Closer To The Ideal

A very clever post by Arc90:

America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence, [...] the frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and as a general thing no disposition.

The punch line is that this W. J. Stillman, writing in 1891, complaining of the effect of the telegraph on journalism.

Awful and sad. Rogers Cadenhead writes Why Leslie Harpold’s Sites Disappeared. We are often misunderstood by our family, and they often hold a worrisome power to censor us after our deaths.

I sent an email yesterday to Leslie’s niece, asking if it would be possible for some of her friends to reprint her work as a book and web site. Today I heard back. They will not allow anything to be republished. Because I’ve been told that some of her writings might be a sensitive issue for her family, I replied to her niece that if this is indeed the case, those particular works could be excluded from reprint.

This did not go over well.

I was told that it’s none of my business why her family doesn’t want her work republished, which is absolutely true, and that her legacy “is not dependent on websites or books; her legacy is with every person who knew her and loved her.” This is only partially true. Leslie was an early pioneer in the creation of autobiographical content and experimental web design. She left behind thousands of web pages, many of which are as memorable as Possible Scenarios for Heaven from 2003.

Leslie’s family appears to have decided to let her entire body of work disappear and be forgotten completely. The only things that are left online are articles she wrote for other sites, such as The Morning News.

This raises an important question for those of us who create work on the web that we publish ourselves. When heirs decide to bury a web creator’s body of work by shuttering sites and rejecting all republication requests, can anything be done to save the material?

If the heirs of Charles Dickens had decided that his novels were not his legacy, they could have spurned all publishers and let the books fall out of print, but the existing copies would not have vanished entirely. There still would be physical copies of the books to read and some would’ve survived long enough to fall into the public domain.

It is a sad story where one’s career fails after one has died. The worst thing you can do to a pioneer is erase any trace of their innovations. That she had a big impact on a lot of people is obvious from what was written about her, This Is Not a Eulogy

Todd Levin: Leslie was the Internet’s den mother. She adopted me in 1996, after discovering my Web site—perhaps you were familiar with its very memorable URL, http://users.interport.net/~toddl—and presented me with her plan to launch a web zine called Smug. It was to be both a repudiation of the early Web’s Whole Earth Catalog brand of sincerity, and a big Midwestern embrace of everything we hold dear. It was going to be amazing. It was going to change the medium, and maybe even the world.

I thought she was full of shit, and that Smug would never be seen by any eyes other than Leslie’s. I also honestly thought she was using this fictitious zine as counterfeit currency to purchase an online friendship, because I didn’t trust anyone I met on the Internet. But no one else had shown any interest in my writing, and there’s something very intoxicating about someone who wants to create something new and explosive and world-changing, and wants you on her team. So yes, fuck yes. Smug was going to change the world.

…Liz Entman: I knew Leslie only through her writing, which reveals a woman I would very much have liked to meet in person—sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive, and deeply, quietly hilarious. Her writing is fresh and very, very good. She wrote an article for us before I came on board that is especially poignant to read now—“How to Write a Thank-You Note”—which seems to reveal her wit, warmth, and humor as much as it explicates a problem of modern etiquette. It is fitting, then, to give thanks here for Leslie and her many gifts. She will be missed.

…Liz Entman: I knew Leslie only through her writing, which reveals a woman I would very much have liked to meet in person—sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive, and deeply, quietly hilarious. Her writing is fresh and very, very good. She wrote an article for us before I came on board that is especially poignant to read now—“How to Write a Thank-You Note”—which seems to reveal her wit, warmth, and humor as much as it explicates a problem of modern etiquette. It is fitting, then, to give thanks here for Leslie and her many gifts. She will be missed.

Anil Dash wrote, Leslie Harpold: Always Fearless, Never Smug

If you didn’t know her work, you might fear that someone who owned the domain names fearless.net and smug.com might be a bit, well… prickly. But more than 10 years after Leslie Harpold helped start some of the most clever and intelligent personal sites on the web, and just a few short months after her untimely passing, the lasting impression of Leslie’s life, on and off the web, is of surpassing kindness. And as we look at 10 years of blogging culture this week, her impact and legacy in the world of blogging is well worth revisiting.

The sites that Leslie helped create are legion. There’s The Historical Present, her blog. And Harpold.com (formerly Hoopla.com), which acts as something of a gateway to the rest of Leslie’s legacy on the web. The Smug archives still bear witness to the early experiments in design and writing which Leslie shared with us all. And each year, Leslie shared with us her Advent Calendars, (see 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005) making explicit her desire to give a gift to the entire web.

Clearly, Leslie Harpold had a big impact on the early web, and on the early pioneers of the web. Her life, and work, is now a part of history. It is all together tragic that her family wants to erase her memory, just because they are uncomfortable with some of what she wrote.

Every time a society is doing economically well, someone emerges to suggest that that success is based on innate differences that go back thousand of years. Meanwhile, when a society is doing poorly, someone argues that it is being dragged down by forces that have been pending since the beginning of time. The most notorious example was the preening that the West engaged in during the 1800s – Asians and blacks were naturally lazy, whereas white people were biologically superior. The grotesque reality is that such attitudes were used to justify genocide.

Anyway, now China is doing well and America is doing poorly, so David Brooks starts writing a eulogy for the US:

David Brooks: Asians place emphasis on context while Westerners place more emphasis on individuals. This seems like a gross generalization but it is robustly supported by hundreds and hundreds of studies. Richard Nisbett’s book, “The Geography of Thought” summarizes some of the evidence.

If you show Americans a fish tank, they’ll talk about the biggest fish in the tank. If you show Asians a tank they will make, on average, 60 percent more references to the context and the features of the scene. Western parents tend to emphasize nouns and categories when teaching their kids, Korean parents tend to emphasize verbs and relationships. If you show Americans a picture of a chicken, a cow and grass, they will lump the chicken and the cow, because they are both animals. Asians are more likely to lump the cow and the grass because cows eat grass. They have a relationship.

The mode of thought more common in Asia is better suited to the complex networks that make up the modern world. The contextual, associational style is simply more valid. The linear style we’ve inherited from the Greeks is less adaptive toward the modern age. I think the West may be doomed.

For my part, I think the hype about China is over done. The problems in the US economy were created by forces internal to the US, and they can be fixed by internal forces as well.

David Simon writes the single most ludicrous, misguided, uninformed post about the future of the newspapers that I’ve yet seen:

The true audience for this essay narrows necessarily to a pair of notables who have it in their power to save high-end journalism—two newspaper executives who can rescue an imploding industry and thereby achieve an essential civic good for the nation. It’s down to them. The rest of the print journalism world is in slash-and-burn mode, cutting product and then wondering why the product won’t sell, rushing to give away what remains online and wondering further why that content is held by advertisers to be valueless. The mode is full-bore panic. And yet these two individuals, representing as they do the two fundamental institutions that sit astride the profession, still have a card to play, and here’s a shard of good news: it’s the only card that ever really mattered. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Katharine Weymouth, publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post, are at the helms of two organizations trying to find some separate peace with the digital revolution…

Melodramatic. Two brave souls have the power to save the noblest industry on Earth, the 4th estate, they can perform “an essential civic good for the nation”, but only if they act bravely and wisely. It is a good setup for a movie. How is it that Simon got so far out of touch with reality that he doesn’t understand how sentimental and over-heated this is?

Simon is so desperate to save the newspapers, that he wishes they could break the law:

Most of all, I know that here you are being individually asked to consider taking a bold, risk-laden stand for content—that antitrust considerations prohibit the Times and The Post, not to mention Rupert Murdoch or the other owners, from talking this through and acting in concert. Would that every U.S. newspaper publisher could meet in a bathroom somewhere and talk bluntly for fifteen minutes, this would be a hell of a lot easier.

This by itself says a lot about how doomed the newspapers are – that their supporters think the only way to save them is by breaking the law. Having written this paragraph, Simon should then draw the obvious conclusion – that there is no legal way to save the newspapers. But he is deep in denial. He has a strong emotional attachment to the newspapers, so contemplating their demise causes him too much pain – so he escapes into fantasy:

You must act. Together. On a specific date in the near future—let’s say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it—both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only, and that while subscription fees can be a fraction of the price of having wood pulp flung on doorsteps, it is nonetheless a requirement for acquiring the contents of the news organizations that spend millions to properly acquire, edit, and present that work.

No half-measures, either. No TimesSelect program that charges for a handful of items and offers the rest for free, no limited availability of certain teaser articles, no bartering with aggregators for a few more crumbs of revenue through microbilling or pennies-on-the-dollar fees.

I’m familiar with “a miracle might happen” reasoning. I went through a lot of this when my father died: “The doctor says there is no hope, but a miracle might happen.” Of course, now, looking back, I can clearly see I was deluding myself. Simon is at an earlier stage. He has not yet started mourning because he believes the thing he loves can still be saved.

He then indulges a fantasy in which he is someday regarded as a hero (I assume he will someday be embarrassed that he wrote this):

And when the Justice Department lawyers arrive, briefcases in hand, to ask why America’s two national newspapers did these things in concert—resulting in a sea change within newspapering as one regional newspaper after another followed suit in pursuit of fresh, lifesaving revenue—you can answer directly: We never talked. Not a word. We read some rant in the Columbia Journalism Review that made the paywall argument. Blame the messenger.

Especially stupid is his dismissal of the idea that online ad revenue will someday be greater than what it is now:

Clearly, the product still moves. But to what purpose, when more and more readers rightly identify the immediate digitized version as superior, yet pay nothing for that version, and online advertising simply doesn’t deliver enough revenue?

He then makes a ludicrous comparison:

For the first thirty years of its existence as America’s primary entertainment medium, television was—after the initial purchase of the set itself—provided at no cost to viewers, instead subsidized by lucrative ad revenues. The notion of Americans in 1975 being asked to pay a monthly bill for their television consumption would have seemed farcical. Yet in the ensuing thirty years, we have become a nation that shells out $60, $70, or $120 in monthly cable fees; indeed, whole vistas of programming exist free of advertising revenue, subsidized entirely by subscriptions.

So, somehow the fact that Americans are willing to pay money to get more content proves that they are willing to pay money to get less content.

Maybe the most funny thing in his whole essay is where he compares the brave, visionary geniuses who run the television industry with the stupid, crass, profit-obessessed buffoons who run the newspaper industry:

But unlike television, in which industry leaders were constantly reinvesting profits in research and development, where a new technology like cable reception would be contemplated for all its potential and opportunity, the newspapering world was content to send its treasure to Wall Street, appeasing analysts and big-ticket shareholders. There was no reinvestment in programming, no intelligent contemplation of new and transformational circulation models, no thought beyond maximized short-term profit.

Oh, those damn newspaper publishers! Always obsessed with short-term profit! Why can’t they be more like the noble, far-seeing statesmen who run the television industry?

But here is the saddest paragraph of all, the one that truly shows how much Simon is gripped by the past, rather than what is to come:

In the newspaper industry, however, the fledgling efforts of new media to replicate the scope, competence, and consistency of a healthy daily paper have so far yielded little in the way of genuine competition. A blog here, a citizen journalist there, a news Web site getting under way in places where the newspaper is diminished—some of it is quite good, but none of it so far begins to achieve consistently what a vibrant newspaper, staffed with competent, paid beat reporters and editors, once offered. New-media entities are not yet able to truly cover—day after day—the society, culture, and politics of cities, states, and nations. And until new models emerge that are capable of paying reporters and editors to do such work—in effect becoming online newspapers with all the gravitas this implies—they are not going to get us anywhere close to professional journalism’s potential.

David Simon will only respect New Media once New Media is able to replicate what Old Media gives us everyday. And here, possibly, is the one and only thing that Simon and I agree on: New Media will never replicate what Old Media gave us.

This is reality: the newspapers will largely die, and nothing is going to take their place. There will be other forms of media in the future, but they won’t look or act like what the newspapers did.

Here is the only passage in the essay where he correctly notes that the newspapers have been dying for a long time, and the Internet is only speeding a long-term, secular trend:

Last, and perhaps most disastrous, the rot began at the bottom and it didn’t reach the highest rungs of the profession until far too much damage had been done. As early as the mid-1980s, the civic indifference and contempt of product inherent in chain ownership was apparent in many smaller American markets. While this was discussed in some circles, usually as a matter of mild rumination, little was done by the industry to address a dynamic by which men in Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, at the behest of Wall Street, determined what sort of journalism would be practiced in Baltimore, Denver, Hartford, or Dallas. If you happened to labor at a newspaper that was ceding its editorial ambition to the price-per-share, it may have been agony, but if you were at the Times, the Post, The Wall Street Journal, or the Los Angeles Times, you were insulated.

I’ve rarely read an essay where the author’s fear of change was so near the surface, so present in every sentence.

There are at least 2 ways to attack Simon’s ideas. One is offered by Brad Delong, who makes the case that the newspapers are often full of lies and misrepresentation, and so he generally finds his favorite blogs more interesting:

I am 6.5 times as likely to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories in my RSS reader as I am to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories printed by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

To some degree this is the “Daily Me” phenomenon: my RSS reader is now tuned to bring me things written by people I learn from, while the editors of the Washington Post and the New York Times select stories on the basis of… bizarre and incomprehensible algorithms. To some degree this is because this is because the WP and the NYT are pitched at a level far below the one I want to read at, in part because they think their audience is less clued-in than I am (Peter Baker and Helene Cooper; Dan Balz) and in part because their reporters are out of their depth (i.e., Tobin Harshaw). In part this is because they are unprofessional (i.e., Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston not situating their article in its proper context in the journalistic enterprise begun by The One-Percent Doctrine). To some degree this is because their reporters know nothing about how representative their anecdotes are and so have absolutely nothing interesting to say (Michael Wilson and Solomon Moore; Michael Rosenwald)….

But there is a bigger problem: the army of small start-ups that want a piece of the New York Times’s market. Last year I spent $30,000 to start a new political web site. That is, I spent a small sum, and attracted a small audience. But there are thousands of entrepreneurs like me. Collectively, we spend millions each year, trying to establish sites that can take market share from existing newspapers. And every dollar we spend is a torpedo aimed at the old institutions of media.

In the old days, it took millions of dollars to set up a new newspaper. USA Today took 15 years just to break even. The large scale of the needed capital acted as a barrier to entry, and protected the newspapers from competition. Now a new web site can get going for just $100,000 (I’ve previously written about the costs of websites). Nothing can bring back the old days, when the newspapers could generate high margins, safe behind the barriers that kept competition limited. But David Simon doesn’t see this. Consider the static, unchanging nature of the world in which he thinks he’s living in:

Antitrust considerations prohibit the Times and The Post, not to mention Rupert Murdoch or the other owners, from talking this through and acting in concert

See, in Simon’s world, all of the owners of all of the media companies are known, and could be called together to meet, if only it weren’t for antitrust considerations. What Simon doesn’t see is the vast army of entrepreneurs who are just off-stage, waiting for the right conditions, ready to strike.

My world is very different from Simon’s world. Here’s the world that I live in:

1.) Consumers do not want to pay for online content, so if the newspapers put up pay walls, then entrepreneurs like myself will jump up and down with pure joy, and call in all our favors, to put together the funding for new companies to replace the old newspapers.

2.) However, if a miracle happens, and suddenly consumers are willing to pay for online content, then entrepreneurs like myself will jump up and down with pure joy, and call in all our favors, to put together the funding for new companies to replace the old newspapers.

Either way, more funding will continue to be invested in online media ventures, and the endlessly growing supply will drive down everyone’s margins. More so, we are in for a prolonged period of over-supply, which will drive down everyone’s margins very low, so those businesses that were built around the assumption of healthy margins (and that would include the major newspapers) are going to go bankrupt. A prolonged period of very low margins will mean that only those ventures that are built to survive very low margins will, in fact, survive. And, obviously, the web-based ventures, free of the costs of printing plants and distribution networks, sometimes even free of having an office, can get by on some extremely narrow margins.

There are no scenarios in which the newspapers survive.

Paul Carr defends long articles on the web:

Sometimes I write long. I really don’t care if the Internet is supposed to be limited to 140 badly punctuated characters of nothingness or one-note blog posts designed to leave a tsetse fly with ADD wanting more. For every comment I see complaining about the length of this column, I will add an extra 100 words to the following week’s installment. Believe me when I say this is a battle that I will win.

Jakob Nielsen used to argue that people only wanted to read short articles on the web. And yet, his description of how people read web pages exactly matches the way I read the print version of the New York Times:

A key finding is that most website users don’t read all your words. Instead, they scan the text and pick out headlines, highlighted words, bulleted lists, and links. Scanning is even more prevalent for readers of email newsletters.

Too many of the articles in the New York Times offer boring opinions and occasionally interesting facts, which is why I end up scanning it, instead of reading it. But my attitude is different when it comes to my favorite weblogs. I’ve read many fascinating essays on weblogs. And some of them are long. Complex thoughts can not be expressed in 140 characters. I appreciate Paul Carr’s slam against Twitter.

Once upon in a time, in a land far, far away a journalist by the name of Walter Cronkite could be found, via a Gallup poll, to be the single most trusted person in America. Yes, a lowly journalist was the person that Americans trusted most. And how did he get to be so trusted? Largely because he did his best to tell people the truth, in so far as he knew it. He had the advantage of living in an era before the anonymous sourcing of stories had become important. When he got important information, he shared it with the public.

To my way of thinking, basing important stories on anonymous sources is one of the banes of the present eras.

I’m surprised to see, over at TechCrunch, that Michael Arrington was sent some important information via emails, and he promptly published all the emails, and his readers, in the comments, are almost wholly opposed to his actions:

OoTheNigerian (@OoTheNigerian) – April 30th, 2009 at 5:20 pm PDT

Bad Journalism Mike! Never reveal your sources. You have just killed this guys credibility. He was trying to give you inside information and you played it wrong!!
Not Nice!!

Bob 3 – April 30th, 2009 at 5:42 pm PDT

Michael Arrington, here goes your credibility….
Doing this will further reduce your website traffic..

Cicero – May 1st, 2009 at 12:28 am PDT

I agree … don’t reveal your sources

Too many ones – May 1st, 2009 at 8:58 am PDT

Right. Owen Van Nutta would never have done this mike, and you say his integrity is questionable.

Rehan yar Khan – May 1st, 2009 at 12:01 pm PDT

V bad Mike, totally killed your credibility!

Seb – April 30th, 2009 at 5:33 pm PDT

I COMPLETELY agree…

Seriously mike…
“Not Nice!!” does not even begin to describe this

…But you probably don’t care what we think anyway

These people live in some kind of alternate universe where building a story around anonymous sources is actually a good thing.

Paul Mulshine says no one can replace the work of professional journalists.

After I got out of Rutgers, I began as a reporter at a newspaper in Ocean County, N.J. If the Toms River Regional Board of Education had not offered free coffee, I fear that I might have been found the next day curled up on the floor in the back of the room like Rip Van Winkle. As it was, I only made it through the endless stream of resolutions and speeches by employing trance-inducing techniques learned in my youth during religion class at St. Joseph’s school up the street.

The common thread here, whether the subject is foreign, national or local, is that the writer in question is performing a valuable task for the reader — one that no sane man would perform for free. He is assembling what in the business world is termed the “executive summary.” Anyone can duplicate a long and tedious report. And anyone can highlight one passage from that report and either praise or denounce it. But it takes both talent and willpower to analyze the report in its entirety and put it in a context comprehensible to the casual reader.

Damn, I am getting bored of this debate.

If people aren’t willing pay for Paul’s summary of the Toms River Regional Board of Education then, by definition, that information is not valuable. So why should anyone do it?

Journalism starts with The Spectator. Yet Joseph Addison and Richard Steele wouldn’t recognize what Paul Mulshine does for a living. And there are aspects to the writing of The Spectator (in particular, the prevalence of opinion) that have more in common with blogs than with what Mulshine does.

Modern journalism begins to take shape during the 1890s and reaches its full form by the 1920s. Then it has a good 40 year run, and then it goes into decline. When I was young, in the 1980s, I heard story after story about how newspapers were in decline, because Americans don’t read any more.

When I was in middle school, and then high school, our teachers used to plead with us to read the newspapers. We were often given newspaper reading assignments – once a week we had to find a story we liked and bring it to class. Even though my folks were fanatic readers of the New York Times, and even though I read it often myself, I usually could not bring myself to engage in the stupid, artificial assignments.

I hated the histrionics – I recall a history teacher in the 9th grade who told us that without newspapers, there would be no more democracy. My feeling, then and now, was that if democracy was that weak then it deserved to die.

The death of the newspapers was a big subject all through the 80s, even after I got out of high school. In college I recall a professor asking the class how many of the students read the paper everyday. Maybe a quarter of the class raised their hands. The professor shooks his head sadly and said that the nation was doomed.

So much melodrama! So much dismay and nostalgia! So much sadness and disappointment for the older generation!

Can I contribute to this outpouring of emotion? I’d like to offer my own melodrama:

I want the newspapers to die! I’m tired of them always being on their deathbed! This industry has been dying for my whole life! How long can this story possibly continue? When I am 90, will the newspapers still be dying? Whatever Paul Mulshine is trying to defend is too old and too decrepit to be of any use to anyone, ever again. Drown it with acid, set it aflame or blow it to bits, whatever is necessary to make sure it is dead.

What I am eager to see is what comes next. I’m more interested in the new next thing then I am interested in yesterday’s news.