Mark Cuban: Rupert Murdoch to Block Google = Smart
I love to tweak all the internet information must be free bigots. They get so damn religious about information on the net that they lose what little objectivity and awareness of the real world they had in the first place
Wherever it’s found, bigotry deserves to be called out— say, with a link? Plus, tweaking people you ID is funner, Mark. They can answer back and the party’s on!
eweek, When Legal Strikes—Chaos Theory Meets DRM
While theres a certain infantile, self-serving view (common among the information-wants-to-be-free crowd) that just about anything one might want to do with others intellectual property is covered by fair use, the law bends pretty effectively to codify what Grant says the majority intuitively knows to be right.
Infantile and self-serving both? Juicy! Got a name?
The conventional wisdom on whether and how newspapers ought to charge for their online content is changing so rapidly, some people are having trouble keeping up. One of those people is Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, who Monday repeated one of the favored fallacies of the information-must-be-free crowd: that publications that try to squeeze some cash out of readers, however delicately, risk losing their audiences.
Actually, the crowd Kurtz was talking about is people who won’t patronize pay sites; that’s not a fallacy, it’s just… what they do. And if you charge your traffic goes down. That’s not a delusion of the nameless crowd you prefer to argue with but a well established fact of life on the open web.
Douglas Rushkoff in the Daily Beast
Discussions between Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for a structure where the former’s search engine (Bing) would pay for exclusive rights to the latter’s content (Wall Street Journal, Fox, etc.) has proven instantly upsetting to the self-appointed defenders of a “free” Internet. The simple reason: it might just work…
Of course, the information-wants-to-be-free troops are already up in arms. Some welcome what they see as the extinction of both evil empires in an ill-conceived death grip that will push Fox News and the Wall Street Journal off the mainstream map. Others see it as a last-gasp effort by “old media” to resist the unstoppable, Google-driven evolution of an entirely free content universe. They see searchability by Google as equivalent to participation in democratic society—and any resistance to offering up one’s content to exploitation by Google Inc. as resistance to the natural openness of interactive media and bottom-up civilization.
Doug: this is the web. You know… “featuring hypertext?” Can’t we visit the troops ourselves?
Ken Davis, moderator of the Chicago Journalism Town Hall
Eventually even the “information wants to be free” crowd, a little greyer and sobered by mortgages and tuition bills, will come around to, and benefit from, a sane payment methodology.
Do “crowds” grow up? Seems to be what you are saying.
Some of the people in the “information wants to be free” crowd, who say News can’t do it, make some unwarranted assumptions.
First, they assume that News will only enclose the newpaper content that it currently gives away, and that they will enclose all of it.
Second, they assume that there will always be a free equivalent to anything that News puts behind the wall, meaning that people won’t have any reason to pay for it.
Third, some seem to think that just because they don’t like something, that means there’s no market for it.
Fourth, they assume that no News journalists have skills, expertise or access that might be worth paying for.
And last, there seems to be a belief in some quarters that News Corporation is largely staffed by idiots.
Wowzer: that’s a lot of assumptions; they sound pretty specific, too. Like you read them somewhere…?
Malcom Coles yesterday wrote a great blog post looking at ways that News International could succeed in monetising their content. I think it addresses a lot of issues and niche content that does exist, that the naysayers of the ‘information wants to be free’ crowd tend to sweep under the carpet as it doesn’t fit with their argument.
Wait: there’s a big ass crowd of folks who say you can’t charge for niche content? Really?
Michael Becker at Hypercrit: Set the good stuff free and charge for the peas
The title of this post doesn’t make a lot of sense until you read an interesting post by Lucas Grindley, the online managing editor for NationalJournal.com. Grindley’s responding to the revived idea of charging for news content online, an idea that’s stuck in the craw of many “information wants to be free” advocates.
Craw-stuck-upmanship can be bales of fun to observe. May we have a link please?
Scottfox.com, Twitter Gurus Please Stop Whining!
Remember how the first generation of bloggers howled when the 2nd and 3rd generation of bloggers started including advertisements on their blogs? And, even before that, how the “information wants to be free” crowd rebelled against commercialization of the Web? And in the middle 1990’s, Internet purists even objected to the addition of images on web pages!
Well, we all know how that turned out…
Purist gurus howling and whining… Aw, hook us up! We’d pay to see that.
Notes
Newsweek comments on Tumblr: “Agreed. It’s lazy journalism to make charges against some vaguely-defined enemy; better always to give specific examples and back them up. That hyperlink tool is there for a reason; use it.”
Jeff Jarvis on Twitter: “Here I specifically declare myself not a member of the information-wants-to-be-free crowd.”
Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton, part of Murdoch’s News Corp, doesn’t care what Jarvis says about his own beliefs. Hinton knows better. “The blogosphere has an explanation, if not a justification, for what’s transpired. The world has changed utterly, they type. The mainstream media doesn’t understand it. It’s the inevitability of the Internet. Or as Jeff Jarvis, one of the leading proponents of the information-must-be-free imperative puts it: The content economy is over…” More from Mr. Hinton:
Let’s not forget the basic economics: The rates on our ad cards increase when there is less competition, not more. There is something else fundamental at work here. Implicit in the false gospel of the Web is the faith that free is superior. And those who dare think otherwise are heretics and fools
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, on Twitter: “Even Stewart Brand didn’t argue that ‘information wants to be free’ the way those critics put it. Nor do I. It’s a straw man.”
John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says on Twitter: “If they wish to denounce someone from the info-wants-to-be-free crowd, kindly remind them of me.” Will do, John!
Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, is an honorary member of this club: “A lot of people in the news business, myself included, don’t buy as a matter of theology that information “wants to be free.” Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized and explained — that stuff wants to be paid for.”
Think Keller knows that the same guy who originally said “information wants to be free” (Stewart Brand) also said “information wants to be paid for?”
Also an honorary member, Walter Isaacson, the former editor of Time Magazine, who wrote: “One of history’s ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed. Instead, the Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free. Others smarter than we were had avoided that trap.”
For some sanity—with history and links—on the subject of what users will and will not pay for see Jack Shafer in Slate, Not all Information Wants to be Free. His analysis is sound. But even he cannot resist a nameless, linkless, risk-free shot at the true believers: “The idea that people won’t pay for content online has become such a part of the Web orthodoxy that New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller risked getting lynched earlier this month for merely musing about paid models for the online editions of his paper.”
I was asked to speak recently at a conference organized by Yale University with the title “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?” This irritated me. The question should have been “who will subsidize news production?” because news production has always been subsidized by someone or something. Very rarely have users paid directly the costs of editorial production.
So here’s my list of known sources of subsidy, with examples to illustrate each. What I have left out please put in the comments and I will edit the list. If you have a link that provides an example, that would help a lot.
1. Government can subsidize, through general tax revenues. As in some Scandanavian countries.
2. Rate-payers can subsidize, a solution that has to be enforced by government. As with the BBC license fee, or proposals to require Internet Service Providers to support journalism through a surcharge.
3. Political interests can subsidize the press, as with the party press in 19th century America or labor’s willingness to fund some new media operations today.
4. Philanthropy is a possible source of subsidy, as with the rolling grants that Paul Bass secures for the New Haven Independent, or the donations that have flowed to the start-up, Texas Tribune.
5. Rich egoists will sometimes subsidize, as with Mort Zuckerman’s ownership of The Atlantic magazine from 1980 to 1999.
6. Advertisers are of course the most common subsidizers, though as Clay Shirky says, Best Buy never signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau. They just didn’t have a choice. Plus, the advertisers can now go direct to consumers and become publishers themselves.
7. Entertainment and the revenues it produces can subsidize news production, as with the early days of network television, when the news divisions lost money. Good old fashioned sensationalism also fits under this heading.
8. Soft news can subsidize the hard, as with travel and food sections that pay for other kinds of coverage. (A point suggested by Richard Gingras of Salon.)
9. Unrelated businesses are sometimes a source of subsidy, as with the Washington Post Company’s ownership of the highly profitable Stanley Kaplan company.
10. Then there’s logically-related businesses, as with Bloomberg L.P. and Thomson Reuters, both of which make big money providing data to businesses and then subsidize news production (mostly business news) from that. (More on selling data.) The Economist has its “intelligence unit,” which works in a similar way. (Hat tip, Klint Finley.) Another related business would be web services—setting up a website or social media tools—to the people formerly known as the advertisers. Here’s one example, in pdf form. A second, from knoxnews.com.
11. Clever spin-offs can subsidize editorial costs, as with Techdirt’s Insight Community, basically a focus group business featuring the highly informed community that gathers at Techdirt. At the level of the stand alone journalist, this becomes: “Some people who blog make money because they blog,” as against making money from the blog itself.
12. Educational institutions—especially university-based journalism schools—can be a source of subsidy, as with the partnership between Northeastern University’s journalism program and the Boston Globe.
13. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly likely to sponsor or support journalistic work, often in partnership with traditional news producers.
14. Love is a factor. High earning spouses sometimes subsidize stand alone journalists with start-up sites. Middle-to-upper class parents subsidize college students working at newsroom internships.
15. Live events, for which there is an admission charge. As with magazine conferences or this event: “KCRW & NPR Present ‘Planet Money — Live!’ at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica.”
16. E-commerce, also known as selling stuff, sometimes works, as with Techdirt’s “Connect with Fans and give them a reason to buy” program.
17. The most passionate users (those who can afford it) will sometimes subsidize the production of news available to all users through small donations, as with public radio’s membership model in the U.S., or Firedoglake at the Libby Trial, or the community-funding platform spot.us and its garbage patch story.
18. Premium memberships: those who pay get extra benefits, and thus help to subsidize the rest. An example of an extra benefit: fruitful interaction with highly informed journalists.
19. Many think a future source of subsidy will be lead generation. It means providing good information to businesses on who is exceptionally likely to buy— for a fee. One company doing it now is the technology trade publisher IDG. (Hat tip, Berend Hilberts.)
Subsidy ideas in development:
Scott Karp of publish2.com writes of the possibility of high value advertising that would represent a conceptual break with the whole display ad regime. If such a system existed it would be added to my list as a different type of subsidy. The idea is to create advertising of such quality and informational value to users that it enhances the value of high-end editorial production. According to Michael Boyle in the comments, high value advertising has been working for a while at specialty sites like theheart.org for medical professionals.
Currently in development are voluntary micropayment systems, which would represent a new type of subsidy. No one knows if they’ll be successful, of course. Two to watch are Emanci-pay (“a choosing system… readers, listeners and viewers can easily choose to pay whatever they like, whenever they like, for the media goods they use”) and Kachingle (“crowdfunding sites you love.”)
Also in the concept phase is Lyn Headley’s restrospective funding model for news. “A retrospective news medium is an organization that bestows a continuing stream of awards, each with a monetary component, on the producers of the best pieces of journalism it finds, shortly after each piece is published.”
On Twitter, C.W. Anderson asks the following question: if the rumors come true, and Microsoft pays News Corp. to exit from Google search and deal exclusively with Bing, which category of subsidy would that be? That would be #20, indexing rights. But it hasn’t happened yet.
Some notes: I do not talk about subscriptions or paywalls in this post, because those are not a subsidy system: they’re direct payment for editorial goods. We get that system.
This interview with one of the founders of the Sacramento Press demonstrates how in practice born-on-the-web news sites combine various sources of subsidy to make a go of it. Nos. 6, 10 and 15 are mentioned.
Official notices carried as ads are a less direct form of government subsidy, kind of a combination of #1 and #6. (Hat tip, John McQuaid.)
Kevin Coates in the comments says: “The BBC has a profit-making arm which among other things, commercializes rate-payer funded content in other geographic markets. Profits go back to the BBC to supplement the rate-payer funds. Similar to your #7, but revenue does not just come from entertainment (e.g, if you view the BBC news website in the US, you see ads; in the UK, you don’t.)
Here’s an interesting model: crowdsource a recurring feature and over time it adds up to a book you can sell. You can also crowdsource demand and use print-on-demand publishing.
Worth mentioning is the newsroom-as-cafe concept, which appears to be succeeding in the Czech Republic. Here, the idea is to take a business that already works—the bustling cafe—and turn it into a news gathering operation. Different.
Bonnie Bucqueroux: “So why not re-think the job of reporters and editors, transforming it into a multi-task position that combines journalism, consulting and teaching?” Some worthy speculations relevant to this post.
Laura Lorek in the comments. “News as Art or Gifts - Newspapers get subsidized by selling photos, t-shirts, coffee mugs and commemorative issues around a special event or everyday news. This may be a small subsidy but in the age when everyone wants digital delivery, the nostaglia for printed products is a real marketplace.”
For a Spanish-language version of this post, go here.
Here are the ten key ideas I plan to share with the Media140/Sydney conference underway right now in Sydney, Australia. I will be speaking to the conference via Skype in a few hours. The theme of the event is “the future of journalism in the social media age.” These ten Twitter-able ideas are my contribution to that puzzle.
1. Audience atomization has been overcome. (Link)
2. Open systems don’t work like closed systems. (Link)
3. The sources go direct. (Dave Winer)
4. When the people formerly known as the audience use the press tools they have to inform one another— that’s citizen journalism. (Link)
5. “There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” (Clay Shirky)
6. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” (Jeff Jarvis)
7. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” (John Wanamaker)
8. “Here’s where we’re coming from” is more likely to be trusted than the View from Nowhere. (Link)
9. The hybrid forms will be the strongest forms. (Link)
10. “My readers know more than I do.” (Dan Gillmor)
Bonus notion: You gotta grok it before you can rock it. (Link)
A method I endorse is to understand things by participating in them. By doing your own thing, you learn the difference between possible actions (what you can do with the system) and likely behavior: what most people will tend to do when that system is switched on for them. Forget this difference and you foreclose on your invention.
I started about a year ago in my project to understand Twitter by being on it. I wanted to know what it could be used for by citizens of the Web seeking knowledge for any reason. As a writer I wanted to make it work for me and my interrelated schemes. (Which is the approach I have with Tumblr, too. And Friend Feed.)
Taking @jayrosen_nyu for my ID on Twitter brought the social graph of the university and its requirements into play. Constraints create the “field” in which a style can emerge upon a practice. The name I’ve given to the posting style I favor is mindcasting. These notes are in further definition of the form, which is also a meme that is incompletely spread.
But it has spread, as I will try to show. And I am trying to spread it now, by posting this compendium.
Notes 1-16
1. Home page of my Twitter feed. “I don’t do lifecasting but mindcasting on Twitter.”
2. David Sarno, technology reporter for the Los Angeles Times: On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting (March 11, 2009)
Twitter, the micro-messaging service where users broadcast short thoughts to one another, has been widely labeled the newest form of digital narcissism. And if it’s not self-obsession tweeters are accused of, it’s self-promotion, solipsism or flat out frivolousness.
But naysayers will soon eat their tweets. There’s already a vibrant community of Twitter users who are using the system to share and filter the hyper-glut of online information with ingenious efficiency. Forget what you had for breakfast or how much you hate Mondays. That’s just lifecasting.
Mindcasting is where it’s at…
“Mindcasting came about when I was trying to achieve a very high signal-to noise-ratio,” he explained. This meant using his Twitter account to send out tweets pointing to the best media news and analysis he could find, 15 or 20 times a day. “I could work on the concept of a Twitter feed as an editorial product of my own.”
As Rosen noted, that product is itself a distillation of the huge stream of input he gets from the nearly 550 journalists, analysts and news outlets he follows on Twitter. “I’ve hand-built my own tipster network,” he said. “It’s editing the Web for me in real time.”
Also said to be practicing the mindcasting style: Tim O’Reilly. (Who later responds on Twitter: “I only wish I was as disciplined as to use the process [he] outlines in #3.”)
3. From Digital Media Buzz, Mindcasting: the New Blue Ocean:
The act of building an editorial presence in Twitter by filtering, processing and structuring the flow of information that moves through the medium using one’s follow list, journalistic sensibilities and individual right to publish updates.
4. New method: (Twitter, April 4th, 2009) Slow blogging at PressThink, daily mindcasting at Twitter, work room at FriendFeed. Example: post in gestation.
5. Mindcasting: Field Notes
√ Demo for a breaking news approach: Example of trying to be first for followers, with new facts and perspectives on a story. Which are then—if it works—spread by followers. (The story: “Seems Maureen Dowd plagiarized from TPM’s Josh Marshall. Wonder what the explanation could be.”)
√ Demo of a Tweet that uses 140 characters but it’s constructed for easy re-tweeting via the chopping method. http://tr.im/kWAw
√ Demo: professional press watcher’s hand-built tipster network and alert system.
√ Demo: live bug catching in an AP report about a Twitter-based TV show.
6. Twitter is blogging adapted to the live web. (Read Doc Searls on the distinction, live vs. the static web.) PressThink, begun in 2003, is the site I use for long-form blogging: feature posts typically run 2,500 words with dozens of links, plus an After Matter section that curates reactions and adds related material. Each feature attempts to be definitive in some way; they succeed in search when done right.
The research question was: can ‘casting on a theme over an interval in editorial time—a month, say—drive the production of an standout long-form blog post on that theme, in that time? (The month.) Here’s the demo I did to test the idea: links were proven effective on Twitter, then woven into a round-up post on a big debate going on now. The final product saves the user time and meets other ends the university has. It is J-school on the extension model.
PressThink, Rosen’s Flying Seminar In The Future of News (March 29, 2009)
The pace quickened after Clay Shirky’s Thinking the Unthinkable. Here’s my best-of from a month of deep think as people came to terms with the collapse of the newspaper model, and tried looking ahead. I know these twelve links work. I tested them on Twitter.
As the crisis in newspaper journalism grinds on, people watching it are trying to explain how we got here, and what we’re losing as part of the newspaper economy crashes. Some are trying to imagine a new news system. I try to follow this action, and have been sending around the best of these pieces via my Twitter feed. It’s part of my experiment in mindcasting…
We like to test our work: did the flying seminar take off? Google search for “the future of news.”
Also: by using Twitter as a simple notification system I can drive as many users to my new blog posts as I used to get by wrangling links from other bloggers and aggregators. This is because the people who follow me have selected for what I ‘cast about, as you can see here.
7. It’s true that mindcasting is a pretentious term. People have always told me that certain things I do are pretentious. Every occupation has its hazards, right? What saves mindcasting from being totally so is that it’s an alternative to an even more pretentious notion: lifecasting. Still, I have no quarrel with lifecasting; I just don’t do it, myself. Twitter’s architected question, “what are you doing?” got crossed out, in favor of: “what are you thinking? ” and (via Chris Brogan) “what has your attention?”
8. Sean Carroll at Discover magazine’s Cosmic Variance group blog.
The biggest substantive complaint is that we have become a society of over-sharers, and one simply doesn’t want to be continually updated about what people had for dinner. Again: fine! Just don’t subscribe to Newt Gingrich’s feed. But the claim that Twitter is nothing but mindless inanities is just as wrong as the analogous claim for blogs — in fact it’s precisely the same claim, five years later. There are other things you can do with the technology — the technical terms are “lifecasting” [here’s what I had for dinner] vs. “mindcasting” [here’s a thought, a question, an observation, a link to something more substantial]. And if someone else really does want to know what their friends are having for dinner, why should you be so bothered?
9. Wordspy (“the word lover’s guide to new words…”) has an entry on mindcasting.
pp. Posting a series of messages that reflect one’s current thoughts, ideas, passions, observations, readings, and other intellectual interests.
—mindcast v., n.
—mindcaster n.
10. A Blog Around the Clock: New Journalistic Workflow (April 5, 2009)
Step 1 is mindcasting on Twitter (often misunderstood for time-wasting lifecasting, e.g., this)
Step 2 is aggregation of a number of imported tweets and digestion of them on FriendFeed
Step 3 is aggregation of several FF threads into a more coherent blog post.
The next step, Step 4, could potentially be to aggregate the ideas and knowledge from several blog posts and publish as an article in the traditional media outlets.
I can think of even Step 5 - aggregating a number of media articles into a book.
11. Mindcasting has metrics. Of course it does. See http://jay.40twits.com/ “These are the 40 most recent links I’ve pushed through Twitter, ranked by the number of times they’ve been clicked.” (You’ll see that “Seems Maureen Dowd plagiarized from TPM’s Josh Marshall” did very well.)
jay.40twits.com is a Twitter application in the development phase, created by media hacker Dave Winer, author of Scripting News, godfather of RSS. We discussed it in this 45 min podcast, part of a series we do called Re-booting the News. The top 40 list is a tool “of” mindcasting. It teaches me about what I am doing. What works with the crowd I am doing it for. (Currently around 21,000 people.)
12. Christopher Geidner at Law Dork, 2.0
As I deal with figuring out what Twitter means for my blogging, I’m trying to post much of the “quick links” and pithy (or not) thoughts (what Rosen calls “mindcasting”) at Twitter while reserving the blog for longer, more developed posts. In other words, if you like Law Dork, I’d encourage you to follow chrisgeidner @ Twitter.
13. New York Magazine’s Twitter approval matrix. Graphs Twiiter users on two dimensions: “insightful” to “insipid” on the vertical, lifecasting to mindcasting on the horizontal. Meme spread high point. Caused Twitter to put me on the suggested users list on April 29, 2009. The next day I requested that they take me off the list, for reasons explained in the first 15 minutes of this podcast with Dave Winer.
14. Stowe Boyd, Word of the Moment: Mindcasting (March 15, 2009)
We’ll have to see if the subtle shading of mindcasting really catches hold. I am betting no, although I appreciate the nuance.
I favor streaming as the core verb for all these activities, anyway. Casting is too strongly related to broadcast, which is strange, considering Jay is the guy who coined the term “the people formerly known as the audience.”
15. Comment I left at Mindcasting: the New Blue Ocean.
I’d like to add one component to your list of key features in mindcasting as currently practiced…
and
16. Julian Dibbell, Is a Tweet the New Size of a Thought? (Wired.com)
It may begin as just a seed of an idea — a thought about the future of online media, say — tossed out into the germinating medium of the twitterverse, passed along from one Twitter feed to another, critiqued or praised, reshaped and edited, then handed back for fleshing out on a blog, first, and then, perhaps, in a book. It’s not that tweet-size sparks of insight haven’t always been part of the media ecosystem, in other words. It’s just that Twitter now has given them a vastly more exciting social life.
The Tuscon Citizen
Our Opinion: Seeking answers?
For those of you looking to this space for perspective on the Citizen’s demise, for those looking for What It All Means - you are looking in the wrong place. Excuse us, but we’re a little too close to the situation right now.
Do you ask someone how it feels when a relative dies after a long bout with cancer? After all, we knew the end was coming for months.
But here’s a revelation: When death comes, even if it’s not supposed to be a shock … it’s still a shock.
So give us six months, or six years. Then we can provide some context.
Let’s stick, then, to the few points we can make with a sufficient degree of conviction:
• If there’s a way to spin the Citizen’s closure into a positive for Tucson, we’d love to hear it. But one doesn’t exist.
It would be bad enough if we were just any company. But a newspaper is the type of high-salary, knowledge industry, “smart” business that any of the city’s TREOish, economic-development types would love to recruit.
Those of us who have explored Tucson’s, uh, challenging employment environment know we won’t be making anywhere near the money we make now. Bottom line for Tucson: More than five dozen well-paying jobs lost.
But a newspaper isn’t just any company. It’s a repository of the city’s collective memory and of our aspirations and hopes.
Healthy journalism equates with a vibrant city. A dead paper is analogous to the city’s libraries closing - a chilling prospect.
• To all those bloggers and “citizen journalists” who, if you believe the Internet, are this close to reinventing the industry, here’s your opportunity.
Now is your chance to cover never-ending board meetings, make Freedom of Information Act requests to dislodge facts from public officials, call sources - you have cultivated sources, right? - and otherwise do what we in our dying industry like to call “reporting.”
To do it right, you’ll have to work eight to 10 hours a day, five to six days a week. If it sounds like a job, not a hobby, it is. But don’t expect to get paid; apparently, that business model has been discredited.
We’re rooting for you. Public officials need vigilant scrutiny if our dollars are to be wisely spent and public policies are to be sane and progressive. So good luck with that.
• Finally, frankly, this paper’s closing dissolves a colorful, creative cast of characters the likes of whom you’ll never find in one place again. From sweet Mary Bustamante’s long-time devotion to schools to Dan Buckley’s vivid mariachi videos, from Ryn Gargulinski’s bizarre takes of the macabre to Alan Fischer’s scintillating science coverage, from Steve Rivera and Geoff Grammer’s mastery of Wildcats basketball and high school sports, respectively, to Anthony Gimino’s personal peeks at sports personas, we’ve had it all. And you had it, too.
But not now. With the loss of the Tucson Citizen, everybody in Tucson loses. And that’s a fact. Goodbye.
Editor and Publisher: Tucson Citizen Folding Tomorrow
Tuscon Citizen: Our epitaph
Arizona Star: AG sues to block closing of Citizen: Star’s owner denies it conspired with Gannett on paper’s shutdown
The problem lay not so much with the poverty of the underlying theory as with selective reading of it—a selective reading shaped by the social milieu. That social milieu encouraged financial decision makers to cherry-pick the theories that supported excessive risk taking. It discouraged whistle-blowing, not just by risk-management officers in large financial institutions, but also by the economists whose scholarship provided intellectual justification for the financial institutions’ decisions. The consequence was that scholarship that warned of potential disaster was ignored. And the result was global economic calamity on a scale not seen for four generations.
… These simple models should have been regarded as no more than starting points for serious thinking. Instead, those responsible for making key decisions, institutional investors and their regulators alike, took them literally. This reflected the seductive appeal of elegant theory. Reducing risk to a single number encouraged the belief that it could be mastered. It also made it easier to leave early for that weekend in the Hamptons.
Now, of course, we know that the gulf between assumption and reality was too wide to be bridged. These models were worse than unrealistic. They were weapons of economic mass destruction.
When it is costly to acquire and assimilate information about how reality diverges from the assumptions underlying popular economic models, it will be tempting to ignore those divergences. When convention within the discipline is to assume efficient markets, there will be psychic costs if one attempts to buck the trend. Scholars, in other words, are no more immune than regulators to the problem of cognitive capture.
The consumers of economic theory, not surprisingly, tended to pick and choose those elements of that rich literature that best supported their self-serving actions. Equally reprehensibly, the producers of that theory, benefiting in ways both pecuniary and psychic, showed disturbingly little tendency to object. It is in this light that we must understand how it was that the vast majority of the economics profession remained so blissfully silent and indeed unaware of the risk of financial disaster.
— Economist Barry Eichengreen, The Last Temptation of Risk, April 3, 2009
On a recent visit to Iraq, my first trip back in over three years, a few things surprised me. There was the “countdown calendar” to President Bush’s last day in office, sitting openly on a soldier’s desk. There was the high-up United States official who told me, by way of introduction, that he did not believe the decision to invade Iraq was “reality-based.”
— New York Times reporter Ian Fisher, Bahgdad Bureau blog, March 20, 2008.
As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ”In meetings, I’d ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!”
— Ron Suskind, Without a Doubt: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, New York Times, October 17, 2004
The White House seemed guilty of what might be called persistent, chronic up-is-downism, the tendency to ridicule the possibility that a given policy might actually have its predictable adverse consequences, to deny those consequences once they have already occurred, or—failing that—to insist against all evidence that those consequences were part of the plan all along. By late July, even a paragon of establishment conservatism like Barron’s columnist Alan Abelson was lamenting the president’s “regrettable aversion to the truth and reality when the truth and reality aren’t lovely or convenient.”
In the midst of getting those policies passed, the administration’s main obstacle has been the experts themselves—the economists who didn’t trust the budget projections, the generals who didn’t buy the troop estimates, intelligence analysts who questioned the existence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iraq. That has created a strong incentive to delegitimize the experts…
By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in these various countries, the administration’s hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how which would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality. When they went into Iraq they were essentially flying blind, having disengaged from almost everyone who had real-world experience in how effective occupation, reconstruction and nation-building was done.
— Josh Marshall, The Post-Modern President, Washington Monthly, September, 2003
1. “Left to Just Study What We Do.”
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
— Ron Suskind, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, New York Times, Oct. 17, 2004.
2. Other Governments Got it and Reported Back
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
—The Downing Street Memo, (emerged) May 1, 2005.
3. Torture Gets the Flow of Facts Going for Claims that Were Fictions to Begin With
In gathering evidence from victims of torture, we built a consistent picture of the narrative which the torturers were seeking to validate from confessions under torture. They sought confessions which linked domestic opposition to President Karimov with Al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden; they sought to exaggerate the strength of the terrorist threat in Central Asia. People arrested on all sorts of pretexts – (I recall one involved in a dispute over ownership of a garage plot) suddenly found themselves tortured into confessing to membership of both the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and Al-Qaida. They were also made to confess to attending Al-Qaida training camps in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. In an echo of Stalin’s security services from which the Uzbek SNB had an unbroken institutional descent, they were given long lists of names of people they had to confess were also in IMU and Al-Qaida. It became obvious to me after just a few weeks that the CIA material from Uzbekistan was giving precisely the same narrative being extracted by the Uzbek torturers – and that the CIA “intelligence” was giving information far from the truth. I asked my Deputy, Karen Moran, to call on a senior member of the US Embassy and tell him I was concerned that the CIA intelligence was probably derived from torture by the Uzbek security services. Karen Moran reported back to me that the US Embassy had replied that it probably did come from torture, but in the War on Terror they did not view that as a problem.
— Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Trying Again to Stop Torture, March 13, 2009. (via Andrew Sullivan.)
4. Making Your Own Reality is Hard; I’m Pooped!
Frank Luntz, the arch-conservative pollster known as the research hammer by which the Gingrich revolution came down hard on President Bill Clinton, wants to take over research for the entertainment industry. Why would he give up pollstering in American politics — where he has been so successful — for the movies? Luntz, who sold his company, Luntz Research, to Omnicon in 2005, said he’s had enough of politics. “I’m tired of selling reality,” he said. “Reality sucks. It’s mean. Divisive. Negative. What Hollywood offers is a chance to create a new reality, in two hours time.”
—Sharon Waxman, Fox Pollster Goes Hollywood, April 27, 2009
5. The base is not reality-based. So why would the people at the top be?
This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert’s political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert’s political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.
— International Journal of Press/Politics, The Irony of Satire, Vol. 14, 2009. (via Jason Linkins.)
6. On what basis, indeed?
The word had appeared a few times before in this context, most recently on April 10, when the Central Intelligence Agency said it was closing the network of secret overseas prisons where interrogations took place. Scott Shane, who covers national security, said he and his editor in the Washington bureau, Douglas Jehl, negotiated over the wording of the first paragraph. Shane wrote that methods used in the prisons were “widely denounced as illegal torture.” Jehl changed that to the “harshest interrogation methods” since the Sept. 11 attacks. Shane said he felt that with more information coming to light, including a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the words harsh and even harshest no longer sufficed. He proposed brutal, and Jehl agreed. … Jehl said that when the paper is discussing what is generally regarded as the most extreme interrogation method the C.I.A. used, waterboarding, “we’ve become more explicit in saying in a first reference that it’s a near-drowning technique” that Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and many other experts “have called torture.” But he said: “I have resisted using torture without qualification or to describe all the techniques. Exactly what constitutes torture continues to be a matter of debate and hasn’t been resolved by a court. This president and this attorney general say waterboarding is torture, but the previous president and attorney general said it is not. On what basis should a newspaper render its own verdict, short of charges being filed or a legal judgment rendered?” Jehl argued for precision and caution. I agree.
— Clark Hoyt, New York Times, Public Editor, Telling the Brutal Truth, April 25, 2009
√ For more on these themes, PressThink: The Retreat from Empiricism (2006)
PoliticsDaily is the brainchild of Martin Moe, senior vice president at AOL, and is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself.
Moe says that while the Huffington Post is largely a content aggregator, has a leftward bent, and doesn’t pay many of its bloggers, PoliticsDaily will be 100% original content from “experienced” paid writers, and will be “poly-partisan” with perspectives from the liberals, centrists and conservatives. Of course, with the financial backing of AOL, PoliticsDaily has the advantage of being able to pay all those editors and reporters. But if PoliticsDaily is supposed to be an online new magazine, why isn’t AOL’s sister subsidiary Time Inc. running it?
via TechCrunch
I recently was in Evansville, Ind., where my parents live, to cover Sarah Palin’s speech at a pro-life dinner there. (No, we most certainly are not above luring in readers with a gateway drug, hoping they stick around for the hard stuff). At a League of Women Voters lunch there, the local Congressman, former Vanderburgh County Sheriff Brad Ellsworth, made the same point Kristof had: “When you see the gotcha that goes on,” with both right and left not only claiming they’re correct 100 percent of the time but “trying to make the other side look like serial killers,” neither side is wholly credible. “Whether you watch 24/7 Fox or 24/7 MSNBC,” he told the crowd. “Don’t watch only that.” Instead, make sure you’re exposed to multiple views, and thus the whole picture. Which is what we’ll do our best to offer at PoliticsDaily.com.
Melinda Henneberger, editor of PoliticsDaily, Old School Journalism in a Dot-Com Package.
1.
The New York Times’ Peter Baker, who reported on the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations for the Washington Post, said that the Obama administration is “in some ways … more transparent,” but in other ways, “they’re just like every other White House.”
Baker said that while the Obama team will engage with reporters more than the Bush team did, the traditional dynamic between the press corps and White House remains largely unchanged.
“They’re practitioners of the game,” Baker said of the Obama press team. “They’re not angels sent down from Heaven to change the way Washington works. They’re practitioners of the way Washington works.”
(Because we were under the impression that they are the heavenly angels of truth.)
— The Politico, Mixed Grade for Gibbs from WH Press
2.
I see no reason at all to doubt the sincerity of Dennis Blair, Obama’s own national intelligence director, who said in an April 16 memo to his staff that “high value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding” of Al Qaeda.
Blair later qualified this by adding, “There is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means.” But a reasonable person might imagine that it would take more than sweet talk, mind games, and lollipops to get hardened terrorists to sing.
— Stuart Taylor, Jr. National Journal, Did Torture Save Lives?
(Because we were under the impression that hardened terrorists would reveal all if we asked nicely and gave them sweets.)
— By Kevin Drum | Thu April 23, 2009 10:01 AM PST
Just kill me now. Via The Monkey Cage.
