know who they're talking to.

Well, the machine they made is is a DAMNED LEMON and under federal warranty law, they are warned.

And their warranty is a fraud. I'm not getting my machine fixed. I am not getting at-home service. I am not getting complete care.

Is anybody at Dell listening? I know you are. What do you have to say, Dell?

: While you're at it, Dell, go here and and here and here and read the comments and see how y our customers hate you. (And that extra space in "your" is because of your broken keyboard, by the way.)

: A snarker in the comments says, "Buyer beware."

No, we are in the new era of "Seller beware." Now when you screw your customers, your customers can fight back and publish and organize. I just sent this link to Dell's media relations department and told them to read the comments and see what their real public relations look like.

: Oh, and by the way, the ONLY reason I bought this Dell was because of the alleged at-home service. The machine is not as well-designed as a Viao. It is heavier. There are cheaper machines out there. But now that I'm self-employed (that is, without the blessed in-house PC support department,) I decided to buy a machine from a company that offered me at-home service and a complete care guarantee. And I decided to pay extra for it.

That is the heart of the issue here. That is the essence of the fraud.

June 25, 2005

And the Paris talks begin

: The Times of London says the U.S. is in continuing talks with Iraqi insurgents.

By the way

: I'm enjoying the Blogebrity blog, which isn't a hoax, just a blog. I'm not saying that get get more links and stay on the A list. Really, I'm not. Trust me.

BlogPulse need caffeine?

: Matt Galloway wonders wazzup with BlogPulse. I suggest we ask them. I shot them an email.

: UPDATE: See Blogpulse's Pete Blackshaw's response in the comments.

Lost in translation

: Yesterday, I did my blogboy dance for a bunch of French print and wire-service editors on an IFRA tour (ironic, when Loic -- whose reputation they all knew -- could tell them more on their homefront than I could). Anyway, I asked how many of them read blogs; most but not all. I asked how many of their journalists read blogs. They all put their thumbs and forefingers a millimeter apart. Un petit peu

Vs. the U.S. in ClickZ:

Journalists mostly used blogs for finding story ideas (53 percent), researching and referencing facts (43 percent) and finding sources (36 percent). And 33 percent said they used blogs to uncover breaking news or scandals. Still, despite their reliance on blogs for reporting, only 1 percent of journalists found blogs credible, the study found.
Snotty, those reporters.

Tim Porter talks to some smart journalists who use blogs.

The moderate revolt

: Andrew Sullivan sees the Rove strategy at work in a new poll that finds disapproval of Bush equivalent among Democrats and independents, vs. solid approval among Republicans:

This strikes me as a direct result of the Rove strategy of brutal partisanship, Christianist pandering, and general fiscal and military fecklessness. Some readers have said that my criticism of the administration makes me sound like a liberal these days. Well, from these results, I'm not the only one being pushed by right-wing extremism into opposition.

June 24, 2005

Dell sucks. Dell lies. Continued and continued and...

: I just got my Dell back. They replaced the system board, the CPU, the memory, the palmrest assembly, the keyboard, and the wireless NIC.

Within a half hour, it's proving not to work. The heat, according to an ap my son found, is up to 154 degrees. The machine is overheating. The fan is on high. And the CPU is running at 100 percent. Dell sucks. Dell lies.

Dell makes lemons. No lemonade.

Dell sucks.

TV explodes

: The other day, I said that the reduced take in TV's upfront ad selling season was the tipping point -- tipping the wrong way indeed -- for broadcast TV. Here's the next evidence making the case: An ad agency exec smells weakness and demands lower rates:

Advertising spending growth may slow from next year as TV networks in the U.S. are forced to cut rates as audience levels fall, Saatchi & Saatchi Chief Executive Kevin Roberts said at an industry conference.

Ad spending worldwide should increase 5 percent or 6 percent this year, Roberts, 55, said in an interview at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes, France. Annual growth will slow to an average of about 4 percent after 2005 as TV prices ``come down,'' he said late yesterday. ``They will have to. Otherwise advertisers are going to leave the medium.'' ...

In the U.S., television networks ``seem to be gouging advertisers,'' Roberts said. ``Their rates are going up and the return on investment is coming down.'' ...

Television will remain the largest advertising medium, Roberts said. ``How it will be used will be very different. It will become more interactive.'' Advertising will also change to be more ``emotive'' rather than ``yelling at you,'' he said.

New Media

The current year of TV programming, which runs into 2006, will be the ``biggest ever year in history on television advertising,'' Roberts said. ``While the return on investment in television is deteriorating, because rates are going up, clients are still flocking to the medium.''

That will change over the next few years as techniques are developed to measure the effectiveness of ads in new media such as mobile phones and the Internet, he said.

``We don't have enough pre-testing and measurement of emerging media. What we need is a bit of time behind us so that we get some empirical data'' and advertisers will become more confident with such media.

And I will argue that advertisers are fools waiting for the perfect data when they could be using new media aggressively and still quite inexpensively and learning along the way. But, hell, they're the fools with the money and so we need to build that data for them. And now is our opportunity, as TV explodes. [via Lost Remote]

And it's not just TV. See also newspapers here and here and here and follow the links therein.

Covering Hoder covering the election in Iran

: The LA Times writes today about Hossein Derakhshan, "the godfather of the Iranian blogosphere," returning from exile to cover the election in his homeland. Hoder has left Tehran for London but his coverage continues.

Stuck in the fringes' tug of war: We're the rope

: I just read a longer excerpt of the Rove screed in the NY Post and here's the real problem: He is doing precisely what he is accusing the other side of doing. He says:

Has there ever been a more revealing moment than this year. when the Democratic senator, Democrat Richard Durbin, speaking on the Senate floor, compared what Americans have done to prisoners in our control in Guantanamo with what was done by Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot — three of the most brutal and malevolent figures of the 20th century?

Let me put in this in really simple terms. Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Sen. Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

OK, Rove, and now your remarks are being repeated all over the world to show how we are at war with ourselves.... and not with the enemy.

And, Rove, you whine when Howard Dean calls Republicans all a bunch of white Christians (said perjoratively, which causes this white Christian a moment's pause). Yet you turn around and call all liberals a bunch of terrorist sympathizers (which causes this liberal hawk a moment's pause as well).

You're both wrong. Your all wrong. You think you're going to win at the edges because that's the way the game is played today. But you have lost the middle.

The NY Times' op-ed graphic illustrates the point, uh, graphically today. It shows that the number of moderates in Congress -- not in the nation, mind you, but in Congress -- has greatly reduced because:

The differences are attributable to the emergence of the permanent campaign, the rise of partisan news media and, most of all, changes in Congressional redistricting. The expansion in the number of “safe” seats in the House that began in the 1980’s has put an increased importance on primaries, which favor more ideological candidates. A number of these sharp-edged representatives have then moved to the Senate, where they have helped widen the partisan gulf we have talked about — and now can see.
The system is as broken as the American auto and airline industries. It's time for a political restructuring. It's time for a revolt of the middle. Right now, the middle is simply revolted at "leaders" such as these.

The victims have no problem calling them terrorists

: The BBC -- which just went out of its way to call "terrorist" a bad word -- reports that Arab media is (finally) seeing Iraqi "insurgents" for what they are: murderers. Meanwhile, the witnesses and victims know what they really are: terrorists.

Al Jazeera - often accused by the Americans of stirring anti-US feeling - has adopted less of an "Us and Them" approach.

The militants are no longer referred to as the "resistance" but as gunmen or suicide bombers.

Eyewitnesses are shown denouncing them as "terrorists" - condemnations that are echoed by a parade of Iraqi officials and religious authorities.

For the record

: Yes, Karl Rove is an ass. But you didn't need me to tell you that.

This liberal wasn't calling for therapy. This liberal was calling for bombs.

Network blog wars

: Brian Williams blogs the news meeting and makes rundown decisions transparent... beating CBS News to the transparent blogging punch.

Dell hell, continued: Laptop 51

: I have no way to verify whether this is true, but a commenter in my Dell laments says he found a spy in his laptop.

It didn't take two seconds to smoke the hoax: see the comments. I posted this on the train; found the nearest starbucks; came online and there was the fact-checking mob. Thanks, guys. Of course, something smelled funny but I'm glad you found the cheese. You're better men than I, Gungas.

: UPON REFLECTION: What I should have done: (a) I shouldn't have posted this on the train, where I was bandwidth-challeneged and didn't have the time, in any sense of the word, to look it up. (b) I should have posted it as a question: I can't believe this is true; has anyone seen anything about this? (c) Whenever I see anything that's too amazing to be true, I should go to Snopes first. I'm going to head over there right now to see whether Google's stock price is a hoax.

Lessons learned.

Can't see the forrest for the papers

: Jon Fine, ex Ad Age and now covering media at Biz Week, hears the bells tolling for newspapers:

Newspapers are cockroaches. No matter what is introduced into the media ecosystem, the oldest of the Big Media survives. Despite decades of doomsayers, newspapers prospered through radio, through TV and cable, through video games, through the Internet....

Not so fast. Suddenly, even sober Wall Street analysts think something new is afoot.

What looms now "is different from all other threats," says Lauren Rich Fine (no relation), a Merrill Lynch & Co. (MER ) analyst who has covered the industry since the 1980s. Consumers are shifting decisively to online information, says Fine, especially the young, and are no longer yoked to the local newspaper. "Ads are following the eyeballs to where they make transactional decisions." Fine recently forecast that newspapers' profit margins are set to enter a long period of decline.

The new and troubling reality for newspapers is that even if they excel as purveyors of information to appreciative audiences, they still face tough business terrain. "They can try to be the destination where you go online and [can] be really successful with citizen journalism and blogs," says Fine. But such innovations are "not going to pay a lot of bills."

Yes, the economics of news have changed, fundamentally. Now the business of news has to change.

: See earlier post on business models for new here and follow the links at the bottom for more.

Nanny news

: In this country, the nannies are using time delays to protect our sensitive selves from breasts and four-letter words.

In Britain, the news nannies are using delays to protect the people from... news! The new BBC ethics policy dictates that:

The corporation will also introduce a time delay on its live coverage of sensitive news events such as September 11 and the school massacre in Beslan.

The time delay will last several seconds and will allow editors to cut any scenes they believe are too shocking for viewers.

Incredible. What do they think they're protecting the public from? The acts of evil terrorists? What is served by softening that? Softening the terrorists?

Since when did you think it was your job to protect the people from the truth?

: Here is the BBC's policy. Here they say they don't want to report the demands of, say, hostage takers and influence the outcome of their actions. OK. But they also say:

we install a delay when broadcasting live material of sensitive stories, for example a school siege or plane hijack. This is particularly important when the outcome is unpredictable and we may record distressing material that is unsuitable for broadcast without careful editing.
What's suitable and for whom?

: There's enough in these guidelines -- a "book," they call it -- to keep a Kremlinologist busy for years. For example:

: On war reporting: "The tone of our reporting is as important as the reliability of our reporting." And just what does that mean? What did that mean in their reporting of the latest war?

: And also under war: "We will ensure our online message boards are hosted to maintain a full debate and avoid offensive postings by switching to pre-moderation if necessary." What, so they don't turn into war?

: And here we have the boogey applied to the word "terrorist:"

The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.

We should not adopt other people's language as our own. It is also usually inappropriate to use words like "liberate", "court martial" or "execute" in the absence of a clear judicial process. We should convey to our audience the full consequences of the act by describing what happened. We should use words which specifically describe the perpetrator such as "bomber", "attacker", "gunman", "kidnapper", "insurgent, and "militant".

Oh, so insurgent, and militant, and bomber are ok but terrorist is not? Well, I'm offended not calling a terrorist a terrorist. The refusal to use that word carries a value judgment, or lack of judgment, in itself.

: I was having such a good time, I flipped back to read the beginning. Here, the BBC thinks it can do nothing less than get the truth.

We strive to be accurate and establish the truth of what has happened. Accuracy is more important than speed and it is often more than a question of getting the facts right. We will weigh all relevant facts and information to get at the truth.
Others would say it's their job to report the facts and ours to judge the truth.

: Under "Harm and Offence," it advises this:

We aim to reflect the world as it is, including all aspects of the human experience and the realities of the natural world. But we balance our right to broadcast and publish innovative and challenging content with our responsibility to protect the vulnerable.
What the hell does that mean?

: On sources: "We should be reluctant to rely on a single source. If we do rely on a single source, a named on the record source is always preferable." And: "We should normally identify on air and online sources of information and significant contributors, as well as providing their credentials, so that our audiences can judge their status." And on anonymous sources.

: Surely this is a parody. First, the guidelines say: "We should not distort known facts, present invented material as fact, or knowingly do anything to mislead our audiences." And I'm wondering, did they really have to say that? But then they add "We may need to label material to avoid doing so." And just when do you need to distort facts, invent facts, or mislead audiences?

: And on the old objectivity thing:

our journalists and presenters, including those in news and current affairs, may provide professional judgments but may not express personal opinions on matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy. Our audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal views of our journalists and presenters on such matters.
In other words, do a really good job of hiding what you think.

: No hypnosis, no exorcism, no subliminal programming.

: On weblogs:

: We will exercise the same level of editorial care with weblogs as we do with other forms of content. This policy will also apply to associated external links and user generated comments.

Members of staff who write and publish weblogs should refer to their line manager. See Guidelines on Conflict of Interest

Why under Harm and Offence do they have a picture of two naked men?

: Nasty words are nastier online:

Offensive language can give rise to widespread offence. The use of certain, mainly four letter, words in text on the Internet may be far more offensive than a fleeting expression on radio or television. Such words may be used only in exceptional circumstances, there must be a clear editorial justification for their use and express approval must be obtained.
: LATER: On the time-delay from the NY Times story:
Some journalists questioned, though, whether removing some scenes might mislead viewers.

"It could be a dangerous precedent," said Jean-François Julliard, an editor at Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group based in Paris, which campaigns for the protection of journalists and their freedoms.

"In some cases I could understand that some editors might want to use it," he said in an interview. "But they must say they are using it. It should be a very transparent process. If they say it is live when it is not, that is a lie."

: FOR A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE on TV showing violence, read the Lenslinger.

June 23, 2005

She is not a crook

: The half-hearted apology that includes such phrases as, "If I made a mistake..." usually precedes the resignation under continued fire by only a few days. Tick. Tick. [via Glenn Reynolds]

Fair and balanced

: Didn't get a chance to link to John Podhoretz' great column yesterday taking apart Ed Klein's effort to take apart Hillary Clinton.

Because if any book in recent memory reads as though it has been written out of greed — a greedy hunger to separate millions of conservative book buyers from their hard-earned 25 bucks — it is Ed Klein's "The Truth About Hillary."

This is one of the most sordid volumes I've ever waded through. Thirty pages into it, I wanted to take a shower. Sixty pages into it, I wanted to be decontaminated. And 200 pages into it, I wanted someone to drive stakes through my eyes so I wouldn't have to suffer through another word.

: And I'm amazined Klein is still on Parade's masthead playing Walter Scott. He's not on a personality parade anymore. He's on a personality perp walk.

French trees shout: Vive l'online!

: Editors Weblog tells us (who don't speak French) about a report from a French government think tank predicting the demise of daily, printed newspapers.

The reaction to this is typically French/EU: Spend some government money to swim against that tide.

Says John Burke at the weblog:

A report just released by a French government think tank that analyzes present situations and predicts the future of various public and private organizations paints a bleak picture for the future of the French printed press. The threat from the Internet and foreign news sources will, according to the think tank, transform all French news organizations into multimedia companies, of which only 2 or 3 will be left standing by 2011. Result: " a majority of newspapers will disappear by 2011... if nothing is done".

The report cites the need of French government aid to journals that undergo innovative reforms and that improve their public service. To further involve young readers, French government subsidies should be used to provide free temporary subscriptions for 18 year-olds. For the French media in general, the report calls for improved training for journalists, a radical reform of Agence France Presse, and a reform of news distribution.

Did they create a tax to feed the horses when the car came along?

Here and here I swatted at the notion of government helping journalism for then it can be used to influence journalism. Just ask PBS.

Beyond that, though, if the people want to get their news online why not give it to them there? If the French government wants to support something, wouldn't it be better to support the future than the past? Wouldn't it be better to underwrite development of online? Or are they afraid it will steal marketshare from the Minitel?

Chief clueless sod

: Simon Waldman quotes Gavin O’Reilly, incoming chair of the World Association of Newspapers, and COO of Independent News and Media, saying at the recent world newspaper confab in Korea:

I think participative journalism is a dangerous precedent for our industry. People forget that newspapers have always been an interactive medium, people have always been able to interact with us through the mailbag.

TV just exploded

: The inevitable just happened: The broadcast networks earned less in upfront (preseason) ad buying this year than last year. That's a big deal. It's not a cycle. It's an explosion. Mark this date as the day TV exploded and the mass market went pfffft with it.

It had to happen. Year after year, network audiences declined, yet ad rates and buying went up: Marketers were paying more for less (and I thought only cable customers did that). The delta between those two lines on a chart is a measure of advertisers' inability to change or worse. But now that has changed.

It's all downhill from here. Oh, this doesn't mean that broadcast is dead. But it will not grow again. It will shrink. Ditto other big, old media outlets. And with that, the media industry will change as it is forced to find new ways to produce lower-cost programming and as advertisers are forced to abandon easy mass-market buying in favor of putting together ad hoc, targeted, and more efficient networks in more measurable media, including media created by people outside media companies (aka you). The dollars will flee to online and its many media at a higher, faster rate than audience declines on the networks as advertisers finally begin to value online appropriately (though online is a scarcity killer with unlimited content and traffic and that will depress rates).

Media Post reports:

Verklin implied the shifts were not merely a function of a cyclical weakness in the TV ad marketplace, but part of a fundamental realignment of marketing priorities, and the way marketers and agencies look at television in their media mix.
And the Wall Street Journal says (not a free link):
The decline appears to signal that, after years of debate about the effectiveness of TV ads, advertisers finally are cutting back on their spending....

This year's decline appears to relate more to questions about the effectiveness of traditional TV commercials. Debate about traditional advertising has risen in recent years as digital video recorders have made it easier for viewers to zap through ads and as people have spent more time on the Internet and playing videogames....

Advertisers for years have believed broadcast television offered the biggest bang for the buck, with millions of viewers tuned in to a single program. In a world where people can easily zap through ads, advertisers increasingly are interested in marketing avenues that capture more of consumers' attention, including the Internet.

It's not a medium, it's a focus group

: The Wall Street Journal (free link) sums up companies who are monitoring blogs to get the pulse of the market.

Dell hell, continued

: As I sent my machine to Dell in the Airborne ambulance, I took the hard drive out at Dell's demand (what if it's the hard drive or the registry that's broken? they will make me spend hours on the phone to diagnose that, said the man). I put it in my son's Dell, which is exactly the same: an Inspiron 600m. Ah, but I saw that it was not exactly the same, not at all: When the machine started up, my laptop's brain in my son's laptop's body started recognizing no end of new and strange hardware. And that's to say that there is no consistency at all in the Dell product. Tom Friedman wrote about that, admiringly, in his World is Flat book: In their just-in-time gusto, they grab a part from this supplier or that supplier and slap them in there. And so there is no consistency to the product: The 600m I bought and was satisifed with two months ago is not one bit like the 600m I bought next. It's as if I went to Burger King and they substituted pork for beef because it was cheaper today.

But you know what, that's Dell's problem, really: All I should care about is having a computer that works. How it works and how it's made is their problem if I have a warranty, right?

But that's what bothers me most: I bought that warranty, the top-of-the-line, most expensive warranty that warrants to send someone to my home to repair my machine.

Except that's a big fat Dell lie. The person they would send to my home would not have the parts (or, according to some of my commenters, the expertise, training, and intelligence) to repair that machine.

Smells like fraud to me.

Smells like a class-action suit to some of my commenters and emailers.

Calling Mr. Spitzer. Calling Mr. Spitzer.

Dell lies. Dell sucks.

I pledge not to pledge

: Yesterday, I suggested that Dan Gillmor should have wikied his pledge and Sean Bonner has done it. Dan has some links.

Thinking about it last night, I liked the idea of a pledge even less but thought I should explain that more.

A pledge assumes ill will and mistrust, requiring that we promise we won't do something bad. If we're decent and you trust us, we shouldn't have to do that. I don't have to take a pledge not to torture little puppies for you to trust that I won't do it. I shouldn't have to pledge to be honest to be honest.

The whole point of this new medium is that it is human and not institutional. In a human relationship, apart from wedding vows and oaths in court, we don't take pledges. When you meet a neighbor, you don't feel the need to say, I pledge not to dump my garbage in your backyard. The compact of civility and trust is assumed until it is broken. That's the way I think this new medium operates. A blog is a person. Buzzmachine is me. You either like and trust me or don't (and there are plenty who don't; just read the comments). Or to put it another way: Like me, like my blog; dislike my blog, dislike me. I keep coming back to the conclusion of my blog chat with NY Times exec editor Bill Keller: Though blogs can do journalism and do media they are still essentially human. Journalism is institutional, impersonal, and dispassionate; blogs are human, personal, and passionate. Institutions takes pledges because they have become separated from the people they serve and they need to. Humans -- bloggers -- shouldn't need to. Doesn't mean you have to trust a blogger. But saying "trust me" doesn't mean anybody should trust you more.

At the end of the day, I don't want to see blogs turn into an institution, or try to, for then they wouldn't be blogs anymore. They are human and operate on a personal and social scale and it's a mistake to see them through institutional eyes. When I sat at an Annenberg confab on journalism a few weeks ago, I flashed on the frightening notion that in 50 years, there could be such confabs among bloggers fretting over trust, ethics, professional standards, educational needs, government relationships.... But then I snapped out of it. I was looking at blog through institutional eyes. No, blogs are just people speaking.

June 22, 2005

Career a clef

: This is awfully inside baseball, but I have to report that everyone I know in media was giggling and gaffawing today over the news that former Conde Nast head Steve Florio is going to write a book about management. The perfect media oxymoron.

Taking the pledge

: Dan Gillmor asks contributors to his Bayosphere to take a