Joel Abrams' Home Page

Wait, the Newspaper Isn't Dead Yet?

2009-12-20T20:07:00.004-05:00

I know the state of the newspaper industry is bad. (I work for one that has gone through more than its share of death throes in the last year, and which is not responsible for my opinion here). But much of the analysis of the industry is entirely ahistorical.

I've been reading the works of A. J. Liebling, who in the early 1960's was bemoaning the demise of the American newspaper. In fact, he noted that the demise had begun in the 1930s, with the closing of some papers, and kept accelerating up until his day, with the consolidation of more and more papers in more and more cities.

He especially bemoans how in city after city, it was much more profitable for the owner of one paper to buy out the other paper than compete with it. At that point, there was no need for quality journalism -- only for the publisher to spend the minimum he thought respectable. And rake in the money from the advertising monopoly.

Flash forward to the Internet era: these monopoly newspapers suddenly no longer have a monopoly on classified ads, sports news, lottery results, comics, and gossip (they had been losing the monopoly on the local ad market for years). They're left with a monopoly on serious local journalism -- but for most readers, the unserious local journalism of TV is more than enough.

Where does this leave us? Perhaps we just need to remember that the Golden Age never seemed as golden when it was being lived. Perhaps we need to remember that the newspaper business has always been a business, with capital-J Journalism more an exception than the rule. Perhaps we need to remember, as Clay Shirky has written that journalism is more likely to survive than the form it currently takes.

The news business survived the death of the evening newspaper and most multi-paper cities. Maybe it's not dead yet.

Blogs I Read

2009-01-31T16:34:00.003-05:00

My former boss Jason was asking for some blog feed recommendations for his new project, and I was going to tweet them to him, but decided I would give the blogs I like an extra link, since I haven't updated my blogroll in years.

...My heart's in Accra - Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center of Harvard on globalization and the Web

Jewschool - current issues in the Jewish community and social justice

Pepys Diary - current issues in 17th century London

Regret the Error - the best in newspaper corrections

Geeking with Greg - posts on academic research into online searching

Compete on Usability - my friend Josh's blog (I feel so 2002, posting it here).

Boston.com Snow Plow Game

2008-12-09T16:01:00.003-05:00

I'm sorry for putting something so addictive here, but I need to try out the widget.

Boston.com Snow Plow Gamegreat free widgetsWidgetbox

Ping (pong) dynasty

2008-08-14T09:40:00.004-04:00

Well, I'm checking out our new "Share This" functionality on Boston.com, and liked this article by Bob Ryan: Ping (pong) dynasty. I read somewhere else that the reason China excels in Table Tennis is nothing cultural - it's just that while the Communists were retreating from international sports organizations in the 50's, the international federation was run by a French communist who welcomed "Mainland China" with open arms.

Grumpy about Ts and Cs

2008-06-05T22:15:00.002-04:00

I decided, for once, to read the terms and conditions before I signed up for some sort of locational blogging site. And I was struck by the site's attempt to put a friendly face on the typical harsh terms imposed by lawyers. So a key section starts "What�s yours is yours. You own your User Content, not us." Wow, they really respect the IP in my blogging. But then...

You grant the Company and its affiliates a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and publicly display your User Content (in whole or in part) and/or to incorporate such your User Content in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed.

So I own the content, but they can do anything they want with it, even in forms that haven't been invented yet. About the only concession that they grant to my ownership rights is that the license is non-exclusive. It says later that you can delete your profiles and that removes your content from the site, but they could still use it anywhere else, perpetually.

Oh well, enough ranting for now. I have to try it out.

Finding a bad lawyer

2008-05-27T21:46:00.006-04:00

Good news on the work front: after weeks of waiting on this and waiting on that, my team finally got an updated version of Boston.com search out the door and into the wild today. It fixes dozens of little things that were bugging me. My favorite feature: we make it a lot easier now to set your default location for business searches. And we know about local locations that Google doesn't do well, like the North End. And we can help you find bad legal advice in Our Fair City from Dewey Cheetham and Howe.
[where: Harvard Square, Cambridge]

Romanesko - "News and information is the new rock 'n roll," says Abrams

2008-03-13T12:49:00.002-04:00

It's not often that the subject line of an email makes you smile the way that one did for me. It's about the new "Innovation Officer" for the Tribune company. (Good innovation, like rock 'n roll, is rarely created by top-level executive hires).

Not that I'm related to Lee Abrams. Or Gen. Creighton Abrams (of the Abrams tank). Or weatherman Elliott Abrams. Or to Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams, lately of the National Security Council (although he did once send me an email he thought was going to his sister).

Where is the Capitol Theater?

2007-12-20T15:07:00.001-05:00

It's a popular movie theater in Arlington. But if you try to find it on Google, it's on Mass. Ave in Boston.

That's a big improvement over AOL Local (formerly CityGuide): it thinks the theater is "convenient to Rts. 2 and 16", but "6132.82 Miles Away" from Boston, in Kyrgyzstan not far from the Kazakhstan border (you have to zoom out the map to see, because they don't have detailed maps of the middle of nowhere).

The clear winner: Yahoo!. They've got it a few feet east of the location, but that's rounding error.
[where: 204 Massachusetts Ave, Arlington, MA 02474]

Democratic Book Social Cataloging Straw Poll

2007-12-16T19:56:00.000-05:00

While the political journalists focus on the money primary, endorsements (do any voters really care who my employer endorses, especially in the Republican primary?), and the Iowa Caucuses, I've decided to look at a totally trivial constituency: people who list their books on Librarything, one of my favorite websites.

The clear leader in literary popularity is Barack Obama, with 1142 libraries including the Audacity of Hope, and another 898 his memoir, Dreams From My Father. Hillary Rodham Clinton runs second, with 835 copies of Living History and only 188 copies of "It Takes a Village." Obama's work also gets a better rating - 3.93 average, against 3.35 for Clinton (out of a possible 5 stars).

The rest of the pack:

John Edwards - 58 copies (but a very impressive 4.5 rating for "Four Trials")

Dennis Kucinich - 25

Christopher Dodd - 21

Bill Richardson - 18

Joe Biden - 7

Mike Gravel - 6

Miscellaneous

2007-12-15T19:09:00.000-05:00

It's always humorous when your children reuse your idiosyncratic phrases. Joshua opened up a DVD from the library this evening and declared "This DVD has serious shmutz on it" and brought it to me to clean.

This was something that made me laugh yesterday: The �Blog� of �Unnecessary� Quotation Marks

While checking my del.icio.us bookmarks for that URL, I just saw a blog that I had saved for looking at some more: The Jew and the Carrot. Perhaps a bit more radical than my taste, but bringing three of my interests (Judaism, food, and social responsibility).

Trick or Treating

2007-10-31T20:11:00.001-04:00

We did trick or treating both in the afternoon (the merchants of Lexington) and in the evening (our neighbors). Much candy was gathered, although only a little consumed. So far, Joshua's favorite was his first Snickers bar; Miriam's, her first cherry Tootsie Roll. The excitement level was definitely the highest it's ever been, fueled by the expectation of candy. One can only imagine what it will be at age 8.

Costume progression:
2003 - Space alien and frankenstein
2004 - Fire truck and fire fighter
2005 - Ballerina and bumblebee
2006 - Ariel the mermaid and Lightning McQueen's pit crew

Reading

2007-10-08T19:55:00.001-04:00

Joshua read his first sentence yesterday: "The cat sat in a hat." He has read lots of single words, and recited sentences from books, but this was an unequivocal case of sight-reading words (in this case, they were from Souperchicken. This seems momentous. And it's one of the rare things that Joshua has done before his sister (although she too is on the verge of really reading as well).

An old fun correction and an incorrect fun prediction

2007-10-02T20:50:00.000-04:00

A co-worker was telling me about one of the all-time best corrections in the Globe: the obituary that spoke of the distinguished teachers tacky pants, instead of khaki pants. A quick search finds the correction, another the obit. Ooops.

On a totally unrelated note, Scott Adams has some interesting thoughts on the future of newspapers. He hopes for "a newspaper that is a hybrid of social voting, such as you see on web sites like www.reddit.com and www.digg.com, but further filtered by human editors who weed out the redundant, the juvenile, and the stuff unsubstantiated by facts." What he doesn't see is newspapers getting into the more general ad-supported search and information business. I think it's a natural - after all, Dilbert certainly isn't news, but the comics are certainly a major reason some people buy the newspaper. And the coupons. And the weather.

Space Invaders

2007-09-28T22:12:00.003-04:00

Extra Lulav and Etrog - Taken

2007-09-26T08:59:00.000-04:00

Update: They've been claimed. Chag sameach!

We ordered a set for the semi-obscure Jewish holiday of Sukkot online from a Judaica store in New York. They sent two by accident, so I'd be glad to give a set away to someone who wants one.

How does one find an online lulav seller? I did a search on Boston.com for lulav etrog, and didn't find exactly what I wanted - but the Google Ads were spot on, with competing lulav merchants.

Rabbit, Run redux

2007-09-11T20:34:00.000-04:00

I recently finished re-reading Rabbit, Run by John Updike, which I first read at age 20 or so (after interviewing Updike, I felt I really should read some of his books, which was probably the opposite of how I should have done it).

So now that I'm a lot older, and it struck me how young Rabbit was, and how young Updike was. The prose is a lot flashier, the sex a lot more euphemistic and flashier too. I found Rabbit even more unsympathetic: perhaps because now, I could understand his choice about family, and realize what a shmuck he was about it. But it was a compelling portrait of a young man coming to grips with the reality of growing up. Is he redeemed? Perhaps. Rabbit, Redux may tell me.

SE Spam Mystery

2007-09-10T20:33:00.001-04:00

Well, I was following up to see why I got a site referral on the query "the abrahms that do infomercials" (now I'll do really well on that query, although I still don't know who that might be, and obviously a search engine is auto-correcting my name), when I saw that the results were filled with odd Chinese pages filled with words and no content.

I thought it might be search engine spamming, but I don't understand how - because there are no links from the page. Nor even a title tag. So there's no way that PageRank can be gained or distributed, that I can see. It's puzzling me.

Startups in Boston?

2007-09-09T13:56:00.000-04:00

Scott Kirsner writes in the Globe today about how Boston can't keep companies like Facebook from heading to Silicon Valley, with an argument that basically says that local VC's aren't daring enough to fund them (with an added measure that Silicon Valley is attractive in and of itself.

It was interesting to read this article in tandem with today's NYTBR article on how Alfred A. Knopf rejected many famous books over the years. If renowned editors trying to evaluate something relatively cut-and-dried like the quality of a history book are often wrong, it's not surprising that VC's are often wrong on something as tenuous as evaluating a brand-new Web 2.0 company.

The difference between Boston and the Valley may be simply the depth of the bench. In the publishing world, "The Diary of Anne Frank" could be shopped around to 15 publishers before one took the risk. In the Valley VC world, that could happen to. In Boston, you'd run out of options before then.

Fun Correction

2007-09-07T10:13:00.000-04:00

From today's Boston Globe:

Because of a reporting error, a Page One story in some editions yesterday about the TV series "Curious George" misidentified Arthur, the main character of another PBS show. Arthur is an aardvark, not a mouse.

I'll have to report it to Regret the Error, the correction blog.

Various Thoughts

2007-07-09T20:46:00.000-04:00

I actually had time to read much of the Sunday NYT while visiting my inlaws this weekend (partly because the second half of the paper comes on Saturday - I wish the Globe would do that for either my Sunday Globe or Sunday times).

The travel section had an article on tea in Portland, OR that made me want to go back. Robin and I had some great tea there on our honeymoon.

Then Sunday Styles made me realize: it's hip to be a librarian. And I am proudly one (even if I'm not really a practicing one). Not only am I a librarian, I'm a Guybrarian.

Lastly, a curious 21st century moment: I took the twins to see "Ratatouille" (a great movie). I had to explain to Joshua that there was no DVD playing, but rather film, and it didn't had a menu, and (most tragically) I couldn't fast-forward through the parts he found scary. Kids these days: he understands the difference between a DVR and a DVD, but doesn't have a concept of what film is.

Today's fun search

2007-06-20T20:11:00.000-04:00

I just activated a great new search at boston.com: boston gas prices. I'm going to expand it to include every other town and city in Greater Boston, but I haven't had a chance to yet.

Polling

2007-06-18T21:40:00.000-04:00

Verizon has recently put a new telephone pole in front of our driveway, almost a year after their repairman noted that the poll was listing horribly and needed to be replaced. Now it's a question of when they'll actually transfer all the wires. I say one year - Robin says at least two.

Facebook

2007-06-14T09:17:00.000-04:00

I just tried importing my blog into Facebook. I'm not sure if it will work, or even why I would want to you. Oh yeah, because being on Facebook makes me feel younger and hipper than I actually am.

Good writing, bad writing

2007-05-16T20:13:00.000-04:00

My boss and I were laughing at work over the outrageously bad writing on a restaurant website. Here's a sample from the "Mise-en-scène" (I've heard of mise-en-place in a restaurant kitchen, but geesh):

Apocrypha�s fare and libation are presented by servers whose ethereal timing ensures both comfort and elegance. Hailing from a variety of places and with a shared passion for fine dining, they present the meal with a subtle precision and an acute attention to detail which seamlessly fuses together all the elements of the Apocrypha dining experience.

It's hard to know where to begin to skewer the lack of punctuation and basic grammatical understanding, not to mention pretentiousness.

On the other hand, Sunday's NYT Book Review had a review of Kevin Henkes's latest kids book, which was beautifully written. It captured everything that I love about his work: "Henkes�s best books are good for you the way art is good for you, as opposed to the way right-thinking lesson plans are."

How to Tell if You're a Robot

2007-05-07T20:26:00.000-04:00

During bath the other day, I had been getting lots of cheap laughs by pretending to be "Robot Daddy." Later, I had this discussion with her.

Joel: How do you know I'm not a robot?

Miriam: Because you look like a human

Joel: What if I'm a robot who looks like a human?

Miriam: You can't be a robot. You have a human voice, and you don't have batteries.

I think Miriam may be the latest in the long line of Abrams lawyers.