Xark!

Why Newt won SC: Hatred

2012-01-22T12:44:58-05:00

There's been plenty of punditry on the topic of Newt's "surprise" win in the Palmetto State, but I think it's really quite simple. Bill Clinton won because he felt our pain. Newt Gingrich wins because he channels their hate.

My fellow South Carolinians hate a lot of things, including their prevailing belief that expressing one's hatred in public has been unfairly prohibited by political correctness. There are costs in 21st century America for publicly and explicitly hating blacks, gays, atheists, illegal immigrants, intellectuals and liberals, and so Southern conservatives have learned to speak in code: birth certificates, grades, teleprompters, food stamps, welfare, socialism. The code words express the outlines of their complaint, but not the seething anger that animates their politics.

Not only does Newt understand the immense power of repressed hatred, he also grasps that the one group Americans can still hate publicly without fear of reprisal is "The Media." Newt ran in South Carolina as The Guy Who Really Hates The Media, demonstrating to standing-ovation crowds that when it comes to hating, he's the man.

Of course, Newt has this one little problem nationally, but you know. Politics.

Next stop: Florida.

Romney & Ingraham, 1.20.12: Hoping for bad news

2012-01-22T12:13:22-05:00

In case the media circus surrounding Newt Gingrich's win in South Carolina yesterday caused you to miss Laura Ingraham's Thursday's radio interview with Mitt Romney, here's a chance to catch up. It's a remarkable glimpse of the dilemma facing the Right today, regardless of its eventual nominee. I transcripted the full text of the most interesting exchange (emphasis mine):

INGRAHAM: Governor, the President and the Vice President, Secretary of the Treasury have said that, look, the economy is getting better, it's creating jobs month to month, it's not growing as fast as anyone wants but it's getting better. You've also noted that there are signs of improvement on the horizon in the economy. How do you answer the President's argument that the economy is getting better in a general election campaign if you yourself are saying that it's getting better?

ROMNEY: Well of course it's getting better. The economy always gets better after a recession. There's always a recovery. There's never been a time anywhere in the world where an economy has never recovered. The question is, has it recovered by virtue of something the President's done, or has he delayed the recovery and made it more painful, and the latter is of course the truth.

The President's policies have made this recession deeper, and it made the recovery more tepid and difficult on the American people. This is the worst recovery we've seen from a recession since Hoover. And President Obama wants to take credit for things getting better. He in fact has made things worse. He's made this recovery take much longer.

But will our economy get better some day? Of course it will. And it will not be thanks to President Obama, it will be in spite of President Obama, and that's of course the message we have to give. If people think the right course for improving an economy is to massively expand debt and the federal government, why they can vote for Barrack Obama. But we know better.

INGRAHAM: But isn't it a hard argument to make if you're saying, like, OK, he inherited this recession, and he took a bunch of steps to try to turn the economy around, and now we're seeing some more jobs, but vote against him anyway? Isn't that a hard argument to make? Is that a stark enough contrast?

ROMNEY: Well, do you have a better one, Laura? (laughs) It just happens to be the truth. (laughs)

We're going to see the numbers in terms of how the economy does. It's very possible, by the way, that the economy will go into a decline again. I mean it's a... I can't tell you that I can predict that it's going to get better, but I think that ... at some point it's going to get better. But I don't think President Obama's helping it. He's been far less effective than he should have been at turning the economy around. I think if we'd elected John McCain we'd be in a much better position today. But do I think that the economy will get better at some point? Yeah. But you know by November of 2012 we'll see if it's gotten better or not.

The key for me is that if you look at what's happened to American employment, the reason that our unemployment rate has come down is because of the number of people who've dropped out of the base of workable, uh, the workforce. And him taking credit for people becoming so desperate that they drop out of the workforce altogether is a very weak position from which he'll be campaigning.

After months of effectively blaming the recession on Obama and "holding him accountable" for the nation's miseries, Republicans are now faced with an increasingly bleak landscape. An improving job market. Surprising growth in the manufacturing sector. Unemployment claims at a four-year low. "Twenty-two consecutive months of private-sector job growth," a White House figure I can't replicate from BLS data, but even its less-sexy alternate isn't bad: job growth for the past 15 consecutive months, and 18 out of the last 22. We added 1.6 million jobs in 2011, and the unemployment rate dropped from 9.1 to 8.5.

To make matters worse for the GOP, despite its hypnotic drumbeat of blaming Obama for everything, the public has consistently continued to acknowledge that our current economic conditions are something the President inheirited, rather than the result of his policies.

The Republican scorched-earth policy in 2010-11 succeeded in limiting the speed of the recovery and damaging Obama's approval ratings (though, interestingly enough, not his favorability ratings), but at an appalling high cost to the nation and the public's view of the GOP as a whole.

And now, after all of this, the economy is improving, the Republican primary season has produced nothing but the prospect of a protracted fight between two unpopular candidates, Occupy Wall Street shifted the national discussion from debt to income inequality, and more than 1 million people in Wisconsin have signed petitions to recall their Republican governor. Reince Priebus must be quietly losing his mind.

After framing 2012 as an economic question, the crisis for the GOP is that they can't publicly cheer against the economy, and the economic data is improving to the point that even their hyper-partisan media supporters can't ignore it. So while they'll cross their fingers and hope for bad news in the coming months, what do they do in the meantime? Based on Romney's response, perhaps they'll draw on a discordant note from the otherwise positive November 2011 jobs report: that the improvement was an accounting trick based on discouraged workers leaving the workforce.

That's not an entirely incorrect observation. Discouraged workers do drop out of the market, and the ratio of job openings to job-seekers remains above 4-to-1 for the third consecutive year. It's a tough recovery, following the worst recession since the Great Depression, which is why getting this stuff right is important.

But the bottom line on Romney's claim that "the reason that our unemployment rate came down is because of the number of people who have dropped out of... the workforce" is that he's flat wrong. The size of that workforce -- the number of Americans who are counted as employed or looking for work -- grew in 2011. Yes, there were month-to-month fluctuations, like the drop emphasized by Republicans in the controversial November jobs report, but the workforce grew again in December, even as the unemployment rate dropped for the fourth consecutive month.

By the Bureau of Labor Statistics' numbers, the Civilian Labor Force stood at 153,250,000 Americans in January 2011. By the end of December, that figure had risen to 153,887,000. That's an increase of 637,000 people. And despite having to include all those new people in the pool of workers, the national unemployment rate dropped by 0.6 percent.

But it gets worse for the GOP.

Republicans have spent three years dismissing out-of-hand any Democratic assessments of federal policies that included estimates of "jobs saved," instead favoring absolute numbers framed from their least-flattering perspective. By opening their critique to say that "Things are improving, but we would have done better," and moving away from their context-free assault on the President's economic numbers, they are moving onto a battefield in which the ground favors the Democrats.

This doesn't mean Obama wins in the fall. But it does mean the planets are re-aligning.

Change

2012-01-10T23:17:48-05:00

"I know you are taking it in the teeth, but the first guy through the wall... he always gets bloody... always. This is threatening not just a way of doing business... but in their minds, it's threatening the game. Really what it's threatening is their livelihood, their jobs. It's threatening the way they do things... and every time that happens, whether it's the government, a way of doing business, whatever, the people who are holding the reins - they have their hands on the switch - they go batshit crazy."

-- John Henry to Billy Beane in "Moneyball."

Nation's cats dissatisfied with food, toys, sleeping arrangements

2011-12-21T16:48:20-05:00

Owner approval ratings hit all-time low

Dec. 21, 2011

For Immediate release

By Frank Comment

TRENTON, NJ – A majority of America's cats* are disappointed with their quality of life, with 57 percent expressing displeasure with their food, 53 percent describing themselves as “bored” or “very bored” with their current collection of kitty toys, and 51 percent indicating that they are currently looking for a better place to sleep.

The key satisfaction numbers continued a downward trend in the annual Wall Street Journal/Cat Fancy Feline Opinion Survey, conducted Dec. 16-19 by Cat Dynamics Research Associates Inc. and funded by the I Can Haz Cheezburgers Charitable Trust.

The trend correlates to continuing declines in Cat Owner Approval Ratings, which have been in retreat since the Clinton Administration. Those ratings dipped to an historic low in the 2011 survey.

Next we have some questions about your relationship to your human staff. [RANDOM ORDER]

C. In general, how would you rate your human(s)'s overall job performance over the past 12 months?

This result renders a Composite Approval Index (CAI) of 40 percent, the worst CAI recorded in the 57 years since Cat Dynamics Research Associates added the question to its annual survey. The response was also the most negative ever recorded in the Waking Respondent Segment Measure (WRSM), with 89 percent of cats who happened to be awake at the time of the survey offering a negative assessment of their owner(s).

“America's cats are not amused,” said Isabelle C. Francis, President and CEO of Cat Dynamics Research. “To be more accurate about it, those who are awake are not amused. So far as we can tell.”

The poll was conducted by bothering 1,634 adult American cats between Dec. 16 and Dec. 19, 2011. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 50 percent.

Complete poll results here.

*Based on responses from cats that were able to wake up for or stay awake through survey interviews.

Divided government, Parte Deux (2012 Senate overview, with spreadsheet)

2011-11-01T21:30:08-04:00

It's not exactly news that elections can be weird, but when it comes to U.S. Senate "classes," it's the norm. This has to do with Senators' six-year terms and the ups and downs of presidential and mid-term election cycles.

Here's why: Only 33 of the 100 Senate seats are up for re-election in 2012, and because of those presidential/midterm cycles, there's a distinct rhythm to these things. This is Class I, which picked up eight seats in the notable 1994 Republican Revolution election. This meant that when it came time for Class I to stand election again in 2000, Republicans were defending more seats, and lost four of them, knotting the Senate at 50-50. Then in 2006, the Democrats went on a mid-term tear and gained six seats and 51-49 control of the Senate.

Which brings us to today. Heading into 2012, Class I consists of 23 Democrats and 10 Republicans. From a political science perspective, that means Democrats are on the defensive, because a 23-10 majority means there just aren't that many seats to be gained, and lots of seats to protect .

But just how bad is it for the Democrats? I spent the bulk of my day reading up on the landscape of the 2012 Senate contest and building this spreadsheet so I could start doing some basic analysis (it's yours to use, take and adapt), and here's what I wound up with:

STATES WITH DEM INCUMBENTS: 23
STATES WITH DEM INCUMBENTS W/ OPEN SEATS: 7
STATES WITH DEM INCUMBENTS W/OPEN SEATS RATED LEAN-D OR TOSS: 4
STATES WITH DEM INCUMBENTS W/OPEN SEATS RATED AS FAVORING GOP: 1
POTENTIAL DEM LOSSES: 10

STATES WITH GOP INCUMBENTS: 10
STATES WITH GOP INCUMBENTS W/ OPEN SEATS: 3
STATES WITH GOP INCUMBENTS W/OPEN SEATS RATED LEAN-R OR TOSS: 1
STATES WITH GOP INCUMBENTS W/OPEN SEATS RATED AS FAVORING D: 0
POTENTIAL R LOSSES: 2

What does that mean? To put it in context, with their 53-47 advantage in the Senate, Democrats will relinquish control of the legislative body if they lose four seats. If they lose three seats, and the presidency, they'll also lose control of the Senate (because the new GOP vice president would cast the deciding vote).

If you can use that spreadsheet to describe a plausible scenario where the Democrats wind up with 21 or more of these 33 seats, please fill me in. Because it looks really unlikely to me.

My own baseline is probably overly optimistic (bias transparency note to first-time visitors: I am a liberal), based on my belief that Massachusetts is more of winnable a toss-up than the "Leans R" rating most analysts gave it. And my optimistic estimate (Democrats hold 18 of their 23 seats and pick up Scott Brown's) still gives the Republicans a one-vote majority. Practically every analyst I read today has already written off Democrat Kent Conrad in North Dakota, ranking his seat as either "Leaning R" or "Likely R," so the Democrats are probably already down one seat before the race even begins.

Anyway, it's pretty clear which states look to be the most likely battlegrounds:

Battleground States (toss-ups, purple)

Massachusetts: R Scott Brown, incumbent. I think this is the Democrats' best chance at a pickup. Brown is relatively popular with voters, but he's unpopular with the Tea Party activists who helped get him elected in a special election to fill Ted Kennedy's vacant seat, and this is still a blue state. His likely challenger -- Elizabeth Warren -- is a progressive heroine who is sure to gather plenty of national fund-raising support and party backing.
Missouri: D Claire McCaskill, incumbent. Missouri is a conservative state, and they call her "Obamaclaire" McCaskill there. A tough road, at best, and most likely a loss.
Nebraska: D Ben Nelson, incumbent. Nelson is the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, and has never been a sure vote for anything on the party agenda. His only reliable value to the party is a vote for a Democratic majority, and given the conservative nature of his state, no one will be surprised if he loses next year.
New Mexico: D Mark Bingaman, retiring. New Mexico is an interesting state politically, much stronger for Democrats than its neighbors. But it's still a marginally blue state, and the seat is open. Hispanic disdain for the GOP could help here, but the candidate is going to be the most important factor. And we don't have a candidate yet.
Virginia: D Jim Webb, retiring. Webb -- a former Reagan administration official -- was a conservative who was also a tough opponent for Republican foolishness. His decision to retire moved this race from a Leans D ranking to a toss up. It's seen by most insiders as a likely match between Democratic Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine and former Sen. George Allen, who lost to Webb in 2006.
Wisconsin: D Herb Kohl, retiring. Obviously, the candidates will have a lot to say about this one, but one trend that looks strong for 2012 is that statewide candidates in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan (where state-level GOP officials surprised voters with unannounced anti-union campaigns in 2011) are going to enjoy massive, energized, motivated union support. Recall elections -- running against GOP incumbents in GOP-favoring districts -- came within one seat of taking control of the Wisconsin state senate, and polls indicate statewide support for pro-worker Democrats will be solid.

Kinda-sorta battlegrounds (light red, light blue)

These are Lean D or Lean R seats... from a collection of enigmatic (to put it politely) states.

Florida: D Bill Nelson, incumbent. Look, Florida is just a weird state. Wouldn't surprise me if Nelson won, wouldn't surprise me if he lost. Wouldn't surprise me if the peninsula broke off and floated away to the Bermuda Triangle, either.
Hawaii: D Daniel Akaka, retiring. It's an open seat with no clear heir, but as several others pointed out, whoever runs for the Democrats will pick up HUGE coattails from Hawaiian native-son Barrack Obama. So it looks like the Democrats' seat to lose.
New Jersey: D Bob Menendez, incumbent. New Jersey is a blue state with a popular Republican governor. I don't know what that means (I don't understand Jersey Shore, either), but the consensus is that it adds up to Leans D.
Nevada: R John Ensign, retiring. So what if Ensign had to resign under a cloud of scandal? This is Nevada. Scandal is the state's second-largest export. Right behind vice. This one smells like Leans R to me.
Ohio: D Sherrod Brown, incumbent. I left this one as Leans D instead of Likely D because Brown always seems to have strong opposition, but Gov. John Kasich's approval rating was down to 33 percent in May, and it just feels like a tough year to be a Republican in Ohio.
West Virginia: D Joe Manchin, incumbent. The Mountain State is home to a bunch of conservatives who vote for Democratic politicians. This really seems to piss off national Republicans, who think they should own the vote of every white, blue-collar, social conservative by default. Here are four little words for them: Coal miners appreciate unions. I call it Leans D.

So what's the bottom line?

Since there's no realistic chance of the Democrats picking up the seven seats necessary to break the filibuster stranglehold the GOP has placed on Obama since February 2009 (when three Republicans voted for Obama's stimulus bill), on one level, who cares? The worst-case scenario is that Republicans take the Senate and then don't have the votes to over-ride Democratic filibusters.

But here's the depressing part.

Even as the Senate looks more like a Republican win in 2012, control of the House and the White House are well within the reach of Democrats -- because unlike the Senate, the presidential and House elections are truly national elections.

We've had divided government for the past two years, and nothing has gotten done.

Looks like we're looking at another two years of it... before Senate Class II stands for a vote in 2014.

Lord help us.

Kindle Fire & "direct-to-consumer" marketing

2011-09-29T11:17:44-04:00

Martin Langeveld (Neiman/Harvard) came out this morning with a big prediction for the new Amazon Fire tablet:

The advent of the Kindle Fire will impact every business engaged in advertising, from your local weekly newspaper to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Groupon, because it will vastly accelerate the transformation to direct-to-consumer marketing by merchants, manufacturers, and service providers, without the traditional interpolation of advertisements to drive buyers to sellers.

It's a good piece, worth reading.

But there's a logic to commercial information in this Media Interregnum that I need to keep emphasizing, because it's as true now as it was when I began beating this drum six years ago.

Advertising (renting the attention of consumers to sellers) puts publishers in the business of representing the interest of the seller;
As consumer attention fragments and advertising becomes ubiquitous, basic market principles will continue to drive down the ad rates that publishers receive;
Commercial media saturation creates a new problem for buyers.They need help cutting through the low-value sales-pitch clutter to find products (CNET) and services (Angie's List) that actually suit their individual needs;
Businesses that recognize this opportunity move from representing the interests of the seller (help me sell the thing I want to sell) to representing the interests of the buyer (help me select the right thing for me).
By adding the option of moving directly from research to purchasing ("My Shopping Cart"), businesses generate revenue by adding value for the user (comparing products in useful ways), the seller (providing quality commercial information about the seller's product) and both buyer and seller (by handling the transaction). The result is a virtual marketplace in which a share of every transaction belongs to the business that brings buyer and seller together;.
Internet-era businesses following this logic have created successful digital marketplaces for products that are the same no matter where you buy them (Amazon), products that can be hard to find in your town (HuckNroll), discounted products (O.co), and products that can be shipped cheaply and returned easily (Zappos);
The challenge for publishers who serve specific physical communities (news of interest only to this town or that one) is to organize efficient, tailored virtual marketplaces for brick-and-mortar businesses in those communities. These transactions are often more complex than buying books online, but they are also more valuable because they are more complex;
To capture that value, local publishers must shift from publishing and structuring information solely on behalf of sellers and put the user at the center of their business model. Only then can they create marketplaces in which they receive a cut of every transaction;
Doing this will not only create a more profitable business model, it will improve the trust that individual users give to the non-commercial information a publisher provides;
And, finally, by doing this, they will begin to reap higher advertising rates. Because if you're a car dealer, whose attention do you really want to rent? The person who just wants to watch a ball game, or the person who is -- today, right now -- actively looking to buy a car?

Obviously, this logic requires quality software. It requires research. It requires studying local retail businesses and buying patterns to understand what information adds the most value to transactions.I'll need a different approach for scheduling auto repair than I will for buying school supplies or selecting a backyard grill.

Now, after saying all of that, have you noticed the shortcoming in Martin's prediction yet?

By focusing on "direct-to-consumer" marketing by individual businesses, he's essentially betting on the emergence of thousands of individual, disconnected, single-business marketplaces "(merchants, manufacturers, and service providers").

Consumers don't want one set of choices. We want the best set of choices.

Also, what he describes is expensive. The stuff he writes about how tablets as a gadget-class change the psychology of online shopping is all valuable, but if you're imagining a world in which every bike shop in every mid-sized town has to pay some third-party vendor to provide a direct-to-consumer marketing app, -- plus the cost of delivering that app to potential consumers -- well, I'd like to know what color the sky is there.

On the other hand, if you can figure out a way to provide that service for free for all the bike shops in your market, connecting all the retail sellers and all the consumers in your community, you've got a business with a future. That's what I've been betting on since 2005.

What is truly conservative?

2011-09-26T17:01:05-04:00

This is Henry Wallace, a Republican businessman, agricultural scientist and newspaper editor who -- despite his party affiliation -- became Franklin D. Roosevelt's first Secretary of Agriculture in 1933. For more than seven years, Wallace did that job so well that Roosevelt named him as his as his vice-presidential running mate in 1940. Had it not been for a revolt among Democratic delegates at their 1944 convention, Vice President Wallace would have become the 33rd President of the United States instead of Harry S. Truman.

There are all sorts of interesting facts about Wallace, an Iowan whose research into crop yields changed the way we grow corn today and later led to the first genetic corn hybrids, which have done wonders to increase food production around the world.

But here's what's truly remarkable about the man from my perspective. As Wallace arrived in Washington in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, America's heartland had become a radical place. Midwestern farmers had been suffering through their own recession for years before the stock crash in 1929, and the Depression only made their already desperate crisis worse. By the time Wallace took office, American farmers -- generally considered then as now a practical and conservative bunch -- were on the brink of open, violent rebellion. Not right-wing rebellion, mind you. Left-wing, socialist, communist rebellion.

Farm strikes began across the region during the Hoover Administration, but the intensity of the "Farm Holiday" movement didn't subside with the election of a Democratic president. By the end of 1933, pickets in Iowa and Wisconsin and the Dakotas were blockading roads that other farmers used to carry their goods to market. The traffic stops turned violent, and their movements became bolder. Law enforcement feared to venture into hotbed areas.Clashes between strikers, strike-breakers and National Guard troops turned fatal.

And so Wallace, who arrived in Washington with a scientist's sensibilities and no meaningful political background, took a look at the problem and came up with a solution. The farmers were going broke because they were too productive, which was driving down the price of food. Since individual farmers couldn't afford to stop producing (they were going broke in the first place), and since markets were only doing what markets do, American capitalism had created a vortex that was endangering the nation's food supply and threatening to radicalize its agricultural heartland. Communist Party organizers, recognizing an opportunity, converged on farming communities across the Northern Plains.

So what did Wallace do? He proposed a radical, left-wing solution: He paid farmers to stop growing crops. He paid farmers to slaughter hogs and not take them to market.

He took taxpayer money (well, actually, he borrowed it) and gave it to people to do nothing. He blatantly redistributed wealth.

And here's the point. This profoundly radical act (paying out farm subsidies) turned out to be profoundly conservative. In doing this thing that horrified American capitalists, Wallace conserved American capitalism. He didn't propose farm subsidies because he wanted to end free-market farming, or make farmers government-dependent tools of a socialist state. He proposed it because it solved a problem that was on the verge of tearing the country apart and providing an opening for radical opponents of capitalist democracy. By violating capitalism's moribund 1930s orthodoxy in order to save it from its own inherent flaws, Wallace conserved what was valuable about our system.

In setting an ideological hard line against Obama's jobs bill and other efforts to improve the economy, today's Washington conservatives seek to accomplish two things: 1. Obstruct everything Obama proposes in order to humiliate him; and 2. Keep the economy in crisis, in hopes of blaming Democrats for our national misery in 2012. They have branded as "socialist" every Keynesian effort the Democrats have proposed to get the economy moving again, and routinely refer to Obama's policies as radical.

From any kind of less-partisan perspective, Obama is the opposite of a radical. If you want to see radical, let the Republicans continue their failed economic policies. Let them expand the disparity between the wealthy and the middle class. Let them balance their artificially urgent austerity program on the backs of the poor and middle class, while the rich get richer.

If you want to be conservative, conserve our values by fixing what's wrong with our system, even it if means going outside of your comfort zone. You want to see radicalism, don't fix anything. You'll get your wish, and none of us are likely to be happy about it.

On writing, and other forms of bullshit

2011-09-24T19:14:34-04:00

Once upon a time, maybe as recently as 2006, I loved writing. I'd always hoped to earn my living by putting words together, and to be a professional writer and editor, in a community of professional writers and editors, thrilled me. Sometimes it thrilled me several times a week.

For instance, in 2000 I helped launch an anonymous newspaper column called Good Morning Lowcountry, which ran half a page, seven days a week, in The (Charleston) Post and Courier. GMLc was the work of no single writer in its early years, so several of us shared the duties, churning through local topics and mild obsessions and odd bits of Lowcountry trivia like a pack of raccoons rooting through trailer park garbage cans. Every now and then we'd even pause between deadlines to talk about the experience and its process, prompting me once to write a GMLc with the self-absorbed subhead "This Writing Life," in which I attempted to share the good-humored, arty, third-person-objective camaraderie of it all.

Now, of course, I just wish everyone would shut up and get on with it.

There is no more thoroughly boring topic than writing, and if you doubt this, listen to a public radio interviewer ask a Famous Author to talk about his or her process, or even worse, his or her deeper thoughts on language or storytelling..

This afternoon I was subjected to several minutes of some unfortunate soul lobbing verbal kisses toward award-winning science fiction novelist Samuel R. Delany. Delany, the interviewer said, is "a sentence lover." This breathtaking banality set up what must have been a 90-second soliloquy by Delany on how sentences were made up of words, which makes them superior to words, because you can express more with a sentence than you can with a single word.

I shit you not.

Now I say this next part with regret, because I have some wonderfully talented friends who have completed MFA programs in creative writing from respected institutions and I don't seek to offend them. But here's the hard (and oft-noted) truth: MFA graduates learn to write for other MFA graduates. In doing so, they dramatically reduce their chance of ever producing original, culturally relevant, commercially viable work, receiving in exchange only a modest increase in their chance of eventual publication.

Of course quality writing matters, and yes, there's a craft to it. Proper spelling is helpful, too (although Cormac McCarthy has proven that proper grammar is negotiable).

But if we actually care about "literature" as a meaningful product of our culture, then the time has come for writers to violently and irrevocably declare their independence from the institutions of literature. We certainly have nothing to lose: in 2009, so-called "literary fiction" comprised less than 5 percent of the $10.2 billion U.S. book publishing industry, and even that dismal figure hides the true crisis, since it includes "classics."

The response to this decline from within the walled garden of critically/academically acceptable literature has been to take all incoming critiques as barbaric assaults on quality, as if they can imagine no alternative to their current state of inaccessible, self-referential obscurity than a "dumbing down" to the standards of "the masses." Consider this strawman defense of the genre, a classic in the annals of denial:

Literary fiction is an increasingly smaller part of the market, but only because the market is being flooded with more and more books that are more and more identical. Literary fiction is not dying off. Like it or not. Literary fiction may bore you. That's fine. But if it bores you and you never read it, you are not anything like an expert on literary fiction so keep your fat mouth shut when you talk about how it needs to change to become more in line with populist tastes. Literary fiction doesn't give a fig about populist tastes, which is one of its great strengths. In a hundred years, Stephanie Meyers will be forgotten, but people will still be reading Shakespeare. Why? Because Shakespeare is more important to us as a species. Even if you personally don't "get" it. Shakespeare isn't snooty or elitist. Literary fiction isn't snooty or elitist. But it may be too good for you. And that's fine.

So just remember, haters of literary fiction: when you talk about the death of literature, literature is not listening to your foolishness.

No, it seems "literature" is not listening to anything -- except its own literati. Its problems are all out there, with those people, those lesser readers who don't get it. And conflating the inane MFA drivel that passes for "literary" work today with the works of Shakespeare is just God's gift to unintentional irony. In his day, Shakespeare was considered the equivalent of a clever pulp writer -- a producer of vulgar entertainments for the masses. The idea of Shakespeare as icon of the English language didn't arrive until centuries after his death.

So if you were planning to complain that I'm calling on publishers and critics and humanities intellectuals to reject their current tastes and instead celebrate "dumbed-down" fiction for the masses, save yourself the pixels. No, I'm calling on writers -- professionals, amateurs, anyone who puts words together -- to stop caring about what the literati think, write and say. Get over your insecure quest for "legitimate" acceptance. The price is only your ideas, voice and soul.

Literary fiction isn't "too good" for us. We're too good for literary fiction, with its tiny stories and tiny ideas and lock-step aversion for anything that aspires toward big and important. Modern, critically accepted literary theory -- like modern visual art and musical composition and "social science" -- stands athwart our naive impulses toward greatness and off-the-map exploration and shouts "STOP!" Our literary establishment has become a tyranny of the smugly insignificant.

It's not incumbent on our MFA programs, book critics and humanities professors to solve this problem. In fact, I contend the people employed within these institutions are now incapable of challenging the systems that produce our high-minded mediocrities and ensure their professional status and continued employment. Western intellectualism's arms race toward theoretical abstraction rendered it impotent and irrelevant decades ago, and it cannot recover from within.

Neither can we look to the book publishing industry to save us. It's such a mess that even the people who run it seem to despise it. I've also given up hope that networked media -- the idealistic movement that produced blogs like this one in the middle of the previous decade -- will ever rise to its full potential as a democratic alternative to top-down systems of marketing and control. So no, I don't see a way around this problem.

But I do see a way through it.

We can start calling things by name. We can call bullshit when we see it. We are neither stupid nor uneducated, and though we are told that we're not qualified to comment on certain things, it is up to us whether we choose to take that input as an order or a plea.

We can find ways to beat the idiocy and kitsch of mass-culture, with its dependency on celebrity in place of independent thinking. We can reject the enforced conformity of modern intellectualism, with its Emperor-Has-No-Clothes absurdities of fearful fashion. We need not choose one over the other. We need to choose something new -- something that neither offers, and never will.

And to choose it, we must create it. We should start immediately, each in our own way.

The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger (script)

2011-09-19T21:50:26-04:00

If you haven't seen this one before, where have you been? And even if you have seen it, you might not have noticed how it's taken over the world, selling more T-shirts than Old Navy and prompting half the people in America under the age of 30 to say at least once, "honey badger don't care." Based solely on his access to the brains of our young, this guy Randall, who does new voiceovers for old nature videos, is one of the most influential men in the United States.

But what else does he say? Since I couldn't find a script online, I decided to transcribe it. So I do all the work, like the honey badger, and you come around and pick up the scraps."Thanks for the script, stupid!"

This is the honey badger. Watch it run in slow motion.

It's pretty badass. Look. It runs all over the place. "Whoa! Watch out!" says that bird.

Eew, it's got a snake! Oh! It's chasing a jackal! Oh my gosh!

Oh, the honey badger is just crazy!

The honey badger has been referred to by the Guiness Book of World Records as the most fearless animal in the animal kingdom. It really doesn't give a shit. If it's hungry, it's hungry.

Eew! What's that in its mouth? Oh, it's got a cobra? Oh, it runs backwards? Now watch this: look a snake's up in the tree. Honey badger don't care. It just takes what it wants. Whenever it's hungry it just -- Eew, and it eats, snakes... Watch it dig! Look at that digging.

The honey badger is really pretty badass. It has no regard for any other animal whatsoever. Look at him, he's just grunting, and eating snakes. Eew! What's that? A mouse? Oh that's nasty. They're so nasty. Oh look it's chasing things and eating them.

The honey badgers have a fairly long body, but a distinctly thickset broad shoulders, and, you know, their skin is loose, allowing them to move about freely, and they twist around.

Now look: Here's a house full of bees. Do you think the honey badger cares? It doesn't give a shit, it goes right into the house of bees to get some larvae. How disgusting is that? It eats larvae. Eew, that's so nasty.

But look! The honey badger doesn't care! It's getting stung like a thousand times. It doesn't give a shit. It's just hungry. It doesn't care about being stung by bees. Nothing can stop the honey badger when it's hungry. What a crazy fuck! Look, it's eating larvae, that's disgusting.

It's running in slow-motion again. See?

Now, what's interesting is that other animals like these birds here, they just wait around until the honey badger is done eating, and then it swoops in to pick up the scraps. It says, "You do all the work for us, honey badger, and we'll just eat whatever you find, how's that? What'daya say, stupid?"

Look at this bird: "Thanks for the treat, stupid!"

"Hey, come back here," says the honey badger.

Birds don't care, and you know what? The jackals do it too. Look at these little dogs. They're like "Thanks stupid! Thanks for the mouse! See you later." The honey badger does all the work and all these other animals just pick up the scraps.

At nightime the honey badger goes hunting, because it's hungry. Look! Here comes a fierce battle between a king cobra and a honey badger. I wonder what will happen?

Look at this, there's the honey badger just eating a mouse, and then look, "Get away from me!" says the snake, "Get away from me!" Honey badger don't care. Honey badger smacks the shit out of it. And the snake comes back and it lashes at the honey badger.

Oh, little does the honey badger know, FYI: it's been stung! It's been bitten by the snake, so while it's eating the snake -- eew, that's disgusting -- all the poisonous venom is seeping through the honey badger's body, and it passes out. Look at that sleepy fuck.

Now the honey badger is going to pass out for a few minutes, and then it's going to get right back up and start eating all over again, because it's a hungry little bastard.

Look at this! Like nothing happened! The honey badger gets right back up and continues eating the cobra.

How disgusting.

And of course, what does the honey badger have to eat for the next two weeks?

Cobra.

The honey badger.

Intent, art and the 21st century

2011-09-01T13:57:47-04:00

So it was that in April of 1970 an artist named Lawrence Weiner typed up a work of art that appeared in Arts Magazine -- as a work of art -- with no visual experience before or after whatsoever, and to wit:

The artist may construct the piece

The piece may be fabricated

The piece need not be built

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership

And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a "receiver" that may or may not be a person or may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just "the artist" in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, for nothing is demanded fo him, nothing at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode -- and in that moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture... and came out the other side as Art Theory!... Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision inivisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.

-- Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, 1975

The tragedy of re-reading Wolfe's short masterpiece today, 29 years after I first encountered it, is its sad failure in predicting the future of artistic taste. Back in the mid-seventies, The Man in the White Suit felt confident that the world would come to its senses by the year 2000, that artists and collectors and writers would look back on the artistic period 1945-1975 with head-shaking wonder. "What happy hours await them all!" he wrote. "With what sniggers, laughter and good-humored amazement will they look back upon the era of the Painted Word!"

Sadly, Old Tom failed to appreciate the gravity of our 20th century intellectual failures, for we remain incapable of escaping their black-hole pull. The Grand Duchy of Art Theory that Wolfe skewered wasn't some post-war aberration: it was an Event Horizon, a point-of-no-return from which a once-cohesive culture doesn't simply recover. From art to literature to political science, the intellectuals of the mid-to-late 20th century pursued abstraction for the sake of theoretical purity, rendered their fields impotent and irrelevant, and then hid the keys to understanding within an arcane codex of self-referential gibberish that only members of their self-selecting academy could hope to understand.

It is this reason more than any other -- more than mass media, more than politics, more than economics, science or religion -- that accounts for the fraying of our current culture. As I wrote in 2005:

When what is on the canvas alone is not enough to make a judgment on its quality, then art has been replaced by theory.
When theory is less important than the theorist, then art has been replaced by fashion.
When only fashion determines success, then art has been replaced by conformity.

And so it is. When our most educated classes -- the stewards of 5,000 years of civilization -- adopt untestable theories that cannot be held accountable to anything beyond the whims of their own cliques, then the connection between our culture and its traditions breaks. The rest of us lose our access to the realm of ideas and art, leaving most Americans a fast-food culture of consumerist commercial kitsch. Any potential rebels within the academy find themselves isolated within their departments, but also cut-off from the larger society, from the very people who might give them vitality, support and strength.

Intent and fashion

This line of thinking began for me several weeks ago when I heard my wife ask an artist friend of ours what made one photograph great art and another photograph trash. And this intelligent, caring, talented man gave my wife a particular look -- a look that many of us have given others, a look that conveys a polite but weary condescension -- and said, "It's the intent of the artist that makes it art."

Au contraire, Pierre.

When someone says that intent is what makes a thing art, he is correct. It's only when we ascribe that intent to the artist that we leap into arrogant absurdity, because the intent of a third party is both unknowable and irrelevant.

In fact it is the intent of the observer that determines whether an object is art or trash, and that intent in modern society is shaped by fashion, status, ambition, insecurity, resentment and fear -- shaped by everything except the higher callings we claim with our laughable abstractions, our wryly ironic po-mo angels dancing on the heads of so many mis-imagined quantum pins. This is what William Irwin Thompson addressed when he spoke about the unavailability of modern intellectualism. This is the fundamental disconnect that so fascinates Louis Menand.

We cannot search for beauty, because our art theorists tell us that "art" disdains beauty as irrelevant. We cannot search for truth, because our intellectuals tell us truth is immaterial, too subtle for us to comprehend, and above our pay grade, regardless. The price of understanding and relevance in the humanities is a PhD, a degree that can only be granted by other PhDs, a title that is rarely offered to heretics.

Is it any wonder that the populist wing of American politics aggressively disputes everything from evolution to global warming to the roots of our current fiscal problems? That millions of Americans enthusiastically embrace the psychotic nonsense of a Glenn Beck? That our most popular painter is Thomas Kincaide? That our best-selling writers are typically pulp-showmen who deal in cardboard and cliches?

Don't blame Fox News for manipulating the fearful and confused -- blame those of us who know better. Our anti-borgeois elitism wound up separating us from working-class society decades ago, creating a vacuum of meaning and trust that Roger Ailes was only too happy to exploit. Blame every upscale Manhattan socialite whoever feigned cocktail admiration for the paintings of Barnett Newman (that's his 1966 painting "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?" on the right). Because yes, the common man may not be all that sophisticated, but he can plainly see that the pompous emperors of the art world have been parading around naked for the last 50 years. And if the "so-called elites" can be so wrong about that, then... well, where's their credibility about anything? Which is actually an excellent question.

The century ahead

I'm serious when I say that there is no healing this culture, no steady-state solution, no bridging this divide back to a stable Amerian society, I'm also at peace with the belief that our old culture needed to be broken. Its coherence was based on exclusion -- of blacks, of women, of queer-thinkers of various stripes -- and its power was based on a historic anomaly we're unlikely to experience again.

What I've come to realize with ever-expanding awe is that the Media Interregnum I've written about previously is not merely an industry transition -- it's part of a societal interregnum that began with the collapse of our old order in 2008 and will continue until the emergence of a new global coherence of ideas and art and economics and science. Politics will follow, not lead these changes, and a period of dark regression is as likely as an other scenario.

But I am also hopeful. In the 20th century we deconstructed our beliefs until we had nothing left but existential angst and the dark entropy of rubble, but in the 21st century new insights are emerging quietly all around us. No, we're unlikely to find new absolutes, yet nature keeps revealing elegant Fibonacci numbers in all manner of living things. Neuroscience, physics and biology keep discovering deeper structures and profound connections. The artificial dualism of subject and object is being challenged by science, opening new pathways to exploring those big questions we long-ago abandoned as sophomoric. Chaos gives way to pattern.

In the meantime, we are stuck in that most horrible and exciting of moments -- the pause before the beginning. I hope some of us will find ways to make the most of it.

Transparency journalism: an FAQ

2011-08-05T17:00:22-04:00

If the news industry is going to explore transparency as an alternative to the “journalistic objectivity” claim to credibility (and yes, as a matter of fact, we are), then this big idea is going to have to confront a series of small questions. Thank goodness we can begin answering them.

What's wrong with objectivity?

First, we all need to agree on something important. Scientific objectivity is an experimental condition that limits observation so that the collected data will be identical for all observers (and, if managed properly, repeatable in multiple trials). Journalistic objectivity is an assumed perspective that includes a set of variable practices, but is essentially a subjective claim to credibility.

The problem with that credibility claim is that Americans don't believe it. A Gallop poll in September found that 57 percent of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. That's a record low for this Gallop question, and it reflects a decades-long declining trend that others have noticed as well.

So other than the fact that journalistic objectivity is a claim to authority that cannot be supported objectively and isn't accepted by a majority of Americans, what's wrong with it?

How about its poor performance in terms of educating and informing readers/viewers/users? Despite unprecedented access to news information, studies show the American public was woefully misinformed about important facts during the 2010 elections.

This is not a coincidence. An artificial claim to credibility that requires journalists to present “both sides” of a story with equal weight, even when one of those perspectives can be factually disproven doesn't serve the public interest. Instead, it acts as a free license for partisan manipulation of the press, and the manipulators are well aware of this fact (even if the press is not).

For instance, regardless of the ultimate validity of global warming theory, there is no doubt about the strength of the scientific consensus that surrounds the data. Yet Americans as a group continue to underestimate the extent of that consensus – a direct result of poorly applied standards of journalistic objectivity and partisan media propaganda by an organization that famously claims to be "fair and balanced."

So what is the claim to credibility for a transparency-based approach to journalism?

There is probably not one transparency-based approach, but for the sake of the discussion, let's say that a transparent news organization begins by making smaller claims to credibility. Journalistic objectivity is a black-box claim to universal credibility. Transparency journalism acknowledges the limits of individuals, organizations and what can be known under specific circumstances. Instead of bold claims based on dubious, priest-like denial of the self, transparency journalism offers goals and processes that continuously work toward developing and understanding facts, perspectives and contexts.

What should transparency reveal?

Whatever might reasonably be considered to influence the way people and organizations process, evaluate and present new information. This begins with the goals of the organization (if you are representing a partisan, geographical, class-based or niche interest, say so) but also extends to the relevant interests and influences of individual executives, reporters and editors.

Such as?

Partisan involvements, obviously, even though most journalists won't have any of significance.

I start with politics not because it's the most-significant issue in developing transparency systems, but because it's the top-of-mind credibility issue for most news consumers.

So if a reporter has worked for a political candidate, or donated money to a campaign of political group, these are obvious things to reveal if – and this is a big if – the reporter is working in a role or beat in which political influences are relevant. A restaurant critic or a gardening writer probably doesn't need to reveal political activities (so long as their coverage stays clear of political topics), just as political and government reporters probably don't need to reveal what restaurants they've worked for, or whether they own stock in a compost company.

Donations and volunteer work are verifiable topics, but what about attitudes and influences?

The goal of personal transparency should be to make it possible for interested parties to learn relevant information about the people involved in reporting and shaping the stories that concern them. A sports fan may legitimately want to know what school a college football beat writer attended, or what MLB team ballcap he wears when he mows the lawn. That same sportsfan is probably not all that interested in what the sportwsriter thinks about John Maynard Keynes. But the reverse is true if the reporter in question is assigned to the business desk and covers The Federal Reserve Board.

Defining the reasonable limits of privacy and transparency will be an ongoing issue for any journalistic organization that adopts this approach, and one way of managing this challenge may be to ask journalists to write and publicly maintain a personal manifesto.

Unlike formal transparency that defines a journalist solely by his or her activities and affiliations, a personal manifesto is a collection of nuanced statements that define what someone believes to be true and valuable. Without a statement of beliefs and values, readers will simply infer from reportable particulars a set of beliefs that may not come close to representing the complexities of a journalist's actual beliefs. In the same way that a person can be a registered Republican and still believe in a progressive tax structure, so too can a sportswriter graduate from the University of Alabama and cheer for the Florida Gators.

The Xarker Manifesto is my expansive experiment with this concept from 2005, and while it delves into all sorts of areas that the average reporter might not need to consider, it reflects my personal belief that all topics are related. I produced it as a founding document for this blog because I disliked having conversations in which I had to dispute beliefs that others had erroneously projected upon me. Whatever its value as a document, the manifesto has been highly useful for clarifying the record on what I actually believe to be true.

So is a writer supposed to append a manifesto on every story?

Of course not. The transparency approach says that your relevant influences and attitudes should be easy to find should someone want to go looking for them. That's all.

In practical terms, this means that working journalists should maintain an online professional profile page, and that anyone who seeks that page should be able to easily find answers to their relevant questions about that person. It also means that supervisors and employees should have a constant working understanding of what kinds of information should be considered relevant, and everyone should have an expectation that the things a person reveals are factually correct.

What about information that speaks to a reporter's character or reveals personal information?

While a reporter's sexuality, relationship history or adolescent criminal background may reasonably provide limited insights into his or her character, the decision to make public any of this information should be a decision left solely to the journalist. Additionally, news organizations may counsel journalists that certain types of information should not be revealed as part of a companywide policy.

Enough about what gets revealed. Aren't you really just saying that reporters and editors are supposed to be putting opinion – or “point of view” – into their coverage?

This is the most important question I'll answer today, and the answer is, absolutely not.

The trust-via-transparency argument doesn't change the goals of journalism. We seek to provide reliable, high-quality information that helps people understand and engage the world around them. For that information to be useful and trustworthy, it needs to meet certain standards of quality and process. With few exceptions, the opinion of the reporter is not the valuable thing that's being produced.

But reporters who are sincerely trying to reach an accurate and meaningful understanding of a subject and communicate it don't need to express an opinion to reveal a bias.In fact, I would argue that the more knowledgeable and experienced that reporter is, the more valuable that bias becomes.

For intance, knowing what I know about global warming science, I will write stories that place greater weight on statements endorsed by the scientific consensus than on conflicting statements from fringe scientists at think-tanks funded exclusively by the oil and coal industries. I will not give “both sides” arbitrary (and artificially) equal weight, because I am the author of the piece and I have revealed in my profile how I evaluate these questions.

Someone reading that profile may choose to challenge my reporting on the grounds that it unfairly downgrades the opinion of global warming skeptics, but they won't be able to claim that I'm covertly manipulating public opinion. I am overtly using my experience, knowledge and reason to give the relevant, reliable facts to my readers, sans artificially balanced misinformation.

Now, in my personal case, I'm skeptical about the predictive accuracy of complex mathematical models that describe chaotic systems. I may choose to include that opinion in my profile, because that opinion will likely cause my coverage of global warming developments to be more conservative than reporters with greater faith in those modeling techniques.

But the thing to understand here is that my opinion about the science involved doesn't add a shred of value to the subject, because my opinion isn't a qualified opinion.

In other words, the value of revealing relevant opinions in my transparency manifesto is that this accounts for the biases in my work. I put my opinions in my profile, where they are relevant, so that I can keep them out of my reporting on subjects where I lack a qualified opinion.

So you're saying that transparency journalism should never express opinions?

No. I'm saying that transparency journalism enables journalists to structure their coverage in ways that seek a more accurate and responsive representation of facts than the artificial “balance” of traditional journalistic objectivity.

If a news organization sets a goal of representing the conservative view of life and politics, such as Fox News Channel or Newsmax, then it should say so and explain, in its transparency documents, how it evaluates certain types of information.

But not all news organizations will choose to represent a partisan viewpoint. They're probably much more likely to represent a geographical bias (news of interest to South Carolinians) or a niche identity bias (news for middle-class African-American women who are single and Christian). So long as these goals and influences are explicitly expressed in the organization's transparency documents, it shouldn't be necessary to insert them as opinions in individual news items.

These organizations are free to express opinions, or to ask their reporters to express opinions. But that's a choice, not a requirement, and it's hard to believe that most organizations will seek this path.

When should a reporter express an opinion, then?

That's a question that should be answered with another question: What are that reporter's qualified opinions?

For instance, if you ask me for an opinion on the latest results from the hunt for the Higgs Boson, I don't have the background to offer a qualified opinion. That's why we go to physicists instead of biologists when we're writing stories about supercollider experiments. On the other hand, I was raised on a counter-culture commune as a child in the 1970s, and if you assigned me a story on the communes that continue to operate today, my personal experience and opinions might improve the quality of the story I could present.

This becomes particularly interesting in the fields of politics and government, where experienced reporters are often far more expert on the ins-and-outs of state legislatures and local political parties than the freshmen lawmakers they're interviewing. A reporter with 30 years experience covering campaigns in Virginia may have a much more honest and revealing opinion of what a particular event portends than some novice candidate for a Richmond State Senate seat.

The first challenge, then, is for organizations to define what counts as a qualified opinion. After that it's a matter of understanding how and when those opinions can add to the public's understanding. If all an opinion adds is noise, then we should probably leave it out.

What about editorial decision-making?

For the most part, it should take place in public view.

You mean livestreaming video of editorial budget meetings?

Maybe. If not live streams, perhaps it would be worthwhile to post links to unedited video of an editorial meeting that took place several hours earlier. The point is not to make decision-making more difficult or to unilaterally hamstring an organization's competitive edge, but to shine light on a secretive process that has enormous influence on public understanding.

Too many journalism organizations make choices that would be indefensible if they had to be held up to public scrutiny. By offering up our deliberations for review and scholarship, we will likely move toward a more civic-minded editorial philosophy.

Won't that mean that editors will grandstand in meetings?

Some probably will. Some already do.

Won't that mean that editors will stop speaking candidly about topics because of liability and public relations concerns?

I think it means that those discussions will take place outside of budget meetings.

How is that transparency if you're just pushing the embarrassing decisions into other venues?

It's a start. And let's be clear: Transparency should be used as a tool for building trust and quality, not a blanket requirement for all our activities. Transparency for transparency's sake is exhibitionism.

So yes, talk in public about why you're putting that story on 3B for the print edition while you're pushing it to the top of the website this hour. Let people see how you decided that today was the day to move a business story about recession fears to the top of your report. But don't talk in public about a rape story in a way that would identify a victim or an unindicted suspect, or tip off the subject of a six-month investigative project on criminal behavior at the tax assessor's office.

Transparency is not a magic bullet, and it's certainly no substitute for basic human intelligence.

You've worked for newspapers and news websites. You know that top editors sometimes represent the unspoken and narrow agendas of ownership groups, publishers, boards of directors, etc. How can they possibly do their jobs if they're forced to manage in public?

Their jobs will have to change. And a publisher who wants to continue to furtively influence coverage will have to change as well if he or she chooses to go the transparency route.

Then why on earth would anyone choose this alternative?

Because in a competitive media ecosystem, if people trust my reporting more than yours, I stand to win our competition. That's a powerful motivator.

Reading William Irwin Thompson

2011-08-03T21:57:58-04:00

Paradoxically, for my generation, one that came of age in the revolutionary spirit of the affluent 1960s, liberation from institutions and their systems of meanings was not a relationship with a specific oppressive condition but a general, eternal, and absolute value in and of itself. In challenging the rhetoric of Western Civilization, the generation that mocked the bourgeois liberal pieties of its fathers and mother rather smugly took for granted a niave and simpleminded faith in revolt against all forms of authority and enduring value. And, as always seems to be the case in the world of fashion, the French led the way. Roland Barthes announced "The Death of the Author" and tore down this idol of literate civilization; Michel Foucault exposed the "episteme" that bound institutions and forms of knowing into the "discourse" that was itself the system of domination; and Derrida made certain, with an ultimate Deconstruction, that no text would ever rise up again with a pretense to ultimate meaning, or high-minded and high-handed final authority. For an affluent and expanding bureaucracy of academic literary critics and behavioral scientists, this demolishing of the mystique of the solitary romantic artist who could pretend to cosmic knowledge without the necessary university credentials was indeed welcome news, and without much regret the culture of Author-hood and Authority was shouldered aside. "Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes futile... We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author."

***

With the replacement of bookstores by supermarket chains, the only books that are now available are books by movie stars and TV celebrities. In a differance, the text is a sign of being famous, and the famous are simply those who are famous for being famous. An appearance on a TV show is itself an achievement, an epiphany of the culture. A text in this world is not to be read: it is simply another form of currency and a means of exchange. In the consequent breakup of culture into subcultures, intellectual respectability must come from its unavailability and its resistance to communication and exchange, much like the heavy gold stored under the Paradeplatz in Zurich, and so incomprehensibility becomes their essential value. Here, the Europeans come back into their own, and no American professors can hope to compete with the likes of Derrida and Habermas.

--William Irwin Thompson

Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science

1989

Reading Louis Menand: Commercializing anti-commercialism

2011-07-20T09:11:52-04:00

"Nearly all American culture is commercial. It is either market-driven, as in the case of popular music, paperback fiction, and movies; or it is advertising-driven, as in the case of radio television, newspapers and magazines. And this culture is, of course, only an aspect of the American way of life generally, in which virtually every good – food, housing, furniture, clothing, cars, shaving creams – is understood to be designed to extract the greatest possible profit from the market conditions available, and to be susceptible to alteration the instant those conditions change. Because it is the chief tool for making conditions change, thereby creating new areas of demand and new sources of profit, advertising has become for most people the symbol of the thoroughgoing commercialism of American life.

"Everyone participates in this system, and partakes of its benefits (individual economic opportunity and national economic expansion) and puts up with its drawbacks (cheap goods, an often banal and sometimes exploitative popular culture, financial uncertainty). The group that has benefited the most from this way of life, and that has done the most to shape it and keep the system producing more of it, is the group of upper-middle-class professionals – lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers, designers, advertising executives, editors, publishers, business executives, television producers, and the college professors who educated them. These people were made possible – were made necessary, in fact – by the spectacularly successful commercialization of American life in the twentieth century; for they supply its creative and analytic intelligence. They are the society's most highly prized and rewarded members. But until recently, this group always demonstrated one peculiarity. Its tastes, its values, its lifestyle were all anti-commercial. The Wall Street banker lived like a member of the English gentry in a mock Tudor mansion in Mount Kisco. The Madison Avenue adman had a place in Vermont with outdoor plumbing and no electricity. The television producer bought his filet at an old-fashioned butcher, where it was wrapped in old-fashioned butcher paper. The publisher of a magazine for teenage girls watched public television – or had a passion for Mozart, or Trollope, or vintage wines. He vacationed in the cathedral towns of France. He didn't like motorboats, or billboards, or big American cars. And so forth. His face was turned away from the culture that gave him his living."

--Louis Menand, from “A Friend Writes: The Old New Yorker,” circa 2002

We are the Founding Fathers (& Mothers, too!)

2011-07-04T12:10:57-04:00

There are several ways to measure the length of continuous Chinese civilization, but for the sake of discussion, lets set the beginning point for China at the establishment of the first unified Chinese state. That would be the Qin Dynasty, which began in 221 BC, giving us 2,232 years of China as an evolving cultural identity and political reality.

And with that in mind, ask yourself this question:

Would anyone in China today argue that only the ideas expressed during the 15-year run of the founding Qin Dynasty should be counted as valid statements of the Chinese ideal? Would anyone in their right mind conclude that only the Qins should count as the founding fathers of China?

Of course not. That would be silly.

Here in the United States, we voted to declare our independence from Great Britain just 235 years ago (on July 2, 1776 -- today's official holiday celebrates the publication of the press release). It took another 11 years and an an utterly failed system of government before those political founders came up with a working constitution. Even then, they left out something pretty important: the rights that they'd fought the British to secure. Adding those into the rules for the new Republic took another two years, and after that the resulting Bill of Rights wasn't ratified until 1791.

So from Declaration of Independence to ratification of the Bill of Rights is a period of 15 years. That's all the basic "founding" stuff that our Founding Fathers undertook. Fifteen years. The exact duration of China's Qin Dynasty.

I bring this up because it's practically an article of faith to Americans that our Founding Fathers were uniquely wise, as if imbued by God with special grace and insight. Conservatives and liberals both tend to believe this, although today we have conservatives who declare themselves "strict constructionists" and quite openly treat the founding papers of our Republic the way Jerry Falwell treated the Bible: inerrant, complete and divinely inspired expressions of truth and wisdom. Every Republican president since Ronald Reagan has promised to appoint only strict constructionists to the federal bench.

This is, of course, outrageously silly, and the silliness begins with the absurd notion that the wisdom of our Founding Fathers was unique, or that the political battles that they fought (and sometimes lost) were unique to their age. To make a fetish of these men, or to gloss over their shortcomings with the old "product of their time" excuse, is shameless political kitsch. Yes, there were men in Philadelphia who supported universal sufferage and the abolition of slavery, but the reason our original constitution didn't include such things was that these modern concepts didn't win political arguments in the 18th century, not even in gatherings of our sainted Founding Fathers.

I bring up the Qin Dynasty and our Founding Fathers today because we're a young nation with a warped sense of time and history. If the United States of America lasts 2,232 years, will the Americans of 4008 AD look back at their history and say "the only important wisdom about our nation was expressed in its first 15 years?"Or will they look at the constitutional convention's incomplete struggles with slavery and conclude that Abraham Lincoln was also a Founding Father? Will they study the convention's anti-democratic beliefs about who should be allowed to vote in America and conclude that the Suffragetes of 1920 were also Founding Mothers? What about the men and women who sacrificed to make the Voting Rights Act of 1965 possible? And so on, down to today.

The United States of America is an idea in search of completion, and we are still arguing over questions that vexed the original founders at the birth of our Republic. Wouldn't it be better -- in fact, wouldn't we take our poltiical and philosophical positions with greater seriousness -- if we recognized that from the perspective of future historians, we are still actively engaged in the founding of this country?

Let us remember today that on July 1, 1776, only nine states voted in favor of the Declaration of Independence, and that two states -- Pennsylvannia and South Carolina -- voted against it. Let us remember that the difference between the revolutionary course of action and the conservative status quo that opposed it against all reason was razor thin, fraught with dissention and contested with bitterness that sometimes severed ties of friendship.

We are, all of us, Founding Fathers and Mothers to this wonderful country. Shouldn't we behave like we're worthy of that title?

The worst thing about the paywall question

2011-06-30T14:54:47-04:00

Like a lot of people in the news business, I'm interested in the results of 2011's big bets on paywalls -- the New York Times version and Rupert Murdoch's Times of London version. We're several months in, and I still haven't seen much of substance.

Which was why I jumped on this piece when API's SmartBrief service led with it on June 27. But does the reporting it contains really justify the headline "Murdoch's Leap Finds Converts in Cannes as Paywall Use Grows?" Read it. I'll be here when you get back.

(Tap tap tap tap...)

Welcome back. Feel more informed on the subject? Smarter? No? Me neither.

The point of the argument over paywalls isn't that you can't get some people to pay for your content. It's a net cost-benefit analysis between the value of paying subscribers versus the value of the content if you give it away and sell advertising on it.

So when companies give only one side of that equation (offering subscription numbers without comparing that to traffic and ad revenues), they're not answering the real question: Is it profitable?

I still don't know the answer, but I offer one general observation: Considering what we know about Murdoch and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., if their paywalls were wildly successful, do you think they'd be so coy about releasing their figures?

I'm on the record on this subject. I think there's a place for paywalls, and I say that because there are examples of content and publications that make it work. But I definitely don't think that "place" is going to include general news content, particularly not by metro papers trying to charge for the content they generate and post online for free today (although The New York Times is a special case and could still prove me wrong).

Regardless of that, I'm better known as an advocate for developing tools that would allow journalists to capture and store the data in their stories in useful and potentially valuable ways. That's the context in which I took Ann Brocklehurt's Tweet in response to mine (see the image above). And she's right.

But here's the difference: We've got years of experience with paywalls. Companies have invested millions of dollars in exploring those options. And despite that well-documented history of failure, in 2009 the "paywall movement" took the news industry hostage. It's an irony worth mentioning that the American Press Institute continues to tout flimsy evidence of paywall success in 2011, two years after its leadership instructed API employees to put out a white paper that concluded the paywall movement was worthy of the industry's support and investment. Talk about compromising your reputation.

What do we have in terms of real-world experience with data systems like the ones I've described? Nothing. How about R&D spending? Or private investment? Who is out there with a big name and a big brand crusading on these topics? Answers, please, on a postacard.

The reason that we don't have meaningful numbers about data products is that we don't have experiments to cite, because the industry continues to sink its money into solutions that don't solve anything. We know enough to know that paywalls won't save most newspaper companies, yet this non-answer continues to suck up money, time and talent that could be devoted to investigating something that might actually make a difference.

Want more evidence of that? Here's the teling graph from today's Guardian article about that Murdoch paywall:

Yes, theoretically the extra paywall subscribers offset the decline in printed sales for both titles over the past twelve months - the Times gave up 68,695 in headline sales between May 2011 and the same month a year earlier while the Sunday Times dropped a similar 68,150. So, on a gross basis the revenue lost would be £30.7m.

The problem isn't that we're giving content away on the Web. The problem is that our industry's business model is dying. If the best you can do is limit your losses, you're not pursuing a soft landing or a new business model. You're pursuing a harvest strategy: reap the final profits of the old newspaper system before laying the old gray ladies gently down to die.

And as Jay Rosen so eloquently put it, the important thing about a harvest strategy is, if your company has one, it won't tell you about it.

We desperately need a better professional press, but that revival is not likely to begin until we come up with a business plan that will actually subsidize quality journalism. It doesn't have to be one of my plans, but it needs to be something that demonstrates long-term potential.

Instead, our industry is still stuck in paywall limbo. That's the worst thing about the paywall question.

***

Aftermatter...

I forgot about this little gem. On June 23, API's SmartBrief email led with this summary:

"A multiplatform model for montezing content: Piano, a digital-content subscription service in Slovakia, provides access to premium content from seven newspapers and two TV stations. Users can sign up at one site and go behind the pay wall of the others. One publisher has seen subscriptions to its opinion section go up 14-fold since the service launched May 1."

The link is to Alan Mutter's blog. Which goes on to explain that:

Bella and his media partners are reluctant to discuss the specific results of the venture in its first six weeks. But Bella says paid subscriptions at the opinion pages of his alma mater, SME, are 14 times greater today than they were under the in-house system in place before Piano launched.

Got it? They had an earlier paywall that sucked, and when they came up with a paywall that sucked less and offered more content, their tiny subscription base went way up.

And then there's this:

Bella’s not-so-secret advantage is that he only had to bring together a small band of publishers in a country of 5 million residents speaking a relatively obscure language. Could his approach work equally well in the English-speaking world, where competition is far more intense than Slovakia?

Hmm. Anybody want to take a stab at that one?

Here's a better question: Why are industry leaders still so obsessed with trivial paywall news, and so seemingly disinterested in everything else?

Kerosene Journalism & the quest for the atom

2011-06-06T14:54:39-04:00

Since the new-media conventional wisdom machine is having another loose conversation about the “atomic unit” of journalism (thank you, Jeff Jarvis, for kicking this one off), let's use this fleeting moment of attention to advance the subject toward its ultimate destination.

Future journalists are going to be in the information business, not specifically the storytelling business, or the analysis business, or the Tweeting business, or the liveblogging business. What separates the information contained in all these existing journalistic forms from the journalism that will be valuable in the future, is that the future will require us to store the new information we report in ways that are efficiently usable by computers.

So thank you, Mr. Jarvis, for pointing out that quality reporting need not result in an article. Thank you, Jonathan Glick, for noting that mobile interfaces are changing the way we consume news. Thank you, Amy Gahran, for saying that we need better word-processing and browser tools. These aren't exactly new ideas (Jarvis, Gahran and many others have been making similar points off and on for years now), but the recent cascade of discussion makes this a noteworthy moment.

The flaw in this line of conversation is that it ends at the water's edge, by the banks of a river of change that separates the confused state of modern journalism from a future that may offer astounding rewards.

What Gahran is pitching (a Lego approach to storytelling) is innovative and interesting, but in the end, it's still just storytelling. No matter how artfully assembled and thoughtfully edited, a package of Tweets and posts and photos and videos and stories and analysis is merely an adaptive 21^st century extension of our old 20^th century theory of journalism. Should we do what she recommends? Absolutely. But the results will not fundamentally change a status quo that is in dire need of a revoution.

For all you commenters out there readying your flamethrowers, here come the necessary disclaimers. I'm a fan of storytelling with 20 years in the news business. I've been blogging for eight years (12 if you count the blog-style news update I created with five or six other journalists and techies as the outer bands of Hurricane Floyd whipped Charleston one night in 1999). I not only “get” the pro-am approach to curating news and information, I've done it. Repeatedly. So has my award-winning wife, who put pro-am teams to work covering everything from elections to opera. So please, please don't tell me that I don't understand the power of story, or blogging, or social media, or this or that new software platform. I get their value, but I also know their limitations. First hand.

Got it? I love bicycles, too, but I wouldn't recommend them as a spacefaring technology. And the task before us is not just some search for a cool new way to get around the neighborhood.

Today's journalists report information and file it as natural language text in all the formats mentioned above. They do this because all the tools we have for journalism are based on workflows that were created to get news out to groups of human beings that advertisers want to convert into consumers. In that business, the attention of the consumer group has value, not the information that attracts the group. The vast majority of our journalistic traditions are based on this model. It forms our media culture. It filters the pool of talent that enters our profession.

This status quo is, as Dave Slusher has pointed out, the media equivalent of kerosene. Kerosene production was a huge industry in the 19th century – so successful, in fact, that it wiped out the whaling business in North America. One of its waste byproducts was a volatile liquid called gasoline. It took about two decades of development in the automotive industry (weeding out steam and electricity as competing power sources) before people in the kerosene business began taking gasoline seriously in the early 20^th century.

Today we live in a global economy with an appetite for information that can be used and reused. But so long as we limit our thinking about the information we report to the production of kerosene journalism in varying grades of quality, we will never tap into this new source of abundance and possibility.

The fact is, we do need new word processing tools – specifically, a writing tool that marks up the information communicated in standard kerosene journalism so that computers can process and store it. Not metadata that helps searchers find stories, mind you. Metadata that lets programmers tap into the complete set of discrete bits of knowledge that a news organization has produced over time.

The technologies and standards required to begin this act of creation are available today as the byproducts of systems that were designed for other purposes. Unlike kerosene journalism, which is economically valuable only during the brief moment when consumers are interested in it, the approach I describe produces value that that increases with the size of its resulting data set.

Because ultimately, the atomic unit of journalism is the meaningful, useful, reliable answer. For that unit to have value in a global information economy, we must store the answers we derive in ways that will satisfy questions we haven't even considered yet. For this to work, we must connect the question “what's new?” to the question “what do we know?” so that the first feeds the second and the second informs the first.

Once we do that, then Chuck Peters' wild-eyed dream of a media company that connects to anyone it touches via every aspect of community life won't look so daunting. Steve Buttry's models for community engagement will become increasingly profitable. And Jay Rosen's continuing quest for a new theory of the press will get even more interesting.

Until then, we'll keep running on kerosene.

(This is my bio. This is a list of my essays on these topics. This blog uses a Creative Commons license.)

2011 GOP strategies, in summary

2011-05-20T14:02:08-04:00

Let's review:

Gin-up Birtherism controversies via right-wing media? Obama releases birth certificate, makes them all look like whack-jobs.

Crap! Quick, get on Fox and raise some doubts about the legitimacy of the document! The latest polls show that only 3 percent of Americans still doubt that President Obama was born in the U.S., despite skeptical coverage of the event on Fox and other conservative media. Obama campaign sells birth certificate T-shirts and coffee mugs as a fund-raiser.

Fetishize the deficit and blame it on Obama? Resulting media attention points out that $7 trillion of current debt came from Dubya, and only $1.7 came from Obama -- who spent stimulous money to end the Bush recession's slide to disaster. Also reminds people that before Bush took over in 2001, the federal budget was on track to eliminate the entire national debt by 2008. Ouch.

Yeah, but his Detroit bailout is a war on capitalism! Chrysler in May announces its first profit in three years, and makes a $1.9 billion payment on its $4 billion stimulous loan from January 2009. All evidence suggests the "big-government" Republican-opposed plan did exactly what it set out to do.

Yeah, but his TARP program is a disaster! The Troubled Asset Relief Program was signed into law by President George Bush in October 2008.

Yeah, but his Obamacare system is socialism and Americans don't want it! Polls in 2010 showed that a majority of Americans either favored the proposed reform plan or felt that it should go farther and institute a Canadian-style single-payer "public option." By a 2-to-1 margin.

Yeah, but a majority opposed it! Um, stop saying that. When you take out progressives who opposed it because they recognized it as Mitt Romney's health care plan and felt it didn't go far enough, only a minority of Americans opposed federal health care reform in 2010.

OK, change the subject. Threaten a government shutdown to get more spending cuts! Congressional Budget Office analyzes the GOP-approved spending plan and announces that Boehner's Tea Party trophy actually increases 2011 fiscal year spending by $3 billion.

Pass a budget plan in the House and let GOP Majority Whip Eric Cantor speak to the media! Cantor, grinning like a triumphant schoolboy, gets up in front of God and everybody and announces that the House budget bill contains a sneaky proviso that says that the budget automatically becomes the law of the land if the government can't reach a deal and goes into shudown mode. Unfortunately for Cantor, the idea isn't even remotely constitutional. Even the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, was forced to admit that Cantor is essentially an intellectual dwarf on stilts.

Run on fiscal responsibility in the states but convert those wins into a national union-busting campaign? Recall elections in Wisconsin are on target to produce Democratic legislative majority in the state senate this summer. Blue-collar Americans flock to the Democratic party, energizing the union movement in America for the first time in decades.

Accuse Obama of ruining the economy? Fourteen consecutive months of private-sector job growth.

Call Obama soft? He orders a raid on Osama bin Laden's compound and kills him.

Say, 'Well, yeah, but the only reason Obama GOT bin Laden was because of Bush-era waterboarding!': CIA director writes letter clarifying that "enhanced interrogation" (Republican for "torture") did not contribute to the bin Laden operation; 2008 GOP presidential nominee calls on colleagues to stop making such idiotic claims.

Stick by your guns defending Bush's torture policy anyway? GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum tells a conservative radio audience that Sen. John McCain, who spent five years being tortured in a Vietnamese POW camp, doesn't understand enhanced interrogation. D'OH!

Crap! Raise doubts about whether the raid really happened! Despite right-wing media intimations of a hoax and cover-up, Al Qaeda puts the matter to rest by talking about the death of its leader.

Quick! Change the subject again! Obama invited a scary black rapper who hates police officers to the White House! All hands on deck, partisan media! Some comedian named Jon Stewart writes a rap about how transparently hypocritical you are.

Nobody insults Fox News like that! Get Stewart on O'Reilly for a 'debate!' Stewart makes O'Reilly looks silly. On his own show.

Make a big media push behind the idea that the Ryan budget plan is "brave" and "bold"? Democrats point out that it would kill Medicare as we know it.

Say, 'Yeah, but it gives seniors vouchers': Seniors go nuts at town halls, polls show massive opposition to any attempt to do away with the system.

Argue that we have to do everything we can to reduce the deficit? Democrats offer to cut $4 billion in subsidies to oil companies, which happen to be celebrating record profits in 2011.

Ignore that politically damning offer to cut oil-company subsidies and hope it goes away? Democrats in the Senate force a vote on it anyway. All but three Democrats vote in favor of cutting the corporate welfare program. All but two Republicans vote to keep subsidizing oil companies' record profits.

Enough with the oil subsidies, blame Obama for high gas prices! Exxon chief testifies before Congress that unregulated market speculation adds between 30 to 40 percent to the cost of a barrell of crude.

OK, scratch that, go back to the deficit. We've got to cut spending! Obama calls for deficit reduction based on a combination of spending cuts and tax increases on the rich. Annoying economists point out that costs of this year's GOP tax cuts ($42 billion) exceed the value of all their 2011 spending cuts ($38 billion).

You can't increase taxes on the rich! Come on, Americans, that's where your jobs come from! Rich people! Poll finds that 74 percent of American voters support tax increases for households earning more than $250,000 a year.

Wait, do the math. We can't win in 2012 if we run on gutting Medicare, cutting taxes for the rich, busting unions and deregulating oil companies and market speculation. Memo from Fox News and your unregulated Super-PAC paymasters: No retreat, no surrender. Dissent from the party line will not be tolerated.

OK, we can do this. We'll just tell voters that Democrats want to kill Medicare, too. In the special election to fill the vacancy left by the resignation of Republican Congressman Chris Lee after a Craigslist sex scandal, the reliably red New York 26th Congressional District shifts to "toss-up" in a race that turns on one issue: Medicare.

There's got to be a way around this ideological purity test on Medicare.... Newt Gingrich calls it "right-wing social engineering" on Meet The Press, and after less than 24 hours of relentless hounding is forced to go around apologizing to everyone in America who wears a red tie.

At least we still have social issues! Family values! Sen. John Ensign resigns after a particularly creepy sex scandal. After the breakup of his marriage, former California Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger admits to fathering a child with a staffer a decade ago.

We'll go after gay marriage! People hate gay marriage! New Gallup poll finds that 53 percent of Americans now support same-sex marriage.

Crap! How about Planned Parenthood? We'll cut funding for Planned Parenthood! Ninety percent of that money goes to abortion! Actually, 3 percent of Planned Parenthood's budget goes to abortion. The rest goes for stuff like pap smears and other preventative health care services for women.

Crap! Sen. Jon Kyl said that on the floor of the Senate! It's on the official record! Come up with a statement that gets us out of this! Kyl's office issues a press release that says the Senator's claim was "not intended to be a factual statement." Comedian Stephen Colbert launches the Twitter hashtag #notintendedtobeafactualstatement. In a matter of hours, it's Twitter's top trending topic. Thousands of Tweeters spend hours entertaining each other by lampooning GOP buffoonery.

Pap smears? Preventative health care for women? That's wasteful government spending! The brown-haired guy on Fox and Friends who isn't Steve Doocy says you can get pap smears at Walgreens. Walgreens says that isn't true, either.

Well, at least we've still got that old-time religion! Evangelical radio host predicts that the Rapture will occur on Saturday, May 21, at 6 p.m,. with a worldwide earthquake that will travel around the globe at a rate of one time zone per hour, removing all Christians to heaven.

The Rapture. Maybe that will get us out of this mess. We'll see.Check back tomorrow.

FOX News' historic mistake

2011-05-17T20:23:31-04:00

Here's a large statement with scanty evidence, yet one I believe nonetheless: 21st century media historians will record that the decline of Fox News Channel as a dominant force in right-wing politics began on May 16, 2011.

Not that Fox is showing any particular signs of immediate weakness. It dominates its two cable news competitors in most meaningful measures, and essentially owns the conservative news brand in America. Conventional wisdom says that Fox – which holds the distinction of being simultaneously the country's most trusted and least trusted TV news channel – will be a dominant player in the news business for the foreseeable future.

But sniff around Fox for a while and see if you don't catch a whiff of decay.

The seeds of its coming decline were planted long ago, and much of what will become of Fox is written in generational demographic data, not in a single segment of The O'Reilly Factor. But it's hard to escape the conclusion that letting Bill O'Reilly bring Jon Stewart on the network to debate the comedian's critique of the channel's “selective outrage machine” was a milestone mistake of historic proportions.

It's unclear what O'Reilly and the executives at Fox thought would happen during the segment, but the result was one of those moments that rattles across American society in unexpected ways. O'Reilly framed the discussion of Common's invitation to a White House poetry reading as a culture-war crime against American police officers, but Stewart flipped the script to a direct assault on the channel's calculated demagoguery.People paid attention, and the overwhelming morning-after consensus is that Stewart won. America's usually combative conservative pundit class has been noticeably quiet on the story. Not a mention on Drudge. Not a peep from Malkin, Instapundit, the MRC or Red State. Andrew Breitbart's staff eventually warmed to the task, but only to change the subject.

Fox promoted the Common controversy to create an anti-Obama narrative during the White House's weeklong “We got Osama” victory lap. This was probably obvious to most observers, but it was essentially invisible to adherents of conservative media theology, which asserts that non-conservative media outlets are illicitly biased in favor of liberals, and therefore fundamentally not credible. In the resulting echo-chamber, Fox executives have been increasingly free to pursue partisan narratives more akin to the fever-dreams of wingnut bloggers than the stodgy, fact-constrained coverage of professional news operations. People generally like news that confirms what they already believe, and Fox is in the business of increasing the intensity of those beliefs.

But the Stewart-O'Reilly debate went awry. An O'Reilly interview is supposed to be a cathartic morality play, and when Papa Bear failed to deliver the anticipated smack-down, the result had to feel disconcerting to his regulars.

Fox viewers were introduced Monday night to an alternate reality where Fox News and its most popular personality were proven to be something other than invincible. And since sheer dominance is a big part of Fox's branding (“The Most Powerful Name in News”), any hint of weakness feels particularly troublesome to the channel and its supporters.

Conservative media is generally in an uncomfortable place in May 2011. Glenn Beck and Fox are parting ways, and despite his multimedia empire, Beck's syndicated radio show is suffering from falling ratings, an effective advertising boycott and a diminishing roster of radio stations. Rush Limbaugh's ratings are down as well, and a new method of counting listeners is revealing a sampling bias that may have for decades systematically inflated ratings for political talk.

Whatever the explanation, right-wing media bullies no longer look quite so intimidating, and Fox finds itself bedeviled by the burdens of empire. As David Frum so famously asserted during the 2010 health care fight, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we're discovering we work for Fox. And this balance here has been completely reversed. The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party.”

Which means that Roger Ailes is feeling some pressure. Though generally acknowledged as a TV genius,nothing in the man's record suggests that he's capable of leading an effective political movement. Create the orchestrated illusion of a grass-roots Tea Party movement? Easy. Convert that to legislative success? Difficult. But as the owner of the 2011 GOP, Ailes has to deliver both media profits and conservative policies.

Even the GOP's creepy anti-union victories in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio this winter look Pyrrhic, a classic over-reach that has reawakened blue-collar voters and shoved them directly into the arms of the Democratic Party. Like the fake candidacy of Donald Trump, the modern conservative movement is great at attracting attention and fundamentally ill-equipped to govern.

Absent an unlikely and dramatic reversal of fortune in 2012, conservatives will face some soul-searching questions in 2013. None will loom larger than this one: How do you build a political future when the heart of your party is an aging white demographic and your political opponents keep winning overwhelming majorities among new voters and minorities year after year?

Fox lacks an answer to that question, and its piss-off-grandpa-and-scare-grandma-to-death programming is unlikely to attract new influxes of twentysomethings. It's the dominant force in 24-hour cable news, but as a combination political movement and media jauggernaut, Fox is an evolutionary dead end.

In 2008, the most recent year for which I could find good information, the median age of a Fox viewer was 65. That same year, the median age of a Daily Show viewer was 35.

History suggests that great empires seldom fall because of dramatic events. They just slowly poison their own soil until nothing grows but weeds and thistles, and one day the mighty collapse like empty suits of armor.

Today, the currents of history are swirling around the immobile empire of Fox News, eroding its foundation like a sandcastle at high tide. Every time its defenses are breached – every time a truth-teller like Jon Stewart is allowed to speak directly to a Fox audience, exposing viewers to the foolishness they have endorsed – the empire hollows out a bit more.

Plan accordingly.

Rethinking advertising... in 2005

2011-03-28T08:38:10-04:00

Author's note: What follows is a lightly edited version of a white paper report I gave my bosses at The Post and Courier newspaper in December 2005, describing an approach to 21st century news media and advertising that Steve Buttry (who developed his version independently in 2007) and Chuck Peters would later name C3, for Complete Community Connection. I first blog-published this text in September 2006, because I was shocked that nothing had come of it. Five years later, I'm not shocked. Things were moving rapidly in the web world in 2005, but things do not move rapidly in the news media industry.

For the record, The Post and Courier bosses who received this white paper never invited me to discuss it with them.

Readers, buyers and users
The print-newspaper business model is contradictory and more than a little confusing: We attract readers by covering news, which they pay to read. But the heart of our businesslies with sellers, for whom we deliver the attention of buyers via advertising. This is a conflict. For our brand to be valuable, readers must see it as independent of advertiser interests. To keep that reader trust, traditional newspapers have long erected “firewalls” between their news and advertising and editorial departments.

But we have a secret: Those firewalls come with built-in doors and windows. For all our talk about independence, no newspaper wants its editorial department to go around casually angering advertisers. Sure, we do it, but we don’t do it lightly. Not for long. And when we do, even for the best of reasons, we hear about it from those advertisers.

There’s another flaw in this model: Because the firewall isn’t really what we say it is, we’ve developed this odd tradition about covering commerce. Instead of acknowledging that buying and selling and consuming are among the most important activities in our readers’ lives, we pretend that these topics are really of interest only to businessmen. Why? Because writing about products and businesses from the reader’s perspective is a great way to irritate advertisers. This absurd-but-inevitable position creates the market for Consumer Reports, a relatively expensive magazine that actually covers these subjects with authority.Consumer Reports, of course, accepts no advertising, which means it costs the reader more.

So why do they buy it? Because Consumer Reports saves people money. It is, in the purest sense, what all news media aspire to be: Something so valuable that a subscription is considered an investment. Consumer Reports has no firewalls, because everybody at Consumer Reports is working for the same person: The reader. The buyer.

Which brings us to Amazon.com.

I use to go to Amazon to buy books. Now I go there buy to books, movies and music, even gardening tools and college-logo stadium jackets for my parents. It’s where I’ll do the bulk of my Christmas shopping, because most of my family lives someplace else.

I’m a loyal Amazon shopper, because Amazon works forme. In fact, I’m its business plan.

It learns what I like. It remembers me. It suggests things, based on what I’ve looked at previously.

Amazon respects my time. It collects, organizes and displays information for me in ways that help me make decisions, and when I’m ready to buy, I don’t have to jump through hoops. I can do research, comparison shop, try a free sample of the book I’m thinking about buying. Even its suggestions are useful, tailored to my interests. It never wastes my time with an annoying pop-up ad for something I would never consider buying.

But there’s one other thing Amazon lets me do: It lets metalk about what I’ve bought and read what other buyers have written. If you think about that from a newspaper perspective, that’s a pretty radical idea. We won’t even let reporters write about the relative merits of one furniture brand over another, or the friendliness and honesty of the staff at a particular used-car lot. Would we just open up a forum for readers to pop in and say critical things about our advertisers?

Of course not. That would be stupid.

But then there’s Amazon, making an awful lot of money by being stupid that way.

And when I really sit down and think about it, I could use a lot more Amazon in my life. I need it saving me time, helping me to make smart choices, connecting my needs to products and services in intelligent, adaptive ways.

I need this concept at work in my community. Not just an Amazon for the same-here-as-there world of books, but a similar concept that connects me to the businesses in easy walking distance or a short drive.

When I’m going out to dinner, I’d like to know what’s on each restaurant’s specials board. I’d like see their price for fresh fish, read our restaurant critic's most recent review and check to see what other diners had to say about their experience. Sure would be nice if I could make a reservation online, too.

When I want to go to the movies? Same thing. I don’t just want to buy a ticket online – I want to interact with other movie fans. I want to read what others think, but maybe my tastes are special – maybe I only want to read reviews from people with similar viewpoints. I want a site that helps me filter out the clutter and find the things that are relevant to me.

I need other things, too – like, say, a mechanic I can trust. Actually, I need two – one for a domestic sedan, the other for an import van. I need plumber and a guy who can repair the plaster in my ceiling. I need a lawyer and a built-in dishwasher. Ads give me a clue about who to call, but it’s not generally high-quality information. Sure would be nice if I could do my research, price my job, schedule my service, check references from previous users and conduct my business all in one place.

I think the future of our online business lies within that example. Why not use our unique position in the local media market to build online marketplaces that integrate all the research, interaction, information and commerce functions of smart, 21^st century commerce in one, easy-to-use site? Not an advertising section with stories in it. Not a story section with ads on it. An integrated commerce hub where readers will research, locate, compare, price, discuss and buy – all in one place.

It’s a product that generates revenue for us before we sell the first ad, but I have no doubt that ad sales will follow. Why? Because by bringing interested, motivated buyers to a single virtual marketplace, we will have created a location where sellers want to be.

It’s hard to even imagine such a thing today, but it’s worth doing. Imagine, for instance, a site that combines all our golf coverage with all the stories we’ve ever written about local courses, all the relevant external links (no pun intended, but hey…), columns and blogs by golf writers (both professional and amateur) … and then, at the end, a service that lets the user find available tee times, compare costs and features, and then book a round for his foursome, all without having to leave our site. Everyone benefits, and we get our cut as the middleman.

Now imagine you’re an ad salesman. Why would a local golf course want to advertise online anywhere else?

We need to get in the habit of imagining such relationships.

Could you apply such thinking to automobile maintenance? Getting your house painted? Buying stock online? Could you build a hub for tourists, integrating all the things tourists need to plan and enjoy a trip to Charleston?

So where’s our money in this model?

Everywhere – depending on the type of transaction we’re assisting. Sometimes we’ll sell upgrades from our standard free listings – a detailed restaurant menu, maybe photos or maps. Sometimes we’ll sell services: Perhaps a blog-like “blackboard” where business owners can talk about their specials or chat about whatever’s on their minds. We might charge some vendors a flat fee for providing e-commerce services that lets shoppers buy their merchandise through our site. Others might list their products and services for free, but pay us a commission when we connect buyer and seller. A car dealer might pay us a finders fee. We could even put a Pay-Pal button on some of our sites and ask for tips!

Other types of companies could do this – and, if news organizations don’t do it, these competitors likely will. But nobody else starts with the local advantages we enjoy.They would have to create the content that would give such hubs their depth and value. We already own it. It’s called our electronic archive. They would have to hire writers, set up business, I.T. and advertising staffs. They would have to spend money on marketing just to introduce their brand. But everybody knows about the local paper, and every day thousands of people wander through our website. How might that number change if we made our online brands and their affiliated products significantly more useful?

Coordinating our efforts
The key concept here – the thing that makes the whole idea work – is that because a commerce hub doesn’t requireadvertising to generate revenue, the traditional firewall between advertising and news becomes purely elective.

Sure, a restaurant might protest a negative review by threatening to pull its ad from our online dining hub – but if that hub is the single spot where the majority of local diners go before going out, that ad won’t stay gone for long. What’s more, the interactive features of a truly integrated hubchange the dynamics of a bad review. In print, publication is the end of the story (except for the angry phone calls and occasional letter to the editor). Online, publication is just the beginning of the conversation. Some readers will come to the restaurant’s defense. Others may take the reviewer’s side. Restaurants that participate in the debate – or at least follow it – will learn valuable information about how to improve their business, and would-be diners will get a much more detailed picture of whether or not a restaurant suits their tastes.

As an advertising market, a hub also offers the advantage of being far less susceptible to competition from our traditional media rivals. Smaller publications have been able to take some of our ads by promising downtown bars and restaurants better bang for their buck. While these generic-content competitors won’t go away, the self-selecting nature of a commerce hub audience makes the hub a naturally focused and efficient advertising market, something far more similar to the Yellow Pages than a typical newspaper section or website home page.

Some businesses will be happy to be part of our free listings but may pass on the functional upgrades we’ll offer them for a price. Others may choose to buy tradition online ads and ignore the new products we have to offer. Whatever. Hubs offer businesses a greater ability to customize their presence, and that’s a very Web 2.0 concept. This new medium rewards customization and punishes one-size-fits all inflexibility.

To offer that flexibility, our approach to online business must be equally fluid. Gone are the days of the all-encompassing revenue source, and that means we must learn where we can add value in each transaction. That observation will determine where, and how, we get our cut.

This means changing the way we think about our web operations. It is no longer enough to bundle our multiple products under a single brand, with built-in firewalls between departments. We must begin thinking about every meaningful subcategory of reader/user/buyer interest as the focal point of a new product. We must organize our new-media efforts via interdisciplinary teams rather than by traditional departments.

This last step is only possible when we align our focus to serve one goal: The needs of each individual reader.

The danger in the doldrums

2011-03-11T10:47:39-05:00

This morning's day-off multi-tasking: watching coverage of the horrible 8.9 earthquake in Japan while reading my various feeds, which included finally taking on the Bill Keller column about aggregation. It includes this passage in the ultimate graph:

There is no question that in times of momentous news, readers rush to find reliable firsthand witness and seasoned judgment. (In the first hour after Mubarak fell, The Times’s Web site had an astounding one million page views, and friends at other major news organizations tell me they enjoyed a similar surge.) I can’t decide whether serious journalism is the kind of thing that lures an audience to a site like The Huffington Post, or if that’s like hiring a top chef to fancy up the menu at Hooters. But if serious journalism is about to enjoy a renaissance, I can only rejoice. Gee, maybe we can even get people to pay for it.

So here's a thought question: How many "times of momentous news" do we experience in a typical month? With the exception of you news junkies (and you know who you are), how often do you hear something that sends you rushing to your top media channels to find out more?

I don't have answers to that, other than to say "not that often."

Which points to an overlooked problem in media: If you get most of your attention on days when people are urgently paying attention to an event, but you make your money by selling ads on less-interesting content day after routine day, what does that do to the way you structure and value your newsroom resources?

Let me put it this way: It's easy to do journalism on the big days. You just throw everything you've got at the big story and you work it until you collapse.

The danger to the profession and our industry arises in what we do on the slow days, a problem that can be seen in a more compressed fashion on the 24-hour news networks. With more than 19 hours of daily coverage time available to them, news channels could spend their slow days covering diverse stories, delving into complex topics, exploring places and voices and issues that we don't have time for during busy news cycles.

Of course, that's not what news channels do, and it's really not what newspapers (in print or online) do. Because that kind of news is expensive, and why spend money on quality if people aren't paying attention to it?

And so our traditional advertising subsidy for news creates the structure that produces the crap that people say they hate. It's why we get so much Sheen and Lohan right now, even as viewers protest about the relative lack of coverage given to U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan. It's why aerial videos of meaningless car chases and sharks off the coast trump complex stories like the relationship between the bond markets and political policy.

Don't just bitch about it. Understand it. It's a slow news day and you're a news manager, stuck between the business people in the board room and journalists in the newsroom: you can spend days of reporter time developing a complex story, or you can turn a camera on Charlie Sheen, and probably get more attention. It's simple math.

Journalists struggle with what to do in the doldrums, but they're pushing a rope. I have friends who say things like "we just need to buckle down and start covering things of substance," but they just don't grasp that the business logistics of their industry simply won't support that solution. Yes, journalism has competitive problems and culture problems and distribution problems, but if you're talking about making journalism more responsive to issues and less susceptible to distractions, you've got to go to the root issue. We are in the business of packaging audiences to rent to advertisers.

Got it? It's what we do -- or don't do -- on the slow days that's killing our reputations. It's the fact that we must "feed the beast" on days when there is no "time of momentous news." Your front page is going to require a certain number of stories and photos. On routine days, the size of your newspaper -- the amount of information it's going to provide -- is determined not by news judgment on the significance of things, but by the number of ads that you sold. And even when we know that what we're publishing is boring crap, we'll tart it up to make it appear worthy of attention. Because we have to. Because that's our business.

People get angry with me for saying this, because they can't imagine an alternative. But I can. And the first step toward a healthier future is always the imagination of something better.

The future, on the cheap

2011-03-03T22:42:52-05:00

I read a post yesterday about a profitable hyperlocal news site, and here's my summary: the owners hold down costs by paying freelancers to write articles. Their secret sauce, apparently, is that unlike similar hyperlocal formulas being pushed by Patch and The New York Times, The Alternative Press doesn't waste money on unnecessary expenses - you know, frivilous journalism stuff, like hiring editors.

Result? They've got their overhead down to a triumphant $0.28 per unique user.

“We're the only profitable hyperlocal here today and our business model works,” founder Michael Shapiro told an MIT enterprise forum late last month.

So, let's review.

Shapiro is in the advertising business, and that means he has to acquire content so he can package an audience to companies that want to sell things. But quality-controlled journalistic content is expensive, and the rates Shapiro can get on Web ads are so low that if he spent money on things like editing, his cost-per-unique-user might go up to something like a dollar or more (apparently this is along the lines Shapiro estimates for his competitors), and then his working business model wouldn't turn a profit anymore.

The squeakiest irony here is that Shapiro's websites have “teamed up” with the journalism school at Seton Hall. Got that? Shapiro is touting his business model to an industry desperate to escape a continuing vortex of decline, and that model includes “leveraging” journalism students to produce content for a publication that is only nominally journalistic, at rates so low that they're essentially undercutting the professional future to which these students aspire.

Let's also be clear why the industry notices stuff like this, and it's not because The Alternative Press is the first Web operation to make money via hyperlocal blogging. They're not even the first in New Jersey. To see a great example of how it can be done well, with heart and soul and personality and obvious concern for community (in this case, Montclair, N.J.), check out Baristanet.com. It's personable and talent-rich and unique, and that's its failure from an industry perspective. You can't commodify "unique."

Legacy media executives typically aren't looking for unique. They're looking for repeatable – an industry formula for hyperlocal that reliably produces predictable results. Plug in X dollars, apply the same approach to each new market regardless of quirks, collect X(y) dollars.

There's plenty of evidence that hyperlocal can pay its own affordable freight in a low-cost blog format (duh – how many years has Lisa Williams been keeping track of that story over at Placeblogger.com?). It's a safe bet that entrepreneurial local people will continue to earn working-class incomes by blogging about their communities, making most of their money via CPM advertising.

What concerns me today is this desire to turn hyperlocal into a franchise formula, because it speaks to the fatal flaw in our thinking about the future of media and journalism. The industry's insistence on short-term, repeatable profitability seems practical on first blush (of course we've got to make money to keep the lights on), but low-cost solutions tend to devolve into races to the bottom, and with Web ad rates as low as they are, this particular race will likely be swift.

At what point do we recognize that the years we've spent chasing lower overhead have done exactly nothing to make media companies more solvent, much less to secure any kind of meaningful future for journalism in American society? Shouldn't we take a cue from Google's attack on the content farmers and resign from our industry's embarrassing campaign to wring profit out of increasingly shoddy work? Is there anyone left out there who is happy with the thought that we've met the future, and it's $0.28 per unique visitor?

There is an alternative. We can start building a 21st century approach to journalism that turns reported information into data products that accrue in value over time. There's nothing intrinsic to the craft of journalism that limits us to consuming data, and with the right tools and techniques, we can become producers of robust, unique data -- data that will make our reporting better, but also data that will create tangible value independent of whatever stories we write.

When I stepped up my writing about these ideas in 2008 (see Section IV. The New Exotics), the ranks of journalists proposing a data-supported future for the profession were pretty thin. It's still not a mass movement, and we certainly don't all agree on every detail, but there are more people writing about these ideas, in more prominent places, than ever before. I'm hesitant to name them here, simply because I know how much I hate having my contributions overlooked and I would certainly overlook someone I admire in doing so. But here's the most recent signal (republished by Neiman two days ago) that our data-generating future is nearing mainstream acceptance: Newspapers must become hubs of trusted data in a market seeking (and valuing) trust (hat tip to Andy Rhinehart).

As Seth Godin says, ideas that spread, win. This idea -- the notion that there can be a healthier model for journalism, a more abundant future for the people who work in media, and a better media system for the communities we serve -- is spreading.

Now that media executives are realizing that paid content schemes are not likely to reverse their companies' failing fortunes, an opportunity is emerging for people to fund and build the first practical tools for this data-driven future. I propose we get moving on that, and just leave today's cheap vision of the future to anyone who chooses to live there.

21st century jargon: a list

2011-02-26T07:08:15-05:00

Jargon is one of those things that gets a bad rap from journalists, and writers in general, because it's an evolved specialization of speech. When our lives require new terms to describe the issues we face on a daily basis, we create them. This specialization quickly distinguishes groups from the general population, which is why writers avoid jargon: it limits the audience for their work.

Here's a list I compiled while working as a consultant last year. I imagined a younger, college-educated me, teleported through time from 1985 into the meetings I was attending, and every time I heard a phrase that 1985-me would have tripped over or misinterpreted in its new context, I wrote it down.

Looking back over this list now, I wonder if there's every been a generation in human history that's had to learn so many new terms just to stay in business.

The list:

functionality

instance

ideation

ingestion

widget

problematic

schema

hot folder

objects

module

cloud

platform

Software as a Service (SaaS)

license

deep-dive

huddle

face-up

monetize

revenue stream

CPM/CPA/CPC

semantic

ontology

taxonomy

NDA

social media

SEO

Web 2.0

Web 3.0

remote

CBA

attribute

OOPS

business rules

DAM

DRM

GUI

support

project manager

map

versioning

TME

NLT

script

upgrade

server

alpha

beta

User Acceptance Testing

go-live

user testing

migration

specs

memory

impact

users

audience

target market

budget

slots

RAID

index

Blackberry

Crackberry

CPUs

box

drive

heavy lifting

extraction

thumbnails

generation

API

keyframe

timeframe

usability

resource

"I'll get back to you."

down

multitasking

seat license

UGC

client

look-and-feel

wireframe

downsize

agnostic

content

outsource

telecommute

API

app

development

dev

rack

co-work

wifi

touchscreen

upscale

lowrez

hirez

VOIP

USB

vector

bitmap

noob

pwn

blog

feed

XML

RDF

microformat

style

style sheet

HTML

CSS

tables

hack

smartphone

eBook

reader

silo

verticals

atomized

template

RSS

podcast

streaming

codec

wiki

mobile

heatmap

entity

extraction

structured

semi-structured

W3C

PMP certified

asset

Flash

slider

radio button

Angel

golden handcuff

decision matrix

Agile methodology

scrum

data model

mashup

augmented reality

waterfall

iteration

Advertising is not enough

2011-02-25T12:25:42-05:00

The ongoing death throes of TBD, a Washington-based local news site that launched in April, attract my attention because a talented friend of mine joined the venture last spring. I remember wishing him well in a coffee shop 11 months ago while thinking “I've got a bad feeling about this.”

Here's why, and it's not a complex answer. TBD, like practically every other for-profit media business in America, relies on advertising to pay its bills. The pitch for Web-only news ventures like TBD is that they'll turn a profit on low revenues because they come without the legacy costs of their newspaper-backed Web competitors.

What gets overlooked in these proposals is just how low those revenues typically turn out to be. Despite a rebound from their crash in 2009, Web ad rates remain so dismal that it's difficult to make money producing journalistic content online even when your company's main expense is newsroom payroll.

Despite that math, ad-funded Web start-ups still look like worthwhile risks to some investors. The news-media industry is in flux and local news (in the abstract aggregate) represents an enormous market awaiting an efficient solution. The first outfit to find the magic combination of technology, social engagement, journalism savvy and smart business practices stands to create a profitable template for follow-on franchises.

There's nothing wrong with that logic. The problem is what's happening to advertising.

Advertisers don't sponsor your news product – they rent the attention of whatever audience you've assembled, and this exchange isn't nearly as valuable for either party as it used to be. Much has changed since the era portrayed in Mad Men, but for the purposes of this topic, the most important change is this one: in the mid-20^th century, consumers had limited media choices, and so their attention was concentrated and could be sold at premium prices. In the early 21^st century, consumers enjoy exponentially more media choices, which is why the advertising value of each choice is now miniscule compared to the 20^th century revenues on which the industry was founded.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting that advertising is going away. Consumers still need to buy things, producers still need to sell things, and connecting the two generated $300 billion last year in the United States alone. Advertising is changing, but there's no reason to believe that much of the news our great-grandchildren consume won't come with some form of attached advertising.

What I'm challenging is the prevailing wisdom that because advertising shaped and subsidized journalism in the 20^th century, the reinvention of journalism in the 21^st century is simply a matter of re-balancing online ad rates with newsroom overhead. Those rates are lower because audiences have fractured and we're never going to reverse that trend, so it follows that if your only revenue plan for producing original journalistic content is selling Web ads beside it, you'd better learn to make that content cheaper and more sensational than your already cheap, sensational competitors.

This math is what made the paid-content movement so powerful in 2009. If you can't raise your ad rates and you can't throttle back the supply of things that people pay attention to, your only choices are to produce more content at lower rates or to find an alternate revenue stream. Since print media companies already understood subscriptions and rack sales, re-creating those models online was an obvious pitch two years ago – even though it was already clear at the time that few newspaper companies produced the kinds of content that could reliably profit from paywalls.

The paywall revolution didn't materialize in 2010, and while some of those delayed roll-outs are expected to launch this year, the people predicting success for these ventures tend to be the people selling the software. Even those salesmen are no longer predicting immediate paywall (the new term is "metered model") profitability, redefining success as brand protection and a slow process of indoctrinating online customers to a pay-as-you-consume culture. The idea that paid content will change the game for media companies just doesn't carry its own weight today.

So if that's where we are, and I suspect there's a quietly growing consensus that acknowledges these limitations, then why isn't there more of an effort to develop alternatives?

The most obvious reason is that the intellectual infrastructure of the news industry is an advertising infrastructure. Most news executives rose to their positions either through expertise in the ad business or their experience in the newsroom, where editors teach young journalists that subscribers pay for printing and trucks, but advertisers pay everyone's salaries. Proposing to this group that 21^st century journalism could produce significant value independent of advertising is a bit like pitching heliocentrism to the Roman Inquisition in 1610. You're not just proposing a new revenue stream, you're moving the center of the known universe. Kind of a tough sell.

We live in a mass-media society during an information age, and everyone “knows” that the economic value of quality data is lasting but the economic value of quality news is fleeting. We hold this truth to be self-evident: No matter how well-reported, news is only valuable during the flitting moments when people are paying attention to it. For all our First Amendment rhetoric, journalism isn't a product we sell to consumers, it's a loss-leader we use to package consumers into audiences for advertisers.

I think it's time we challenged this assumption. What if the information that news companies collect and publish actually accrued in value? Even a marginal value for the data produced in the reporting of news stories could be a transformative development for 21^st century media, provided that the value grows as the data set expands.

For the short term future, it's likely that most of the “smart money” in the news/advertising business will continue to back ventures that offer 21^st century tweaks on 20^th century business models. But as the paywall movement fades into a footnote, ad-dependent start-ups like TBD fold into obscurity and cheap cons such as Demand Media collapse like pyramid schemes, an opportunity emerges. Who will imagine the ways to convert reported information into valuable data products? Who will fund the development of the tools that make such products possible and profitable?

The future is not knowable, but let's be clear about the lessons of history. The assumption that the future will look like the past is based on an illusion that time routinely treats with disdain. That's not much of a consolation to the good people laid off at TBD this week, but it might be a new starting point for their profession.

An FAQ for my semantic journalism essay

2011-01-21T18:25:28-05:00

Since several readers yesterday seem to struggle with some of the big-picture concepts in my essay about standards-based journalism in a semantic economy, I'm taking this opportunity to build a better cognitive bucket for all this information I'm shoveling your way. And it seems like the big problem is understanding what RDF is and how it might work in this context.

Rather than doing this in essay form, I'm going to try it as an FAQ.

Q. What's so special about RDF? How is linking to RDF statements any different than just linking to source documents?

A. I focus on RDF because I think of it as a machine-readable grammar that humans can understand, too. And because of the simple and amazingly flexible way that RDF statements are constructed, adding a new RDF statement doesn't mean that all the previous statements about its subject have to be edited to reflect the new stuff.

For instance, at this hour, Google News links to a story about a three-way-tie among the top Republicans in a poll about likely 2012 presidential candidates. How should I store that info?

If I wanted to store information in a Wikipedia-like text summary of facts, and if I wanted it to be useful no matter how a future user might wish to retrieve it, I'd have to go in and create a page for this poll. Then I'd have to edit the pages on polling, on the polling company involved, on the Republican Party, on the 2012 election, on each individual candidate, plus updates to pages for various concepts such as "Christian Right" and "voters over 65." That's a lot of writing.

On the other hand, if I simply ingested the results as a spreadsheet document, I could convert each of the cells in the spreadsheet into an RDF triple:

(candidate) | has support in poll X | (y percent of respondents)

And if I made sure that I used the same terms over and over again ("Huckabee" would normalize to "Michael Dale Huckabee," and so on), without "editing" the database entry known as "Michael Dale Huckabee," I would have expanded it. There would likely be several manual triples that I would have to create to describe additional information about the poll, but once I've established an information template for handling poll data, this won't take me too long.

For purposes of example, let's pretend that three weeks from now, a report surfaces that calls into question the accuracy of this poll. Instead of going back into each record I've created or modified, I'd simply write a new set of triples, including:

Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted by telephone Jan. 13-16, 2011 | has controversy | employee claims data flaw

You'd probably need dozens of RDF triples to represent just the first sentence of that news report:

A supervisor deliberately skewed data collected during a recent poll of likely Republican voters in a deliberate effort to boost fundraising for one of the candidates, Gallup data analyst Erica Borges claimed Friday in a sworn affadavit.

...but that's because human language is based on the assumption that both the speaker and the listener agree that words have common meanings. Computers, however, don't do nuance. They require us to specify meanings in unambiguous ways. This makes RDF absurdly redundant to human readers, but extremely powerful to computer programmers. If you give a computer a set of statements in RDF and provide it the right set of instructions, it can derive valuable statements about large data sets in far less time than humans reading documents and assembling statements with a standard word processor.

Another thing about this logic is, I can write triples about triples, and expand the set of things that I write about :

[Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted by telephone 13012011 to 16012011 | has controversy | employee claims data flaw] | has date of complaint | 18022011

[Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted by telephone 13012011 to 16012011 | has controversy | employee claims data flaw] | has source | Erica Borges

Erica Borges | has employer | The Gallup Organization

[Erica Borges | has employer | The Gallup Organization] | has job title | data analyst

...which means that I can modify more complex concepts without having to write lots of triples from scratch each time I want to say something. If I were to build a system that stores, retrieves and recycles existing statements, I could describe things in RDF with greater efficiency than I could in English.

Q. Are you some kind of expert in RDF?

Absolutely NOT. I have never had the opportunity to create RDF as part of a workflow. Neither have I ever modeled complex concepts in RDF. I'm not a computer programmer, or a semantic technology expert.

When I write about RDF, I typically avoid going into much depth, as I know there are people who've been doing these things for years who would probably look at my examples and laugh (for instance, I'm not sure that the examples above are cleanly constructed).

That doesn't mean that my general statements are wrong. It simply means that I'm not the best candidate to construct a demonstration project.

Q. So are you saying we should just stop writing news stories and produce databases instead?

No. I'm saying that if we used what I call a Semantic Content Management System, it might be possible to create and link to RDF expressions that support the statements we make in collecting and reporting the news.

I'm saying that we could tag statements in our word processors that would link to URIs that are published on the Web as part of a directory of meaning that is produced and published by our SCMS.

Q. That's stupid. "Facts" are fluid things. We disagree about facts. Such a system would never work, because it's too explicit. Don't you realize that context matters?

As human beings, we go around assigning meaning to things. When we see light in the wavelength of 630–740 nm, we call it "red," and we don't get much disagreement. But when we look health care reform, we look at the same data and reach different conclusions, which causes many of us to see red.

In the system I propose, everyone using it would be encouraged to cite sources for their statements. So if a critic of health care reform sees evidence of "death panels" in the law, it would be up to us to collect exactly what sub-section of the bill is being referenced. We'd create a triple that includes that citatation. And later, when everyone is talking about "death panels," it would be much easier for people to find that section.

(as an exercise, go find that exact section of the law. time yourself)

Also, because of the nature of RDF, we could collect all the eventual citations about "death panels" very easily, even if the stories in which the citation occur don't use the searchable term "death panels." As various people discuss and examine the death panel allegation, our reporting on the subject would create a library of triples that can be examined by machines on behalf of our efforts to clarify competing claims.

Would everyone be forced to cite a source? Absolutely not. But would un-sourced claims be evaluated as strongly as claims with citations? Of course not.

Here's a more common example. I'm covering a political rally. I'm making notes. I'm looking at my notes later for quotes and paraphrases. What's the fact I'm citing?

Answer: My reporting. I am the source. And consequently, I am not only writing a news story, but adding to and republishing my publication's directory of meaning. So if I go to a political rally and I hear Sarah Palin say the words: "Just because the words 'death panel' aren't in the law doesn't mean the effect of the law won't be death panels," it will be up to me to to tag that quote like this:

Sarah Palin | has quote | "Just because the words 'death panel' aren't in the law doesn't mean the effect of the law won't be death panels."

[Sarah Palin | has quote | "Just because the words 'death panel' aren't in the law doesn't mean the effect of the law won't be death panels."] | has date | 1834Z13122011

[Sarah Palin | has quote | "Just because the words 'death panel' aren't in the law doesn't mean the effect of the law won't be death panels."] | has location | Manchester High School West auditorium, Manchester, New Hampshire

[Sarah Palin | has quote | "Just because the words 'death panel' aren't in the law doesn't mean the effect of the law won't be death panels."] | has source | "Palin defends 'death panels' claim" http://myNewHamphireDailyExample.com/2011/12-13/palin-defends-death-panels.html

"Palin defends 'death panels' claim" http://myNewHamphireDailyExample.com/2011/12-13/palin-defends-death-panels.html | has author | James Olsen

["Palin defends 'death panels' claim" http://myNewHamphireDailyExample.com/2011/12-13/palin-defends-death-panels.html] | has audio file object | http://myNewHamphireDailyExample.com/2011/december/reporting-notes-recordings/palinRally12122011.mp3

And so on, an example that also serves to demonstrate the need for an SCMS interface that automates the creation of these RDF expressions.

Palin's claim may or may not be predictively accurate. But all the factual claims in RDF are, in essence, merely provisional. Not only that, but more complete citations and data can be added to the stories we write later, as needed.

Q. That sounds expensive! Why would anyone want to do that?

I wrote a previous essay called "Imagining the Semantic Economy" that went into that subject. My web site contains a directory that links to other posts I've written speculating on the revenue streams that could be derived from complete data sets. I believe that reporting and editing workflows can be adapted to create specific data sets. My usual example involves covering a house fire, and supposes that we could sell the resulting data set to insurance companies, home improvement warehouses, etc.)

And while I haven't written about this except in passing, I believe that directories of meaning will eventually acquire a financial value in and of themselves.

Q. How is this different than a database?

It's actually several databases. There's the database of all web stories on your site's server. There's the database of everything you produce for print, which may or may not be available to Web readers. There's a database of objects and resources, like digital video files and recordings of interviews and spreadsheets. There's a database of structured information from various publishing CMS, like the complete data set for all music venues that you get if you use Ellington to publish information about nightlife in your market.

And then there's what I call the directory of meaning .It's a public-facing directory of RDF expressions derived from our work as journalists.

Q. So if I viewed the source code for a story, would it have all these RDF triples embedded in it?

No. When you view the HTML source code, you'll notice a declaration in the metadata directing bots to the URL where the directory of meaning is located. You will also notice that there are tags around many of the words and phrases in the text, most of which have been created by the SCMS without input from the reporter. The inline RDF tags will include a value, and when that value is combined with the URL declared at the top of the document metadata, the result will be URI for the RDF expression that contains the "aboutness" of the statement.

Q. So this is just about metadata? There are already plenty of news metadata schema out there! Why not just use the stuff that's already out there instead of trying to propose new stuff? What's the big deal?

First, and I've said this before in several ways, this is not just about metadata. Traditional metadata describes the "aboutness" of objects: a .doc file that contains a story; a .jpeg file containing a news photograph; a .mov file containing a video. What I propose would embed the "aboutness" of every concept included in the document, but it would also store those statements in a way that would make them useful independent of the documents in which they appear.

So while a document would continue to have metadata (a file creation date, a pub date, an author, a dateline, etc.), the document's metadata would include links to a directory of meanings that would grow and develop with each new definition and relationship defined by the users of that directory.

You will notice that I'm actually using general terms. I don't get into the differences between RDF and RDFa, or weigh in on whether we should develop an SCMS with a preference for NewsML or NITF. Should we use the terms standardized by IPTC or go with a Dublin Core vocabulary? I have some thoughts, but they're irrelevant. These are decisions to be made during development, and frankly, to the extent that this is possible, an SCMS should be designed to be as platform-agnostic as possible. The world is just changing too fast to endorse one schema over another at such an early stage.

Why not just go with what we've got? I think that's exactly what I'm doing. What we've got is RDF within XML. Both are built to be extensible. That makes them compatible with multiple ontologoical systems.

What we don't "got" is a practical system to manage and publish directories of meaning, and then to embed that meaning within documents. No system on the planet today will do that job. But the individual tasks required to construct such a system are not exotic.

Q. That's all pretty is an abstract geek way, but you're asking us to believe you on a lot of things. Where's your proof?

I'm not offering proof, or examples. I'm offering an alternative that I think gives us the ability to create things that would be better than what we create now. I'm offering my logic, and I'm willing to be wrong. But I'm not going to agree that I'm wrong if you're challenging the claim without yet grasping the logic.

Q.The Don't Repeat Yourself model is compelling in the abstract, but I'm not convinced that the resulting directory of meaning will be useful -- in other words, it could "work" without providing value, or even doing the things that you say it would do. Is it possible that the writerly arguments against atomizing content beneath the story level are the winning arguments?

It's certainly possible. And for the record, these questions are largely questions that I've been asking myself for more than a year. And yes, I think I'm familiar with the principles that would argue against a system like mine, and to the extent that I'm capable of doing so I've tried to construct this idea with those critiques in mind.

Do I propose one information structure for all users? No.

Do I propose that governing or reviewing bodies should control facts? No.

Do I propose centralized, top-down control over semantic expressions? No.

I propose that cooperative, interoperable information structures will be an emergent property of media that makes use of SCMS. I propose that the driving force behind such developments will be capitalistic, not idealistic -- but that idealists will enjoy using these tools. I even suspect that a few idealists with the right backers could begin to develop this technology as an open source project. Right now.

Q. Let me get this right: I'm a reporter, and I've had to swallow shit sandwich after shit sandwich for the past decade, I'm doing my work PLUS the work of the three friends of mine who USED to sit in the three empty cubicles that surround mine in this godforesaken moonscape we used to call a newsroom. Management has been asking me to do all this extraneous Web bullshit like blog and Tweet and Facebook, like that's a verb. And now here you come, telling my bosses that they should be asking me to tag every goddamn definitive statement in my news story to an alphabet soup of geek bullshit that has no concrete proof that it's ever going to pay off for anybody. What I want to know is, what's your address? Because I'm going to come around there personally and kick your ass.

I live at 794 Rutledge Ave. in Charleston, SC, but please don't come around and hurt me.

My hope is that we can use these tools to create value for news information that goes beyond how many hits your stories get for the banner ads on the pages where they appear. My hope is that additional revenue will convince your company to start hiring again -- not just reporters and editors, but people who will come in and help you create, manage and benefit from these semantic initiatives. I hope that news companies will get back to competing based on quality, not just low cost. I'm hoping that by changing the rules of the game, we can make life miserable for the hacks who have been tormenting you and better for the people who want to do good, honest, honorable work.

I recognize that these are new concepts (or at the very least, old concepts arranged in ways that are unfamiliar to most journalists). But if you're interested in making something better, I encourage you to stick with it a bit. If I didn't believe this had the possibility of being helpful, I promise you I wouldn't have spent so much time thinking about it.

Standards-based journalism in a semantic economy

2011-01-20T09:30:00-05:00

Abstract: This 2,600-word essay describes how a news-media industry equipped with semantic tools could develop a standards-based certification program for journalism. Certification would be by non-governmental bodies similar to the ISO, and would focus on information processing and coding standards rather than on matters of ethics. The effect of such a standard would enable interoperability between semantic directories, which would allow for the creation of software that compares facts and checks the accuracy of statements.It is the second in a series of essays about semantic media. Since some readers had difficulty imagining the system, I've added an FAQ for these ideas, and added descriptions to the links listed at the end.

There's nothing exciting or romantic about standards. Personally, I find them tedious.

There, I've said it.

But there's no happy and profitable future for journalism without professional standards, and for that future we should be willing to sweat a little tedium. If my conclusions are correct, then our emerging information-based global economy will require interchangeable, robust data in the same way that our current economy requires that every finely threaded quarter-inch screw must have 28 threads per inch, machined to precisely the same height and pitch and thread-axis angle, regardless of whether the screw is manufactured in the People's Republic of China or Alpharetta, Ga.

Manufacturers of products that require screws need to know not only that the fasteners they buy are machined to precise dimensions and specifications, but that the tolerance of the machining and the durability of the materials fall within known quality standards. This generic uniformity makes it possible for manufacturers around the world to compete primarily on cost, and it works because manufacturers voluntarily abide by standards that were published and certified by international bodies.

If we are to benefit from a global semantic economy, then the information that fuels its industries and drives its markets must be structured, coded, stored, published and quality-certified to international standards. This is a foreseeable future (one among many), because we now possess the tools and techniques required to build the first platform that would make semantic markup of narrative documents a profitable, persistent revenue stream across the publishing industry. So long as the value of these resources continues to expand, we can expect to see voluntary participation in these activities, with resulting increases in productivity and organization.

In other words, don't look for this to occur via the W3C's promulgation of abstract (though thoughtful) Web standards. Instead we should expect to see the industries that benefit from the semantic economy creating “voluntary” standards and certifications based on their mutual interest in increased profits. Those information producers who choose not to voluntarily upgrade their processes will suffer the same fate as manufacturers who choose to ignore ISO 9000 certification: death by capitalism.

Which raises the question: If we imagine a future business (not to mention a larger economy) that derives value from the communication of explicit meaning and robust data, how will we conduct journalism in that context?

The view from the past

The notion of applying professional standards to journalism isn't a new idea, just an impossible dream. For the most part, previous discussions of journalism standards typically degraded to debates over journalism ethics – a worthy goal, no doubt, but certainly not an objective, measurable standard. What is fairness? When is it acceptable to invade a person's privacy? Does balance require the equal presentation of popular but factually discredited perspectives? What should be considered in measurements of accuracy? And so on.

The problem with using traditional press ethics as the starting point for a universal standard is that one cannot equate an explicit standard to an abstract goal. To require that a news report be “fair and balanced” without defining those terms in unambiguous detail is the equivalent of throwing out the maximum outside diameter and TPI standards for fasteners and publishing something that declares that in future, all screws “shall be well-made with the highest regard for quality.” Good luck rebuilding your old engine with that hardware, pal.

Previous attempts at press standards worked forward from ethical news judgment and backwards from desired outcomes to propose professional standards of conduct and process. None have succeeded in improving journalism.

The standards I propose ignore ethics, but not out of hostility toward the subject. My assumption is that applying extremely basic rules to the news and information we produce will improve journalism and public understanding. When we focus on the quality of the workmanship, we need not fret the intent of its creator. An ethical journalist with the right tools who uses professional standards will proudly link her work to facts that support her statements. Those who seek seek to mislead the public or profit from shoddy work would face two bad options: either avoid certification and be judged less credible, or adopt the professional standard and thereby reveal your true identity.

Future standards for future communications

Today, as in 2005, as in 1905, most news is organized and communicated as “stories.” To be a story, a collection of information must have a who, a when, a what, a where, and in most cases, a why and a how.

But that traditional approach to news leaves out the sixth W: “Who cares?” A story must be potentially interesting to a valuable audience, or it isn't worth producing.

This is the fatal flaw with a theory of the press that is based on stories. It assumes that the only information that has value is the information that seems immediately interesting.

But what if baseball coverage worked that way? If our only records of Major League Baseball games were stories about dramatic, game-defining events, we'd never read about a bloop single in the scoreless third, because who cares about facts irrelevant to the story? The “story” is the game-winning RBI in the bottom of the ninth.

We enjoy baseball's intricacies today because of an 1860s sports journalist named Henry Chadwick. Chadwick earned a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame for inventing a structured code for recording the outcome of every play in a baseball game. It's because of Chadwick's “box score” that we value inconsequential third-inning singles, because that hit – like the ground-out before it and the strike-out that followed – is part of a comprehensive data set. If we recorded for posterity only those plays that individual sportswriters deemed immediately interesting, we would have no baseball statistics. No objective way of comparing players across eras. No Sabremetrics.

Today's journalists tend to view new alternatives to narrative as barbaric assaults on their art form, but the simple truth is that we love good baseball stories in large part because box scores give writers the freedom to reject stenography in favor of the most interesting narrative, as well as the ability to make wonderfully definitive statements. We need not cautiously declaim that “many close observers agree that Josh Hamilton is one of the best batters in game.” We can instead write that “Hamilton, who hit .359 this season, has added a new milestone to his improbable comeback from drug addiction: 2010 American League batting champion.”

If life were as linear and rules-driven as a baseball game, this would be easy. Since it isn't, finding the right approach is important. So let's begin with a founding concept: Don't Repeat Yourself, also known by its unfortunate acronym, DRY.

DRY facts

The DRY Principle comes from programming, and it's as elegant an approach to managing semantic assets as we're likely to find:

''Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.''

The person who wrote this definition was referring to a software system, but when journalists cover a beat, they create an implicit system of knowledge, organized almost exclusively by documents. Our job is to make that implicit system explicit, and to organize it by each piece of data involved, regardless of whether the information is contained in a published text document, an unpublished spreadsheet, or a semi-public database.

Because the tool for creating this DRY representation of facts will be a Semantic Content Management System, our output will be valid XML/XHTML with embedded inline semantic markup. Its coded declaration will include a link to our directory of “single, unambiguous, authoritative representations.” More to the point, our SCMS will make such markup practical by offering a window beside our text composition screen that will continually display the connections between the natural language text we're composing and its likely links to the DRY representations in our existing directory. That directory will grow with every statement we make about every fact we acquire.

We'll edit that semantic structure (the invisible, machine-readable “meaning model” beneath our story) alongside the text document, connecting to existing items and creating new ones as necessary. And when we publish our story, we'll also “republish” our directory of meaning. Not a directory for one story, but the complete directory of every concept, entity or relationship we've every published.

Because our system is founded on XML and the DRY Principle, a curious human or a relatively simple computer program will be able to trace all the statements within our story back to definitive conclusions. The improvement over traditional search algorithms will be immediately noticeable.

For all these things to work properly, we must be precise in our reporting, writing, editing and data coding. To meet the requirements of standards-based certification, a news organization will have to demonstrate not only the use of data-entry and ontological conventions, but also an acceptable level of quality-control. Finally, machine audits of the system will have to reach certain levels of accuracy and completeness.

On first blush, this sounds incredibly dull. No mention of ethics, no grandiose references to the First Amendment and the Founding Fathers. So yes, it's dull – but it also accomplishes several objectives that modern journalism can only dream of addressing:

By standardizing and publicizing semantic markup and data entry, this system would make the data contained and described within its directories and archives generically useful to anyone who wishes to write scripts for it – or purchase some portion of a data-set for use in their own companies;
By declaring and publishing our directory of DRY representations, this system would make it possible for others to index, participate in, or subscribe to that directory;
By demonstrating the degree of accuracy and completeness of the archive and its associated semantic directory, the system will give an objective measure of the credibility of the information it presents.

Whereas most attempts at press reform attempt to fix news judgment, fairness or accuracy – three wildly subjective concepts – this approach bypasses them. If we can produce news in which the factual basis for every statement can be immediately derived, sourced and evaluated by all observers, using relatively simple technology, then why concern ourselves with meta concepts like “fairness?” Debates will continue, as they should. But if we give people user-friendly tools that provide authoritative access to facts, then over time we will isolate the less credible voices in society to rhetorical ghettos of their own construction.

Professional standards for a serial abuser

Take Glenn Beck for example. Without professional standards, Beck is able to play at journalistic presentation, then retreat behind the defense that he is only an "opinion-maker" or an entertainer each time his outrageous conduct gets him in trouble. His opinions are based on mixtures of unsourced paranoid fantasy and out-of-context facts, yet anyone who believes that Beck shuns research is utterly wrong. His show notes are a jumble of claims and charges supported by an unsorted link-dump to a mixture of mainstream sources and right-wing institutions. It is research offered to provide the illusion of credibility, not meaningful answers.

The show description from Beck's Jan. 6, 2011, show clocks in at 343 words, followed by 3,600 words in the cut-and-paste jumble called “Links to stories and information used in tonight's show.” The bottom of that section includes 24 footnote links, about a quarter of which are sourced to the conservative Heritage Foundation. Simply determining whether these links support Beck's claims would require a hefty amount of reading, and even then you wouldn't have definitive statements of fact, only general correlations between claims and source documents.

But no link supports the obvious whopper in Beck's summary:

Glenn also criticized the Congress for skipping parts of the original Constitution because they were offensive, such as the three-fifths compromise, which the Founders put in so that The South would not have too much power and slavery could eventually (sic) repealed.

Why no link? Because no such link exists. There is no serious historian on earth who believes the three-fifths compromise was an effort to repeal slavery. Yet this fiction served as the foundation to Beck's subsequent argument (which is rather difficult to describe, as he seemed to make one point about it on the 6th and a very different point about it on the 7th).

In an era of journalistic standards, an obvious snake-oil salesman like Beck could opt out of certification. He could still broadcast the same bullshit, but he could hardly make a convincing claim to be more trustworthy than certified organizations with standards for information structure and transparency. Freedom of speech covers everyone, but it's nice to have reliable ways of distinguishing (and continually fact-checking) reputable sources.

Of course, Beck could always adopt professional standards – but tagging his statements to DRY representations of fact would expose his counter-factual practices in short order. Nothing would keep Beck and Fox News from creating their own directories of fact, nor should it. Standards-based directory rules would allow privately curated directories to operate cooperatively with publicly curated directories. But abiding by those rules also means that your directory will be parsable by robots. If you're creating phony facts to support phony claims, it will be only a matter of time before a bot uncovers the scheme and holds your organization up for ridicule – and eventual decertification.

Standard information practices won't make journalists honest or ethical. But over time, they will reveal the liars, the hacks and the terribly confused.

How we get there

Sadly, no one is likely to build an SCMS simply because they can't wait to begin creating standards-based journalism. Companies are going to spend millions of dollars to build these systems because they will add new, profitable revenue-streams to newsgathering and publishing. It will be up to our journalists to spot the opportunity to build something better.

Neither can we expect our journalistic foundations, think-tanks and university departments to take up this cause, at least not initially. These are quorum-sensing entities with their own agendas, and few of these people are likely to jump on the semantic bandwagon until the bandwagon overtakes them.

But it is not too early to begin talking about these ideas. The more I write about them, the more people I find who have entertained similar thoughts. The more we discuss them, the less exotic they appear.

And it's certainly not too early for journalists to begin educating themselves on semantic principles. If you're interested in this future, now's the time to learn some basics: ontologies, controlled vocabularies, XML, RDF, parsing engines. Figure out what Dublin Core means. Learn enough that you can distinguish between an information structure and an information model. Then wow your friends at the next newsroom kegger. If you really want to get on board, read the book.

It's also a good time for the semantic researchers out there to realize that there is a world beyond libraries and the ponderous groves of academe. Semantic developers need to take a long, detailed look at the idea of seeding the news and publishing industries with new tools – not because such tools are cool and civic-minded, but because they have enormous profit potential. Their potential transformative power is just a side-effect.

And all you geek geniuses out there, working in the search industry? We need you. We need your participation in this development, because once the tools I describe begin their spread, Google will have to catch up, pay up, or fall behind. And you know it better than anyone.

The first step toward standards-based journalism will be the development of a Semantic Content Management System, an XML middleware dashboard that goes beyond standard metadata to embed machine-readable meaning within natural language text documents. The pieces of that platform exist today, but putting them together into a reliable, useful product is a major undertaking. Deploying it will take time. Developing the markets for robust data and the infrastructure for standards-based journalism won't take place overnight.

It's an enormous task, with enormous rewards attached to the results. Our future awaits it.

NOTES

These are the 24 sub-pages I created for the home-grown links in this essay:

Tools and techniques, a short list of functions I consider to be part of this concept.

SCMS, a stand-alone description of my concept of a Semantic Content Management System.

Semantic Markup, short description of what I mean by the term.

Narrative, a short discussion of what I see as the strengths and weakness of a journalism model based solely on the communication of stories.

Information Products from media workflows, stand-alone definition of this concept, with links to the posts where I first explored it.

Robust data, a definition of the concept.

An overview of possible information standards, a very basic list of 11 possible topics for standardiation.

The Sixth W, traditionally known as "news judgment," and why it belongs in these discussions.

How a beat represents an implicit system of knowledge, trying to make the distinction between the limits of implicit systems and explicit systems.

Thoughts on DRY Principle journalism. This is one of my key concepts, and this page describes my history of thinking on the subject, along with how I think it could be useful.

Declarations in XHTML, a short thing for people who aren't familiar with the concept of metadata declarations.

What I mean by a "meaning model". This one winds up being one of the most lengthy pages I created for this essay. It includes the most lengthy examples that I wrote about how the system might work.

What I mean by a "directory of meaning". Not as detailed as the "meaning model page, it's not a short definition page either.

Benefits of semantic directories over search, explores this topic a bit further, but not a long post.

What I mean by "data coding" in this contextx, a short definition page.

What I mean by "machine audits", a short definition page.

Open-sourcing our semantic directories, a short discussion page.

More on buying, selling and valuing data, a short discussion page.

Professionals, amateurs and credibility, a long-form, blog-post-style page, talking about how the continuing lack of substantial progress since "Bloggers v. Journalists is Over" six years ago demonstrates that the problem with distinguishing between professionals and amateurs stems from the fact that there's not enough difference between the two to draw a clear line.

What I mean by standards-based directory rules, a short definition.

What I mean by "your directory will be parsable by robots' , a short discussion.

RDF, triples, structured and semi-structured datax, a page where I talk about my own continuing ambivalence toward a "pure RDF" solution, and leaving open the possibility of designing the system to make use of structured and semi-structured data that is created outside of an RDF system.

Building a better bucket, is a blog-style page describing why we have to make extra efforts at helping people understand ideas that are new to them. Very meta.

An FAQ for my semantic journalism essay is a long-form FAQ exploring how these ideas would function, and most importantly, how they would be different from the models that people are familiar with today.

This technique of writing "in-depth" for the Web by creating additional supporting links that expand on the top-level document is part of what I described in my essay "A New Form of Writing." We still don't have an interface that makes it easy, or a browser plug-in that would reveal the benefits of such techniques.Such functions could easily be baked into WordPress or Drupal, and I expect to see features in Firefox and Chrome someday that will take full advantage of semantically structured Web pages, probably in ways I've never imagined.

The first essay in this series, "Imagining the Semantic Economy," was published in December 2010.

More of my essays and posts on media topics can be found on this directory, where I've included brief summaries to help you find subjects that interest you. Of related interest to readers of this topic are the posts "2020 Vision: What's Next For News?", "The Lack of Vision Thing," "Narrative is Dead! Long Live Narrative!" "A New Form of Writing," "Free Wants to be Big," "The Limits of Social," "The Imagination Gap" and "The Future Is Nearer Than You Think."

And if you have never heard of me before, here's my website.

14:50 note: Based on a comment that I just read on Twitter, at least one reader got the impression that I was being hostile toward journalists with my suggestions for things that journalists could read to become more conversant with semantic concepts. I didn't see that coming because it didn't sound that way in my head when I was writing it. Not trying to be snarky, tring to be helpful. dc